From the Beehive: Continuing work to protect the environment

Dr Liz Craig is a Labour list MP based in Invercargill.

Opinion: Last week, along with representatives from the Invercargill City Council, Environment Southland and the Waihōpai Rūnaka, I had the pleasure of attending the whakawātea to officially mark the completion of the Stead St Stopbank Upgrade.

Jointly funded by the Invercargill City Council and the Government, the new sheet pile wall and adjoining stopbank will help protect Invercargill’s airport and other infrastructure during severe weather events, which are becoming increasingly more likely due to climate change.

The view from the Stead Street Wharf that grey rainy morning, with the tide half out and the spoonbills and white-faced herons feeding on the mudflats, was not only a reminder of the need to protect the city’s infrastructure from the looming consequences of climate change, but also to redouble our efforts to protect the environment.

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A few meters away from the Wharf itself, is a small inlet, where plastic and other rubbish tends to accumulate, and which is often a focus of estuary clean-ups.

Fortunately, the Government’s ban on single-use plastic shopping bags back in 2019 means far fewer plastic bags now end up in our waterways.

Similarly, the single-use plastic drink stirrers, cotton buds, polystyrene takeaway containers and cups, which featured so prominently in previous estuary clean-ups, should start to disappear following their ban on 1 October last year.

With single-use plastic plates, cutlery and most single-use produce bags due to be banned from 1 July 2023, and the sale of single-use plastic straws restricted, the area beside Stead Street Wharf should look very different in a few years’ time.

However, with plastic being used in so many everyday items, it won’t be possible to phase it out altogether and so an effective recycling system is crucial.

In this respect, it was great to see the Government recently announcing a new standardised approach to kerbside recycling. This means that from February 2024, councils will only be able to accept glass bottles and jars; paper and cardboard; aluminium and steel tins and cans; and plastic bottles and containers with the recycling symbols 1, 2 and 5, in their recycling collections. Then by 2027, all councils will need to provide recycling collections to households in urban areas, and by 2030, they will need to provide food scrap collections to households in urban areas as well.

It’s estimated this new approach will divert an extra 53,000 tonnes of recycling nationally (about half the recyclable materials thrown in rubbish bins each year), as well as an extra 83,000 tonnes of food waste (about a quarter of the total food waste sent to landfill each year). It will also reduce biogenic methane emissions by 45,000 tonnes CO2e per year by 2035.

However, even with the best flood protection, sea level rise and severe storm events will increasingly impact low-lying areas, and so reducing our emissions remains a high priority.

In this respect it was great to see three Southern businesses benefiting from the latest round of Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry (GIDI) funding, with the Alliance Group Ltd receiving $885,000 to help install a third High Temperature-Heat Pump unit at its Lorneville site, which will further reduce coal use.

Similarly, Downer Ltd received $278,653 to help transition a diesel-fired hot oil heating system to an innovative hybrid electric model at its Road Science manufacturing plant in Bluff, which supplies bitumen for road construction in Otago and Southland.

Finally, Ngahere Sawmilling Company Limited received $835,048 to convert one coal boiler to burning Biomass at their sawmill site in Mataura, which will reduce the use of coal over their timber drying operations.

Along with the previous support the Government has provided to Southern businesses, schools and the Invercargill Prison to reduce their fossil fuel use, these initiatives will significantly lower carbon emissions over the lifetime of these projects.

While it’s great to see the work that’s underway to reduce the amount of plastic entering the environment, as well as our carbon emissions, there’s still much more to do if we are to restore fragile ecosystems such as the New River Estuary and to transition to a low emissions future, and in this all of us have a role to play.