Plastic & metal lid recycling
Our CE Georgie and Darcy from The Tiny Plastic Factory
We’re a central city drop-off for metal bottle caps, lids for glass jars and plastic lids.
We’ve partnered up with McAuley Metals & The Tiny Plastic Factory to deliver a FREE bottle top and lid recycling trial right in the heart of Wellington.
Please clean and dry your lids before dropping them off to us.
JULY UPDATE: PLEASE READ.
We are really happy with how our community has embraced our drop-off point. We have diverted 12kg of plastic lids and 16kg of metal lids from landfill in under 3 months.
As this is a trial, we need your help if we want to keep this service. Unfortunately, the amount of contamination (items we can’t recycle) in the plastic collection is increasing.
These items get rejected and returned to us, making it a more expensive service for us to provide.
We know that you are keen recyclers, so to help we’ve updated the list below to give you more guidance on what you can drop off.
What we accept:
Beer bottle caps ✔️
Metal wine bottle tops ✔️
Metal jar lids ✔️
Metal drink bottle tops ✔️
Plastic drink bottle lids (any colour) ✔️
Milk bottle caps ✔️
What we can’t recycle:
Anything that isn’t a drink bottle or milk bottle lid e.g. food pouch lids, dip lids, coffee cup lids ❌
Lids with a thermal seal inside (this often looks like a blue or white layer inside the lid) ❌
Waxy paper inserts (please remove if you can, we can still recycle the lid) ❌
How it works:
Sort your clean + dry plastic and metal lids into separate steams.
Bring them into us - Sustainability Trust, 2 Forresters Lane (off Tory Street) Wellington
McAuley Metals will collect the metal lids and The Tiny Plastic Factory will collect the lids (by bike)
This is a free service ♻️
Why this is important?
Even with the best intentions, plastic and metal lids don’t always make it into the recycling pile. It’s not because they’re not recyclable, it’s because they are too small to be detected and often slip through the cracks.
Metal bottle caps and jar lids are not recyclable through your kerbside recycling. You can stockpile them and drop them off to scrap metal recycling at the Southern Landfill Transfer Station.
Wellington City Council asks for lids to be removed from bottles when preparing your recycling. Issues relating to plastic lids are due to:
lids being a different type of plastic to the bottle, which when mixed together reduces the quality of the recycled material
lids being left on when contents remain in the bottle results in contamination
The lids are too small to be baled with the other plastics.
Every year, a total of 2,498 tonnes of loose lids are disposed of though rubbish or recycling bins in Aotearoa/NZ. Most of this will end up in landfill.