Rural Waste
What's piling up in your shed?
Check out these services to help with disposing of rural waste.
Agrecovery
Agrecovery is a not-for-profit charitable trust that provides agrichemical container recycling and chemical recovery for New Zealand farmers and growers. Don't leave your junk lingering for the next generation to deal with, get it disposed of safely!
They provide free recycling for 0-60 litre plastic containers from over 3000 of the most common agricultural chemicals, animal health and dairy hygiene products sold into the New Zealand market.
They also provide an on-farm collection service for large quantities or drums between 61-1000 litres. The collected plastic is made into reusable products such as underground cable cover and building materials. Contact Agrecovery to book a pickup.
The small bag recovery programme allows farmers and growers to responsibly recycle feed, seed and fertiliser bags made from LDPE (No.4 plastic) and Woven PP bags (No.5 plastic) FOR FREE! There are four collection sites in Waipā.
To find your nearest collection point and for more information, check out the Agrecovery website.
We’ve always burned or buried rubbish on the farm. This sounds like a lot of hassle?
You have a rare opportunity to teach the next generation a better way of dealing with waste. While burning, burying, and/or stock-piling rubbish on farms has been commonplace for years, we now know that these practices come with negative and harmful effects for our health, crops, animals, soil, and air. Burning waste releases hazardous and toxic substances into the air and leaves a concentrated ashy residue that requires further treatment and disposal. On-farm rubbish dumps cause environmental problems through leachate and poor situation.
The Rubbish Trip have a great article which covers this in more detail, with lots of food for thought.
Plasback
There are now options to recycle used farm plastics such as silage wrap, silage covers, grain bags, polypropylene bags, twines, large drum recovery, vine nets and irrigation pipe.
Plasback New Zealand offers this service with a small cost to collect items direct from your farm.
For more information, check out the Plasback New Zealand website.
Regulated product stewardship
Regulated product stewardship is when regulations are used to increase circular resource use and place the responsibility for managing end-of-life products on producers, importers and retailers rather than on communities, councils, neighbourhoods and nature.
Farm plastics and agrichemicals and their containers (farm waste) are some of the first six products to be formed into a mandatory product stewardship scheme. The Agrecovery Foundation is leading the co-design process for these items. The Ministry for the Environment plan to consult on regulations in late 2023.