Whanganui District Council introducing kerbside food scraps service on July 1

The food scraps collection area will be the same as for the district's kerbside recycling service. Photo / 123RF

Whanganui will have a food scrap collection service by the start of July, whether ratepayers want it or not.

Four hundred households were part of a Whanganui District Council trial for the new service at the start of last year, with food scraps taken to processing business Easy Earth and turned into compost.

Council waste services manager Morgan Harrison told councillors this week that an audit of 20% of landfill bins on the city’s fringes, along with communities at Marybank, Fordell and Mowhanau, was completed in November.

“Approximately 27% of their contents are food scraps,” she said.

“These communities are not so different from their urban counterparts and, regarding waste behaviour, they would benefit from the [scraps] collection service.”

Her report to councillors said the evidence did not suggest rural or lifestyle block properties were composting food scraps “as has been anecdotally suggested by residents”.

She said the collection area for food scraps would be the same as for the kerbside recycling service.

The service would not be up for public consultation as part of the council’s 2025-26 annual plan process.

“However, that does not mean people cannot submit on the issue,” Harrison said.

Whanganui District Council chief executive David Langford. Photo / NZME

Council chief executive David Langford told the Chronicle the public had been consulted about the service multiple times.

“Basically, we are doing what we said we were going to do,” he said.

A 23-litre bin and kitchen caddy will be distributed to every SUIP (separately used or inhabited part of a property) unit in the network.

Low Cost Bins, which handles the district’s kerbside recycling service, will also be the food scraps contractor.

Harrison said bin liners could not be used because the Reporoa Organics Processing Facility, where some of the waste would be taken, did not process them.

Langford told the Chronicle the new service would cost rating households about $69 a year, excluding GST.

“We will be sending as much [waste] as we can to the Easy Earth facility because they are more local. They will be processing it into compost.”

The rest would be sent to Reporoa to go into an anaerobic digester to produce gas for the national grid.

“Any CO2 gets pumped into a hothouse for tomato production and producing fertiliser for farms,” Langford said.

“We are keeping it as green as we possibly can.”

At this week’s operations and performance committee meeting, councillor Jenny Duncan asked what the consequences would be if the council decided not to implement the service.

Harrison said the council was committed to a 10-year contract and bins and caddies had already been bought.

“Trucks are currently being built as well. Those costs are already sunk costs.”

Langford said that, if the council cancelled the services, there would be “some kind of legal process” to determine damages for the contractor.

“We would be making a material departure from the approved waste plan.

“A process would be triggered around reporting back to the Ministry for the Environment on the reasons for that change and the implications.”

At the end of last year, the Government cancelled four of the five policies introduced by the previous Government around improving household recycling, including mandatory food scraps and household recycling services in all urban areas.

Whanganui’s kerbside recycling service began on July 1 last year and will cost the average residential property $147 for the 2024-25 year.

Some of the food scraps will go to Whanganui's Easy Earth facility to be turned into compost. Photo / NZME

Langford said that, regardless of Government mandates, the council was proceeding “because we think it’s the right thing to do”.

“Almost 30% of the weight in bins is food waste.

“That’s a real big volume of food scraps going into landfill.

“It will also help reduce our carbon emissions.”

Meanwhile, monitoring over a month showed 68% of households in the kerbside recycling network were using the service, Harrison said.

“On any given week, 41% of households are presenting crates for collection.”

Her report said about 415 tonnes of materials had been collected from October to December last year, an increase from the first quarter of the 2024-25 financial year.

Harrison said plastics, tin and aluminium were sent to a sort line at the Oji facility at Seaview, Lower Hutt.

“They then send the products to various end markets and, where they can’t find a local end market, they are going overseas.”

Because of the closure of Oji’s Kinleith Paper Mill in Tokoroa, all fibre would go overseas for processing, Harrison said.

Glass is sent to the Visy (formerly O-I) plant in Penrose, Auckland.

Mike Tweed is a multimedia journalist at the Whanganui Chronicle. Since starting in March 2020, he has dabbled in everything from sport to music. At present, his focus is local government, primarily the Whanganui District Council.