by frog
Yesterday the Get Real campaign crew descended on Parliament to perform their hilarious rap/dance/theatre piece on absurd packaging. Metiria Turei went down to meet them and support their call for packaging to go on the Government’s priority list for product stewardship.
Product Stewardship means that manufacturers have to take responsibility for the life-cycle of the products they manufacture (or are imported). It gives them an incentive to redesign their products to create less waste, and also put in place systems to take back products for recycling and reprocessing. There is far too much excessive and wasteful packaging on our shelves and the voluntary industry-led Packaging Accord has been spectacularly ineffective in reducing the amount of packaging waste that ultimately ends up in our landfills, something the Minister has finally admitted at yesterday’s event.
The Greens’ Waste Minimisation Act gives the Minister the tools to act boldly to reduce waste, its now up to him to listen to public concern and get a range of products back on the list – not just packaging, but e-waste and cars and tyres and carpets and batteries and fluorescent lamps – the problem products that are filling up our landfills and creating real headaches for our community recycling operators.
The Minister was reportedly entertained by yesterday’s performance, let’s hope he will also be inspired to take action. Submissions on the Government’s waste minimisation discussion document close at 5pm today and frog readers can find the Greens’ submission guide here.
Published in Environment & Resource Management by frog on Fri, May 15th, 2009
Tags: environment, Waste
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
Just about all that stuff can be burnt in high temperature incinerators to generate electricity as they do in France and Germany. (Hunterweisse designed the exterior of the plant on the Danube.
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