Scientist studies how much construction plastic ends up in landfill

Plastic. Once you know it’s there you can’t unsee it.

It’s what keeps Professor Terri-Ann Berry awake at night.

“I'm actually horrified when I see pictures of waste mountains in various countries and waste in the ocean” she said

“It scares me, and that’s part of the fascination.”

Berry is an environmental scientist and the director of Unitech’s Environmental Solutions Research Centre.

For the past two years she has been taking a deep dive into Auckland’s construction industry to work out just how much of their plastic waste is going directly into landfills.

“We were absolutely gobsmacked,” she said.

“Not just about the amount of plastic but actually the wide variety of different plastic items we were finding.”

Twenty-five thousand tonnes of construction plastic was going straight into landfills every year in Auckland alone.

That’s the equivalent of 3.6 billion of those single use plastic shopping bags banned by the Government in 2019.

Berry doesn’t have the numbers for how much of construction's plastic waste is being recycled.

"We get the impression that it’s not actually very much,” she said.

Plastic can take hundreds of years to break down in landfills and what doesn’t go underground can end up in waterways.

The World Wildlife Fund predicts there’ll be more plastic in than fish in the ocean by 2050.

“It can look kind of bleak,” Berry said.

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“But if we think about it too much, we’ll stop, and we won’t be able to make a difference. And we can’t afford to do that, we’ve got to do something, we’ve got to start acting and doing something now.”

The war on plastic has a new front – the home front.