Farm plastic recycling growing

Plasback runs a nationwide network of on-farm collectors and baling plants to recycle agricultural plastic, including silage wrap, vine nets, polypropylene bags and twine, and Ecolab and FIL 100 and 200 litre HDPE drums.

Plasback manager Chris Hartshorne says for year ending June 30, 2013 year the company collected 869.2 tonnes of waste plastic. This amounts to a 28% increase from the 677.7 tonnes they collected the previous year.

"We are very pleased that growing numbers of farmers make the effort to responsibly dispose of their used plastic," Hartshorne says.

"The industry still has a very long way to go, however. We estimate that farmers acquire more than 4000 tonnes of plastic each year so we are still only recycling about a fifth of the total.

"We are encouraged by the continued acceptance of our voluntary product stewardship scheme but unfortunately we are still seeing too much plastic burnt and buried on farms. In parts of New Zealand it is still legal to burn or bury agricultural plastic, so in essence we are competing against the cost of a box of matches."

Some farmers send their plastic waste to landfills. But Hartshorne says the trouble with this is that landfill taxes are still very low in New Zealand by world standards. If landfill costs were to rise and this was passed on to farmers, it would not be an attractive solution, he says.

"There are growing concerns among regional councils and the public about this issue. We think it is only a matter of time before some sort of product stewardship scheme for farm plastic is mandatory if voluntary schemes like ours do not meet the expectations of Government."