Councils agree to reduce waste
Nelson city and Tasman district councils are on track to adopt a target of reducing waste to landfill by 10 per cent by 2030 – but it could come with a multimillion-dollar price tag.
A reviewed and updated Nelson Tasman Waste Management and Minimisation Plan was approved on Thursday by committees of both councils, and is due to go to the full city council for adoption in September.
While the plan was accepted unanimously by the Nelson council’s works and infrastructure committee, it was not approved by everyone around the Tasman engineering services committee table, where some councillors were concerned about the potential cost of reaching the 10 per cent target.
Estimates in a staff report range between $1.5m and $5.6m a year – between $750,000 and $2.8m annually for each council.
Councillor Dean McNamara, who was on a joint council working party to review the plan, said he was concerned about the affordability of the reaching the target.
The council did not have a ‘‘global CO2 emissions strategy, so we don’t know where the best bang for the buck is that we’re going to get. It may be in reducing waste to landfill, it may be doing something else’’, McNamara said.
‘‘For a council not completing its engineering projects . . . because they’re running into financial difficulty, I think just throwing money at a rubbish tip to try and divert waste is possibly not the best use of our funds.’’
He also said a 10 per cent waste reduction target was not part of the proposal that went out for public consultation.
Deputy mayor Tim King said the cost estimate seemed ‘‘so wide’’.
‘‘All the nice things about the plan, it’s all good, but when you read what it’s going to cost and work out what you can do with that money . . . unless you put it in context of all the things we need to achieve . . . approving something with that level of financial implication just doesn’t seem advisable’’.
However, council solid waste and stormwater team leader David Stephenson said the plan did not authorise expenditure. This would be worked through in the Long Term Plan.
Stephenson pointed out that just under 25 per cent of submissions called for ‘‘zero waste or some target to be introduced into the plan’’.
The scale, cost and achievability of targets was discussed at workshops in December and May. The working party then recommended the introduction of ‘‘an aspirational goal’’ to eliminate unnecessary waste to landfill, and a target of reducing waste by 10 per cent per person by 2030, using a 2017-18 baseline of 619kg per capita.
Councillor Kit Maling, who was chairman of the working party, said it was an ‘‘aspirational plan’’ that he believed would be driven by the community.
‘‘If the community gets behind it, there shouldn’t be costs to the council. We’re already seeing those changes in the community in terms of plastic bags, in terms of fly tipping – there’s less of that now.’’
A proposal for regulated product stewardship released last week by the Government was ‘‘the game changer going forward’’, Maling said.
‘‘Recycling isn’t the be-all and end-all – it’s actually eliminating the waste that is the most important thing.’’
Nelson councillor Tim Skinner said recycling was something of a ‘‘token gesture’’ that didn’t solve waste problems.
‘‘We should be just minimising, rather than aiming to recycle. We definitely have to change our ways . . . don’t keep feeling like you’ve got to buy things new.’’
Nelson council environmental programmes adviser Karen Lee said the plan was an ‘‘enabling document’’ that would let staff put together an action plan.
‘‘We’ll be able to make that very visible and actually achieve some important reductions in waste.’’