KEY POINTS:
I might be more enthusiastic about the Auckland and Manukau city councils' latest gesture towards saving the planet if I had any faith the bureaucrats were sure about what they were doing.
Six years ago we, in Auckland City at least, were introduced to a revolution in household waste management which was going to reduce the amount of household waste sent off to the tip by 50 per cent over the following three years.
Our big 240-litre wheelie bins were to be replaced by half-sized red-topped bins for general waste, and smaller blue bins for recycling plastics, paper and metals.
We kept our 240-litre bins for green waste. The council wouldn't pick that up, but provided coupons so the first six pick-ups from private contractors would be free.
The council even employed 11 "waste doctors" to wander about, educating us on the finer points of rubbish sorting.
The amount of waste going to the tip dropped 30 per cent, which given population growth, was a respectable result.
But now, kerbside recycling has been declared a failure. Instead, the two cities are planning a $20 million, centralised recycling plant to replace the home-based sorting we've all got into the habit of doing.
To provide rubbish for this recycling plant, Auckland city is to recall the reliable blue bins and, with Manukau, issue every household with a new 240-litre wheelie bin - 250,000 of them. Into them go all our recyclables. Over the next 10 years, $27 million of ratepayers' money will be poured into this "improvement."
You'd think that at least the recycling industry would be excited by all this. But no. The glass and paper recycling industries are sounding the alarm over this "co-mingling" collection system. They say mixing the various waste materials helps no one.
For instance, broken glass fragments embedded in the waste paper can damage paper recycling plants. Glass breakage rates of 25 to 30 per cent, which is the experience on the North Shore and Waitakere, where such a system is used, reduces the uses that can be made of the glass. And there are problems with shards of glass getting mixed up with plastic.
In Saturday's Weekend Herald, it was revealed that between 30 and 50 per cent of the glass collected from North Shore and Waitakere is unsuitable for glass making because of the way it is collected.
David Carter, of the Glass Packaging Forum, says that "nowhere in the world does a recovery facility exist capable of delivering the vast proportion of glass to the quality required for glass making. We know that the councils would like to bring the best technology in the world to Auckland but the required technology is not proven and, even if it were, the likely cost will be prohibitive. It will require a huge leap of faith by Auckland's ratepayers to spend much more than $20 million on an untested system."
If the end-use businesses are calling for caution, why should the bureaucrats be spending vast amounts of ratepayers' money for something they don't want?
The manager of Auckland City's environmental infrastructure team, Rennae Corner, says the new bins will give more capacity, make recycling easier and reduce street litter because stuff can blow away from the existing blue bins.
Six years ago, the bureaucrats halved the size of our rubbish bins to reduce waste. As for stuff blowing away, I've always found that tying a piece of string around my pile of papers solves that problem.
Even if we spend the $27 million plus, the biggest household waste problem will remain untreated. More than 40 per cent of the rubbish sent to the tip each week from Auckland households is organic waste food scraps, garden clippings and the like. Wouldn't it be smarter to focus on that?
Also, $27 million would hire a lot of "waste doctors". When the existing kerbside recycling was introduced, we reduced the amount of rubbish going to the tip by 30 per cent. In other words, Aucklanders bought into the scheme.
OK, so now we are slipping a bit. But are 250,000 more wheelie bins and an expensive recycling plant the only answer?
Maybe a new publicity campaign to encourage the backsliders, and a focus on home composting of organic waste, would do the trick.
