Plastic bags used for animal feed are creating large amounts of waste that no one wants to recycle because it does not turn profits, says a rural plastic waste collector.

Neal Shaw, Plasback commercial manager, said only 10% of a small woven polypropylene bag could be recycled, and because it was not economical to pay for their collection, these bags were going to land fills.

There was, however, a drive to recycle plastics from silage bale wraps, because recyclers could recover 60-70% of it and turn it into other sellable products. But the industry should not just focus on these returns, and take collective responsibility to clean itself up even when there were no profits to be collected, Shaw said.

At the moment farmers bought bins which they lined with large collection bags, which were then filled with up to 200 bale silage wraps. The collection bags were collected at a cost, Shaw said.

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Plasback had collected more than 21,000 tonnes of silage wrap and other used plastics on farms over the past 15 years. There was a 20% increase in bin sales over the last year, and an exponential increase in the sale of collection bags, showed farmers wanted to take responsibility for their waste, Shaw said.

The increase in efforts to recycle was particularly visible after Fonterra’s Co-operative Difference initiative was launched last year, Shaw said.

Up to 10 cents of Fonterra shareholders’ milk payment came from on-farm sustainability efforts. Recycling was one way to earn the payments, Shaw said.

But it was time sellers and importers of polypropylene bags took responsibly and helped with costs to recycle other plastic products, Shaw said.

However, polypropylene bags held such low value that farmers had to pay processors a fee to take it, Shaw said.

“While Plasback can cover the cost of processing, baling and shipping used silage wrap by selling it to recyclers, there is no ability to do so with small woven polypropylene bags. If we were to collect these small bags from farms, all we could do is store them, dump them, or lose money by giving them to a recycler,” Shaw said.

The collection could be the same as for silage wraps, Shaw said.

“Companies that supply the plastic should have a mechanism for their waste to be recycled and help cover the cost of doing so,” Shaw said.

“It flies in the face of the Government’s decision to make farm plastics a priority product under the Waste Minimisation Act. By 2024 the industry is expected to have a recycling programme in place for all agricultural waste plastic.

“If rural merchants contributed to the cost of collecting the 20kg small woven polypropylene bags that they sell, it would cover the costs of delivering them to a recycler,” Shaw said.

“It is one thing to have ‘sustainability teams’ and ‘thought leadership’, but it is another to offer customers practical ways to deal with waste and back this up financially,” Shaw said.

Farmlands chief operating officer Kevin Cooney saidit was carrying out waste minimisation trials for feed and seed packaging, and was working with an environment consultant to study alternative packaging options. Farmlands had also invested in sustainability research.

Farmlands is a rural cooperative that provided farming advice, finance and farm inputs like buld fertiliser and seed.

While the work was in its early stages, Farmlands had been dealing with industry bodies to understand the options to improve its packaging footprint, Cooney said.

Manufacturers Association executive director Michael Brooks said it was aware recycling of woven polypropylene bags needed attention.

The association required all its members to have a Feed Safe NZ accreditation, Brooks said.

“We are talking with Ag Recovery (a recycler) and obtaining information on recyclable bags for animal feed. [We] will consider a standard relating to recyclable bags to be included in FeedSafeNZ after our investigation of the costs [and] suitability for the product is completed,” Brooks said.