Roy Eric: Waste Minimisation Bill — In Committee 
Roy Eric: Waste Minimisation Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:648;Page:17573] 
ERIC ROY (National—Invercargill) 
: 
 I was not intending to take a call on this bill because when it came to the House in its original form it seemed to be layered with significant prescriptive matters that I thought were more about bureaucracy and involvement of officials than actually about finding solutions. So I am pleased after having a brief and cursory look at what is almost a total rewrite of the bill to find that there are some commendable aspects to it and National would certainly like to support it. 
We live in a world where the tendency has been to dress up and overuse packaging in a raft of ways as a marketing proposal. I am talking about Part 2—I think we are on Part 2 “Product Stewardship”—and I guess this bill is one step in what needs to be a bit of a montage of things needed in order to change consumer attitudes to the whole notion of wastage around packaging and the use of recyclable packaging. I think this bill is a step along that way. It is not a complete answer but it leads us down the road to some interesting proposals particularly in relation to product stewardship. I remember the birthday parties we used to have when I was quite a bit younger than I am now where someone would wrap up a very small item several times in boxes and with layers and layers of paper. When today I buy a shirt I am reminded very much of those pranks because of the wastage around its packaging so what is proposed in this part is a step forward. As my colleague Jacqui Dean said there is also the whole issue of whiteware and the need to change what we do; we live in a world where we can no longer rely on finite resources to be ever readily available. There is also the significantly negative impact on the environment of the creation of polystyrene and a whole lot of plastic packaging. 
I will also mention an issue that I note in my peripatetic activities around the electorate and the country at the moment. Because it is winter time significant baleage is being unwrapped and fed out through a variety of mechanisms. If there is one blight to be seen in winter agrarian scenes it is plastic polythene in a variety of colours—normally in green white and black but it can be in other colours—flapping around and attached to fences. I have to say we are making progress and there is a greater awareness that this needs to be managed. There also used to be a tendency for farmers to say they could destroy that plastic by burning it as long as the fire was a hot fire. I have no idea whether that is true and I do not know whether any farmer had a mechanism for actually measuring the heat of the fire to see whether it was destroying the particular chemicals that were given off when plastic was combusted in an open fire. It is very hard to keep such a fire hot enough to do whatever it is supposed to do. But there is an awareness of plastic wrap and I am pretty interested to see whether product stewardship can do some specific things in this area. 
I have seen a range of mechanisms for compressing bale wrap. There are others for washing it and cleaning it. There is a market for this stuff in Indonesia and in various parts of Asia including China. It does not have to be a hugely complex task to compress this stuff and make it into a marketable product. I have a redundant conventional hay baler valued probably somewhere between $150 and $200. It is perfectly good and it still works but we have moved on from making conventional bales. The hay baler gobbles up this plastic as if it is going out of fashion. We can screw the tension down and end up with bales of plastic and in Dunedin there is a recycling depot where this stuff can be taken. There the bales are cut and put into a super-high-density press for export so what we need is some stimulus to actually make this happen. At the moment a lot of this gathering up of baleage wrap gives only a small return—for example to schools and boards of trustees. I look forward to this “Product Stewardship Bill”.