A year’s worth of plastic waste, once collected for recycling, may now end up in the landfill. 

The market for coloured plastics dried up with the closure of Chinese recycling plants, and as a result, the Far North District Council is set to send 190 tonnes of plastic to the landfill. 

Sue Coutts, Director of External Affairs for Zero Waste Network NZ, told Mike Hosking it’s no surprise the coloured bottles won’t be recycled, as they’ve known they can’t be for about a decade. 

She says there’s plenty of good ideas out there to mitigate the problem, they just need to be implemented. 

Coutts says the Government is currently consulting on extending producer responsibility, which would put the problem back into the hands of the ones creating it.  

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