Sue Coutts: Zero Waste Network NZ Director of External Affairs on coloured plastic waste

A year’s worth of plastic waste, once collected for recycling, may now end up in the landfill. 

The market for coloured plastics dried up with the closure of Chinese recycling plants, and as a result, the Far North District Council is set to send 190 tonnes of plastic to the landfill. 

Sue Coutts, Director of External Affairs for Zero Waste Network NZ, told Mike Hosking it’s no surprise the coloured bottles won’t be recycled, as they’ve known they can’t be for about a decade. 

She says there’s plenty of good ideas out there to mitigate the problem, they just need to be implemented. 

Coutts says the Government is currently consulting on extending producer responsibility, which would put the problem back into the hands of the ones creating it.  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The old recycling issue was getting another airing in the
Far North. So given the district council, now face is
sending a year's worth of plastic to the landfill. So
the Chinese recycling plants, you might remember, close their business
to the rest of the world a while back. So
we're kind of stucky. And now Sue Coots is with
zero waste network and shoes with us. Soue morning, Good morning, Mike.
Was this a bit of reality your versus theory? I mean,

(00:21):
what really do you think the Chinese were doing with
all our plastic? I mean they weren't really recycling it,
were they.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Yeah, they did their best to recycle it, but people
started sending them such a lot of mad stuff, you know,
recycling everything that we wanted to throw into our recycling bins,
sending it off to China, hoping that they'd be able
to sort our problems out. And I think what we
can take from what's happened in Northland is it's no
surprise that the colored soft drunk bottles are not going
to get recycled, like we've known that for about ten years. Yeah.

(00:47):
I think what's really surprising to me is that producers
are still choosing to sell us strengths and bottles that
aren't recyclable exactly.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
So here's here's the problem. This is, I got this
this type one plastic.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
Is that right, yep, that's right? Yeah, yeah, and colored,
So it's the brown ones. The green ones are dark
blue ones that are really hard to recycle because obviously,
once you put all that die into the material, it's
difficult to include it as recycled content in the next
round of product.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
And when we talk about the Northern District Council, I'm
assuming it's all over the country.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
Yeah, every council, every rate player has an issue with recycling,
and I think that's one reason why we really need
to come up with a bit of a better way
of doing it. Like what Well, basically, there's plenty of
good ideas out there, you know. The reason New Zealand's
got a big rubbish problem at the moment is that
we just haven't done any of them in the last
twenty years. Government's got a consultation out at the moment
looking at extending producer responsibility, which is a really good

(01:41):
way of putting the problem into the hands of the
people that created it. If you if you think of
people who put the packaging on the market. They're the
ones who decide what kinds of packaging they use, are
the ones who have the ability to choose types that
are readily recyclable if we can. You know, if you
look around the world, our extended producer responsibility is where

(02:02):
all our countries are going that we like to compare
ourselves to. You know, would give us a chance to
get something if we get this law in place, give
us a chance to put something like and contain a
return scheme in place, which would see us with really
great outcomes for all the bottles and cans, and then
it could also set us up for things like textiles
and e waste and other things that we want to

(02:24):
see better recycling systems for as well.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
Do you know, And you'll call me negative, but I
just don't think we're that group pliant. I mean, we'll
say we would if you ran a pole, you go,
oh absolutely, Our love recycling fantastic, can't do it enough.
But in reality, if it's inconvenient, we won't do it.
I mean, isn't that the simple truth? He's where we
are where we are.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
It's not what the evidence shows, Like the surveys that
have done in New Zealand show that the majority of people,
even though they don't feel one hundred percent confident that
there's good outcomes from recycling, they're rarely committed to carrying
on and they're really committed to doing the right thing.
I think the main problem we have in New Zealand
is we don't have good, simple systems for people to
be part of. And you know, that's that's that's what

(03:02):
the extent of producer responsibility would set us up with,
and you know we have you know, the issue in
New Zealand really is that we're not committing to putting
those systems in place to help people and businesses across
the country do the right thing.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
Well if you look at well, let's hope it changes.
So but the council still got a pile of plastic
that's going to the tip, haven't they. Suk who's the
director of external Affairs at the Zero Waste Network. For
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