Hawke's Bay's Christmas hangover: A waste mountain

Bottles and cardboard boxes dominated the discards at the Havelock North Recycling Depot. Photo / Warren Buckland

Urban heroes are working hard to collect up the mountains of unwanted paper, cardboard, plastics, bottles and cans left in the aftermath of Christmas in Hawke's Bay.

Councils and other contractors provide drop-off centres, with such sites as the Havelock North Recycling Depot, overflowing with the discarded materials on Boxing Day.

The sheer bulk of what is dumped, and contamination, are the two biggest problems for collectors in the business.

They say adults still have a few things to learn about how to get rid of the recyclable excesses of the festive season.

The problems, says Green Sky Waste Solutions owner Darren Green, could be minimised if more people squashed or broke down items like cartons and plastic bottles, and rinsed items such as plastic milk bottles.

He said the bulk "really took off" before Christmas with home appliance and TV boxes mounting up kerbsides, many still in their full-volume shape when they could have been flat-packed to help the collections process.

"It does take up too much room on the truck, but a lot of people do do a really good job," he said.

He said schools have good programmes educating children in waste disposal, but there are adults who still need to learn the steps they can take to help.

The company has recently expanded its fleet to nine trucks, each with a driver, a sorter and a runner, in a 365-days-a-year collection operation in the twin cities, centred on its sorting and packing facilities in Whakatu.

In Napier, staff were kept busy clearing and sorting at the Onekawa site of Waste Management, from where local company All Brite started one of New Zealand's first kerb-side recyclables collections in 1993.