Single-use plastic bags were banned on July 1. Photo / File
Single-use plastic bags were banned on July 1. Photo / File
Single-use plastic shopping bags are now banned but more than one-third of household rubbish collected in the city is plastic despite the Government's latest crackdown.
Figures from Rotorua Lakes Council show plastic accounts for 38 per cent of household waste while 30 per cent of household recycling was plastic. Thedata was a snapshot over a one-week period in May last year but businesses said attitudes were changing as environmental issues came to the forefront.
A council spokeswoman said it had a sustainability resource educator whose role was to "support the community to find ways to be kinder to the environment and reduce waste".
''Part of this has involved running a series of workshops on worm farms and bokashi, educating people about different home composting options.''
Meanwhile, workshops to make beeswax wraps had also been popular with good attendance and positive feedback.
The council has a role to play in educating the community to reduce waste and it was ongoing, she said.
Other initiatives included providing re-usable shopping bags to new citizens, working with market stallholders to reduce their use of plastic while council staff were also encouraged to do so.
This year the council has sold 15,928 plastic council rubbish bags compared with 45,398 bags in 2018 and 21,454 in 2017.
Lake Rd Fruit Monster manager Deep Singh said it had only made the transition away from plastic bags recently but at least half its customers in the past six months were bringing their own bags.
He supported the move and said the shop stocked brown paper bags.
However, Shirley Braun from Sustain Vegetarian Takeaways said when she started two years ago being plastic-free was a major focus.
Shirley Braun from the Sustain Vegetarian Cafe only uses containers and cutlery that can be composted. Photo / Stephen Parker
She uses packaging and containers including cutlery which was compostable - a concept that fits with her own philosophies.
"I decided I owed it to the environment really. The whole thing about Sustain is eating well with healthy options and making sure the packaging was sustainable as well."
Braun said she used to work for a government department but when the office closed it was time for a career change.
The business was going well and growing, she said.
Foodstuffs has 12 stores in Rotorua including seven Four Squares, one New World, one Pak'nSave and three Liquorlands.
A spokeswoman said it kicked off the plastic bag debate many years ago and had always pushed BYO bags or boxes for Pak'nSave, and charged for bags to drive down usage.
"We have removed 350 million plastic bags from the environment which is a great step forward. Our customers have adjusted really well to the change and we're really thankful for that. Reducing our impact on the environment is a team effort and we all need to pull together to make a difference."
The ban is a first step
Estimates suggest that, over recent times, the average Kiwi had been using 154 single-use plastic shopping bags each year.
That equated to around 750 million bags per year or about 0.01 per cent of the total weight of waste that went into levied landfills - if they didn't end up polluting our environment first.
"Lightweight single-use plastic shopping bags pollute nature because they are easily transported by wind and water," Associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage said.
"The phase-out encourages people to act with nature in mind."
But while widespread, these bags were only a small subset of all sources of marine plastics.
Plastics currently made up an estimated 80 to 85 per cent of marine litter, and once in our oceans, they eventually broke down into microplastics, which could, in turn, enter the food chain and cause many other problems.
The Government has signalled that the new measures are simply a first step to tackling the larger issue that is the "throwaway culture" of our linear economy and moving to a circular economy where little gets thrown out or wasted.
