Auckland Council eyes shake-up of waste centres in bid to slash ballooning trash problem
Sunday, 13 January 2019
Auckland Council is considering wholesale changes to its waste centres as the amount of rubbish dumped in the region's landfills balloons, a new report shows.
The previously confidential report by consultants PwC, provided to Stuff, shows the amount of waste generated by the growing super city will continue to skyrocket without intervention.
Auckland Council is focussed on its zero waste by 2040 goal, but it faces a mammoth task in reversing current trends – the amount of waste sent to landfill increased 40 per cent between 2010 and 2016.
Progress has been made by decreasing household waste per capita – 10 per cent over the same six-year period – but household rubbish makes up just 15 per cent of all waste dumped at landfills.
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'Council now wishes to increasingly focus on the 85 per cent of waste to landfill from the commercial and industrial sectors,' the report states.
Citing commercial reasons, Auckland Council has blacked out the report's options for roadside rubbish collection – the council competes against private operators in that sector.
But the PwC report also outlines options to expand community recycling centres (CRCs) beyond the five currently operating.
The council has already approved funding for a further seven CRCs, expanding the network to 12 by 2024, but a 'growth' option floats adding a further three – increasing the total to 15.
Another option pitches the development of two CRCs focussed on taking construction and demolition waste, suggesting they could run as joint ventures with private businesses.
A further option was to establish a resource recovery park, which would process non-domestic waste, at Whitford Landfill.
Councillor Penny Hulse, chairwoman of Auckland Council's Environment and Community Committee, has not seen the report but said councillors had workshopped the issues around delivering more CRCs.
'We can now move on and look at delivering more of these,' she said.
'Our big challenge now is how we work with the industry [and] work within current legislation to deliver our three bin option [for recycling, food waste and general rubbish].
'We need to make sure that all of Auckland gets the best service they can that's equitable and fair. That's going to be a really big challenge.'
Some Auckanders have seen a raft of changes to how their rubbish is collected in recent years.
In late 2017, orange rubbish bags were replaced with a new pay-as-you-throw bin system in West Auckland.
That change was part of a bigger move to bring the entire city under the same rubbish rules by 2020.
The region would also shift to a three bin system, with a trial for a new food scraps bin started in Papakura in 2018.
'We will have our normal rubbish bin, so for out west it's the rubbish bin we have the tags on, we will have our recycling bin and then gradually rolling out around the region, we will have the food scraps bin,' Hulse said at the time.
Auckland Council's Waste Management and Minimisation Plan aimed to reduce household waste from 160 kilograms to 110kg per person per year.
The region produces about 5.4 million tonnes of waste annually, with roughly 1.6m tonnes going to landfill.
China has effectively banned the import of waste and recyclables which has had an impact on many countries including New Zealand.
According to the PwC report, New Zealand's kerbside recycling waste was typically unable to meet the low levels of contamination required for Chinese importation.
Prior to the new rules, China was the largest buyer of New Zealand's waste and recyclables – in 2017 it purchased $26m worth of exported waste and recyclables.