Council bagged over plastic wheelie bin liners

The plastic bag versus wheelie bin debate has raised its head again, with a resident new to Marlborough shocked to find the region using plastic bags for rubbish collection.

John Dickason moved to Renwick about six months ago after living in Western Australia for 40 years, and said plastic bags were ‘‘never, ever used’’ in the way he was seeing in Marlborough.

But Marlborough District Council solid waste manager Alec Mcneil said plastic bags were only a problem if you ‘‘lost control of it’’.

When used as part of an overall collection system where it ended up in a landfill, it was not a problem, he said.

Rubbish wasn’t collected by the council in Renwick, so Dickason paid for contracting company Waste Management NZ to pick up his rubbish.

‘‘They supplied a wheelie bin plus a plastic bag, which was absolutely crazy,’’ he said.

‘‘We then told them to stop supplying a plastic bag every time they emptied it, but even then it still took several times to finally get the message.’’

Dickason had been reading about the harms of plastic and the saturation of plastic at Henderson Island in the Pacific.

‘‘On one hand, we have an article that shows very clearly the harm that we are doing to our community, and on the other hand, our council is more than happy to continue to pollute the environment by continuing to use single use plastic bags to collect rubbish.’’

The council provided a weekly kerbside collection service in Picton and Blenheim, which included official council bags and the collection of recycling via a 55 litre open top crate.

Mcneil said the bags were not an ‘‘environmental or a pollution