Sustainable Plastic Solutions
Emma KEALY (Lowan) (10:13): Last week I had the great pleasure of visiting Sustainable Plastic Solutions, a start-up business in Hamilton which has done a fabulous job in looking to recycle plastic products produced by the agriculture industry. They have been able to raise about $4 million, mostly through local farmers believing in what they are doing, and what they are doing is transforming bailing twine, grain tarp and silage wrap into plastic pellets to be remanufactured into those exact products. So it is not a downgrading use of plastics, it is taking plastics out of landfill and actually using those plastics to make a new product. At the moment they are saving about 3000 tonnes a year of plastics going into landfill. With a small investment they would be able to, within two years, upgrade that to four times that amount to about 11,000 tonnes a year. At present they have not been able to receive any funding grants or low-interest loans from the government, and so I therefore ask the government to look at the Sustainability Fund – there is about half a billion dollars in there – and to provide the investment into Sustainable Plastic Solutions to help Elisha and Matt transform that business into something that is really making a difference to take plastics out of landfill and put them into useful products in the wider agricultural sector.