A mountain of unwanted recycling is building up at Dunedin's processing facility, as tighter restrictions by China lead to an international glut of materials.
However, the Dunedin City Council hopes investment in new domestic processing facilities within New Zealand could yet provide an alternative to shipping the city's recycling overseas.
That could include a joint DCC-Otago Regional Council bid for money from the Provincial Growth Fund to help pay for a new regional approach to waste minimisation, DCC staff have confirmed.
The developments emerged as DCC waste and environmental solutions group manager Chris Henderson on Friday confirmed there was now a 450-tonne stockpile of recycled paper — newspapers, magazines and flyers — at the city's Green Island processing facility.
The stockpile had been accumulating for about the last two months, at a rate of about 250 tonnes a month, due to the loss of markets for the materials, he said.
That followed a decision by China in 2018 to introduce its "National Sword" policy, banning imports of most plastics and other materials, including paper, after previously handling almost half the world's recycling.