Goods on supermarket shelves contribute hugely to the volume of packaging waste sent every year to New Zealand’s landfills.
According to work conducted by the Food & Grocery Council’s Sustainability Working Group, New Zealanders consume about 860,000 tonnes of packaging every year but we recycle just 58 percent of it. There are no estimates of how much of that is contributed by food and grocery products but it’s likely to be substantial.
Thankfully, the vast majority of food and grocery suppliers are moving to change that. Many have pledged to make all packaging reusable, recyclable, or compostable – or are going to change to a different type of packaging – within just a few years.
The year 2025 seems to be a popular target. Often, how quickly change happens depends on the complexity of finding new ways to protect products from deterioration. And though the issue is one for individual companies to tackle, backup and enablement from the government also plays a crucial role.
A recent move by the Government will go a long way to tidying up New Zealand’s confusing recycling and waste system.
It came in the form of Transforming Recycling, a document containing the sort of proposals for action the grocery sector has been pushing for since before FGC began to tackle issues across plastic, fibre, and metal packaging, compostable plastic products, a container return scheme, and a common recycling label.
The proposals in Transforming Recycling covered three areas:
To read the rest of the column by Katherine Rich, Chief Executive of the NZ Food and Grocery Council, click here.
