By Steve Mead, General Manager NZ – Pact Recycling

Every week, New Zealanders dutifully rinse and sort their recyclable plastics, placing them in kerbside bins with the expectation that they’ll be turned into something useful. But a question lingers in the minds of many: Is recycling in New Zealand actually real?

It’s a fair question. Public trust in recycling has been eroded by stories of exported waste, stockpiled materials and landfill dumping
But here’s the truth: recycling is real and happening in New Zealand. 

From Bin to Product: What We Actually Make 
At Pact Group right here in Aotearoa, we operate several facilities that sort, shred, wash, and recycle plastic into new, high-quality recycled content packaging that is used to make new products, such as:

• Protein trays for meat and chicken sold in supermarkets – made from recycled PET – beverage bottles and protein trays, berry punnets, and bakery clamshells.
• Paint pails, shipping pallets, horticultural bins, bulb crates, milk crates, Wheelie bins, recycling crates, jerrycans and drums 
• Root trainers, construction components, culvert pipes, bread crates, compost bins 
• Slipsheet, Underground Cablecover, Dampcourse, Cornerboards, Plastic plywood.  

These are real products, made in real factories, by real people every day—right here in New Zealand.

How it works 

Every day consumers buy products from the supermarket which then go into our kerbside recycling.  When they are collected, they are taken to a Material Recovery Facility (MRF) and they are sorted into material types.   Our facility in Wellington takes bales of PET bottles and trays from MRFs and recycles these back into new food grade trays to be used, again and again – making millions more trays made with recycled content.   Across New Zealand, most of the trays you buy in supermarkets like New World have been made using recycled content, collected, and recycled right here in Aotearoa.  .

Building a Local Circular Economy 

To improve recycling in New Zealand, we need more than the good intentions of the public. We need:

• Government support: Policies that strongly incentivize local processing, mandate recycled content, and fund innovation and infrastructure development.
• Industry leadership: Investment in infrastructure, genuine commitment to product stewardship, and design for recyclability.
• Consumer action: Reduced kerbside contamination, choosing products made from locally recycled materials and demanding transparency.

At Pact, we’re doing our part. While we’re not alone, there needs to be greater action by all stakeholders. Until New Zealand implements an Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) scheme for all packaging where brand owners are responsible for the costs of collecting, sorting and recycling discarded packaging, we will not see the environmental, economic or employment benefits that come with a strong local, circular economy.

A Call to Action 
It’s time to move beyond the bin and build a system that closes the loop, creates local jobs, and delivers real environmental outcomes.
Let’s stop asking if recycling is real—and start focusing on how we can make recycling a strong industry that benefits all of us.