Following the release of new data on the quantity of New Zealand’s plastic waste exports to many developing nations, Greenpeace Aotearoa is renewing its call for a ban on plastic waste exports.
It has been revealed today that New Zealand has exported over 98,000 tonnes of plastic waste offshore between 1 Jan 2018 and 31 March 2021. More than 46,000 tonnes of this has been shipped to Malaysia and Thailand where a 2018 Greenpeace investigation revealed much was being illegally dumped and burned, with disastrous impacts on the environment and the health of local communities.
Greenpeace Aotearoa plastics campaigner Juressa Lee said the statistics are shocking and show immediate change is needed.
“This sounds eerily similar to the consent recently given for a new landfill in Dome Valley here in New Zealand, even though it was strongly opposed by local hapū. Once again, big corporations are making huge profits while concerns from these isolated and often overlooked communities are ignored, yet they suffer the worst of the consequences,” says Lee.
“New Zealand continues to allow the manufacture, sale and consumption of products and packaging that we have no way to manage, so we export it and make it someone else’s problem. The solution is banning the production of unnecessary single-use plastics including throw-away plastic bottles – we basically need to turn this tap off. We also need to put emphasis on producing suitable alternatives.
“The Government’s recently announced plan to phase out some “hard to recycle” single-use plastics was welcome, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. It made no mention of single-use plastic drink bottles for example, and they’re the worst culprit. To really make a dent in the tide of plastic pollution, we need to first ban throwaway plastic drink bottles altogether, by implementing refill and reuse infrastructure and a container return scheme.”
“This revelation brings home just how inappropriate it is for New Zealand Rugby to sign a 6-year sponsorship deal with the oil and plastic polluting petrochemical company INEOS.
“INEOS is the 13th biggest producer of single-use plastics – one of 100 companies that produce 90% of the world’s single-use plastics so they are directly responsible for making this problem worse,” says Lee.
The waste export revelations also come on the heels of the Government’s recently announced plan to phase some single-use plastic which Greenpeace says doesn’t go far enough.
“Every year in New Zealand, 1 billion single-use plastic bottles are used and thrown away, but there is no away. Of the 8.3 billion metric tonnes of plastic ever produced globally, 6.3 billion has been turned into waste and 79 per cent of that has accumulated in landfills or the natural environment, 12 per cent has been incinerated while only nine per cent has ever been recycled.
Corporations like Coca Cola and INEOS talk about recycling as the solution because it allows them to keep producing and shifting the blame to consumers, but recycling is a failed experiment.”
Greenpeace Aotearoa’s petition to Ban Plastic Waste Exports now has over 37,000 signatures calling for a ban on plastic waste exports from New Zealand.
Video story of 2018 Greenpeace investigation
This is really disgusting as well as being cultural genocide. So we banned single use plastic bags? Yay!!yet more plastic and polystyrene than ever is used as packaging. We are only going to win the war on plastic by turning wholeheartedly to hemp, a wonder plant with a trillion applications. Why then do our politicians hesitate and prevaricate on this issue? If they are backing puberty-blockers they are backing a pharmaceutical; if they are backing a pharmaceutical over a plant they are guilty of war on the natural world, thus a war on natural humanity and animal and plant life.
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