Rob Langford, CEO of The Packaging Forum, shares his thoughts on making bold decisions to improve New Zealand’s recycling rates and reduce waste.
The first question I get asked in almost any discussion around packaging is, “Why is there so much packaging?” The role of packaging is to protect and preserve products.
Making the right packaging choices means that the food we buy is safe with a shelf life that minimises food waste and that those new goods we buy arrive undamaged.
While the whole conversation around packaging is complex, we need to recognise that simply providing goods safely is only half the process. What do we do once we’ve got our goods or eaten our food and are left with a pile of packaging?
Here lies the other part of the process. A lot of packaging can be recycled; however, we need the right systems, behaviours and commitments for this to work.
I recall that, as a youth, we took our rubbish to the dump or burned it. These practices are now recognised as harmful to the environment, so we transitioned to kerbside waste collections, which then became separate recycling and waste collections at the kerbside. The responsibility for managing this aspect has been the domain of the waste sector and the councils for a long time now, and it is paid for by rates.
Recently, we commissioned an independent stocktake of New Zealand’s recycling performance for packaging placed in the New Zealand market. Sadly, but not unexpectedly, the results were poor. The independent assessment showed that New Zealand's total packaging recycling rate is 58 percent.
Effectively, we haven’t moved from the last stock take in 2009 under the Packaging Accord, when we achieved the same recycling percentage. That’s an extremely sad indictment of our current systems. I say estimated because since the Packaging Accord, there has been no requirement for producers, councils, or recyclers to measure or report their data—so they haven’t.
The work undertaken for the New Zealand mandatory Plastics Packaging Product Stewardship (PPPS) scheme design has estimated that our plastic packaging recycling rate is 17 percent, putting us literally and figuratively at the bottom of the world.
The recent Kerbside changes, while a positive change, don’t fundamentally drive significant change to the systems to which organisations, councils, ratepayers and consumers all impact. The adage that doing the same things the same way is the first sign of insanity jumps to mind. Is this the legacy we want to leave for future generations? We’ve made no progress in 15 years. Bold decisions are needed now, or we will be saying the same thing in 2040.
The design of a mandatory plastic packaging scheme is a good starting point, albeit it doesn’t go far enough. Let’s be clear: we can’t keep blaming others - whether past political decisions, councils or industry behaviour, we all respond to what we understand at the time.
There has never been a more critical time for leadership in this space, and we can no longer accept these decisions being kicked down the road because it’s too hard to fix. It’s already been four years since plastic packaging was declared a priority product, and we can’t afford to spend another four years considering what we will do next. Decisions need to be made now.
The Packaging Forum has been working with many stakeholders to move beyond a mandatory plastics scheme to an all-of-packaging Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) scheme. Under EPR, the full end-of-life cost of packaging has been imposed on the obligated parties (the people putting the packaging in the market) with the intent of driving change to better packaging choices, which includes transitioning to more easily recyclable materials, using less, or developing different pathways to market.
This isn’t about slowing down the implementation of a mandatory plastic stewardship scheme; it's about establishing the regulatory framework to allow all packaging EPR. All of this can be achieved within a framework of optimising solutions for reuse and refill. This isn’t a silver bullet, but rather a multiple of initiatives already being used effectively globally that will ensure we obtain the changes needed.
