What happens to your rubbish and recycling
When we recycle correctly, we help protect the environment and reduce landfill. But where does our recycling end up, and what happens to New Zealand’s waste? Read on to find out.
Where our recycling ends up
South Wairarapa’s recycling is sent to Earthcare Environmental’s Material Recovery Facility in Masterton.
Here, it’s hand-sorted for contamination. Then it’s passed through optical sorters, which are high-tech machines that separate plastics by type, and sort steel, aluminium, paper, and cardboard. This is where the ‘do not squash’ rule comes in. If you stomp that soft drink can or squash that milk bottle, the scanners in the optical sorters can’t identify what recyclable item it is. Unidentifiable flattened items are separated and then landfilled.
Once recyclable items have been sorted into categories, they are sent off to the following various places across Aotearoa to be recycled!
- Batteries go to Up-Cycle, an electronic waste recycling company based in Auckland, where they’re safely processed.
- Tins and cans are sent to Auckland to be made into new steel products.
- E-waste is sent to Wellington, where it’s manually dismantled – this is why there’s a cost involved. Previously, it was shipped overseas.
- Paper and old corrugated cardboard is recycled by Oji in Auckland.
- Plastic HDPE (milk bottles, containers, etc) is sent to Comspec in Christchurch, Aotearoa Plastics in Palmerston North, or Pact Group in Auckland.
- Plastic PET (water bottles, biscuit containers) is sent to Flight Plastics in Wellington. Surplus beyond what Flight can manage is sent overseas as a commodity item.
- Coloured PET (Green and Brown) is sent overseas as a low-value commodity item. It is very hard to recycle coloured plastic.
- Soft plastics are sent to Future Post, a Kiwi company that recycles plastic into fence post products.
- Glass is sent to Visy New Zealand and made into new bottles. Glass can be recycled infinitely!
- Metal is sent to local scrap merchants.
Recycling fast facts
Did you know that most plastics can only be recycled 2-5 times before their quality degrades too much for new products? Each time plastic is recycled, it is heated, which shortens the polymer chains and lowers its strength, which means recycled plastic is often downcycled into lower-quality items like fibre for clothing or insulation rather than new bottles or containers.
Here are some fast facts from our recycling contractor, Earthcare Environmental.
- 32 milk bottles can be recycled into a recycling crate
- Five 2 litre plastic (PET) bottles makes enough fibrefill for one fleece jacket
- Aluminium cans are melted down and turned into new cans
- Recycling 1 glass jar saves enough energy to run a light bulb for 4 hours
- Recycling plastic uses half the amount of energy compared to burning it in an incinerator
- For every tonne of paper recycled, 13 trees are saved
What happens to New Zealand’s waste?
Ever wondered what really happens to your rubbish once it leaves your bin?
Check out the film, Wasted New Zealand: The Journey of Waste. This eye-opening video, with waste educator Kate Fenwick and filmmaker Brad Stent, takes you behind the scenes to explore the fate of your rubbish, recycling, food scraps, and even wastewater, and the surprising impact your everyday choices have on our environment.
Discover how small changes in your habits can lead to big wins for our planet, and how you can be part of the solution to New Zealand’s growing waste problem.