Saved jobs part of a mucky system

Let’s be honest. It’s not as if a halo hovers over Southland’s recycling practices. Nor New Zealand’s. Nor the world’s. Many people, in Invercargill particularly, will enjoy the relief and delight at Southland disAbility Enterprises regarding news that a recycling contract with the city council and the Southland District Council will provide at least 18 months’ job security for the 82 disabled workers.

It can be seen as a rejection of cost and efficiency savings through automation, promised by a rival bidder, in favour of a collective sense of deservedness for the hardworking toilers.

But this hardly means our recycling systems are purring along. Far from it.

Certainly, individuals and organisations are trying to be more responsible with their waste but, as so often happens, activity hasn’t necessarily led to achievement.

It’s easy to scowl at the Gore District for taking the unlovely option of dumping plastic and paper in the Southland Regional Landfill. And by all means, let’s do that. But it’s hardly alone in that.

As National Party environment spokesman Scott Simpson rightly lamented, we don’t have the capacity in New Zealand to effectively recycle poorly sorted plastics. And, increasingly, other countries won’t accept compromised offerings.

We can’t honestly claim, collectively, to be especially diligent recyclers.

In the last three weeks of May 11, recycling trucks in Southland were diverted directly to landfill due to high contamination levels. It cost $1000 a load, by the way, in landfill charges.

And you don’t have to look too far for signs that more than a few people hereabouts are sly burners. Some times at some places, the air is redolent with the acrid smell of plastic-infused fumes.

What’s more, the outcomes envisaged by the most ardent and careful recyclers are all too often proving illusory. OK, cardboard goes to offshore pulp and paper plants and glass is stockpiled and used locally as an aggregate.

But one upshot from the softening of the global market for recycled paper is that since February the paper all Southlanders have been putting in yellow recycling bins has been sent to landfill.

As for lower-grade plastics, it’s an ugly picture. Southland is one of the legion of places sending this to Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia – not destinations widely celebrated for their green credentials. In Malaysia, mountains of waste have developed and there’s been a great deal of secret burning.

Much has been made of the end being put to single-use plastic supermarket bags and rightly so. And the Government would thank us to remember its Waste Minimisation Fund in support of projects of strategic importance for waste minimisation (and now a priority is how they will support more jobs). Since 2008 more than 200 projects and initiatives have received in total more than $300 million.

Yet we’re hardly getting on top of the problem. Fact is, it’s still increasingly getting on top of us.

There’s no simple solution but there is a really simple imperative. As consumers, we need to do more to ensure the demand for crappy packaging drops massively. The power of consumerism still hasn’t been used as emphatically as it should be.

The less packaging the better. And for pity’s sake remember that not all plasticky stuff that carries the recycling triangle is created equal.

If you live somewhere where it doesn’t all go directly go into a pit near you, remember plastics numbered 1, 2 and 5 are far preferable to those numbered 3, 4, 6 and 7.

We can’t honestly claim, collectively, to be especially diligent recyclers.