The international market for recycling has changed rapidly over the last year with China and now Malaysia not taking plastics from New Zealand. There is no longer a market for plastics grade 3-7, so from Monday, May 20, Napier City Council is no longer able to collect them through our recycling service.
Recycling presented in plastic bags is also no longer accepted from this date, this is because it's hard for kerbside collectors to manage the different kind of plastic bags customers have started using.
Our community values the recycling services we provide and over the last year we have been working hard to keep up the current service given the many changes happening in the market.
Part of this has included cushioning the increasing costs to the current service. The current service now costs $72 per year per household rates, but the extra cost has been absorbed by Council, keeping the charge to household rates at $19 per year. The current contract is based on an old service model which is no longer viable and cannot continue as it is given the new recycling market conditions.
Around November, we aim to introduce changes to our kerbside recycling service and we have published the tender for the new contract. Due to changes in the international recycling market, the cost has significantly increased in the past year. We will not know the exact costs or detail of the service until the tender process is finished. However, we anticipate that all possible collection options may cost between $56 and $76 extra per year per household rates - that's up to an extra $1.46 per week.
So what happens to our recycling? Currently our city's paper and cardboard is sent to local firm Hawk Packaging for processing, glass is sorted and sent to a company called OI in Auckland. Plastics have been shipped to China in the past, but more recently to Malaysia and Indonesia for processing. Tin and aluminium goes to local scrap metal merchants for recycling.
Napier and Hastings rubbish is taken to the Omarunui Landfill, which is owned by the Napier City and Hastings District Councils. One of the key goals of the joint Councils' Waste Management and Minimisation Plan is to reduce waste going to landfill. In 2016-17 the landfill received just over 84,000 tonnes of waste, increasing to just over 86,000 tonnes of rubbish in 2017-18.
The plastics that are not accepted anymore will increase the landfill tonnage by between 0.5 per cent and 1 per cent. While almost half of the rubbish in the landfill could have been recycled or composted in theory, this is very hard to achieve without markets for recycling or where green waste has been added to the rubbish when it should be separated for composting.
Residents can help by taking extra care with checking, cleaning and sorting their recycling and by not adding organic waste to their rubbish bag or bin. This is especially relevant around this time of the year with all the leaves falling.