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Huge plastic bladders, each weighing up to 20,000 plastic bags, are being dumped in landfills without checks or searches.
A plastic bladder that weighs 110 kilos and is used only once, outshines other garbage in a North Island landfill. Some trucking companies are separately unloading hundreds of bladders a year.
Photo: Supplied
The government and other agencies are largely blind to the growing problem of flexitanks that are used to import and export everything from wine to paint to pharmaceuticals.
Only one North Island trucking company has dumped 450 of the tip bladders in the last year, the equivalent of nine million plastic bags. The company asked not to be identified.
Each bladder had been used only once.
A supplier of tanks to exporters, who also requested anonymity, said demand was growing.
They protested that the tanks were completely recyclable, but they didn’t know what their customers did with them after they were used.
“So if they end up in a landfill, well, there is absolutely no reason why they would go to a landfill.
“I can’t really tell you what my clients do. I hope most people use their common sense and do the right thing.”
However, the county has no infrastructure to recycle the tanks.
A recycler, Plasback of Canterbury, tried and found that washing flexitanks was often “challenging” and “difficult”.
No data, no action
The problem undermines attempts by consumers to phase out single-use and non-recyclable plastics like plastic bags and straws, and authorities have no visibility or data on the problem.
“Flexitanks are not featured in current proposals to phase out single-use plastic items,” the environment ministry said in a statement to RNZ.
“There are currently no work programs looking for flexitanks, or documentation on our website about this product. The Ministry … currently does not track the use of flexitanks … we do not have a record or figures on their import, use or disposal. “
Tanks are the size of a shipping container when full and are transported within shipping containers so as not to break them. They range in size from 12,000-26,0000 liters.
Importers use thousands each year for a single trip, and exporters use hundreds more, at least. New Zealand’s use is a fraction of a global market for cheap, lightweight flexitanks, which are mostly produced in China and are replacing hard plastic and steel containers.
One distributor offered a rough estimate of who uses what:
- Large food companies import between 300 and 500 flexitanks a year.
- Wine companies import 20 to 30 tanks of wine at a time for mixing
- Used oil is exported in bladders and transformer oil for power plants is imported into them.
- Paper manufacturers often import FennoSize compound in this way
- pharmaceutical products are increasingly transported in them
One of the main drivers of bladder demand has been the growth of the global beverage trade, analysts said.
No data was received from the New Zealand Maximum Waste Minimization Agency; “Sorry, flexitanks are not a subject area that we have experience in,” Wasteminz said by email.
Lobbyist Zero Waste also had little to say when RNZ asked about tanks.
“It needs to be on the radar, just because of the scale, the weight and the volume of this material,” said the group’s president, Marty Hoffart.
“We don’t see it, it’s not the face of waste, like plastic bags and coffee cups.”
Shipping containers in Wellington Harbor.
Photo: RNZ / Richard Tindiller
The tanks are not on the radar of the industry body Plastics New Zealand.
“There really isn’t a lot of data on that,” said CEO Rachel Barker.
“It’s one of those things that we probably haven’t gotten to yet.
“There are some areas that need more urgent attention, like curbside packaging, recycling, and making sure we can actually deal with some of that waste on land.”
“Basically, we can only eat one elephant bite at a time.”
The data shortage is accompanied by a shortage of muscle to tackle the problem: The country’s lack of recycling infrastructure has been painfully on display since China stopped taking foreign waste in 2018.
Consumers’ push to ban single-use grocery bags hasn’t touched the sides on the industrial end, where the market for Gulliver-sized bags is a billion-dollar global market that is expected to triple its size. size for 2027.
Demand for bladders is 93 percent dominated by single-use bags.
Weighing the alternatives
But despite the challenge flexitanks pose, using them or not is not easy.
“If you think about the alternative, you will have a fairly heavy metal or plastic tank that will use a lot more fuel to ship,” Barker said.
