Recyclable cups end up in landfill

What if you were told that despite all your eco-friendly efforts, the recyclable disposable cup you get with your morning coffee still ended up in landfill?

This is the case for almost all disposable cups in the NelsonTasman region.

Smart Environmental Upper South Island area manager Yuri Schokking said there was ‘‘such a small, inconsequential’’ amount of cups that ended up in the recycling stream.

‘‘I think people treat them as a waste product because they’re dirty and also because they’re a convenience item that when they’re finished with them [they throw in the bin].’’

Recycling collection in Nelson is outsourced by Nelson City Council to Nelmac and Tasman District Council uses Smart Environmental.

Nelmac subcontracts Smart Environmental to process Nelson’s recycling in its plant. Buller District’s recycling is also processed here.

A dozen trucks come in every day to unload their recycling.

Nationwide, New Zealanders consume an estimate of 295 million takeaway cups every year according to The Packaging Forum.

People often think disposable coffee cups aren’t recyclable due to the wax lining that allows them to carry hot drinks without leaking.

But Schokking said those cups were recyclable, in the right plants, ‘‘but there aren’t any of those [recycling] plants around here’’.

So instead, the few disposable cups that make it to the recycling plant, are being combined with paper fibre recycling as a small portion of contaminated items.

This is because they would otherwise have to be ‘‘physically and manually’’ removed from the stream, ‘‘so it tends to go through’’, Schokking said.

‘‘They are treated as recycling at that point, even though technically they’re not.

‘‘But the biggest thing is that they’re generally not in the recycling stream because know they’re not clean, you need to have clean recycling for it to be recycled.’’

Nelson also doesn’t have a purpose-built system for the compostable or biodegradable cups that turn up at landfill.

‘‘To compost or biodegrade you need the right environment and they aren’t in existence in small centres like Nelson.’’

Schokking said the purposebuilt composting system was generally a heated vessel that rotates, moving material from one end to the other on a very slow rotation for days at a time.

Without it, parts of a paper cup might biodegrade over time in landfill without added heat, but the composition of a disposable cup (the wax and additives to avoid leakage) hindered the composting process.

‘‘Almost everything is biodegradable with time - a rock on the beach is biodegradable...,’’ Schokking said.

Schokking said retailers needed to think about the recycling processes available in the region when deciding on what kinds of cups to use, as there was no point in using recyclable biodegradable cups when there wasn’t the capacity to recycle or compost them.

He said having a reusable cup instead of getting a disposable cup with every coffee or tea would be ideal

Glass was the best recyclable item around.