Big plastic bladders sneak through to landfill
AUCKLAND: Huge plastic bladders, each weighing as much as 20,000 plastic bags, are being dumped in landfills with no controls and no recordkeeping.
Government and other agencies are largely blind to the growing problem of flexitanks, used to import and export everything from wine to paint and pharmaceuticals.
One North Island trucking company alone has dumped 450 of the bladders in tips in the past year — the equal in weight to nine million plastic bags. It asked not to be identified.
Each bladder had been used just once.
A supplier of flexitanks to exporters, which also requested anonymity, said demand was growing.
They said the flexitanks were fully recyclable and there was ‘‘absolutely no reason’’ why they were going into landfill.
‘‘I can’t really tell you what my customers do. I hope most people use their common sense and do the right thing.’’
However, the country has no infrastructure to recycle the flexitanks. One recycler, Canterbury’s Plasback, had tried, and found washing them out was often ‘‘a challenge’’.
No data, no action
The problem undermines consumerled attempts to phase out singleuse and nonrecyclable plastics, such as plastic bags and straws, and authorities have no visibility and no data on the problem.
‘‘Flexitanks do not feature in current proposals to phase out singleuse plastic items,’’ the Ministry for the Environment said in a statement to RNZ.
‘‘There are currently no work programmes looking at flexitanks, or documentation on our website about this product. The Ministry . . . does not currently track the use of flexitanks . . . we do not have a record or figures on their import, use or disposal.’’
The tanks are up to the size of a shipping container when filled, and are transported inside shipping containers so as not to rip them. They range in size from 12,000 to 26,0000 litres.
Importers use thousands each year for just a single trip, and exporters use hundreds, at least. New Zealand’s use is a fraction of a global market for the cheap and lightweight tanks, which are mostly Chinaproduced and are taking over from hardplastic and steel containers.
A distributor offered a rough estimate of who is using what:
Big food companies each import between 300 and 500 flexitanks per year.
Wine companies import 20 to 30 flexitanks of wine at a time.
Waste oil is exported, and transformer oil for power stations is imported in them.
Paper manufacturers often import liquid size this way.
Pharmaceuticals are increasingly transported in them.
A main driver in demand for the bladders has been growth in the global trade of beverages, analysts said.
No data was forthcoming from New Zealand’s peak waste minimisation body, Wasteminz: ‘‘Sorry, flexitanks aren’t a subject area we have any expertise on,’’ it said by email.
Lobby group Zero Waste also had little to go on when RNZ asked about the flexitanks.
‘‘It needs to be on the radar, only because of the scale and the weight and the volume of this material,’’ the group’s chairman, Marty Hoffart, said.
‘‘We don’t see it. It’s not the face of waste, like plastic bags and coffee cups.’’
The flexitanks were not on the radar at industry body Plastics New Zealand.
‘‘There’s really not a lot of data on that,’’ chief executive Rachel Barker said. ‘‘It is one of those things that we probably haven’t reached yet.
‘‘There’s some areas that need more urgent attention, such as kerbside packaging, recycling, and making sure that we can actually deal with some of that waste onshore.
‘‘We can only basically eat one bite of the elephant at a time.’’
The consumer push to ban singleuse supermarket bags has not touched the sides at the industrial end, where the market for the giantsized bags is a billiondollar global market that is expected to triple in size by 2027.
Demand for the bladder containers is dominated 93% by singleuse bags.
Weighing up the alternatives
But despite the challenge flexitanks pose, whether to use them is not straightforward.
‘‘If you think about the alternative, you’re going to have either a fairly hefty tank of metal or plastic that is going to use much more fuel to actually ship,’’ Ms Barker said.
Reusable flexitanks were a growing niche market and ‘‘would definitely be the optimum’’, she said.
Some tanks have a single layer of polyethylene, often recycled. Increasingly, however, the tanks have triple layers, which include polypropylene.
Multiple layers provide more oxygen and humidity barriers, important for transporting beverages and preventing rips.
If a tank had a mix of plastics, that could make recycling difficult, Plasback manager Chris Hartshorne said.
And that was not the only problem.
‘‘We have collected some of these in the past,’’ he said. ‘‘Largely, [reuse or recyclability] depends on what product’s been inside these tanks.
‘‘If they’re food grade, you’re dealing with kinds of things like syrups and sticky materials — you do get problems if they’re not washed out properly.’’
There was no existing setup that could handle them, he said.
‘‘You’ve got to come back around to this idea of the product stewardship schemes to make sure that people who are creating all this waste take some responsibility for it.’’
Plasback’s experience recycling dirty plastic waste from Canterbury farms showed it could be done, he said.
Some farm plastics suppliers supported the scheme financially, so the cost to enduser farmers had been kept steady for 15 years.
‘‘The Government is working towards that, with a regulated product stewardship scheme for other plastic packaging,’’ Mr
Hartshorne said.
Consultation wrapped up earlier this month for the proposed national product stewardship scheme, which considers reducing harm from waste in six priority products, including plastics.
The Government’s focus, reiterated in Labour Party campaign policy, is on phasing out small nonrecyclable plastic items such as cutlery, produce stickers and cotton buds.
‘‘We do a lot of work around plastic packaging, but it tends to be retailcentred,’’ said Rachel Brown, who heads the Sustainable Business Network.
There was ‘‘absolutely’’ a blind spot at the industrial end that must be dealt with, she said.
‘‘You start where the energy is, and the energy has started the facetoface consumer stuff, because wholesale is quite a hidden story.’’
The first step was to find out how many flexitanks were being used by whom, and for what, she said.
Greenpeace perceived some cynicism at work.
‘‘Flexitanks represent a failure of care and imagination by packaging and transport companies,’’ it said.
‘‘The pattern we are seeing in this space is that industry says ‘don’t worry, we’ve got this’ . . . and then we find it turning up in landfill.’’
Local Government New Zealand had not been approached by any councils about issues with flexitanks, LGNZ told RNZ.
However, any national product stewardship scheme might have to be widened as ‘‘preferences and products’’ changed, it said.
‘‘Many producers of packaging and other goods claim their goods are recyclable, when . . . most are only recyclable with millions in ratepayer and taxpayerfunded infrastructure.’’
This demanded that reducing plastic use be the first step.
Marty Hoffart, of Zero Waste, weighed in on the need to widen and toughen up the proposed stewardship scheme.
He is pushing for:
Compulsory recycled quotas in products to provide an incentive to recycle.
Building the recycling cost into the purchase price.
Regulated, mandatory product stewardship.
With consumer pressure setting the priorities, Ms Barker found it understandable flexitanks were not on the agenda, but imagines they would be: ‘‘We are starting to see a lot more product stewardship across the consumer space, the same sorts of things we will also eventually see in the industrial’’ field, she said.
Wasteminz chimed in: ‘‘Any company that is bringing a new product on to the market should be thinking about its endoflife disposal options.’’ — RNZ