Abbreviations

Appendix 1: The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Appendix 2: Examples of plastics/waste resources on the Science Learning Hub

• Material world – recycling and biodegradability – Lots of links to various other resources for teachers
• Flight plastics recycling technology  – article
• Plastics and recycling – article
• What happens to our plastic bottles – activity
• Environmental benefits of potato plates – article
• DIY plastic recycling plant – activity
• Bioplastics – article
• Plastic – reuse, recycle or rubbish game – activity
• Waste management – article
• Looking at modern landfill systems – activity and lots of related links
• Label the landfill – activity
• Waste – a growing challenge – article/multimedia
• Biodegradability, compostability and bioplastics – article
• Litterati – Citizen Science project
• The litter project – Citizen Science project
• Turning old to new – Connected
• Kiwinet awards – featuring SCION’s  Woodforce project
• Composite materials – article

Appendix 3: Current labelling and categorisation approaches for plastics used in Aotearoa New Zealand

Appendix 4: Modern landfill operational standards

Prior to the development and operation of a modern landfill, a comprehensive Resource Consent Application and Assessment of Environmental Effects needs to be prepared and the proposal is subjected to public consultation and a rigorous publicly notified consent process under the Resource Management Act. The proposal will require numerous consents including, but not limited to, Discharge to Land, to Air and to Water; Industrial Trade Activity; Land Use and Water Take.

If approved, consents will be granted with strict consent conditions relating to the construction and operation of the facility. Detailed designs prepared by Chartered Engineering Consultants in accordance with the application and consent conditions will need to be approved by an specialist independent Peer Review Panel and subsequently by the regulator. During the construction process, the liner (see below) and other construction works will be subjected to rigorous Quality Assurance and Quality Control programmes undertaken by independent specialists. Once these specialists have verified that the liner is constructed in accordance with the consent conditions and specifications, they will prepare a report recommending approval. This report must then be reviewed and approved by the independent Peer Review Panel and subsequently by the Regulator before the Regulator provides approval for the placement of waste.

The purpose of a landfill lining system is to contain any leachate, including microplastics, within the landfill and prevent it from entering the underlying soils or groundwater. It provides an ultra-low permeability containment system on which leachate is collected and removed from the landfill. For a modern landfill, a typical liner system would typically comprise one of the following two systems comprising from top to bottom:

• Type 1 lining system
  • Leachate drainage material, with underlying cushion geotextile to protect the geomembrane
  • 5 mm HDPE geomembrane
  • 600 mm compacted clay with a coefficient of permeability k < 1 x 10⁻ ⁹ m/s.

Or

• Type 2 lining system
  • Leachate drainage material, with underlying cushion geotextile to protect the geomembrane
  • 5 mm HDPE geomembrane
  • Geosynthetic clay liner (GCL)
  • 600 mm compacted clay with a coefficient of permeability k < 1 x 10 ⁻ ⁸ m/s.

These two lining systems are considered to be equivalent to each other, and both options are commonly used.

A “fluff layer” of selected waste is placed immediately above the lining system. This layer is usually from the household street collection or otherwise carefully selected waste to contain no large or bulky items and no strong chemical contaminants that may affect the lining or leachate collection system. This offers further protection to the lining system.

All components of the lining system work together to contain leachate within the landfill and prevent leachate seepage until it can be extracted and treated.

Appendix 5: Life cycle assessment

The four phases within the standard life cycle assessment (LCA) method are described and illustrated below.

1. Goal and scope definition
   1. Goal: define why the LCA is being done, for what product, and for what audience.
   2. Scope: define the system boundary, functional unit, data parameters, target for data quality, impact assessment methods etc. This will depend on the product category rules (see Key Terms).
2. Inventory analysis
   1. Measure the inputs (e.g. materials and energy) and outputs (e.g. carbon dioxide emissions, co-products) within the defined system boundary. These are the environmental loadings for the product across its whole life cycle.
3. Impact assessment
   1. Choose the environmental impact categories (e.g. climate change, acidification, freshwater ecotoxicity) and quantify the equivalent impact for each environmental load (e.g. the climate change impact of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide).
4. Interpretation
   1. Assess the results for completeness, sensitivity and consistency and identify key environmental improvement options.

