Rudman's city: Rubbish downsizing a half-baked scheme

By BRIAN RUDMAN

When the do-gooder lefties gang up with the know-best righties, it's time to be very afraid.

Take Auckland's rubbish. Or should I say, please take the city's rubbish, because the council no longer wants to.

Our leaders have decided that the 380,000 tonnes of waste that city businesses and households put out in their wheelie bins each year is too much. By June 2003 they want this figure halved. By June 2010 they want us putting out just 20 per cent of what we now toss away.

How will this miracle occur? Like all true believers, their plan of action is doctrinaire. The popular 240-litre bins are out; half-sized 120-litre bins are in, no matter the size of your family or business.

They're even going to use video cameras to spy on the contents of bins to ensure you put out only acceptable rubbish. In the master plan, even food scraps were to be forbidden.

"Kitchen and garden waste is not collected kerbside, so don't put this in the wheelie bin," said promotional material issued last year.

This was echoed in a council brochure giving six simple steps to recycling. It advised, under the heading "Garden and kitchen waste" to "please don't put this in your wheelie bin."

The policy seems to have softened. This month, after a Herald story referring to the ban, city officials said food scraps were permissible but not garden rubbish.

I'm not too fussed by the ban on big bins. I already compost and need to put mine out only every two or three weeks.

But I don't have a tribe of consuming teenagers to clean up after, or a flow of disposable nappies to contend with.

Friends who do, however, are very agitated. And I can see their point. What are they supposed to do with the rubbish that doesn't fit in the little bin? Wave a wand and hope it goes away?

This is the problem facing Mt Roskill Primary School principal Bas Barriball. For in this brave new world, every unit is treated the same, be it a Freemans Bay pensioner, a school or large factory. Come July, each will be allowed to put out one small bin full of "domestic" rubbish and not one cigarette butt more.

At present Mr Barriball's school gets one large bin as of right and pays the council to have a further seven emptied. These bins are placed around the playground for kiddy litter: yoghurt containers, clingwrap, lunch scraps and the like.

Soon the school will be allowed to put out just one little bin. Staff and pupils already recycle waste paper, but some items don't qualify.

Local councillor David Hay, a critic of this "big stick" approach to recycling, asks if the school is supposed to send the rubbish home in schoolbags?

The reality is, Mr Barriball will have to call in a private contractor - which will not reduce the rubbish mountain one jot.

To me, replacing 150,000 perfectly good bins with little ones is more like creating a new rubbish mountain, not reducing one.

The council fudges the embarrassing question of what to do with the redundant big bins by claiming they are "gifting" them to us for garden waste disposal.

In other words, they've dumped them in our backyards. My bet is an awful lot of other stuff will get dumped in backyards and frontyards and grass berms as well, cluttering up neighbourhoods until an inorganic collection takes place.

Also questionable is the focus on residential rubbish. Council figures show that the city's 127,000 households create just 25 per cent of waste. The rest comes from the city's 40,000 businesses.

Of this business waste, 28 per cent is building materials and 23 per cent metals. On top of this, thousands of tonnes of concrete and rubble go into cleanfill.

Concentrating on this business waste would seem a quicker way to save landfills.