You talk to every fencer and farmer when they're handling treated timber. It's
a horrible muck having that stuff going into the ground and being on us. That's not ideal.
There's plenty of plastic waste out there. One of the first things I put in the factory was
the New Zealand flag. Everyone said "oh you know, good idea, take it overseas and get them to do it"
I'm sick and tired of that s**t happening. You know, we grow our trees and
wool and meat and milk and everything else for nothing, send it over there, they add the
value and we buy it back. It's just b****y dumb. It wasn't going to go down that track.
We've taken rubbish and instead of putting in a landfill, or having it blowing around the countryside
we're turning it into something useful, creating jobs and all of that good stuff.
I'm Jerome Wenzlick. I'm the founder of Future Post, and a farmer here in Thames.
When I left school my dad said "do a trade",
so I did the diesel mechanic, trucking, tractors, and all that.
But yeah, I couldn't see myself being a diesel mechanic the rest of my life.
Just wasn't me. Dad was a fencer as well when he was younger so just started fencing and carried
on farming and a few other bits and pieces along the way. So we were putting a fence up around an old
rubbish dump, didn't even know it was an old rubbish dump until we started digging holes in the ground
because the posts kept breaking, and literally digging plastic out of the ground. Went home that
weekend and got a whole lot of plastic off the farm, lit a fire and tried to melt it into a
pipe, and that didn't work. I thought it would be simple, but anything but.
We've had a lot of experts come through saying what we're doing is impossible
I thought "no, we'll follow this through" and
use our brains, (what little we have), and design a machine that'll make it and that's what we do.
It was a bit of a time of having a problem and fixing that and creating two more, working out
what mix of plastic works and and the ratios and temperatures and pressure, all of that.
We finally got all those bugs ironed out and could do good consistent production. We've got the soft
plastic from the supermarket scheme so that all gets bailed up and sent here, dog biscuit bags,
good old coca-cola bottle lids, got a bit of plastic from Fisher and Pykel Healthcare.
We've got to have our mix right to make a good post. We started with Fonterra they've been b*****y
good, but then we get stuff like Smart Environmental here next to the farm, we
get a hell of a lot of their plastic, and others like Northland Waste, Waste Management
EnviroWaste and EnviroNZ, all of those people as well. There's plenty of it out there.
We could get 10 times the amount if we wanted.
For me, as a fencer and farmer, the main thing is longevity.
You chuck that post in the ground and it's not going to rot, it's not going to disintegrate,
your staples aren't going to rust off. You've got no treatment going into the ground so for
organic farmers, vineyards, and everyone else they can use them in their farming.
Just lasts forever you know. A b****y macrocarpa one or timber one would be rotten
two or three years. When we started we were a little bit more expensive which was just
the way it was, we had to pay bills. We've got two lines at Waiuku now, looking at South
Island to get down there. Since our production's gone up we've been able to bring that price back
down. It was always my main thing to have it the same or cheaper than wood, which we are.
Most people are open to try something new, and you're never going to please everyone, but
if they see a post that's been in a fence line for three or four years
then they start to notice it. That's sort of the way we are
It's not like we've had an open chequebook, so we've got
to make up for that with using our brain and trying things and getting stuck in and doing it.
You don't want to be on your deathbed thinking "s**t, I wish I'd tried that" because it's too late then.
Give it a go, and don't listen to the naysayers. Give them the middle finger and just battle on.