Rachel Barker: Plastics New Zealand CEO on the strategies for minimising plastic waste

A belief there's hope to solving New Zealand's plastic waste problem. 

Plastics New Zealand has released two reports with strategies for minimising plastic waste in the construction sector and in consumer, medical and seafood packaging. 

Five thousand tonnes of polystyrene packaging enters the supply chain every year, with 77% going to landfill. 

Plastics New Zealand CEO Rachel Barker told Ryan Bridge there's work to be done.  

She says New Zealand could implement product stewardship, so people have a place they can take it back to —or it gets collected— so it can be recycled and re-used into new products. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Polystyring a massive problem. It's filling our landfill. Seventy seven
percent of it is not recycled. Construction sites, packaging, they
are the big problems. Four thousand tons of the stuff
ends up in a landfill every year. So the industry
Association done a couple of reports are calling for change.
This morning, Rachel Barker, CEO of Plastics in z with me.
Good morning, Good morning Ryan. So how big of a

(00:22):
problem is polystyring? You know, if you on a scale
of one to ten with our plastics problems.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
At the moment, I probably put it about a five
to be honest, seven percent going to landfill is a
massive problem. But if you look at our general plastic
packaging waste, we're only hitting about nineteen percent recycling rates.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
So what do we do? We just strolled in the bin.
So how do you get people to not throw it
in the bin?

Speaker 2 (00:49):
Or there's a whole lot of different ways we've the
two reports we've done, one is on construction and demolition
plastics where we use EPs for insulation and structural building things,
those sorts of stuff. And then in the packaging space,
it's fairly essential for thermal protection when it comes to seafood,
making sure that that's safe to eat. An end product protection

(01:12):
lots of a product has huge environmental impacts in comparison
to the packaging that's been utilized to ship it. In
the packaging space, what we can do is implement products stewardship,
so make sure that people have a place that they
can take it back to or it gets collected and
then can get recycled and reused back into new products.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
All Right, Rachel, interesting to have these two reports out
from you this morning. Really appreciate your time. Rachel Barker,
CEO of Plastics en Z.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
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