New bin colour scheme few could refuse

By SUZANNE McFADDEN

Like them or loathe them, Auckland - here are your shiny new wheelie bins.

In old, vacant warehouses across the city, 64,500 of them sit ready to be plonked outside households and businesses.

But not everyone is waiting with open arms.

Some Auckland City residents are disgruntled that their old wheelie bins are being swapped for new ones half the size.

But there is no choice. The dark green 120-litre bins with fire-engine-red lids will line the streets in July.

The smaller bins are part of Auckland City's drive to stop landfills taking over the horizon.

Residents are being urged to recycle.

Every month Auckland homes and businesses put out enough trash to build a five-storey mountain inside Eden Park.

Over a year, the garbage mounts up to 380,000 tonnes.

By 2005, Auckland City wants to halve the amount.

In the time it takes you to read this, another wheelie bin has been spat out of a machine at an Otahuhu factory.

The machine runs 24 hours a day, every day of the week.

Otahuhu firm Sulo-Simaplas has the contract to make 65,000 bins from 1125 tonnes of raw plastic. Another 75,000 have been imported from Germany, and 10,000 are being made in Australia in order to meet the July 1 deadline when all wheelie bins must have new homes.

The bin lids are a blinding red for a reason - to send an environmental message.

"They're like a red traffic light," says Warwick Jaine, the council's manager of refuse procurement.

"Stop and think about what waste you're putting in here."

The new bins are designed to take rubbish that cannot be recycled or composted.

Households can have up to three light blue bins for recycling glass, plastic and cans.

Garden rubbish is banned from the new wheelie bins.

Residents can keep their old 240-litre bins to store grass clippings and twigs, and have them emptied using vouchers that will be handed out with the rates notices.

A fleet of new rubbish trucks will also hit the road in July.

Each will be armed with four video cameras.

If any garden rubbish is spotted on camera as the contents are poured into the truck's hopper, the bin-owner will be given a polite reminder, Mr Jaine says.

Doug Astley, chairman of the council's works committee, is a big fan of the bins on wheels - he has had the same bin at his Mt Roskill home for 15 years.

He is well aware of scepticism out on the streets about the bin size being split in half.

But he continually tells householders of his favourite trial case - a Mt Wellington family of 14 who thought it would be impossible to keep their rubbish down to one 120-litre bin each week.

With help from waste experts, they managed to squash it all in.

"It's not impossible. It's simply a mindset.

"We just have to make people realise they can recycle," Mr Astley says.

The 150,000 new bins will be delivered next month.