More Councils Are Setting Up Soft Plastic Collection. Starting The Habit Now Means You Will Be Ready

Palmerston North is launching a drop-off trial in July 2026. Nelson has already shown the model works. Households that build the routine now will not have to scramble when a scheme arrives nearby.

For most New Zealanders, recycling soft plastics still means a deliberate trip to a supermarket bin. It works, it is accessible in most urban areas, and it depends entirely on households making it part of the routine rather than an afterthought.

That routine is worth building, because the places where it can be maintained close to home are multiplying.

Nelson has been running the country's first kerbside soft plastic trial since October 2024. Around 1,000 households in the Stoke neighbourhood have been putting orange bags out on collection day, with the material going to Future Post in Blenheim to become fence posts and garden products. The trial was funded entirely by The Packaging Forum and has demonstrated a consistent result: when collection is convenient and the instructions are clear, households participate and the material arrives clean enough to recycle.

Palmerston North is next. The city's Community Resilience and Sustainability Committee voted unanimously in February 2026 to approve a 12-month soft plastic recycling trial, launching in July 2026. Rather than kerbside collection, the Palmerston North trial will use drop-off points at locations across the city, including the Awapuni Resource Recovery Park, operating through The Packaging Forum's national scheme. The capital cost is $82,600, primarily for a storage shed, with an annual operating cost of $28,000, both funded from existing council budgets.

Other councils are watching both trials. The national policy environment has become more cautious: the government suspended several proposed kerbside recycling mandates in 2025, preferring to allow councils to move at their own pace rather than mandating a national timetable. WasteMINZ, the waste and resource recovery industry body, has pushed back, arguing in its 2026 policy manifesto that voluntary and council-led progress, while valuable, will not achieve the scale of soft plastic diversion that the country needs without clearer national direction.

In the meantime, households in areas where trials are not yet running are not without options, and they are not without influence. The behaviour that every scheme depends on, whether kerbside or drop-off, is the same: setting aside clean, dry soft plastics separately and getting them to a collection point regularly. Building that habit now costs nothing and requires no new infrastructure. When a trial arrives in a neighbourhood, households that already separate their soft plastics will simply have a more convenient place to take them.

The starting point is usually storage. Soft plastics pile up faster than expected, and a collection that grows too unwieldy tends to end up in the wrong bin. Keeping the pile compressed and contained throughout the fortnight, as The Shrinker! is designed to help with, is what makes the habit manageable enough to sustain until the system catches up.

For households in Palmerston North, that system arrives in July 2026. For others, the timeline is less certain, but the momentum is real. Nelson proved it works. Palmerston North is about to prove it can work somewhere else. The councils watching both trials are not simply waiting: they are looking at the evidence and deciding when it is their turn.

The households that are already in the habit, separating their soft plastics, keeping them clean, storing them tidily between visits, will find the transition, whenever it arrives, is the easiest thing they did not have to think about. The habit will already be built. All that changes is where it takes them.