Recycling blues Chinese ban felt here
Madison Reidy continues our series on the UN-sanctioned steps towards sustainable business. Today: recycling.
The amount of businesses recycling their rubbish has increased significantly in recent years, but they have been met with fresh challenges.
John Gibson, chief executive of recyclable collecting company Reclaim, said the volume of recycling had increased here although there was still not enough rubbish to justify opening specialised recycling mills in New Zealand.
Recycling was an ‘‘economies of scale’’ business.
‘‘You have to have enough of the material to justify a facility in New Zealand.
‘‘We are doing as well as we can do.’’
Reclaim collects paper, cardboard, glass, plastic and food waste from businesses and sends it to recycling plants.
Gibson said his company tried to ‘‘find a home for everything,’’ although that home was not always in New Zealand.
He said New Zealand’s recycling plants were mostly for glass and cardboard because they were easy materials to sort and break down.
Paper and plastic were made up of numerous grades, making them harder to separate so they retained their value, he said.
So most of that rubbish was sent to China and Asia to be broken down at specialised facilities.
Countries competed to buy New Zealand’s waste, often paying up to $6000 a tonne, Smart Environmental’s Yuri Schokking said last year.
Schokking said all of the South Island’s paper and card recycling was sold overseas because the North Island plants only had enough capacity to process its own.
About half of New Zealand’s milk bottle plastic was sent to Asia and turned into non-food grade products such as pens, toys and consumer packaging.
But Gibson said a recent crackdown on waste imports into China had changed the business case for the recycling industry.
Companies that wanted to recycle now had to pay for it.
He said the Chinese Government had not renewed its recycling company import licenses, in a move dubbed the ‘‘National Sword’’.
The ‘‘big clamp down’’ happened because the world was sending non-recyclable waste to China, Gibson said.
‘‘China was effectively being used as a dumping ground.’’
China has banned 24 types of waste entering the country by the end of 2017, diverting some plastic and paper and textiles to plants in Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand.
Asia’s recycling facilities had become flooded, causing up to a 75 per cent drop in the price of some plastic grades. found in shampoo bottles and sushi takeaway trays.
‘‘A whole lot of processing capability is not available anymore.
‘‘If they [companies] are going to want to recycle their products for certain types of materials, it is going to cost.’’