Fair Go: Why Auckland has so few public recycling bins

A young waste warrior wants to change how we dispose of rubbish in public after discovering most shared recycling ends up going to landfill.

Orewa College student Maria Walker-Kinnell has been challenging a lack of public recycling bins in Auckland, with no easy way to know how to locate one on a street.

Auckland Council takes care of around 240 public recycling bins, although that figure excludes libraries or leisure centres. More than half of the bins are in the CBD or central suburbs alone.

Maria teamed up with Fair Go after being selected as one of the programme’s Consumer Heroes, a competition which backs young people to push for positive change in their community.

She raised her concerns with Auckland Council community Waste Wise coordinator Cathy Ma and discovered that up to 95 per cent of public recycling bins in the city have enough general rubbish that none of the bins’ contents can be recycled.

Ma explained that with “so many people putting stuff into them, there could be one person who knows a lot about recycling and there could be someone who's mistaken about what can be recycled”.

Maria agreed with Ma’s suggestion that distributors and producers like cafes, dairies and supermarkets needed to step up to take care of waste – and allow consumers to return it.