New Zealanders throw away 295 million single-use cups per year. Alice Neville ponders our obsession with takeaway culture, and looks at what’s needed for consumers to change their behaviour. How many commuters did you see clutching single-use takeaway coffee cups on your way to work this morning? Or how many empty ones are strewn about … Read more
Three Countdown stores are currently trialling drastically reducing plastic from their fruit and veg… but it’s a solution that comes with problems of its own. Ah, plastic. The synthetic material we love to hate. In a world where many of the biggest contributors to the climate crisis are not exactly easy to give up – … Read more
The government will start phasing out polystyrene packaging and beverage containers in response to a major new report calling for a nationwide rethink on plastics in New Zealand, PM Jacinda Ardern announced today. Here’s what you need to know about the announcement, and the Rethinking Plastics in Aotearoa report. For much of the year, a … Read more
A Canterbury startup is exposing medical equipment manufacturers’ deliberate one-use design tricks and proving that hospitals can reuse and recycle. There has been a lot of hype about the phasing out of plastic bags at supermarkets. But what about far more expensive items which only ever get used once and are then thrown away? A … Read more
Every scholarship exam and approximately every two external assessments are wrapped in their own single-use plastic bag. We’re asking the NZQA to cut it out, writes year-13 student Sophia Honey Every year after an exam, I see the same conversation happen. Friends turn to each other, talk about how difficult that question was, and then … Read more
From last Monday, single-use plastic bags are banned in New Zealand. To keep the ball rolling, here are five more things we could look at banning. The hotly-debated plastic bag ban came into effect last Monday, aligning New Zealand with the likes of the EU, the UK, Peru, and other nations with bans on single-use … Read more
Today the law against single use plastic bags goes into effect. One less thing to feel guilty about? Well, maybe, writes Pallas Hupé Cotter. Trips to the grocery store have never been my favourite thing. I’m not someone who flips through cookbooks as a pastime, dreaming of what I can create in the kitchen (I … Read more
In our new Q&A series, The Lightbulb, we ask innovators and entrepreneurs to tell us about how they turned their ideas into reality. This week, we talk to Hello Cup’s Robyn McLean on what sparked the move into menstrual cups. Since launching in December 2017, Hawkes Bay-based start-up Hello Cup has helped introduce menstrual cups … Read more
OK, so we’ve got rid of plastic bags. But what about all the other stuff? Phasing plastic packaging out is a mammoth task, but some of the industry’s main players are working hard to promote change. Next time you’re at your local supermarket, have a look around. Go up and down each aisle and have … Read more
With global angst mounting about the buildup of plastic ending up in landfills and the environment, chemists and materials scientists are considering pyrolysis as an option. But how does it work? And is it really a solution? For decades, putting used plastic into recycling bins was considered a convenient way to get rid of rubbish, … Read more
A call for feedback in our daily email newsletter The Bulletin on how New Zealand could reduce the amount of waste being produced – and ending up in landfills – prompted a massive response. Here are some of your ideas. In some ways, this call for feedback was the crisis New Zealand is facing with … Read more