Reusable flexitanks are a growing niche market and “would definitely be optimal,” he said.
Flexitanks are used to transport wine.
Photo: 123rf
Some tanks have a single layer of polyethylene, often made from recycled plastics. However, more and more tanks have triple layers, which include polypropylene.
Multiple layers provide more oxygen and moisture barriers, important for transporting beverages and protecting against breakage within a container.
If a tank had a mixture of plastics, that could make recycling difficult, Plasback manager Chris Hartshorne said.
And that was not the only problem.
“We have collected some of these in the past,” he said.
“Largely [reuse or recyclability] it depends on the product in these tanks.
“If they are food grade, you are dealing with things like syrups and sticky materials; you have problems if they don’t wash properly, they are very difficult.”
There was no existing setup that could handle them, he said.
“You have to go back to this idea of product stewardship schemes to make sure that the people who are creating all this waste take some responsibility,” Hartshorne said.
Plasback’s experience in recycling dirty plastic waste from Canterbury farms showed that it could be done.
Some agricultural plastics suppliers supported the scheme financially, so the cost to end-user farmers remained stable for 15 years.
“The government is working towards this, with a regulated product stewardship scheme for other plastic packaging,” Hartshorne said.
Agricultural waste such as bale wrap and silage are recycled in Canterbury.
Photo: RNZ / Susan Murray
The consultation concluded earlier this month for the proposed national product stewardship scheme, which considers reducing waste damage in six priority products, including plastics.
However, the Environment Ministry only had one staff member working on product stewardship as of mid-2019, council records showed. Now he has about four.
The government’s approach, reiterated in the Labor Party’s election campaign policy, is to phase out small, non-recyclable plastic items such as cutlery, agricultural product stickers and cotton buds.
“We do a lot of work around plastic packaging, but it tends to focus on retail,” said Rachel Brown, who heads the Sustainable Business Network.
There was “absolutely” a blind spot on the industrial end that needed to be addressed, he said.
“You start where the energy is, and the energy has started consumer things face to face, because wholesaling is a pretty hidden story.”
The first step was to find out how many flexitanks were being used by whom and for what, Brown said.
Greenpeace sensed a certain cynicism in action.
“Flexitanks represent a lack of care and imagination on the part of the packaging and transportation companies,” the environmental protest group said.
“The pattern that we’re seeing in this space is that the industry says ‘don’t worry, we have this’ … and then we find it turning up in a landfill.”
No council had contacted the local New Zealand government regarding the flexitank issues, LGNZ told RNZ.
However, any national product stewardship scheme could have to be expanded as “preferences and products” changed, he said.
“Many producers of packaging and other goods claim that their goods are recyclable, when in fact … most are only recyclable with millions in taxpayer-funded infrastructure,” LGNZ said.
This required that reducing plastic use be the first step, he said.
Marty Hoffart, from Zero Waste, spoke of the need to expand and strengthen the proposed management scheme.
“We have been making plastics since the 1950s; it is one of the least recycled products out there, we must step up it.”
“Let’s not pretend that it is not going to end up in landfills.”
Flexitank demand fueled the front end of demand, he said; “If we don’t stop extracting oil from the ground to make all this plastic, we will never stop climate change.”
He is pressing for:
- mandatory recycling quotas on products to encourage recycling
- Incorporate the cost of recycling into the purchase price.
- regulated and mandatory product stewardship
With consumer pressure setting priorities, Rachel Barker of Plastics NZ found that understandable flexitanks weren’t on the agenda, but imagine they would be.
“We are starting to see a lot more product stewardship in the consumer space, the same kinds of things that we will eventually see in the industrial field,” he said.
Wasteminz, while keeping mum on flexitanks, chimed in: “Any company bringing a new product to market should think about its end-of-life disposal options.”
Manufacturers should check with the recycling industry during the design phase “to make sure their product can be recycled,” he said.
Hoffart said public polls showed one thing: “We are all fed up with plastic.”
