Shrinking Our Wrap

Unless we get serious about recycling, therell be a tonne of plastic for every three tonnes of fish in the ocean by 2025 and more plastic than fish, by weight, by 2050. With China shutting its gates to our plastics and paper, what can New Zealand do to stem the tide?

- Veronika Meduna

Twenty years ago, people in the small seaside community of Raglan got a wake-up call when their rural landfill closed. It was an old, unlined rubbish dump and had been leaking into local waterways and the harbour. The closure meant the township had to find other ways of dealing with its waste.

Rick Thorpe got involved because he loves the harbour and saw an opportunity to restore it. Inspired by the late Eva Rickard, an outspoken MÄori land-rights campaigner who had been urging the community to take better care of its environment, he helped establish the community resource recovery centre Xtreme Zero Waste. He is still there today, now one of 40 employees. The centre returns $1.2 million to the local economy. “That’s what we used to bury in the ground.”

Initially, the town transferred all waste to another landfill, but that proved costly and opened people’s eyes to the sheer volume of rubbish. Xtreme Zero Waste began exploring other options and, within five years, managed to divert three-quarters (about 13 tonnes) of rubbish that would have otherwise been dumped. The remaining quarter is an ongoing challenge, Thorpe says, “partly because we don’t have control over some waste streams that are imported or manufactured and we don’t have adequate central government policy or legislation on product stewardship”.