Letters: Waste should go back to provider

Glass collection in Mount Maunganui. Photo / File

I read the editorial for recycling in Tauranga (Opinion, November 27).

This is really the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. The ratepayers should not pay for a recycling process and street pick-up.

Ideally your waste should never reach the recycling bin. Take it back to the provider.

The suppliers/resellers of packaging and containers should be responsible for the collection after it has been used and not dump it in the community and make us accept that we must pay additional rates to send it to the landfill.

For example, supermarkets should have large bins outside for you to bring back your empty containers, plastics, glass, and so on. They send the plastics out into the world, they should be responsible for taking back the empty containers.

Tauranga City Council is blindly following the rest of New Zealand and paying lip service to recycling.

Only 9 per cent of plastics collected can be recycled. Where do the rest of the plastics go? The landfill.

Can Tauranga City Council do it differently? Yes. This is worth the conversation, let's get started.

The immediate conversation needs to be about reducing the number of recyclables we consume in our daily lives.

Philip Brown
Pāpāmoa

Too broad brush in generalisations

Dawn Picken's column on free speech (Opinion, November 23), as always, made for excellent reading.

But I think she is maybe a little too broad brush in her generalisations.

Denigrating criticism aimed at individuals or sectors of the community are not acceptable.

But if we disagree with legislation passed or proposed by our Government we have a right to say so. We don't have to be an Opposition MP to air our views.

For example, if we don't agree that we should be deprived of the freedom to discipline our children as we see fit; if we don't agree that people of the same sex should be allowed to marry; if we don't agree that human life should be prematurely terminated for any reason; if we think government legislation unfairly disadvantages or favours a particular sector of the community, we have a right to say so.

God willing we will never have to go to the extremes that citizens of Hong Kong have done to preserve that right.

Ian Young
Pāpāmoa

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