| 45 T T Virginia Wright Posts from plastic waste The posts can be found all over New Zealand, Australia, through the Pacific Islands, and Hong Kong, Future Post REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT If you’ve ever wondered whether the soft plastic you’ve dropped at a collection in the supermarket or local library ends up anywhere other than landfill you can put your mind at rest thanks to Future Post. Two factories, built in the last few years, take 4500 tonnes of mixed plastics a year and turn it into up to 250,000 hard-wearing eco-friendly, recycled plastic fence posts that weigh in at around 19kg each. The man behind the product, heavy diesel engineer, fencer and farmer born and bred, Jerome Wenslick, came up with the concept to solve the quality issues he had been having with the conventional timber posts he had been using for 15 years. “If it’s wet, or there’s impact from a vineyard harvester or damage from an animal, or you’re on an organic farm, they don’t stack up,” says Jerome. The final catalyst was when he was putting in a security fence in South Auckland around what he discovered to be a former rubbish dump, which meant digging the holes by hand, Jerome explains. “Every post hole we dug was full of all sorts of weird plastic, and the idea was, ‘I wonder if we melted all of that together we could make a post that wouldn’t’ break and it might be able to be used in all the places where timber posts aren’t coping’.” When Jerome couldn’t find a machine to do the job anywhere in the world, knowing from personal experience as a farmer that plastic rubbish was a problem in New Zealand, he doubled down and started working with locals like Ron Williams. Ron already worked with plastic machinery, putting his own skills to work along with South Waikato Precision Engineering in Tokoroa, and knowing exactly what the end product needed to be, explains Jerome. “We were self-funded with the help of lots of good people – friends and family, business people, a good cross-section of people. They’re all known to us and they like what we’re doing. “The first post went into the ground in 2018. There was no one to copy or consult with, so there was a hell of a lot of changing different parts of the system to make it work and come up with this design, which is novel and unique in the world. On the way through we were making posts, but we didn’t stop improving parts of the system through the whole of the first year. To this day we still tweak things here and there to improve it.” As well as taking household soft plastic through the Soft Plastic Scheme, they absorb plastics from the likes of the viticulture industry, Fonterra, Northland and other waste companies that sort their kerbside collection and send through things like shampoo bottles and milk bottles, and from well over 100 RAD partners (Recycled Advocate Partners) from a wide variety of companies who want to responsibly dispose of their plastic waste. The posts can now be found all over New Zealand, Australia, through the Pacific Islands, and Hong Kong, and their reach is expanding as they solve a problem for anywhere with issues that affect wood, such as humidity, or bugs that eat wood, such as termites. They have just won the Supreme Award in the Marlborough Environmental Sustainability Awards, as well as the award for the wine industry section. “It’s great for the guys in the factory and the rest of the team and their incredibly hard work,” says Jerome. Turning Waste into Sustainable Solutions The Soft Plastic Recycling Scheme is part of the Packaging Forum family whose goal is to create a circular economy based on sustainable end-of-life solutions to packaging waste. It has several initiatives designed to make it easy for each of us to dispose of our waste materials in a way that allows them to be reprocessed into new valuable products and commodities. The Packaging Forum invests in and promotes recycling solutions which work to help us keep New Zealand green. The Packaging Forum actively encourages industry, councils, and government departments to start buying the products which are made from their recycling e orts because if we aren’t buying recycled, then we aren’t really recycling. As recently as 2018 there was no onshore processing of post-consumer soft plastics into locally made products. Today there are two examples of Kiwi ingenuity in production that rely on recycled plastic, one makes recycled fence posts, the other recycled board used for construction. With somewhere to send it once collected, sourcing the soft plastic to be recycled was key. “Ultimately, we can only collect as much soft plastic as there is capacity to process it. This is why our supply agreements are important and why it’s critical that there is consumer demand for the posts and rails and building materials manufactured from our waste plastic. This year we celebrate a decade of collecting and recycling soft plastic which consumers have dropped o at their local participating store. Over 87% New Zealanders have access to the service and we have recently started a kerbside collection trial with households in Nelson drawing on overseas experience of making it easier for people to recycle,” says Scheme Manager Lyn Mayes. The Soft Plastic Recycling Scheme is responsible for collecting soft plastic from over 320 participating retail premises including selected Woolworths, The Warehouse, New World, and PAK’nSAVE stores. One of its key tasks is informing New Zealanders about what they need to do to help keep plastic bags and packaging out of land ill. The Scheme encourages us all to collect all the soft plastic packaging we use at home, to make sure the bags are empty and dry, and drop them into one of our local Soft Plastics Recycling bins. https://www.recycling.kiwi.nz/store-locator The project takes all soft plastic bags including bread bags, frozen food bags, toilet paper packaging, confectionary and biscuit wrap, chip bags, pasta and rice bags, courier envelopes, shopping bags, sanitary hygiene packaging. Basically, it will accept anything made of plastic that can be scrunched into a ball including bubble wrap. These soft plastic collections not only keep an increasing amount of plastic out of land ill, but they are also an important source of plastic for Future Post to recycle into their hardwearing, sustainable fence posts. recycling.kiwi.nz Sustainably recycle your end-of-life dripline into posts for use in vineyards and farms. Dripline Recycling Programme Water Supply Products: www.watersupply.co.nz | Future Post: www.futurepost.co.nz
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