Trash to triumph for FuturePost

Some people’s trash is another person’s fencing, vineyard post or bollards, with the country’s largest recycling business creating a circular economy out of soft plastics.

FuturePost, the Port Marlborough 2025 Marlborough Environment Awards Supreme Award winners, hosted over 60 eager community members at their Waters Ave processing and manufacturing plant, alongside a site visit to St Clair vineyard to see the vineyard products in action.

Founder Jerome Wenzlick and CEO Dave Elder spoke to guests on the processes and business journey, before seeing posts being produced and exploring the yards of both unprocessed soft plastics and posts ready to be sent.

“We aren’t a recycling business, we’re a manufacturing business making a bloody good product finding use across many industries.

“This has come from something as simple as Jerome doing fencing on a former landfill, breaking treated wooden posts and seeing the plastics in the soil”, said Dave.

“The ethos of this business has been to keep plastic out of landfill and to give ongoing use, including as our posts come to need replacing, we take them back and return into our process and continually reuse.”

While the soft plastics recycling is supplied freely, major costs for the business come in power for melting the plastics down to its base substance and in getting added ingredient Carbon Black which acts to seal in the plastics and creates the UV stabilised plastic for outdoor use.

“But we also spend a lot of time on proving our products, so with some of our first installed posts we’ve ran microplastics testing around them after five, six and seven years and a $300k cost to ourselves but proving there’s no soil leaching.

“We get the soft plastics from a range of suppliers, from grocery shop bins, vineyard dripline, councils and business partners from across the country”, said FuturePost sales and marketing manager Leslie O’Dwyer.

“So really the best way Marlborough can continue helping us thrive as a locally based manufacturer is to correctly clean and recycle soft plastics.”

Dave says that the combination of recycling and manufacturing, creating a circular way for plastic to be reused in a productive way, gives the whole team satisfaction and motivation.

“We are proud that people, like everyone here today, support us because we’re fuelled by the fact when our grandkids ask what we do for a business we can actively say we’re having positive impacts on our environment.”