The amount of Tauranga household waste ending up in the local landfill has nearly halved since the city's ratepayer-funded kerbside collection service was introduced last year.
The new kerbside service, which addded food scraps, recycling, rubbish, and optional garden waste bins to the existing glass recycling collections, was launched on July 1, 2021.
Tauranga City Council's sustainability and waste manager Sam Fellows. Photo / Supplied
Tauranga City Council's sustainability and waste manager Sam Fellows told the Bay of Plenty Times that, collectively, the community had made a "massive difference", by reducing the amount of waste going to landfill by up to 89 kilograms per person a year.
Fellows said he and Council staff put this milestone down to a "fantastic effort" by the residents of Tauranga to embrace the changes and use the service correctly.
"Almost halving the amount of waste going to landfill within a year is a really impressive, fantastic result."
Fellows said prior to the introduction of the service last year, residents were sending 190 to 200kgs of waste per person a year to landfill, with 254,127 bins in service across 60,086 properties across the city.
"After the first year of the ratepayer-funded collection, this has reduced to 111kgs per person a year. And it would have been even less if Covid-19 hadn't led to a disruption in our food scraps and glass recycling collections.
"Our original goal was to reduce our household waste-to-landfill by one-quarter by 2023. Now, thanks to the fantastic work of our community, we have revised our goal to reduce that amount even further to over 60 per cent by 2028.
"Together, we can achieve this goal by using the food scraps bin, making sure recycling is clean and dry, lids removed, and by making more conscious decisions when purchasing."
Fellows said the service cost $210 for the first year, and is now $220 for a standard bin size bundle; the cost will increase by $10 a year until 2025, in line with the increases to the government's waste levy.
Market research showed that this was significantly less than the $515 a year for an average household using private kerbside rubbish and paid recycling collections, he said.
Fellows said the collection truck drivers were the "unsung heroes" of the service.
"Tauranga relies on our truck drivers to get the job done, and they've gone above and beyond in what has been a challenging first year due to Covid-19.
"To help them out, make sure your bin lids can close, leave 30 centimetres between bins, ensure bins are well clear of power poles, cars, and letterboxes, and put smaller bins like food scraps and glass to the right facing the road, so they're more easily seen."
Council's waste operations team leader Hope Lawson said Tauranga households had adapted quickly to the new service, helped by their friendly bin inspector, who walked up to 45 kilometres each week checking the right things were going into the recycling bins.
Lawson said putting food scraps and garden waste in the right bins meant they get turned into a nutrient-rich compost used by orchards and farms across the Bay of Plenty and the Waikato.
The vast majority of plastics collected in the yellow-lidded bins (numbers 1, 2 and 5) get transformed into new things like food containers, detergent bottles and products for the building industry – right here in New Zealand.
Bottles and jars are melted down in Auckland to make new ones, and paper, cardboard, tins, and cans are also recycled into new paper, cardboard, and metal products.
Households wanting to change their bin sizes - there will be another chance from early next year. Anyone wanting kerbside collection updates can get them via the council's website.
