13th April 2011

The Unpackit crew will be visiting Lakes High School on Thursday 14th April at 1 pm, entertaining students and encouraging them to vote in the 2011 Unpackit Packaging Awards.

The team of four, who all work at Wanaka Wastebusters, will later meet with the Sustainability Team from Rotorua District Council to talk about the project and sustainability initiatives in Rotorua.

The Unpackit Packaging Awards for the Best and Worst packaging in the country are being run by Wanaka Wastebusters, and received over 100 nominations from the public.

Shortlists of eight finalists have been made for each of the awards.

During the roadshow performance at the school, the Unpackit team will talk students through each of the finalists, before the each student votes for their choice of the Best and Worst finalists.

The show is livened up by skits including chip-pack juggling, wrapper rapping and bananas on stilts.

Votes can also be made online at www.unpackit.org. Nearly 7,000 votes have been received since the shortlists were announced on 25th March.

Roadshow organiser Ivy Willmott said the idea behind the Unpackit roadshow is to make people laugh as well as making them think.

“It’s a serious message, but it doesn’t need to be boring,” she said.

The roadshow has been touring the country since Monday 28th March, when the first show was performed in Wanaka.

Awards organiser Sophie Ward said the 16 finalists had been narrowed down from over 100 nominations.

“We were surprised to find that nearly all of the eight “Best” finalists are from small to medium-sized New Zealand businesses.

“For most of the Best finalists, the packaging is part of the brand they’re creating and they’ve put a lot of thought into it.

“Some of the best packaging is made from recycled materials, or from a waste stream – such as Potatopak which is made from starch waste from potato chip manufacturers.”

All of the “Best” finalists are fully recyclable and/or home compostable. In contrast, all of the eight “Worst” finalists are destined to end up in the rubbish bin, because they can’t be recycled or composted.

“All of the eight “Worst” finalists use more packaging than they need to, most of them are what I would call excessive,” said Ms Ward.

“I don’t know whose bright idea it is to individually wrap Sunsweet’s prunes, but I haven’t met one person on the roadtrip so far who doesn’t think that it is absolutely ridiculous.”

Ms Ward said the eight “Worst” finalists had also failed to label their plastics with an identifying number in a triangle (with the exception of Cadbury Drinking Chocolate who did label their plastic lid). As a result, the plastics couldn’t be properly recycled.

The Unpackit Roadshow of Joy will be on tour until April 21st, and will go as far north as Kaitaia. For a full itinerary and roadshow blogs, please go to www.unpackit.org


The winners of the awards will be announced May 6th.

ENDS

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