GetReal recently won a major battle to get Foodstuffs to start charging for plastic bags in all of its New Zealand supermarkets and members hope the group's new campaign will have the same sort of impact.
Wild Oats, GetReal's own performance troupe, premiered its show ‘‘Stop Absurd Packaging'' at schools and on the streets of Wanaka on Monday, before taking the show on the road to Queenstown, Invercargill and Dunedin. Over the next few days, performances will continue in main streets, at farmers' markets and on university campuses in Christchurch and Nelson, on board the Interislander ferry and in towns throughout the lower North Island.
The street theatre is a mixture of rap, dance music, poetry and skits, highlighting absurd packaging with lines such as ‘‘When you buy food from the dairy it's the food we want to taste. You can't eat that silly wrapping, it goes into the waste.''
The show's final performance will be on the steps of Parliament on May 15, the deadline day for consultation on the Ministry for the Environment's Waste Minimisation Act. An open letter will be delivered and a huge roll of wallpaper covered in signatures supporting the campaign will be rolled out on the steps.
Wanaka Wastebusters general manager Sue Coutts said recycling centres and rubbish contractors were left to clean up the mess of excessive packaging and councils had to pay for it.
GetReal wanted to force companies to take responsibility for their packaging choices by getting packaging put back on the Priority Products List under the Waste Minimisation Act.
‘‘If that happened, a product stewardship scheme would have to be accredited for packaging.
‘‘We have until May 15, when submissions close on the way the government is planning to implement the Act,'' Ms Coutts said.
-- Lucy Ibbotson