Key terms

• Life Cycle Assessment (LCA): a method to evaluate the environmental impacts of a product through its entire lifespan.
• Product Category Rules (PCR): the LCA requirements for a specific product so that a fair comparison can be made between products in the same category.
• Environmental Product Declaration (EPD): a third-party verified summary of an LCA, registered with a program such as the Australasian EPD programme
• Environmental load: the quantity of an input or output associated with a process (e.g. water use, fossil fuel use, carbon dioxide emission to air, cadmium emission to soil)
• Environmental impacts: categories of impacts with adverse impacts on ecosystems, human health and/or natural resources (e.g. climate change, eutrophication, freshwater toxicity). Environmental loads are assessed for their contribution to these impact categories.
• Functional unit: the unit of analysis for a study.
• Product system: the processes that are involved in supplying the physical product, materials, service, or building being studied in the LCA.
• System boundary: the processes that will be included in the study. Not all studies will include the full life cycle and may limit analysis to a certain part of the product system’s life cycle (e.g. a “cradle-to-gate” study will consider processes from extraction of raw materials through to the point where a product exits the manufacturing facility; a ‘cradle-to-grave’ study will consider processes from extraction of raw materials, through manufacture, distribution, use and on to final waste management.

Functional unit in practice

It is important to evaluate single versus multi-use products in terms of the equivalent services delivered by these alternative options. In LCA studies, this service is quantified as the unit of analysis for a study (called the ‘functional unit’) and is the basis upon which alternative options are compared. Examples of functional units include ‘delivery of 340 ml coffee’ for coffee cups) and ‘shaving the face 100 times’ for a razor. It is also important to remember that many of our products may enter a second life if we pass them onto others once we have finished with them; this avoids the need to manufacture more new products and reduces waste.

International standards and guidance

There are international standards and guidance for life cycle assessment methodology.

• ISO (International Organization for Standardization) developed two standards for life cycle assessment and one for environmental product declaration
  • ISO 14040:2006, Environmental management – Life cycle assessment – Principles and framework, provides a clear overview of the practice, applications and limitations of LCA to a broad range of potential users and stakeholders, including those with a limited knowledge of life cycle assessment.
  • ISO 14044:2006, Environmental management – Life cycle assessment – Requirements and guidelines, is designed for the preparation of, conduct of, and critical review of, life cycle inventory analysis. It also provides guidance on the impact assessment phase of LCA and on the interpretation of LCA results, as well as the nature and quality of the data collected.
  • ISO 14025:2006 – establishes the principles and specifies the procedures for developing Type III environmental declaration programmes and Type III environmental declarations. It specifically establishes the use of the ISO 14040 series of standards in the development of Type III environmental declaration programmes and Type III environmental declarations.
• The UNEP and SETAC established the ‘Life Cycle Initiative’
  • Global Guidance for Life Cycle Impact Assessment Indicators
• The Consumer Goods Forum developed a protocol on sustainable packaging design
• International Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) system
  • Product Category Rules (PCR) database
• Developers and researchers
  • Life cycle assessment is an active field of research and the practice is constantly being improved. For example, Laurent et al. published methodological guidance for better practice for LCA studies of solid waste management systems.[1]

LCA in Aotearoa New Zealand

The ongoing local LCA workstreams in Aotearoa New Zealand include:

• The Life Cycle Association of New Zealand, who have developed best practice environmental impact categories for NZ LCAs
• The New Zealand Life Cycle Management Centre
• The Australasian EPD programme

Local stakeholders include researchers who refine the LCA method and perform academic analyses, consultants and industry associations who provide LCA for businesses, and the groups who commission LCA studies (e.g. industry, government, NGOs).

While it is becoming more commonplace for companies to perform LCA on their product or system in Aotearoa New Zealand, it is often still cost prohibitive, particularly for smaller businesses. New Zealand companies who do an LCA on their product and publish a report on it may be able to achieve certification within the Australasian EPD programme.

[1] A. Laurent et al., “Review of Lca Studies of Solid Waste Management Systems – Part Ii: Methodological Guidance for a Better Practice,” Waste Management 34, no. 3 (2014).

