Better bins glass recycling replacement leaves bitter taste

Bottle banks have replaced kerbside pickups. Photo/Andrew Warner

Tauranga City Council's elected members gave themselves a big pat on the back on Wednesday for their swift move towards taking over the city's glass recycling collection.

Their decision - subject to community feedback - came in an extraordinary* meeting on Wednesday, a mere week after the commercial sector stopped accepting glass in recycling bins across the Western Bay on March 1.

A week is a whip-fast reaction in council time. But do they really deserve credit for speed?

The council got out of the kerbside pick-up game 25 years ago, leaving most of Tauranga's waste collection eggs in the commercial sector's basket without so much as a bylaw requiring them to collect glass.

So when Waste Management announced in November they would replace kerbside glass recycling collection with the sanctimoniously-named Bins for Better Communities, we all just had to like it or lump it.

The community outrage took a while to heat up but what we have seen in the last few weeks was surely entirely predictable: lots of time-poor people just aren't keen on regularly schlepping clattering boxes containing the evidence of how much sav they've been drinking to the Community-Bettering Bins.

That goes doubly for those many unlucky residents, many rural, who don't have a convenient set of Bins With Which To Better Their Community.

The council heard on Wednesday that many schools and supermarkets had declined to host the bins due to health and safety concerns around increased traffic and broken glass.

Let's hope those community groups and businesses who have stepped up to host bins report some good earnings or they too might decide it's not worth the hassle.

The schlepping is annoying enough when I only have to go down the road to the Four Square, never mind a transfer station.

On Wednesday councillors reviewed a list of what some other councils do about glass. Every one of the authorities reviewed had some sort of kerbside collection service.

It's expected.

Like many others, I feel I've lost a service that should be standard-issue and is ultimately the council's responsibility.

Because if anyone thought those of us who were quite happy to pay to farm this job off to someone else would be equally happy with the much-less convenient Bins for Better Communities offering, they were kidding themselves.

*Extraordinary in the technical sense that it was a late addition to the meeting schedule, not that it was particularly noteworthy, unless you really enjoy councillors' childhood stories about collecting bottles to sell for "thrupence".