Editorial: Council cleverly harvests treasure from trash

An eyebrow or two may have been raised over a new Waitakere City Council policy of charging residents $11.25 to collect inorganic rubbish - and then selling it on an auction website. Some ratepayers are perhaps annoyed that this user-pays system, which has replaced the old free kerbside collection, sees the council cashing in twice. They should not be. Rather, they should applaud the council for having the nous to see the value in some of the products of today's throwaway society.

After a quick spruce-up, the council is selling the likes of lawnmowers, barbecues, bikes and furniture on Trade Me. According to its solid waste business manager, some of the lawnmowers considered junk by their former owners need only a new sparkplug to be ready for sale. In such circumstances, it would be remiss of the council to merely cart these objects to the dump. Its activity surely echoes that of private collectors, who make the most of other people's rubbish.

Not only are lawnmowers, bikes and suchlike able to be recycled but there is an environmental benefit in reduced landfill use. That, in itself, justifies the approach, provided it can, as seems to be the case, be operated at a break-even level. Curiously, the other city councils in the Auckland region seem unwilling to follow suit. They appear unduly wedded to the free kerbside collections that every year prompt health and safety issues and unsightly clutter.

Among those somewhat perplexed by Waitakere's initiative may be the Local Government Minister. Rodney Hide thinks this sort of entrepreneurial and environmental endeavour should be outside councils' bailiwick. But this is also an example of a council introducing and augmenting a system of user-pays to cut the cost of rubbish collection. On balance, probably even he should be applauding.