Our Story
The Soft Plastic Recycling Scheme formed as part of the The Packaging Forum family, which is an amalgamation of the Glass Packaging Forum, Soft Plastic Recycling, and the Public Place Recycling Scheme, promoting the Love NZ brand to reduce landfill and promote packaging recycling, so you can help keep New Zealand green and clean.
Our focus is to help find end of life solutions for packaging, particularly for recycling soft plastic.
The Love NZ Soft Plastic Recycling Programme is about informing New Zealanders about how to keep plastic bags and packaging out of landfill. Collect all the soft plastic packaging which you use at home, make sure the bags are empty and dry and drop them into the Love NZ Soft Plastics Recycling bins at supermarket and retail premises.
The project takes all soft plastic bags including bread bags, frozen food bags, toilet paper packaging, confectionery and biscuit wrap, chip bags, pasta and rice bags, courier envelopes, shopping bags, sanitary hygiene packaging - basically anything made of plastic which can be scrunched into a ball.
We partner with social enterprises Abilities in Auckland and Earthlink in Wellington who collect the soft plastic recycling from the stores. Customers should bring their used soft plastics back to store and put them in the soft plastics recycling bin.
Plastic bag recycling can even be turned into useful products you can buy!
Help us to Create a Circular Economy
Recycling soft plastic is something you can do. The Love NZ Soft Plastic Recycling Scheme website tells you all about plastic bag recycling and plastic wrap recycling, and how to recycle grocery bags and to recycle bubble wrap.
More and more brands are now putting our soft plastic 'recycle at store' logo on their packaging to help you know what can be recycled.
Customers can bring their used soft plastics back to store and put them in the plastic bag recycling bin. Recycle soft plastics in the green and white bins at selected Countdown, The Warehouse and other participating stores in regions around North Island.
There is now onshore processing of post-consumer soft plastics with two North Island plants; Future Post in Waiuku and Second Life Plastics in Levin - which are great examples of Kiwi ingenuity and where we send your recycled soft plastic.
The soft plastics that you drop off are made into a range of plastic products which are on sale in New Zealand.
To have a sustainable circular economy where waste materials are re-processed into new valuable products and commodities, we need industry, councils and government departments to start buying products which are made from our recycling efforts.
Look out for the green and white bin at your local store. Remember: only soft plastic recycling that is clean and dry should be placed into this bin. Otherwise the whole lot is contaminated and cannot be recycled.
Thank you for being such loyal supporters of soft plastic recycling!
Video of How Soft Plastic Recycling is Processed
We have produced a video to show you what happens to the soft plastic, and the range of products it is being made into by Future Post and Second Life Plastics. The video also tells you what we CAN and most importantly CAN’T collect.
Recycling Soft Plastics Into Fence Posts
We’ve teamed up with Future Post to supply them with soft plastics which are blended with HDPE milk bottle plastic to create the plastic fence post.
Ducting From Soft Plastics
In the Lower North Island we’re supplying a small Levin company Second Life Plastics with soft plastics which they use to make products such as ducting.
