Turning soft plastics into fences
Inside an 800sqm building in the south of Auckland, a handful of people are hard at work turning plastic into fence posts.
The thrum of machinery fills the air, forklifts zip across the concrete floor and what smells like melted plastic wafts into the nostrils.
Stuff is inside the heart of Future Post, the brainchild of Kiwi Jerome Wenzlick.
Sitting in the office, which doubles as a lunch room, he recaps the journey from plastic to post above the noise from the factory below. About two years ago Wenzlick was building a security fence around an old rubbish dump, but his wooden fence posts kept breaking courtesy of the long-buried plastic below.
‘‘The ground was full of plastic. And that’s how it all started – I thought: ‘Why don’t I make a post out of that?’’’
He teamed up with farmer Bindi Ground, who had experience in recycling and repurposing products.
Wenzlick said a ‘‘hell of a lot’’ of research and development followed to get where the company is today – winning the top Agricultural Innovation award at Fieldays.
The pair were given seed funding by Callaghan Innovation and took a trip to the US to see if they could source technology developed there to create the posts. But the US technology did not work, so Ground and Wenzlick designed and built their own machines in Tokoroa, with the help of South Waikato Precision Engineers.
Today, the Waiuku-based factory produces about 400 posts per day. They come in three different sizes – 100mm in diameter, 125mm and 200mm. The fence posts are sturdy and weigh 12kg, 19kg and 64kg respectively.
Wenzlick said the round posts were environmentally sound and sustainable. Compared to traditional wooden posts, Future Posts do not contain tanalising treatment, so will not leach any toxins into the ground.
Although ‘‘marginally’’ more expensive than their wooden counterpart – one of the posts retails for about $15.90 compared to about $12 for a wooden post – Future Posts are more cost-effective in the longrun – they last for about 50 years, Wenzlick said.
Everything which can be done to a pine post – rammed in with a post rammer, stapled, nailed, cut with a chain saw – can be done with the new invention.
More flexible, the posts are safer for livestock, and horses, goats and rabbits will not chew them.
Wenzlick said Future Post had received interest and support from all sectors – the posts were being used on dairy farms, for keeping in horses, in horticulture, viticulture and the marine industry.
The posts are ‘‘impenetrable’’ by water, frost, insects and fungi. They do not split, crack or rot, he said.
BioGro certified, organic producers can also use them.
Soft plastics and recycling arrives in bales from households and businesses across the country.
Fonterra recovers used plastic bottles from cafe´s and restaurants and sends it Future Post’s way. ‘‘A match made in heaven’’ – The Packaging Forum – provides the soft plastics.
One tonne of plastic is capable of making 84 100mm posts. Going into one of these posts is about 240 milk bottles and 2000 plastic bags. In a year, about 2000 tonnes of waste plastic can be chipped by the machines, making about 100,000 fence posts.
There is contamination during the process – kids toys, money, clothing, a soft ball have been pulled off the conveyer belts. These are all kept for a ‘‘show and tell’’.
For the future, Future Post was going to be expanding into other products.
‘‘We’re taking your waste and turning it into something useful instead of sending it to landfill.’’