Two new product stewardship schemes approved
24 May 2010
Last week the government announced the approved accreditation for two new product stewardship schemes. One is the Glass Packaging Forum which has a voluntary scheme in place for the reduction of glass to landfill and the other is the Plasback farm plastic recycling scheme. The full press release from the Ministry for the Environment can be found here.
SIFT is now a IRD registered charity for donations
7 May 2010
The Sustainable Initiatives Fund Trust is now registered with the IRD as a charity that can take donations. Those who make a donation to SIFT will now be able to claim a tax credit for cash donations of $5 or more. You can either donate directly to SIFT by sending donations to P O Box 3121, Christchurch or contacting us via This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it as well as through the GiveALittle website.
Each donation will go towards helping with the day to day running of the trust so more of our funds can be given to eligible waste minimisation/reduction projects.
Plasback Agricultural Plastics Recycling Campaign
15 March 2010
A new agricultural plastics recycling campaign, partly funded by the Sustainable Initiatives Fund Trust, aimed at Canterbury farmers has recently been launched by Agpac. Agpac are running a new recycling scheme called Plasback - on farm collection of agricultural plastic wastes such as baleage wrap and silage sheets, polypropylene bags and HDPE Drums.The education campaign includes a helpful and instructional brochure for famers showing them how to recycle each type of waste stream which will be mailed to farmers in Canterbury as well as radio and press advertising and is part of the Plasback Product Stewardship Scheme.This new campaign not only educates farmers on who can take their waste but how to handle it while it is on the farm such as the importance of triple rinsing HDPE drums and not including balenet or twine in the balewrap collection bins. Plasback also offers a recovery programme for the return of 100 and 200L containers for reuse.
The Plasback Product Stewardship scheme for recycling farm plastics will go a long way to helping to clean up Canterbury's countryside, reducing waste to landfill and recycling the approx. 4000 tonnes of LLDPE (Linear Low Density Polyethylene) used as crop packaging on New Zealand farms each year. The recycled plastic will be turned in pellets that can be reused as new resin stock for plastic production.
For more information on the Plasback Education Campaign visit www.plasback.co.nz.
New Mastagard $ 5 million plastics recycling facility opens
14 October 2009
The Sustainable Initiatives Fund attended the opening of Mastagard's new $ 5 million plastics recycling plant. This is an exciting step forward in plastics recycling for Christchurch and surrounds as Mastagard will be able to recycle milk bottles, HDPE plastics (High Density Polyethylene) and LDPE plastics (Low Density Polyethylene - such as plastic food wrap). This will significantly increase the types of plastics that can be recycled thereby reducing the amount of plastic that goes to landfill. Congratulations to the team at Mastagard.Read the Mastagard Press Release 141009 on the opening (pdf).
And visit our flickr site for photos.
News Bulletin - Sift Plastics Research Executive Summary
24 September 2009
The Sustainable Initiatives Fund recently carried out in-depth analysis to find out what the life of plastic packaging is, where it ends up and better ways of recycling it and targeting behavioural change within a consumer education programme, so we don’t use so much plastic in the first place.
You can read an executive summary of the aims of the research and the findings here SiftPlasticsResearchExecutiveSummary (pdf).
