Flight Plastics has opened a new wash plant in Lower Hutt earlier this month, so that PET drinks bottles and plastic packaging can be recycled here in New Zealand.
Derek Lander, Director Flight Plastics summarises what this means for our country: “Flight is a 100-year-old, 100% NZ owned business. We are a long-established supplier of food packaging products which we manufacture for New Zealand, in New Zealand.
“PET is the most used plastic packaging material, it is recognisable by the number 1 recycling logo and is used in most drink bottles and the majority of food trays and containers. Flight are now offering the market New Zealand Recycled, food safe, price neutral, PET packaging. A lot of PET packaging says ‘Recyclable’, but NZ Recycled is very different from recyclable and it’s a critical difference. Recyclable means ‘someone else, somewhere else in the world can deal with it’ with all the carbon miles and extra environmental and economic costs that involves. NZ Recycled means ‘we are dealing with it, here in New Zealand, we are taking responsibility’. Every company talks about Sustainability. At Flight we are actually doing it.
“We’ve made it simple for everyone to do the right thing – all our customers, the food packaging industry, the supermarkets, the recycling industry, in fact…the whole country because everyone can recycle their PET bottles and containers and buy them again, and then recycle that packaging, and the whole cycle can happen again and again, on and on.
“Importantly, Kiwis will also know that their recycling efforts now have a local use, saving the need for more imports, more carbon, more freight – instead supporting New Zealand’s economic and environmental performance.
“We can use this NZ Recycled material to make all the PET containers and trays you see in the supermarkets – meat trays, fruit and produce trays and punnets, and bakery packaging.
“All the other PET containers are 100% imported material – some of them virgin material, some of them recycled in other countries, but all of them are an entire addition to New Zealand’s imported volumes,” says Smith.
Food producers and supermarkets can use a New Zealand recycled, food grade product for PET trays and containers, which benefits New Zealand’s environment, economy and credibility.
“We can all, very easily be part of this Circular Economy story – turning our waste into a valuable resource, it’s too good an opportunity to ignore.”
