This project seeks to divert more rural waste from landfill by seeking sustainable end-of-life management solutions for animal health medicines and their packaging.
Our current scheme operates for manufacturers who voluntarily commit to product stewardship. With agrichemicals being declared priority products, all agrichemicals must become part of a regulated product stewardship scheme under the Waste Minimisation Act. This includes but is not limited to all substances that require registration under the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Act 1997, whether current or expired, and their containers (packaging), which are considered hazardous until they have been triple-rinsed.
How this is being done
We are working with industry to determine the extent of animal health medicinal products in the New Zealand market and what happens to them at the end of their useful life. We will then develop and analyse the options for recycling them and make recommendations to the Ministry for the Environment on the design of the preferred product stewardship schemes for these products.
- Read more about priority products
Animal Health Advisory Group
The role of the advisory group is to provide intelligence to Agrecovery to help inform the design process. This is a consultative group that will ensure that Agrecovery has the information required to build a product stewardship scheme that meets the government issued guidelines and works for producers and consumers alike. Agrecovery will lead the design process and determine the final form of the scheme, but the advisory group has a critical role in ensuring the design is properly informed and resilient.
Read the Animal Health Advisory Group Terms of Reference
Timeframes
The focus in Year 1 of the project will be on ensuring a strong foundation for a resilient and robust scheme that can be built upon. As we progress the project, the approach will need to be fair to all participants and have minimal disruption to the industry and product users.
The following timeline shows the current steps we are working through:
| Animal Health Product Stewardship Scheme Advisory Group Members provided feedback on Strawman and documentation provided at the end of 2022 | Due 6 March 2023 |
| Any feedback provided will be collated and sent out for wider consultation to the Stakeholder and Reference Groups. | End of March 2023 |
| While out for consultation, Advisory Group Members will be working on the questions that need to be answered for a product to go through their part of the supply chain i.e. health and safety, types of plastic and ease of recyclability, handling challenges and a combination of other factors. The answers derived will inform the decision tree on how all products are treated when entering the Product Stewardship Scheme. | From April 2023 |
| Feedback from the wider Stakeholder Group consultation was received. View the Advisory Group’s response to the feedback received: Animal Health Consultation Feedback | June 2023 |
Agrecovery Animal Health Product Stewardship Scheme Overview
This details the key stakeholders that interact with the supply chain of Animal Health products and the roles that each of the actors play in moving the plastic packaging back through the supply chain.
Animal Health Product Stewardship Scheme Terms of Reference Meeting
To develop a regulated animal health product stewardship scheme, Agrecovery held a meeting with the Animal Health Forum to discuss the Terms of Reference and their nomination for the Advisory Group.
Below is a recording of that webinar: