this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Our council has prepaid plastic bags. You can't get a private company wheelie bin? Some have fortnightly collection, which is what we use.
It's great you've managed to get your rubbish down so much! I swear we would have 1/4 of the rubbish if we didn't have kids.
Nah, we live way out in the wops. We don't get any services out here at all. We have to drop the bags and recycling off at a collection point. We do try to cut down where we can.
Meanwhile, most people out here still burn their rubbish, plastic and all. The farmers burn huge piles of plastic silage wrap, filling the valley with the sweet aroma of burnt polyethylene.
Ah I see. That sucks, I wonder is burning plastic silage wrap is counted when they measure the CO2 output of NZ farms.
I can't complain. The air is usually so clean out here.
It probably doesn't amount to much CO~2~ in the scheme of a farm, but it's releasing all kinds of toxins into the environment. I never thought about all the plastic they go through with silage until I moved into the country. I certainly didn't know it was usually burned. They were trialling a recycling scheme for it a few years ago and the farmers seemed pretty keen. They got about 20 tonnes of wrap in two days at two drop-off sites. It's really bulky so it would've taken a lot of effort on the farmers' part to load and cart it in. It seems like they stopped that though. Farmers can pay to have companies come and take it away for recycling, but it doesn't seem like many are keen on that. At least not around here.
It's probably one of those things we need government intervention to have recycling paid for up front, like has been suggested for TVs. Then you can make collection and recycling free, to encourage it.
Just had a look. 85% of it was being recycled last year. So it's just that our neighbours are the useless ones. And the government's going to start requiring that all farm plastics are covered by a stewardship scheme to recycle them.
Still, it seems like a government program could be so much more efficient than the current system of calling someone to have them come and pick it up from the middle of nowhere then take it back. You could have one rubbish truck with a compactor move to a different area every day and pick it up everyone's wrap in one go.
Long-term we need something better than plastic for silage wrap. People have been working on it but no one can do it at scale yet. When that happens, we need to make sure that's cheaper/easier than the plastic stuff.
Oh that's good to see!
The problem is you need something that will not break down. Maybe the solution is to eeplace silage rather than the wrapping. Perhaps you use something that only breaks down in commercial composting, but silage can get very warm so that still may not be enough to prevent it breaking down in the paddock or shed.
Some Canadian researchers have actually made something out of corn proteins that they say works. They just don't know how to scale up production. No idea how it can be both biodegradable and withstand the fermentation process and outdoor conditions.
That's cool! I guess you need something that takes a medium time to break down, but when it does, it breaks down to organics rather than microplastics.