New Zealand's inconsistencies across recycling and kerbside collections create confusion, makes more waste go to landfill and can increase contamination in recycling, a new report has found.
Ministry for the Environment commissioned the report by WasteMINZ to recommend ways to standardise kerbside collections, reduce confusion, improve quality and reduce the amount of rubbish going to landfill.
The key recommendations were:
- To standardise materials collected in kerbside recycling across New Zealand (e.g. plastics 1, 2, 5; metal, glass, cardboard and paper).
- Incentivise local authorities to collect food waste to reduce rubbish to landfill.
- Incentivise glass to be collected separately.
- Provide recommendations for food waste, recycling and rubbish collections to increase consistency.
The report said the main cost of the recommendations would be educating households - but said if recycling was the same across the country this could be nationalised.
It was estimated a separate food waste collection could cost local authorities $45 per household per annum.
"This includes the cost of containers, collections, and processing infrastructure," the report stated.
"This would be partially offset by reduced residual rubbish disposal costs, with less residual rubbish being collected, and local authorities also potentially being able to reduce residual rubbish collections to fortnightly to further offset costs."
It said the tolerance for contaminated recycling (which includes anything that should not be there or dirty products) had dropped and there was limited markets in New Zealand to recycle materials such as fibre and glass due to ageing infrastructure.
There was also a 'postcode lottery' - where the distance of reprocessing plants meant some areas had to heavily subsidise recycling services if they were placed further away.
New Zealand was one of the highest countries in the OECD for waste per capita - coming in at 10 as one of the most wasteful countries in New Zealand, according to World Bank data, the report stated.
It also included recommendations from a 2019 WasteMINZ working group to only collect plastics 1, 2 and 5 in curbside recycling.
Associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage said New Zealand’s recycling system relied on a lot of manual sorting.
"It’s not pleasant work, especially when people put rubbish in their recycling bin. An immediate first step the sector and councils can do is move towards collected a standard group of materials.
"There also needs to be a collaborative approach between central and local government, while recognising that councils have their local contexts and existing services to manage."
Ms Sage also announced today $36.7 million from the Covid-19 Response and Recovery Fund would go to upgrade recycling facilities in Christchurch, Auckland, New Plymouth, Hamilton, Thames, Napier, Northland, Bay of Plenty and Canterbury.
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