Samantha Motion: We've bin had - why a good move got bad reviews

Bags are out and bins are in, but it's been a rocky road to get there. Photo / File

OPINION

Change is hard. Especially change of the "tough-but-necessary" variety.

We might know it's good for us in the long run, but that doesn't necessarily make it easy to motivate ourselves to make it happen - speaking as a lifelong dieter.

But change is even harder to accept when it is jammed down our throats.

That might be why some people in Tauranga are feeling aggrieved right now.

Tauranga and Western Bay councils have decided to start full kerbside waste collections, so every house in Tauranga and most in the Western Bay will be getting a new set of bins - and a new set of rates charges - come July next year, wanted or not.

Both councils have good intentions: less waste going to landfill that could be recycled or composted instead.

Waste minimisation has been the main motivator for other councils that have made similar switches, too.

Rotorua switched from bags to a three-bin system in 2016, adding kerbside recycling to the council service offering at long last.

Everyone in the urban area got two bins - rubbish and recycling - and a crate for glass.

Looking back at the news coverage, it mostly seems to have been a welcome move.

Hamilton has just changed from rubbish bags and a green recycling crate to an identical set-up to Tauranga's - two wheelie bins, a glass crate and a food scraps bin. Not too much fuss there either.

In the great scheme of things, Tauranga and Western Bay are actually quite late to the party, and yet the Tauranga backlash has been significant - so much so, senior council figures in Tauranga admitted this week it had taken them by surprise.

It shouldn't have been a shock, this was never a universally supported move and the scale of change is bigger than in other places where councils have basically updated or expanded city-wide services they already ran.

Rubbish and recycling collection has mainly been in the hands of private operators for decades,

People are going from a system that has near-unlimited flexibility to one that is rigid.

At present, people can choose between bags or bins, collection frequencies and a range of bin sizes. They can research prices, negotiate payment plans and even factor in things like company ownership if they really want to dig deep.

The last week of rubbish bag collection in Rotorua before bins arrived in 2016. Photo / File

These are the upsides.

The numerous downsides mostly impact us collectively rather than individually, so only the council really had a shot of tackling them.

Between the two new services, Western Bay offers more flexibility with pay-per-throw rubbish.

You buy tags at the dairy or supermarket and stick one on your bin when you put it out.
Create less rubbish, buy fewer prepaid tags.

It's also what a majority in that community preferred when presented with the options at the beginning of the process.

Tauranga's offering - which the council picked at essentially the last minute after, in my view, piecemeal consultation - is one-size-fits-all for the first year, with more size options for rubbish and recycling bins in year two.

Delaying the introduction of size options seems a backward way to manage a big transition to me.

The council says doing it in the first year will be too complicated.

But for who? Unlike in other cities, most residents already choose their own service and know what they need.

If you ask me, it's mainly more complicated for the council, which would have to take our bin size orders.

But it already has to work out who wants an optional greenwaste bin, so can't all the selections be done in one hit?

The council can't even tell us what these different sized bins will cost yet. After two years of intensive work.

Come on.

It's also bizarre to me to not choose pay-as-you-throw now, but still fit the bins with identification tags so the council can potentially switch to it one day if technology allows charging by weight, but still also lean on a survey that found a slim majority of people preferred a rates-funded service to pay-as-you-throw.

Messy.

All in all, as a resident of Tauranga, I support what the city council is trying to achieve.

The soon-to-be-old system is inefficient and out of step with the rest of New Zealand.
The Government is pushing landfill charges up significantly. We have to cut our waste-to-landfill rates or it will hit us in the pockets.

I'm fine with single-payer waste collection, I'm fine with the council running it. Yay for separated food scraps.

For my household of two, the service looks good and the price is a steal compared to what I pay now.

I don't even mind the "bin options" system, I just want the choices from day one - more for the sake of single-person households or big families who face a much more inconvenient change than I do.

Some of the gripes about the new system don't hold much water, in my view.

Bins from other councils were used as examples in Tauranga City Council chambers. Photo / File

People will find a place on their property to put the bins - there are only two big ones, the other two are small, it will be okay.

They aren't beautiful, but they are part of suburban and city life all over the country and surely people can see it's better than continuing to put single-use plastic rubbish inside single-use plastic rubbish bags.

I have faith the yet-to-be-clarified assistance service will mean the elderly won't be left to struggle alone up driveways dragging a heavy bin in one hand and managing a walking frame with the other.

But here's the rub: I object to what in my opinion has been the unnecessarily alienating approach Tauranga's council, in particular, has used to make this decision.

I believe the council relied excessively on the advice of other councils, with too little respect for the different scales of change and local attitudes.

The consultation was done in pieces, which meant people never got a say on the service options as a whole, which has only added to the totally predictable feeling of change being bulldozered in, even though it has long been flagged.

It was never going to be possible to keep everyone happy and councils must sometimes act for the collective good at the expense of individual preferences.

But what we have here, in my view, is a good move marred by an unnecessarily bad process.

It should be a lesson for all councils about the value of genuine engagement and knowing your local audience.