Appendix 6: Plastics research projects in Aotearoa New Zealand

Download a spreadsheet of plastics research projects (XLS, 20KB)

Appendix 7: Tools to support enactment of Māori knowledge systems in environment

Existing tools to support enactment of kaitiakitanga operating in the Māori agribusiness sector might be useful for engaging a Māori-centred approach to address plastic impact on the environment. These include:

• Mauri Compass Tool: An environmental assessment tool and framework to understand the mauri (the essential quality and vitality of a being or entity) of a waterbody and interconnected parts of its system. It involves using standardised tests to assess 12 parameters (referred to as compass points), assigning a value for each from 1 to 5. The assessment of tangata whenua, wairua, mahinga kai, and culture can only be assigned by tangata whenua. The others draw on Western science and include: habitat, biodiversity, water biology, water chemistry, tuna growth rates, tuna species, tuna abundance and population and tuna biological health.
• Te Mauri Model Decision Making Framework: The ‘mauri-o-meter’ is a tool that assesses the impact of practices or activities on the mauri of a resource and attributes scores and weightings to each. The wellbeing factors are interconnected and include; mauri of the whānau (family, economic), community (social), hapū (cultural) and ecosystems (environment). The framework supports decision making by integrating quantitative and qualitative data and providing a sustainability assessment.
• Cultural Health Index (CHI): A Māori-led and developed tool to monitor change in a specific environment based on three components: 1) whether the site has traditional significance to tangata whenua (yes/no); 2) a qualitative assessment of the mahinga kai (natural resources) of the site; 3) a stream health index made up of qualitative ordinal rankings. The tool is highly adaptable for different environmental domains.
• Te ao Māori framework for environmental reporting: this scoping document includes a series of measures for environmental monitoring that align with te ao Māori values and would give full voice to the Māori world view for reporting on environmental impacts.

Appendix 8: Import data

Download a table of plastics import data (PDF, 108KB)

Appendix 9: Imported synthetic textiles

Download a table of imported synthetic textile data (PDF, 96KB)

Appendix 10: Export data

Download a table of plastics export data (PDF, 209KB)

Appendix 11: Material flow analysis of PET bottles

Download an analysis of how PET bottles flow into and out of Aotearoa New Zealand (PDF, 273KB)

Appendix 12: Rural waste

Download a rural waste summary data table (PDF, 126KB)

Appendix 13: Non-municipal landfill

Non-municipal landfills include cleanfills, industrial fills, construction and demolition fills and farm dumps. Few studies have estimated the composition of waste to class 2-4 landfills. The study reviewing potential impacts of adjustments to the waste levy cites 0% of waste to these landfills being plastic, based on a survey of waste materials to Fulton Hogan operated cleanfills in 2003.

Several studies report tonnages of waste to non-municipal landfill, but few detail landfill composition, including plastic, so it is difficult to know the actual proportion of waste going into these landfills that is plastic.

In 2012, the Ministry for the Environment engaged Tonkin & Taylor Ltd to develop a database of non-municipal solid waste landfills throughout Aotearoa New Zealand. The primary purpose of this database was for estimating greenhouse gas emissions, and a secondary use was to inform review of the waste disposal levy. This study did not report the proportion of waste that was plastic.

The non-municipal solid waste landfill database was retrospective and only captured data until 2012. It is not framework for ongoing data collection. Where data was missing, information was extrapolated. From this database, total tonnes of waste going to non-municipal landfill was back-cast and projected through to 2015, predicting an upward trend. Data is also shown by region.

Appendix 14: Best practice data collection for plastics

To develop a framework and data collection system that will work in Aotearoa New Zealand we should build on international best practice, such as the following examples.

Waste

• During the process of developing the National Waste Data Framework, WasteMINZ reviewed international waste data practice
• 2016-17 Australian Plastics Recycling Survey data: This information is collected through a detailed survey of Australian reprocessors, Australian resin manufacturers and importers, and extensive interrogation of Australian Customs data, sourced from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT)
• Queensland Waste Data System
• Sustainability Victoria waste data portal and calculator
• ACOR 10-point plan #4 re new metrics for waste: “Development of new metrics for waste, recycling and resource recovery activity – beyond tonnes diverted – to include greenhouse gas abatement, energy efficiency, toxicity avoidance, regional development contribution, economic/social capital generation”
• Wales municipal waste management
• US EPA (also here and here)

Packaging

• WRAP UK: Plastic Packaging Flow Data Report
• UK: National Packaging Waste Database
• The EU has a standard data framework for reporting fate of packaging material but has only single category for plastic

Construction

• Netherlands has BAMB framework

Marine plastics

• Work around standardisation has been underway for at least 10 years, and is a very important part of gaining international agreement on the nature and scale of the challenges, e.g. GESAMP
• EU: Assessment of measures to reduce marine litter from single use plastics