Latest / Early Edition with Ryan Bridge / Rachel Barker: Plastics New Zealand CEO on the strategies for minimising plastic waste

Transcript

Rachel Barker: Plastics New Zealand CEO on the strategies for minimising plastic waste · Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Polystyring a massive problem. It's filling our landfill. Seventy seven
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: percent of it is not recycled. Construction sites, packaging, they
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: are the big problems. Four thousand tons of the stuff
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: ends up in a landfill every year. So the industry
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Association done a couple of reports are calling for change.
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  Speaker 1: This morning, Rachel Barker, CEO of Plastics in z with me.
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  Speaker 1: Good morning, Good morning Ryan. So how big of a
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  Speaker 1: problem is polystyring? You know, if you on a scale
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: of one to ten with our plastics problems.
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  Speaker 2: At the moment, I probably put it about a five
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  Speaker 2: to be honest, seven percent going to landfill is a
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  Speaker 2: massive problem. But if you look at our general plastic
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  Speaker 2: packaging waste, we're only hitting about nineteen percent recycling rates.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: So what do we do? We just strolled in the bin.
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  Speaker 1: So how do you get people to not throw it
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  Speaker 1: in the bin?
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  Speaker 2: Or there's a whole lot of different ways we've the
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: two reports we've done, one is on construction and demolition
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  Speaker 2: plastics where we use EPs for insulation and structural building things,
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: those sorts of stuff. And then in the packaging space,
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  Speaker 2: it's fairly essential for thermal protection when it comes to seafood,
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  Speaker 2: making sure that that's safe to eat. An end product protection
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  Speaker 2: lots of a product has huge environmental impacts in comparison
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  Speaker 2: to the packaging that's been utilized to ship it. In
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  Speaker 2: the packaging space, what we can do is implement products stewardship,
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  Speaker 2: so make sure that people have a place that they
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  Speaker 2: can take it back to or it gets collected and
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  Speaker 2: then can get recycled and reused back into new products.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: All Right, Rachel, interesting to have these two reports out
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: from you this morning. Really appreciate your time. Rachel Barker,
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: CEO of Plastics en Z.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: For more from earlier edition with Ryan Bridge, listen live
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: to News Talks it Be from five am weekdays, or
• 1:49
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