Recycling week kicks off October 21st – 27th and it’s time to flip your lid. Metal and plastic lids can’t be recycled in kerbside recycling, but all lids can now be dropped in town at the Whāingaroa Enviornment Centre located at the Town Hall on Bow St, or to site at Xtreme Zero Waste on Te Hutewai Rd for recycling.

With the rollout of a new recycling programme at the beginning of September 2024, plastic and metal caps and lids can now be collected and recycled instead of ending up in landfill. The Caps and Lids Recycling Scheme is an industry-funded programme operated by the Packaging Forum, designed to ensure as many metal and plastic caps and lids as possible are diverted from landfill, and instead placed back in the recycling and circular economy.

Collection boxes are available inside the Whāingaroa Environment Centre, or in the wheelie bins at the Recycle Wall at Xtreme Zero Waste. A number or New World, PAK’nSAVE and Four Square supermarkets also now have collection boxes alongside Soft Plastic Recycling Scheme bins.

If you’re wondering why you should bother to collect a little lid, New Zealanders collectively dispose of approximately 16,000 tonnes, or 900 loaded trucks, of caps and lids annually. That’s a huge amount of material going to landfill that could be recycled. Though metal and plastic caps and lids are mostly recyclable, the items can’t be collected in kerbside recycling following the standardistaion of kerbside collections across New Zealand this year. The standardisation aimed to give consistency on items that can be recycled, and to improve recycling quality across New Zealand. It means all caps and lids, irrespective of size, shape or material, are excluded from kerbside collections.

There is good reason for excluding lids from kerbside recycling: lids are generally too small to make it all the way through the recycling process from collection at the kerbside to processing and bailing, and so they often end up as litter or landfill. They also can’t be recycled at the kerbside because the lid is generally a different type of material from the item, e.g. a glass jar with a metal lid, and processing facilities aren’t equipped to separate the sheer volume of lids from recyclable items.

The new Caps and Lids Recycling Scheme is set up to keep all the little lids contained and sent to viable and traceable recycling markets, e.g. plastics going to PACT Recycling in Auckland to be locally granulated, washed, and dried then sent to Australia to be sorted and recycled to make a range of new products including wheelie bins, flowers pots, slipsheet and cable covers.