Rob Fenwick: Auckland should not be dumping organic rubbish

Western cities waste far too much food and when we do, we often chuck it into landfills. Photo / 123RF

If Auckland Council is determined to run a sustainable city it will need to get serious about waste.

After 30 years an investor in resource recovery and an adviser on waste policy for several governments, I've seen seismic changes in the way society regards waste and resources. Sadly Auckland has not kept up with the pace.

Despite its commitment to zero waste by 2040 and its enthusiasm for kerbside recycling of packaging materials, Auckland has still not dealt with the waste stream that does most environmental harm - organic waste.

This makes up more than a third of Auckland's total municipal solid waste in its landfills and includes garden waste, kitchen waste and waste from food businesses, supermarkets and restaurants.

The Ministry for the Environment's hierarchy of harmful wastes identifies organics as having priority to divert from landfills.

Much has been written about food waste, most of it true. Western cities waste far too much food and when we do, we too often chuck it into landfills where it rots creating methanogenic greenhouse gas.

Altogether this is a bad look. It's disrespectful to millions that go hungry, it's wasteful of natural capital and human resources invested in producing food, but worst of all, by landfilling food and garden waste, we deny the opportunity to enrich productive soil when we could, and should have made compost.

For nearly two decades the Auckland Council and its forebears have talked about a regional composting plant to expand the efforts of private garden waste operators like Living Earth. The talk continues while other cities have got on with it.

These cities have reaped the economic benefits of preserving valuable landfill space during a period when the cost of purchasing and consenting new landfills has soared and landfill disposal charges have risen with the introduction of waste levies.

These cities have also proved that front footing waste issues is a safe political potato. That's because we all know we should waste less but we need solutions to be simple and convenient, particularly when greater urban density makes home composting impossible.

Christchurch for example built a regional composting plant about eight years ago. Today thousands of tonnes of compost are sold every year to dairy farmers, commercial growers and landscapers, enhancing the productivity of local soils through introducing organic matter and facilitating landscape scale planting programmes in the city's rebuild.

Christchurch residents quickly warmed to the addition of a green-bin kerbside collection service for kitchen and garden waste.

With urbanisation we risk losing touch with basic natural processes such as the simple cycle of rotting organic matter returning to the soil to sustain plant life and food production.

We can't all have a compost bin at the bottom of the garden but we can, with the support of a progressive council, ensure our food scraps end up where they were intended.

• Sir Rob Fenwick is an environmentalist and co-founder of the company Living Earth which was purchased by Waste Management NZ Ltd in 2014. He was the inaugural chairman of the Government's Waste Advisory Board.