Feilding could home New Zealand’s first plastic reprocessing centre

Feilding could soon solve the lower North Island’s recycling crisis, one milk bottle at a time.

New Zealand’s recycled plastic is shipped overseas to Malaysia, Thailand or the Philippines, but a proposed centre would reprocess much of it in Manawatū, preventing pricey shipping fees and importing plastic back into the country.

It’s up to the Manawatū District Council to persuade the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment after the provincial development unit handed it $81,000 to put together a business plan.

Chris Pepper, the council’s special projects manager, said Kiwis needed a better system after China last year stopped taking the country’s recycling and waste.

China’s restrictions had created stockpiles of waste throughout New Zealand and the best way to solve the problem was to deal with it ourselves, Pepper said. 

The Feilding centre would use technology to clean, sort and melt recyclable material that would be sold to recycling factories around the country. 

It would also draw recycled products from homes all over the lower North Island. 

The new facility would mean households will be able to use their wheelie bin to recycle more types of plastics. At the moment only plastics 1 and 2 are able to be recycled, but that is set to increase to plastics 1 through to 7.

This means yoghurt pottles, ice-cream containers, margarine tubs and takeout food containers will all be recyclable. 

Although selling recycled trash is worth some coin, Pepper said the general thinking was the more that can be recycled, the less rubbish has to be dumped into landfills. The less that went to landfill, the less ratepayers had to pay in landfilling costs.

Manawatū District processed more than 4000 tonnes of recyclable waste each year, but Pepper said that figure would increase substantially with another 2000 homes earmarked in Feilding over the next few years. 

“Wellington, for example, is sending recycling to Malaysia or Thailand. The plastic could be sent to Feilding and then reused in New Zealand.” 

Manawatū mayor Helen Worboys said the centre converted plastic, which is typically shipped offshore, into something that could be reused in higher-value products. 

“This is good for the environment and the economy.

“Our current facilities do not allow us to efficiently sort and recycle the amount of plastic waste that is being created [and] the market for simply sorted plastics is diminishing.  This facility will enable us to reuse the plastics rather than sending them away”.   

The council has committed $3.45 million in its Long-Term Plan to constructing a new resource recovery facility.

The business case must be presented to the ministry by June 28.