All-new gear for ageing city recycling centre
Palmerston North’s recycling plan is due for a total overhaul within the next couple of years.
The 17-year-old materials recovery facility at Awapuni is struggling to keep up with the volumes of recycling coming in, and it is becoming costly to maintain.
The city council’s group manager for property and resource recovery, Bryce Hosking, said some $6 million to completely replace all of the internal equipment had been signalled in the council’s current 2021-31 Long-term Plan.
A facility such as that at Awapuni “suffers a pretty hard life, with a mixture of mechanical equipment and electrical equipment that have life expectancies of 15 to 20 years”, he said.
Hosking said the plant was working at maximum capacity to cope with the volume of material collected every day.
Whenever there were downtimes to deal with maintenance or breakdowns, or there were seasonal spikes in volumes, extra shifts were required on Saturdays to keep up with the load. The facility was “coming to the end of its useful life and it’s costing more and more to maintain”, he said.
The plan, currently scheduled for the 2025-26 financial year, was to build a new plant within the existing building and future-proof it for city growth, he said.
The existing plant and equipment would first be decommissioned and removed.
The work was estimated to take 12 to 16 weeks, during which time the contents of the city’s kerbside recycling bins would have to be sent to another plant for processing.
Hosking said that next year, when there was $200,000 in the draft budget, staff would be investigating what sort of plant and equipment to install.
There were a number of options to consider, he said. New mechanical technology was emerging, and “optical” sorting was a possibility using cameras and lasers to recognise and send different items in different directions.
However, technology would not replace the need for people to operate the plant and undertake some of the sorting tasks.
Given that the building would remain, its roof was being considered as a suitable site for solar panels.
Council senior climate change adviser David Watson told the council’s sustainability committee that a $343,250 project to install solar panels was being assessed as a candidate for the $1m low-carbon fund.
The fund was set up to help pay for the extra capital cost of making council projects more energy efficient and to reduce carbon emissions.
Negotiations were under way with a supplier to establish whether the solar panel project should go ahead.