Rethinking the way we treat rubbish

I HAVE a few idiosyncrasies - well more than a few, truth be told. But one admission is that I'm often found looking in rubbish bins.

No, I'm not scrounging for a cigarette butt or hungry enough to eat someone's leftovers - I'm checking for waste stream contamination. Yep, I'm obsessed with recycling.

One of my roles at work is co-ordinating my company's green office programme, so when I travel from office to office I often peer into their bins, checking whether there are recyclables in their landfill bin or food in the recycling bin. It's a good indicator of the health of their green office efforts.

I have a history of this, too, having overseen the waste and recycling programmes on Rottnest Island, when I lived in Western Australia, and, prior to that, the waste system at Whakapapa Village for the Department of Conservation.

So I was interested to read this week that in Whanganui less than 100 households are using the services of the city's two private waste collection companies to recycle.

I had always hoped that Whanganui would join the many other places that offer kerbside recycling for residents, but with our award-winning Resource Recovery Centre, I started thinking it might, ironically enough, remain down the list of priorities.

The thing is that driving - or cycling if you have a trailer set up and it's not raining or blowing a gale - to deliver your recycling to Maria Pl is all well and good if you have a car. It's a bit hard for those without a car to get there.

I'm a fan of kerbside recycling - it makes recycling easy and accessible. Although, it's not that simple of course - there is a cost with such a service and ratepayers foot the bill.
There are also operational challenges with kerbside collection where the mixing of different types of recycling is inevitable, with a downstream impact on the prices received - or even usability - of contaminated glass, plastics and cardboard.

But let's not make the classic error of focusing on cost and not benefit. The obvious benefit is we literally have less waste when we recycle. The other important benefit, particularly relevant from a ratepaying perspective, is that every time you divert waste from landfill, you extend a landfill's life, saving money and saving impact on those who are the future neighbours of the next landfill.

Landfills are not cheap or simple, so don't underestimate the value of keeping them going as long as possible.

Of course, you don't have to be as into waste as I am to recognise that recycling is the last in the line of options to reduce waste, the third in the original three of "reduce, reuse, recycle".

Reducing your consumption or reusing your items before you dispose of them are great ways to make a difference. My colleague in Brisbane, Rachel Smith, has just published an e-book, Underspent, about her year of not buying anything new or second-hand. She offers a 14-week programme to help people who want to break their impulse shopping addictions, too. If cutting back like Rachel is not your cup of tea, then another R is re-purpose - it's more than reuse, it's giving new life to your original product, whether it's art and craft with the kids, reusing a plastic bag to pick up dog poo or the more-challenging building a glasshouse out of old windows.

My favourite bonus R-word comes right at the beginning though - redesign. Redesign means coming up with new ideas that rethink waste. There are some incredible innovations being led out of New Zealand, including ecostore, a cleaning products manufacturer making the switch from plastic bottles to ones made from sugar cane, which actually captures carbon as it grows.

There are easy things to do as an individual, too - bring your own cup for takeaway coffee or container for takeaway sushi, or at home go retro and put an upside down plate on top of your leftovers in the fridge.

As English philosopher Sydney Smith once wrote: "It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little."

Nicola Young is a former Department of Conservation manager who now works for global consultancy AECOM. Educated at Wanganui Girls' College, she has a science degree and is the mother of two boys. These views are her own.