New Zealand’s Plastics Landscape.

A short summary

The introduction of new laws and legislation will shape the future for plastics in New Zealand. 

Some plastic grades will no longer be legal to use in packaging. Kerbside collection schemes and labelling will become standardised. You may have to provide total stewardship across your product and packaging’s lifecycle and plan what happens at the end of its use. You’ll also have to pay at least three times more for your landfill by 2025.

If your business is using priority products, find out more about what you need to do, by when here. In most cases, the co-design of the scheme will pull together key stakeholders, and you will have the opportunity to provide feedback during consultation phases of the scheme design.

“Funding will be available for innovative projects from designing out waste in products and packaging, or adopting and scaling up existing technologies, through to switching materials and developing recycling solutions not currently available.” 

A circular plastics economy relies upon effective collection and processing systems for the reuse, recycling and/or composting of plastic products and packaging. 

There is a massive opportunity for the expansion of materials recovery and reprocessing in Aotearoa to create new value in our economy. 

Recyclers collect, sort, wash, and bale plastics, which are recycled back into their original products/packaging  (perfect loop) or alternative products by reprocessors. There are less than 40 recovery partners in New Zealand. Most of them are focused on collecting and sorting recyclable materials without actually recycling them here in New Zealand. Onshore reprocessing of plastics is limited to a handful of players and is at a relatively small scale. 

The Ellen Macarthur Foundation estimated that 20% of the global plastic packaging market could shift to reuse, which presents an opportunity in Aotearoa given some of the market challenges we face. 

The variation in kerbside recycling is, one of the biggest challenges to creating circular loops across every region. It’s essential to understand which councils collect what and the demand for certain recycled materials. The highest volumes of plastic packaging collected through kerbside collections are #1s (PET), #2s (HDPE) and #5s (PP). Nearly 6,000 tonnes of unidentifiable plastics may be going to landfills.

New Zealand’s industrial composting infrastructure is limited, and research shows less than 40% of Aucklanders compost at home. The result — most compostable packaging in New Zealand is ending up in landfill.

Compostable plastics should only be used where reusable and/or recyclable packaging are not possible, as they are best suited to closed loop use-collect-compost systems.