Quarter of glass recycling wasted

More than a quarter of recyclable glass bottles and jars are winding up in landfills across the country.

Roughly 60,000 tonnes – or 27 per cent – of glass containers ended up in landfills last year, according to the Glass Packaging Forum.

But one industry leader says the actual amount of recyclables being sent to rubbish dumps is likely to be even higher.

Grahame Christian, director of Smart Environmental, one of the largest glass-recycling collectors in the country, said the difficulty of servicing isolated regions, low returns, public apathy and batch contamination were to blame, and likely put the total wastage far higher.

‘‘People just generally don’t recycle because either they don’t have a recycling service or they can’t be bothered,’’ he said. ‘‘A significant volume would come from commercial operators like pubs.’’

Even when business owners did make the effort to recycle and sort glass, CCTV footage suggests it could still wind up at the tip.

Footage revealed on Wednesday showed a Waste Management employee emptying carefully sorted glass bins from a Blenheim backpackers into a pickup truck, meaning it would be contaminated and sent straight to landfill.

Wellington City Council waste operations manager Adrian Mitchell said 4 per cent of waste going into the city’s landfills was glass, which included recyclable items and broken window glass. He said kerbside sorting and Wellingtonians’ conscientiousness meant rejection rates were low, at about 1 per cent.

‘‘We recycle 4500 tonnes per year from kerbside collection and 200 tonnes at the recycle centre at the southern landfill,’’ he said.

Christian said separated glass fetched about $75 per tonne on the market, which often made it uneconomical when transport costs were factored in.

‘‘In the remote areas of the Thames-Coromandel [district] we’ve had to cease providing a glass service because the users aren’t wanting to pay a cost because it’s greater than sending it to landfill,’’ Christian said. In areas such as Auckland, glass was mixed in with other recycling, which also increased rejection rates. Often as much as 25 per cent was wasted. An easy way to decrease the amount of glass waste, was to increase the cost of waste dumping at landfills, Christian said.

Glass Packaging Forum figures have shown a decrease in waste since monitoring began in 2006, when only 50 per cent of glass was recycled. The current figure placed New Zealand on par with the European average of 73 per cent, and compared favourably with Australia’s average of about 40 per cent.

Green Party waste spokeswoman Denise Roche said New Zealand could learn a lot from South Australia, which has a refund payment notice printed on every bottle. The money could then be recouped, as it once was in New Zealand.

‘‘That increases the amount of glass that goes to recycling, as well as tin and plastics, and it also reduced littering,’’ she said.

‘‘The packaging sector and beverage companies don’t like that because it increases cost, but really the cost is passed to the consumer, who then gets the refund on the drink container.’’

The glass recycling rate in South Australia is 79 per cent, Glass Packaging Forum spokeswoman Lyn Mayes said.

Wastage figures matched those from the Ministry for the Environment. A ministry spokeswoman said 97 per cent of New Zealanders had access to glass recycling facilities, while 77 per cent of councils offered a kerbside service.

Logistical challenges were the main barriers to reaching 100 per cent glass recycling.