City wait for full recycling plastic service
"This issue of plastic is actually impacting our environment right here. It's not just somewhere else that this plastic is coming to." Go Eco's Anna Casey-Cox
If you’re a Hamilton resident desperate to recycle pizza boxes, yoghurt pots and takeaway containers, you’ll have to wait.
Hamilton City Council has decided not to introduce a full plastics recycling service - at the kerb or at collection points - until wheelie bins arrive in 2020. People in Hamilton can currently put out plastics labelled 1 and 2 with their recycling, but anything else has to go in the bin. The proposed wheelie bin system would cater for plastics 1 to 7.
A petition urging council to up its plastic recycling before the changeover was signed by 1042 people and presented to council in December. But it’s a no from council and its contractor, Waste Management, which says there’s not enough space in the trucks and it’s not viable to buy more trucks when the contract has just a couple years to run.
Petitioner Hemi May Kelly had a message for councillors.
‘‘If we can’t get all this plastic out of our city, then why are we letting it in?’’ she asked at a February growth and infrastructure committee meeting. She suggested collection points around the city to get people used to recycling more varieties of plastic.
The discovery of pre-production plastic pellets on the beach at Raglan showed the impact of the products, Go Eco’s Anna CaseyCox said.
‘‘This issue of plastic is actually impacting our environment right here. It’s not just somewhere else that this plastic is coming to.’’
Hamilton currently lags behind its neighbours when it comes to collecting plastics for recycling: the Waipa District and Raglan collect plastics labelled 1-7 and the rest of the Waikato District collects plastics labelled 1, 2 and 5. But Hamilton staff recommended sticking with just plastics 1 and 2 until June 2020, when the full collection is due to start.
Contractor Waste Management said its recycling trucks are nearly full, so there is no space for kerbside sorting of extra materials. It’s not viable for the company to buy more trucks with two years left on its contract, a council report said, and there are also health and safety risks.
Council staff also said it’s getting harder to find a market for plastics under China’s Green Sword policy - described as ‘‘effectively a ban on the import of 24 types of solid waste into China’’.