Time to set the bar high to a zero waste goal
OPINION: Climate change has been called an inconvenient truth.
When you break that down, it makes sense. It’s a terrible inconvenience on our lives and how we live in the 21st century. It’s inconvenient to not use a car for all travel. It’s inconvenient to not throw everything into a landfill. And it’s inconvenient to cut down on the resources we are using and change our attitude to how we live on the planet. And the truth part.
The overwhelming consensus from scientists is that global warming is happening and we’re facing a 2 degrees Celsius rise in temperature by 2050. This will have potentially catastrophic consequences both here in Taranaki and across the world. So we have to address what we’re doing sooner rather than later and one way to take a giant step towards this is to go Zero Waste in our district by 2040.
Given the dire consequences we are facing for our environment, it is inevitable that Zero Waste practices become an environmental essential for all of us.
The aims are simple – everyone is encouraged to reduce the amount of waste we create, reuse when we consume and recycle the rest. This is the Three Rs that the global Zero Waste community is campaigning for: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. If we follow this practice, almost nothing should be reaching the dump.
The idea of simply dumping all of our rubbish in the ground is offensive, repulsive, expensive and environmentally unacceptable. The idea of simply dumping our rubbish in the ground offends many of us, is culturally repulsive from a Te Ao Ma¯ ori view yet continues to be an accepted practice. It is the old way of doing things and it’s time to change those old attitudes.
Taranaki’s landfill at Colson Road receives about 50,000 tonnes of waste each year; that’s about half a tonne of waste for each of us! Of this 40 per cent could be recycled and much of the rest reused. We plan to reduce that amount by 20,000 tonnes a year within this planning cycle. Colson Road is scheduled to close in a year or two and a new landfill will open in Eltham at a cost of $40 to $50 million.
But can we really change our habits and achieve Zero Waste by
2040? The simple answer is yes. Sweden has already shown that it can be achieved by embarking on a ‘recycling revolution’. In 1975 the Scandinavian country recycled about 38 per cent of waste but over the last 40 years it has completely changed how it deals with waste and now 98 per cent of household waste is recycled or reused in power stations instead of fossil fuels. Sweden has set the bar high but we can follow its example. We’ve allocated $175 million in our draft 10-year plan for Zero Waste. This will allow us to:
❚ replace rubbish bags with rubbish bins
❚ provide a kerbside food waste collection
❚ establish a Zero Waste hub and ongoing education
❚ set up a commercial and industrial recycling facility ❚ and continue to run the central landfill.
The strategy focuses on five key areas: behaviour change, partnerships, leadership, innovation and easy to use facilities. Behaviour change is all about teaching everyone in the district about how we ‘‘get smart’’ to dispose of waste. We’ll be targeting education programmes to help people understand how to change and also introducing things like home composting workshops. It’s about shifting attitudes by encouraging the reduction of waste through reuse and recycling, creating a retail space for reusable and upcycled materials and providing a public drop off area.
The road to Zero Waste is all about collaboration and partnerships. This means working with other councils in Taranaki, organisations and businesses. NPDC believes within five years it can become the first Zero Waste organisation and council in New Zealand. It’s vital to take a leadership role and there are many ideas already in the pipeline such as employing a commercial Zero Waste officer, tackling illegal dumping and coming up with an in-house waste strategy.
Finally we need to create accessible services to enable people to reuse and recycle. This includes providing a weekly food waste collection service, changes like replacing kerbside bags with a 120 litre bin and extending our collection service to rural areas where possible. We’re also looking at developing a Zero Waste hub, tying in with existing facilities on Colson Road, in collaboration with WISE, the Taranaki Education Trust, local businesses and people who are highly passionate, committed and effective in this cause.
There are a lot of ideas already taking shape – too many to mention here – but it shows we’re taking this challenge seriously. I’m positive we can achieve this. Zero Waste 2040 will take time, effort and the determination of everyone. I think we are up for that challenge.