Return of plastic tickets disappoints
The Nelson City Council has been questioned about reintroducing plastic parking tickets, made of plastic it recently announced it wouldn’t accept for recycling.
Port Hills resident Kerry Williams said he was surprised to find on Friday that parking meters on the city’s main street were dispensing the plastic tickets, ditched in 2018 after a long-running campaign that found many of them ended up in the sea.
‘‘I went to pull the ticket off the dashboard as I drove away, and I thought that’s not paper, they’ve started using plastic again,’’ Williams said.
‘‘I just couldn’t believe that they would do that after so much publicity with regards to plastic ... and finally getting around to it [removing plastic tickets].’’
Williams said the move flew in the face of the council’s recent decision, on ethical grounds, to stop collecting plastic that was shipped overseas for recycling.
The plastic tickets would never break down, he said.
‘‘I worked in Halifax St and I used to see them just building up in the gutter. They were literally going down through the grill and into the storm water, and those storm water areas, even in Halifax, they just go out into the Maitai [River].’’
Nelson City Council Group Manager Alec Louverdis said a move to replace existing parking meters with ticketless meters was on track to start at the end of June.
‘‘A supply issue with our current paper tickets has meant we have had to temporarily revert to the existing stock of plastic tickets.
‘‘While this is unfortunate, we are limiting the use of these plastic tickets by swapping remaining paper stocks to more frequently used machines. ‘‘
The council switched to paper tickets about 18 months ago on the back of a successful trial, after a previous pilot with paper tickets didn’t work because they jammed the machines.
‘‘A supply issue with our current paper tickets has meant we have had to temporarily revert to ... plastic tickets.’’ Alec Louverdis Nelson City Council group manager
In 2015, the city council plan proposed a $1 million project to replace all pay-and-display parking meters with more modern models by 2019, saying the technology in the existing ones was becoming obsolete.
Last year, the council said it would replace existing parking meters with ticketless meters – where drivers enter their car number plate, and pay for parking via cash or card – this June.
Students from Nelson College for Girls took up the cause to get rid of plastic parking tickets in 2016, finding 200 tickets in just 40 minutes of searching around town.
Nelson College for Girls students Freya High and Sylvie Lloyd were part of a follow-up campaign by Nelson Intermediate in 2018.
A rubbish pick-up they arranged found hundreds of the tickets littering the city in a one-month period.
While the pair were not sure what else the council could have done in this situation, it should at least have told people about the temporary switch back to plastic, they suggested.
‘‘Even having bins on the way out of car parks, something that all the parking tickets can go into, especially while they’re using the plastic ones ... otherwise they are going to end up ... littering waterways’’ Lloyd said.
Nelson Environment Centre manager Anton Drazevic said it was disappointing that plastic was in use, but he understood the council had to be practical. ‘‘If they have a stockpile of plastic tickets sitting there, we would much rather see them used, and then move on ... to a natural biodegradable product like paper.’’