The Government is proposing to regulate a whole bunch of problematic wasteful items (finally) and they’re consulting on it RIGHT NOW. Submissions close on Friday 4 October 2019 at 5pm. We strongly encourage you to make a submission. You can do so here.
The overwhelming response we got when we shared this information on social media the day of the announcement was “YAY, THIS IS AMAZING, I’M SO HAPPY, ABOUT TIME, WHOOP, GONNA SUBMIT”. Closely followed by a less excited but steady stream of private messages and emails being like “So, guys… when are you releasing your submission?” or “I don’t know what to say in the submission” or “what are they actually asking, can you help?”
The sense we get is that lots of peeps broadly support what the Govt is trying to do and want to let the Govt know that, but many find the 56-page consultation document slightly overwhelming and the language used kinda technical. SO, we’ve teamed up with others to create the following resources to help you out (click to view):
ALSO, Zero Waste Network Aotearoa have created their own guides for submitting on the consultation, which are super useful and we recommend checking them out too. And this post from WasteMINZ is also very handy!
We teamed up with the New Zealand Product Stewardship Council to run this FREE WEBINAR on Thursday 5 September, briefly explaining what the consultation’s about and some important things to note, before opening the floor up for Q&A. Special thanks to to Dr Trisia Farrelly (Massey University, New Zealand Product Stewardship Council & Aotearoa Plastic Pollution Alliance) for joining us and answering the gnarly plastic questions!) You can watch the video below but NOTE a couple of things:
First, we forgot to press “record” at the beginning, so the intros are cut off.
The second techno boo-boo we made is that when we ‘shared’ our screen, we failed to exit the slideshow when we went to share the websites/submission form/consultation documents as we referred to them. WHOOPS. So when we say “as you can see here” and all you can see is our slides… SORRY. Because we muted everyone, no one was able to tell us that they couldn’t see what we were sharing, haha. Anyway, here are the links to all the websites and documents we attempted to ‘share’ during the webinar – if you open them up in your browser so you can look at them as we refer to them, hopefully it should make sense…:
MfE landing page for consultation doc and submission form: https://www.mfe.govt.nz/consultations/priorityproducts
Submission form: https://submissions.mfe.govt.nz/…/propose…/make-a-submission
Consultation Doc: https://www.mfe.govt.nz/…/proposed-priority-products-and-pr…
Our demystifying consultation doc infosheets – CO-CREATED with Helena Ruffell (this link – see below)
The NZPSC reference page with relevant materials for various proposed priority products: https://www.nzpsc.nz/
Aotearoa Plastic Pollution Alliance: http://www.nzappa.org/
https://www.facebook.com/TheRubbishTrip/videos/2294157867562956/
We collaborated with our mate Helena Ruffell (the scientist we mention in our talks who’s studying the microplastics coming out of NZ wastewater treatment plants) to create THREE infosheets just for you that break down what the consultation is about and highlight things to think about for the submission. We’re not gonna lie, they’re probably still not the most exciting thing you can view or read on the internet, but hopefully they’re helpful.
These aren’t meant to be an alternative to reading the consultation doc – please do still read the official government consultation document!! But hopefully they make that document slightly easier to digest.
References for content in infosheets at the end of this post
For those who are super keen, check out The Rubbish Trip’s submission (scroll down to see it in the PDF reader)! Please note that it’s not exactly short and snappy – it’s a bit technical. The submission form’s lack of paragraphing spacing options also makes it quite difficult to read. So, just a small warning that if you’re feeling overwhelmed by info already, then reading this submission might not help. However, if you are interested in going into some areas in more depth, reading our submission might fire off more ideas for you (even if you disagree with what we’ve written!) – we’ve certainly benefitted from chatting with some other waste geeks about what they have written or plan to write 😉
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