2020 election: Winston Peters calls Labor’s $ 50 million fund for plastic innovation ‘reckless in the extreme’

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters says Labor’s promise to create a $ 50 million fund to research alternatives to single-use plastics is “reckless in the extreme.”

The Plastics Innovation Fund was announced by Labor along with a pledge to ban single-use plastics like straws, coffee stirrers and fruit stickers within five years if they are re-elected.

“That kind of heroic talk is great, no one is going to object to that,” Peters said of the policy at a campaign stop at the Albany Mall on Auckland’s North Shore.

“Except applying $ 50 million to investigate it is extraordinary, it is extreme recklessness. We don’t have that amount of money.”

Labor said the money would come from the existing waste tax, which is expected to generate $ 276 million per year by 2024.

Leader Jacinda Ardern said many single-use plastic products already had an alternative, such as straws and coffee stirrers, so bans on those items would be introduced before the 2025 deadline.

But they would have to “do some work” on other examples, such as importers who would have to make sure their suppliers had plastic-free packaging alternatives.

Ardern said he felt it was understood why there was a need for single-use plastics to be switched, a topic he previously called “personal priority.”

Ardern said the policy was about upholding New Zealand’s “clean green image”, reducing waste to the environment and creating a future that the younger generation can be proud of.

Twins Grete and Skye Nicolson spent their 13th birthday at Sustainable Coastlines in Auckland, where Ardern unveiled the policy, sorting the plastic found on the city’s beaches.

They liked the idea of ​​the policy, but what they hated buying the most was cigarette butts because they were so “stinky.”

Ardern said many companies were already moving toward plastic-free alternatives, and Ardern said they needed to “level the playing field” and “make sure everyone moves.”

Businesses would be given some lead time, as they did with the plastic bag ban that entered the Labor-led government in 2019.

The $ 50 million Plastics Innovation Fund would provide grants and loans to researchers or companies to rethink plastic products.

Labor environmental spokesman David Parker said they would also “take steps” to get more recycling done locally and continue to work on a deposit return plan for beverage containers.

And next year they will implement the regulations for product stewardship schemes where a producer or seller of a product takes responsibility for reducing the waste of their products.

It would also seek to standardize curbside recycling by collecting plastics 1, 2 and 5, metal, glass, cardboard and paper across New Zealand, incentivizing food waste collection and glass collection separately from other types of recycling. .

National leader Judith Collins said supermarkets were already eliminating plastics on cotton swabs and that “poor Labor [was] playing catch up. “

“This is just another nice to have. People are trying to do their best, but the main thing is the fact that people lose their jobs every day and I think they are going to be more concerned about that, frankly.”

Law enforcement leader David Seymour said Labor policy was “nothing more than a mark of virtue that will make New Zealanders uncomfortable.”

Instead, better waste management was needed, he said.