These city streets worst for dumping
Fly tipping – dumping rubbish – is costing Christchurch ratepayers dearly, with the price of rubbish disposal from Cashel St alone exceeding $43,000 last year.
Items including old furniture, household rubbish and even a boat are being left on the side of the road in ever greater amounts, and the council is resorting to installing cameras in the hope of tracking down and prosecuting culprits.
Central city streets were the worst offenders. The cost of disposing of dumped rubbish from five city streets – Cashel, Hereford, Worcester, Gloucester and Armagh – topped $170,500 between January 2023 and February 2024. But plenty of other parts of the Garden City are getting in on the act. Disposal fees for rubbish dumped on Aldershot St, Aranui, cost ratepayers $17,279, while Emmett St, Shirley, cost $16,786, and Brockworth Place in Riccarton notched up 123 jobs totalling $12,511.
City Streets maintenance manager Steve Guy said the real price is far greater. The bill for dealing with litter around the city reaches about $61,000 per month as part of road maintenance contracts. The other costs – $43,394.71 just for Cashel St for example – only relates to fees incurred in the actual disposal of the dumped rubbish.
There were more than 22,000 jobs relating to fly tipping with a price tag of almost a million dollars by the end of the last road maintenance contract period.
And the problem has been worsening for years. That could be partly down to people baulking at paying increased waste levies at the dump, Guy said.
“Then you get some people who are just lazy and that’s what they do – dump it on the street.”
There were discussions underway within the council to see if there could be an inorganic waste collection, as happens in Auckland, but “there are significant challenges” as the schemes are often abused, Guy said.
“You can help people dispose of things in an ethical manner, but there has to be a strategy.”
One unexpected item left out for the city’s non-existent inorganic collection late last year was a rubbish-laden boat.
By the time contractors went to remove the boat from Roberts Rd, Templeton, it had been “burnt to a crisp”, Guy said.
The “one success story” had been progress made working alongside community boards at a grassroots level to identify, target and clear up hot spots, he said.
But for those who can’t be dissuaded, Guy was working with the council’s enforcement and legal teams to work out the best way to prosecute dumpers, as well as trialling several different types of camera and finalising potential locations.
It could be difficult to “categorically prove” who was behind dumping.
He said he had trawled through one lot of dumped rubbish and found mail addressed to six different people at different addresses.
Guy said cameras were likely to provide the best evidence to meet the strict criteria the council needed to to prosecute suspected offenders.
“You can help people dispose of things in an ethical manner, but there has to be a strategy.”
Steve Guy
City Streets maintenance manager