A small Waiuku company is making a dent in the plague of plastic by taking plastic junk and turning it into fence posts.
The idea came to long-time farmer Jerome Wenzlick when he was having trouble putting up a fence at a rubbish dump.
“We know this will be a solution to the plastic problem that’s in the country, but not only here but everywhere else in the world,” Future Post founder Jerome Wenzlick told Seven Sharp.
The Tokoroa farmer is turning single-use plastic bags, soft plastics and milk bottles into future-proof fence posts.
The company makes enough posts to put up around 80 kilometres of fencing per month.
Each post is made up of 320 milk bottles and 1200 plastic bags, saving 230 tonnes of plastic from the landfill every month.
“If these break, we take them back, we granulate them again and we put them through the process and we can do that many times over,” Future Post general manager Chris Meyer explained.
Demand for the posts have gone through the roof amid a nationwide timber shortage.
“We don’t have to wait for a tree to grow or chop down a tree to supply a farmer with a fence post,” Meyer said.
Wenzlick has been farming for 20 years, and had an epiphany while fencing an old rubbish dump almost three years ago.
“We were having to dig holes because our wooden posts were breaking and we pretty much sat there and I thought, ‘Wonder if we can make a post out of all this waste plastic’.”
Wenzlick couldn't find anyone else doing it, so he teamed up with some local engineers to build the posts from scratch.
Meyer says there’s “a lot of international interest” in the one-of-a-kind machine.
“They are going to last forever, they’re not going to rot, the sun isn’t going to break them down so we UV stabilise them,” Wenzlick said.
“We’re making them out of 100 per cent recycled plastic so we’re saving the world one post a time.”
The posts aren’t just for farmers – the plastic post is BioGro certified, so organic producers can use them too.
”Every tonne that we turn into a post here is a tonne that’s not trucked to a landfill,” Wenzlick said.
"If we can stop a landfill being filled by 50 years, it saves us having to dig another one."
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