Recycling Week 2026: Keeping Glass in Circulation

This Recycling Week, we’re celebrating what recycling can achieve when materials are treated as a resource rather than waste.

Running from 19–25 October, Recycling Week is New Zealand’s largest educational campaign focused on waste minimisation and recycling. Importantly, it encourages us to think beyond the recycling bin and consider how materials can be avoided, reduced, reused, repaired and ultimately recycled.

At 5R Solutions, that thinking is at the heart of what we do.

Since establishing in 2009, we have developed solutions that keep significant volumes of glass out of landfill each year. By January 2026, we had diverted more than 500,000 tonnes of glass from landfill, and in March we reached another major milestone: 1.5 million windscreens recycled.

Giving glass another life

Glass recovered by 5R is processed so it can become a useful resource again.
Depending on the material and end market, our processed glass can go into products including new bottles, glass wool insulation, wastewater treatment systems and filtration applications.
It demonstrates what a circular approach can look like in practice: recovering material that might otherwise be discarded, processing it to customer requirements and putting it back into productive use.

Recycling starts with better choices

Recycling Week is also a good reminder that recycling shouldn't necessarily be our first response to waste. The wider waste hierarchy asks us to first consider whether something can be avoided, reduced, reused or repaired before recycling it.

When recycling is the right option, however, getting the material into the right recovery stream matters.

At 5R, we’ll keep working with businesses and industries throughout New Zealand to find practical ways to recover glass and keep valuable resources circulating.

Have glass that could be recovered rather than sent to landfill? Get in touch with the 5R Solutions team to discuss what's possible.