A billion bottles, 7,000 sent to the Minister

A billion plastic bottles are manufactured worldwide every day, and today we launched a new website,https://billionbottles.org.nz/, to highlight this astounding fact!

The New Zealand public are crying out for a bottle deposit scheme and have sent the Associate Minister for the Environment more than 7,000 messages in a bottle to tell him so.

The Kiwi Bottle Drive action, Message in a Bottle, has been encouraging people to send a plastic bottle to the Associate Minister calling for a bottle deposit scheme.

“Based on peoples self-reporting, we estimate more than 7,000 bottles have been sent to the Minister since 1 July” says Sandra Murray, from the Kiwi Bottle Drive “While we have asked the Associate Minister to tell us how many he has received, he has simply not told us. However, we have handed out more than 12,000 stickers and had over 2,000 downloads of the label from our website”

“Because most people buy a drink when they are out and about, kerbside recycling doesn’t work well for bottles. At the moment, NZ only collects about 35% of our drink bottles for recycling. A bottle deposit scheme will bring that up to over 85%”.

A bottle deposit scheme is where you pay a small fee when you buy a bottle and you get that money back when you take the bottle in to be recycled. Bottle deposits are in more than 50 countries worldwide- with England, Scotland, Ireland, ACT, Queensland and Manila recently making the decision to bring bottle deposits in.

The Kiwi Bottle Drive is encouraging people to send a bottle to the Minister to show their support for bottle deposits to be re-introduced. No stamp is required – you can just send it to “Minister for the Environment, Freepost Parliament, Private Bag 18 888, Parliament Buildings, Wellington 6160.

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