Miss Maiden said Tauranga's waste management position was different to that of Auckland, Wellington or Hamilton because its landfill waste needed to be transported to the Waikato.
"The distance that we have to transport waste is quite a large component of the cost," she told the Bay of Plenty Times Weekend.
A lot of the weight in this waste was from food scraps and green waste, which could be reused on farms or home gardens.
It was uneconomical for plastics labelled 3 to 7 to be collected for recycling in Tauranga, a reason the Government was considering product stewardship as a way of making producers responsible for their product at the end of its useful life, Miss Maiden said.
Opinions on recycling costs, shared on the Bay of Plenty Times Facebook varied widely. Some residents expected the rates-funded service they had become accustomed to in other cities while others felt the costs associated with a user-pays system were fair.
Many took their recycling to the transfer station at no cost, but questioned how those without personal transport could do the same.
Director of Tauranga consultancy Waste Watchers, Marty Hoffart, said he "did not buy the argument" that if it was rates-funded people would recycle more.
The city's two recycling centres were "bumper to bumper" every day and a lot of residents had a user-pays kerbside recycling service.
Including an annual council charge for collection of general waste, green waste and recycling could also penalise elderly people who produced very little waste, he said.
Mr Hoffart, who moved to New Zealand from Canada 21 years ago, said waste was a national issue, rather than a local one. He wanted to see New Zealand adopt product stewardship where the cost of new items such as televisions, computers and car tyres included a fee for recycling.
Envirohub BOP staff member Tania Bramley said more education was needed around ways to decrease the amount of household waste being generated.
"How to avoid buying that kind of packaged product in the first place and looking at ways to re-use things," she said.
New products, including beeswax-infused cotton food wraps, could replace the need for non-recyclable items such as tinfoil and plastic wrap. Bamboo toothbrushes, cotton buds and clothes pegs were also a more sustainable alternative to non-recyclable plastic items.
The Envirohub, based at the Historic Village, was taking entries in the Sustainable Art Challenge, which encouraged locals to find innovative ways to use things that would otherwise go to landfill.