Haere rā, un-fantastic plastic
A suite of single-use, hard-to-recycle plastics are officially no more.
Kia ora, hello and welcome to Future Proof, brought to you by Electric Kiwi.
This past week we said see ya! to an array of hard-to-recycle and single-use plastic products: cotton buds, drink stirrers, polystyrene takeaway containers and PVC trays. These were part of the government’s first tranche of a problematic plastics phase-out, which came into force on 1 October. Reporters from RNZ and 1News hit the streets to find out how businesses were dealing with the switch-up, and how the alternatives fare.
It feels like a lifetime ago that we used to pack our groceries into single-use plastic bags at the supermarket checkout. In fact, they were only banned three years ago in 2019. The relative ease with which we’ve adapted makes me hopeful that we’ll see similar easy-breezy shifts with the latest ban.
What are the alternatives?
The Ministry for the Environment encourages a switch to reusable alternatives (BYO container/cup/cutlery) or to recyclable paper or plastic (numbers 1, 2, 4 and 5, which are a bit easier to recycle). Keep an eye out for cardboard-ish containers and cups that might look like you could chuck ‘em in your compost, but may actually have a bioplastic liner that requires an industrial-strength composting facility to break down. Commercial composting isn’t available everywhere, so you may end up throwing these bad boys into the landfill.
Recycling is not the answer
In New Zealand, we’re pretty crap at recycling, with our 28% rate looking mighty shabby next to some other countries’ 50% recycling rates. Nationally standardised recycling was proposed earlier this year in the government’s “Transforming recycling” programme, alongside a container return scheme and kerbside food waste collection. But while there’s certainly room to beef up our recycling capability, it’s not the cure-all it’s cracked up to be, says plastics researcher Alex Aves. In other words, let’s not forget the first two Rs: reduce and reuse. Get your keep cups and reusable takeaway containers ready: “recycle” is the third R for a reason!
Of course, in the context of a pandemic, there’s been an uptick in some single-use plastic items for health and safety reasons – with adverse environmental impacts of this extra waste already evident. So I was stoked to see local mask manufacturer Meo leading a stewardship scheme to collect up used masks and send them for recycling into fence posts, in the same process used to recycle soft plastics.
What’s next?
The next farewell of single-use plastic items will happen in mid-2023, and will include plastic produce stickers, produce bags, straws, plates, bowls and cutlery. By mid-2025, all other PVC and polystyrene food and drink packaging will be goneburger. And further on the horizon, there’s some cool science aiming to enhance our recycling capability: from clever chemistry to enzymes in wax worms that can break down plastic in a matter of hours. Now that’s what I call fantastic.
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Climate pollution from Bitcoin comparable to beef farming, crude oil
In 2020, mining for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency used more energy than the entire country of Austria. Now, researchers have estimated the climate damage caused by Bitcoin. It ain’t pretty: slotting in somewhere between beef farming and petrol production from crude oil on the climate pollution scale. Plus, it’s an entire order of magnitude larger than gold mining – an industry it’s often compared to in terms of environmental impact. Yikes.
Brace yourself for the bird banter
Voting for Bird of the Year 2022 opens on 17 October, and the memes are beginning to trickle into social media feeds. Ruby Werry writes a Bird of the Year feature for Critic – tracing the history of voting scandals over the last 17 years, meeting some of this year’s ardent campaigners, and liberally sprinkling her prose with more bird puns than you can shake your tailfeathers at. Bird of the Year is always a bit of fun, but with a new report revealing that New Zealand has the fifth largest proportion of threatened bird species, there’s good (and serious) reasons to bang on about birds!
“Democratising discovery” with citizen science
I’m a big fan of iNaturalist NZ – an app/website where you can upload photos of living things, and find out what species you’ve snapped. Your observation and its coordinates are logged, contributing to a growing database of sightings that’s increasingly used by scientists to understand our changing environment. Shanti Mathias dives into the world of citizen science on The Spinoff, and speaks to scientists about how everyone’s eyes, ears and smartphones can grow what we know about the natural world.
In more citizen science news: this photography competition spearheaded by the Northern NZ Seabird Trust is asking keen photographers to get out and about on the coast this summer, snapping photos of white-fronted terns/tara and what they’re munching on.
And if trapping is more your thing, mustelid scientist Dr Andrew Veale is looking for ferret samples from across the motu.
Experts weigh in on the need for climate justice ahead of COP27
“There can be no justice when big emitters spout hot air at climate talks then continue filling the coffers of the fossil fuel industry, while the people of small island developing states make further concessions and face very real, devastating losses at home,” says Conrod Hunte, deputy chair of the Alliance of Small Island States. “Just like the industrialised world, we deserve to leave a legacy for our future generations, not just to survive but to thrive!”
Quake shaking risk rises across parts of New Zealand
A new national seismic hazard model forecasts more intense shaking during an earthquake for most parts of New Zealand – with the shaking hazard growing by 50% or more, according to NZ Herald science reporter Jamie Morton. But this doesn’t mean the shaky isles are becoming shakier. The change in hazard reflects our improved understanding of earthquakes over the last decade, the GNS scientists behind the model say. While the model can predict what might happen below ground, it can’t tell us what the above-ground impacts might be, writes Phil Pennington for RNZ.
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More stories
Car-free city centres in Europe aren’t a product of centuries of history, writes town planner George Weeks on The Spinoff. They’re the hard-won result of political bravery – and we could learn from them to decongest our own car-choked cities.
A long-read from Kate Yoder for Grist on how reframing “carbon emissions” as “carbon pollution” shifted how we think about anthropogenic greenhouse gases – and how we respond to climate change. Plus, a shorter piece from Yoder on “nature rinsing” – similar to greenwashing, but more subtle. Think ads with gigantic gas guzzlers driving through pristine wilderness.
Take a gander at the world’s largest “flow” battery that has just become operational in China. This type of battery uses newer tech and more sustainable materials, and is well suited for “static” applications like storage facilities connected to the grid, helping to smooth peaks in electricity demand.
Will New Zealand’s new climate risk disclosure rules for big business really create change? There’s perhaps a missed opportunity to amplify the impact of disclosures, argue two researchers on The Conversation. Focusing only on informing investors about climate risk – and not other stakeholders like employees, customers or the wider public – may narrow the chance for change.
To finish this edition, I love this story from Newshub’s Isobel Ewing, combining two of my favourite scientific topics: birds and poo. It turns out that critically endangered kākāpō, famed for their charismatic yet bumbling antics, share similarities with equally charismatic-yet-bumbling pandas: both species have unusually high levels of E. coli in their gut microbiome. Closely examining the kākāpō’s kaka is giving scientists clues about how to help these rare parrots stay healthy (avoiding a case of crusty bum, perhaps?) and make more adorable parrot babies. Because let’s be honest, the world would be a much better place with more kākāpō, please.
As Sirocco would say: Boom! Skrraark,
Ellen
Got some feedback about Future Proof or topics you’d like covered? Get in touch with me at futureproof@thespinoff.co.nz
