Tauranga's kerbside glass recycling scheme to go high-tech

Associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage checks out Tauranga's sixth glass collection truck. Photo / Sandra Conchie

Tauranga's kerbside glass recycling scheme has been given $256,500 to help fund a high-tech upgrade of its collection service.

Associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage announced the funding at the Te Maunga transfer station yesterday.The funding would be used to install radio frequency identification readers on half of Tauranga's 52,950 blue recycling crates.

The recycling crates' new radio frequency identification technology would track the bins to individual properties.

The high-level data captured by the new technology would identify recycling trends and patterns that could be used to help the community about how to recycle more wisely.

The kerbside glass recycling service was introduced to households in Tauranga in October last year after private kerbside glass collection services were withdrawn in March 2018.

Tauranga City Council and the Ministry for the Environment teamed up to support the household kerbside glass collection in the city.

Sage said the glass recycling project was a critical part of the process of ensuring the community recycled more and sent less to landfill.

Sage said the decision by the council to keep the glass from contaminating papers, cards and plastics made it much easier to recover and recycle.

"We have got a real challenge in New Zealand reducing the mounting volumes of waste that are going to landfill...This is a very exciting recycling initiative.

"We are committed to supporting these types of solutions to reduce waste. It's fantastic to be able to fund this initiative, which has had a significant impact on reducing our landfill."

Mayor Greg Brownless said the project was led by the council's sustainability and waste team, with support and funding from the NZ Glass Packaging Forum.

"The partnership between Smart Environmental and the council has been instrumental in getting this service off the ground in such a short timeframe, Brownless said.

There has been lots of positivity from the community about the service, and the scheme had encouraged more residents to recycle glass, he said.

Brownless said the kerbside collection service had a much more significant uptake than expected, so the council put on a sixth glass collection truck which began on July 1.

On average, 5500 households were serviced each day.

He said the council estimated almost twice as much glass was being collected compared to the previous collection service.

"We are very proud to say that we are well on track to diverting 6000 tonnes of glass from landfill this year. That's a huge amount of glass in such a short space of time.

"We are also proud that our service is using this new technology which allows us to scan crates, so we know exactly which crate is picked up and emptied, and when.

"No other council has used this technology on glass crates before, so we are leading the way in this field... It's a very positive story all round," he said.

NZ Glass Packaging Forum manager Dominic Salmon said the funding was a strong endorsement from the Government of its colour-sorted, kerbside collection service.