New waste management plan seeks to curb consumerism’s debris.
Don’t throw food away – instead recycle it as food scraps or compost. Don’t buy new stuff - repair existing things. Don’t send working appliances or reasonable used furniture to the tip - give it away.
Auckland Council can give you 1.5 million reasons why this lifestyle makes sense for the city and for the planet. Each of those 1.5m reasons is a tonne of rubbish that goes to Auckland’s mixed waste landfills every year – and that compelling figure is why the council is on a committed course to help Aucklanders waste less, far less, and turn more waste into resources.
“Turning trash into treasure” is how they express the move to halt one of the prime faults of today’s consumer-oriented lifestyle: throwing things out, instead moving to a more circular economy.
Auckland Council Waste Planning Manager Sarah Le Claire says waste prevention and minimisation is essential now: “Less really is more for everyone, even if it is something on a seemingly trivial scale as fewer rubbish trucks going down your streets, making the neighbourhood safer and better. If you zoom out from there, it means improvements for the city, the country, and the planet.”
While convenient and comfortable, the modern way of life comes at a price beyond the cost of living. Throwing out trash not only creates costs financially in transport and disposal, it represents lost resources and energy and includes the environmental impacts and greenhouse gases from extracting and transporting replacement resources.
Le Claire picks up on a number of these global themes, contextualised into what she calls “a personal waste journey. The first step on that journey is simply thinking about your place in the world, and the waste your choices produce. When people buy less stuff, you get immediate drops in emissions, resource consumption and pollution.”
An astonishing amount of rubbish going straight to the tip is food waste; Le Claire says as much as 40 per cent of household waste falls into this category: “For example, reducing or removing food scraps has a major impact on the 1.5 million tonnes of waste heading to Auckland’s mixed waste landfills every year.”
The best solution is rethinking our purchases so that we don’t buy things we don’t need and throwing away less of what we buy. In terms of food waste, the scraps from preparing food are also ideal for composting. Kerbside waste collection is a relatively small part of the whole, constituting 15-18 per cent of everything Auckland sends to landfill.
“We all must act more broadly in terms of what we buy, how we renovate our homes, what we do with construction and commercial waste. If we only talk domestic waste, we’d be missing a huge part of the challenge,” Le Claire adds.
Mindfulness in purchasing choices can make the biggest difference, avoiding waste where possible by buying reuseable products rather than single-use items or buying more durable items; or avoiding unnecessary items.
In other words, says Le Claire: “Think about how you buy and what you buy. Better goods last longer, whether whiteware, furniture, or anything else. Look to re-use, repair, and recycle wherever possible, including through donation to community organisations – or checking in with those organisations when you need things rather than buying new.
‘Fast fashion’ is a similarly ‘glocal’ problem, with textiles comprising a staggering 5.4 per cent of Auckland’s landfill by weight – avoiding cheap, mass-produced ‘one-time wear’ items means less in the trash and better clothes and shoes in the closet. For longer.
Working towards this new mindset is the council’s Draft Waste Management and Minimisation Plan 2024 – which seeks to help individuals and households take positive steps towards reducing the amount of rubbish headed to landfill and work in partnership with the commercial sector.
The initiative is part of working towards the challenging goal of Zero Waste 2040 and, with a range of measures under development, now is the time for people to add their voices to the effort at www.akhaveyoursay.nz and become part of the solution.
Le Claire says Auckland Council’s plan and efforts are aided by official moves in waste management elsewhere, with clear evidence coming from councils like Tauranga and Hamilton that people respond well when supported in making better choices.
“Incentives to use bins better work,” she confirms. “In those two cities, we’ve seen landfill halved thanks to measures including fortnightly rather than weekly collection, bigger recycling bins and smaller general waste bins, and food scraps collection bins.”
Auckland itself is on a positive journey, with the rate of growth in waste to landfills slowing at 10-15 per cent below anticipated levels. More can be done, with the draft Waste Management and Minimisation Plan 2024 setting out 12 priority areas supporting the country’s biggest city on its Zero Waste 2040 journey*. Targets include a 30 per cent reduction in total waste per person, 29 per cent reduction in kerbside waste per person and a big 50 per cent reduction in council office waste.
A big part of success, Le Claire says, rests on making convenience a reality for everyone. One example is the creation of a network of easily accessible community recycling centres. “We’re aiming to have 21 such centres across the region by 2031 while also limiting the cost of goods disposal so the obvious choice is also the good choice,” she explains.
It is precisely because waste management affects everyone that Auckland Council is inviting submissions on the Draft Waste Management and Minimisation Plan 2024. Make your voice heard at akhaveyoursay.nz
*The draft Waste Management and Minimisation Plan 2024 has 12 priority areas:
- Strengthen ways of working with mana whenua and deliver Maori outcomes through waste initiatives
- Continue expanding and strengthening the resource Recovery Network and its services
- Target construction and demolition waste
- Focus on five priority waste streams - organics, plastics, packaging, textiles, and bio-solids
- Strengthen focus on disaster preparedness & climate change mitigation, adaptation and resilience
- Advocating for source reduction, re-use and right to repair to move “up the waste hierarchy”
- Advocating for the implementation of a container return scheme & other mandatory product stewardship action
- Support Aucklanders to use kerbside recycling and food scraps bins effectively and shift to rates-funded collections
- Transition to a fortnightly kerbside rubbish collection once food scraps collection is well established
- Accelerate efforts to reduce operational wastes from the Auckland Council Group
- Address litter and illegal dumping to protect public health and the environment
- Partner with others to achieve a Zero Waste Auckland built on a circular economy
For more information click here.