Plastic wrap is now used extensively throughout NZ farmland, mainly as a weather protection for pasture or a cheap storage facility for grain.
Unfortunately some farmers are not as careful as they should be in disposing of the used product, and often it is a blot on the landscape hanging in trees, in waterways or half buried in mud.
To maintain our clean green image so often used in selling our products, farmers need to get more comitted to the recycling programmes now avaliable.
Urban folk have now got into the habit of recycling, and farmers need to do the same with used plastic.
More than 4,000 tonnes of silage wrap – enough to circle the earth eight times – and millions of plastic chemical containers are used by NZ farmers every year, but getting rid of such waste in an environmentally safe way is proving tough going, reports The Nelson Mail.
Nelson farmers are coming under increasing pressure to recycle their plastic waste rather than burn or bury it. The Tasman District Council already bans their burning while Nelson City Council is weighing up whether to require people to have a resource consent if they want to burn silage wrap or chemical containers.
With just an estimated 10 per cent of these products recycled nationally, the councils are trying to cajole farmers into improving their often outdated waste-management habits by using the programmes offered by two rival recyclers, Agrecovery and Plasback.
Burning most plastic wrap and containers, particularly at bonfire temperatures, is polluting and releases a range of dangerous gases, including cancer-causing dioxins, and when mixed with chemicals can produce an even more toxic brew which increases the health risk for those nearby.
Agrecovery, which has been collecting containers since 2007 and chemicals since 2009, last year recovered 91,064kg of container plastic, up 21 per cent on the year before. This represents 21 per cent of the containers produced by brand owners participating in the scheme, which Agrecovery hopes to increase to 60 per cent by 2012.
Last year it launched a user-pays silage wrap recycling scheme and has so far sold more than 20,000 recycling liner bags and collected 2,500 full bags in the past six months.
2 Comments
If you've been to places such as Greece you'll realise that plastic as a waste product from agricultural useage can quite simply despoil the entire landscape (and the neighbouring waterways and seas). In Greece its clear plastic used in low tech greenhousing that is a major problem - for example the whole of the eastern end of Crete is littered with the damn stuff.
Great campaign get our farmers to act NOW.
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