Plastic, the future of fence posts?
Future Post has created an alternative to wooden fence posts, and won an Innovation award at Fieldays.
Wooden fence posts are a New Zealand staple, but an alternative made of recycled plastic is here to change that.
Future Post has won an Innovation award for its recycled plastic posts at Fieldays.
The Launch NZ Innovation award is for products being launched onto the New Zealand market and is worth $5,000 to the winner.
Founder Jerome Wenzlick said that the inspiration for the post came while he was working as a fencer.
“I was fencing on an old rubbish dump, putting the security fence around, breaking wooden posts and digging holes in the ground, digging plastic out of the ground – and we thought, why not make the posts out of the plastic?”
Future Post collects a lot of commercial waste, it collects milk bottles from Fonterra and other plastics from the soft plastic bins in supermarkets.
Wenzlick says that they have a working relationship with Fonterra, which use his posts to fence their farms.
“It’s a whole circular economy thing, right? From their milk bottles back into their farms and doing something useful.”
The plastics are ground down before being made into posts through a manufacturing process designed specifically for this.
He also said that being made of plastic, the fence posts do not have the same issues the wooden posts do such as water damage and splitting.
“One of these is going to last a hell of a lot longer,” he said.
Future Post expect that the posts have a life span of more than 50 years.
