Annette Brosnan: Napier and Hastings councils seeking waste-management feedback

Annette Brosnan

I'm endeavouring to start this talking point with a witty pun about the amount of rubbish we speak at council, but that's a "litter" bit tiring, so instead I'll just say there are some exciting new rubbish and recycling options the Napier and Hastings councils are asking you to consider, which could mean a huge step forward in the way we operate our household waste.

Napier and Hastings councils have a joint waste committee chaired by deputy mayor Tania Kerr and deputy chaired by myself. This committee is responsible for the development of a Waste Management and Minimisation Plan (WMMP).

In short, the goal is to reduce, recover and recycle more waste from landfill (Omarunui) that doesn't need to be there. We dumped 84,000 tonnes to landfill last year which was an 11% increase from the previous year, an unsustainable trend.

As a community, close to 50% of our landfill waste could have been recycled or composted, 33% was green and kitchen waste (compostable) and 80% of all household rubbish did not need to go to landfill.

As households 58% of our kerbside bag content was divertible, 75% of wheelie bin content was divertible and wheelie bin users put out three times more waste than bag users (in terms of weight).

The landfill has a fixed life/space, so by achieving diversion goals we (ratepayers) can save tens of millions in operations and in deferring the cost of opening new landfill valleys.

So how do we do this? I'm a firm believer that by "making it easy" is how we change our behaviour. So here are the options we're asking you to consider:

1. Replace rubbish bags with a council-provided wheelie bin (80ltr or 120ltr)
2. The council to provide recycling bins (three collected weekly or four collected fortnightly)
3. Introduce green collection: the council to provide a green wheelie bin (240ltr collected weekly or 240ltr collected fortnightly) or fund existing organic models like crediting worm farms/ composting/ existing collections

Waste is a diverse topic and there are many facets I haven't touched on like the flexibility within these recommendations for special areas or circumstances, the risks around the export of plastics and uncertainty of its market, recycling contamination, waste bylaws, soft plastics, health and safety of kerbside bags and random collection bins, illegal dumping and the list goes on.

If you're interested in any of these I encourage you to pop online (www.myvoicemychoice.co.nz/) and read parts of the draft WMMP which covers them all. So what do you think? I encourage you to have your say by going online to www.myvoicemychoice.co.nz/ or returning the freepost submission form being delivered to your letterbox in the following week. Submissions close on March 23. Hearings will follow in April and a final WMMP will be adopted in late May. Any changes will come into effect after the current contracts expire in 2020.

Annette Brosnan is a Napier city councillor and deputy chair of the NCC & HDC joint waste futures committee. Views expressed here are the writer's and not those of Hawke's Bay Today.