COMMENT
Goodness me — it seems Napier City Council has upset more than a few of its residents with its recycling changes.
The council is pleading with people to be patient with them and to expect a few teething problems as they roll out the changes.
Residents have all been issued with three bins, one for paper, another for glass and the third for plastics (only those marked 1 and 2) and cans.
In an article in yesterday's Hawke's Bay Today, Napier City Council's environmental service manager Cameron Burton said "Due to the very quick turnaround in developing this contract, going out to public tender, evaluating tenders, awarding the contract, agreeing to terms etc, it is not physically possible to have a purpose-built new fleet constructed and road-tested in that time."
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He is talking about the fact that Napier's recycling is now picked up by three separate trucks, one for each crate. Which of course means triple the drivers and triple the fuel. It does seem rather ridiculous.
I understand the need for patience, every new venture no matter how big or small has teething problems and to be fair to NCC this is a huge venture.
However, was it really necessary to move so fast? Why didn't they simply wait until they had all their bins in a row. It would have saved a lot of confusion and I imagine money.
There have been texts to the editor, letters and loads of chatter on social media about the changes.
And although the recycling will now be picked up weekly instead of fortnightly (great move) the thing that seems to be upsetting many people is that their recycling is being limited.
One person on social media posted a picture of his bins that had been left behind because they were overfull with pizza boxes and beer bottles. His comment was something along these lines "now the council are telling me how much pizza I can eat and how much beer I can drink".
Not quite true but you get the drift.
Some people have more recycling than others and I don't think there should be any limit on how much anyone can put kerbside.
There's no limit in Hastings. I can put out as many containers as I like as long as they are sorted properly. I sincerely hope Hastings District Council doesn't follow NCC's lead when it makes changes to its recycling next year.
What's going to happen at Christmas when loads of people have twice the amount of recycling. The perfect solution of course would be that it will make people stop and think about buying goods with unnecessary packaging or maybe composting some of that cardboard and paper.
But we know that most will carry on as usual. Let's just hope that it doesn't lead to more rubbish dumping as was highlighted in Monday's Hawke's Bay Today.
We all need to think smarter when it comes to buying items that we know are going to end up in the landfill. That in itself will reduce the amount of recycling we have.
If you do happen to see someone dumping rubbish, ring the council. It's not being a tell-tale tit — it's being responsible and caring.
Linda Hall is Hawke's Bay Today assistant editor.