Soft plastics recycled into sturdy fenceposts

Discarded plastic bags will soon be given new life as fenceposts.

Material from soft plastic recycling bins, which are at most supermarkets, has been sitting in storage since about September after the Australian company that was accepting it became inundated with too much plastic.

But the Packaging Forum, which runs the Love NZ Soft Plastic Recycling Scheme, has now partnered with new company Future Post to convert some of the stockpile into fenceposts.

Future Post was founded earlier this year by farmer Jerome Wenzlick who got the idea while struggling to build a fence on an old rubbish dump site. His wooden fenceposts kept breaking but they weren’t hitting rocks, they were hitting plastic waste in the ground.

Future Post account manager Irene Ground said they were able to use soft plastics to create a fencepost that was better for the environment, while also reducing the amount of plastic sent to landfill. A standard fencepost could be made out of 208 milk containers, or about 1700 single use plastic bags, she said.

The final post would be about 10kg of solid plastic, expected to last about 50 years.

The company can recycle single-use plastic bags, soft plastics, and milk containers by processing them into a ground state. The blends are then UV stabilised and extruded into a post through Future Post’s manufacturing process.

Future Post has also partnered with Fonterra to turn Anchor bottles into fence posts. Last year the two worked on recycling milk containers into shampoo, conditioner and body lotion bottles for Sky City hotels.

Wenzlick said the partnership gave Future Post access to a steady supply of milk containers and a customer base of 10,000 farmers in the co-operative.

Lyn Mayes, from The Packaging Forum, said they hoped local and central Government would also buy the fenceposts.