Containers recycled through Agrecovery are often made into underground cable cover.
Worldwide, a total of nearly 130 million kilograms of crop protection product containers have been recycled since the CropLife International container management initiative began about a decade ago.
“Recycling used crop protection containers goes a long way in environmental benefits,” notes Detlef Doehnert, Ph.D., chair of CropLife International’s Container Management Project Team.
“It’s easy to demonstrate the value of container management programs.”
For instance, about 30,000 to 70,000 tonnes of empty crop protection product containers were collected each year between 2005 and 2012. A total of nearly 400,000 tonnes of containers.
About 50 percent of them were in Brazil, which has the largest container management program in the world. In 2012, over 37,000 tonnes of plastic were collected there alone, representing almost 95 percent of the containers entering the Brazilian market.
The amount of plastic recovered from empty crop protection product containers globally in 2012 would have filled 238 Olympic size swimming pools. More than 70,000 tonnes of plastic were recovered to be recycled into useful products, such as drainage pipes, fence posts and parking cones. This amount of recycling also spared energy use amounting to 130 million liters of gasoline or 24,000 fewer cars on the road per year.
Source: Leading the Vison – Stewardship in the Crop Protection Industry – Issue 2 (1)
Through Agrecovery New Zealand farmers, growers and contractors have recycled nearly 800,000kg of container plastic since we started in 2007. That’s a lot of plastic not burned or dumped on properties in New Zealand.
Using Crop Life International calculations, we’ve worked out the amount of energy saved using recycled plastic vs new plastic:
800,000kg of recycled container plastic is equal to 1,360,000 litres of petrol!