Separate glass recycling proposed
Invercargill and Bluff residents now have their chance to endorse or oppose plans for household glass recycling collections.
The Invercargill City Council has proposed supplying households with bluetopped 140-litre wheelie bins to increase the quantity of glass being recycled.
This would also cut the quantity of mixed waste being sent at ratepayers’ expense to landfill because of broken glass contaminating the existing mixed recycling collections, the council said.
The up-front capital cost of the new service would be $1.65 million in the coming financial year, with an ongoing operational cost of $620,000, which would add nearly $30 to the annual targeted rate per household for recycling, increasing it to $273.
The blue-topped bin collection is the preferred option put forward in the council’s long-term plan for the next decade.
City councillor Alex Crackett said separate glass recycling would ensure more glass was being reused for purposes such as aggregate for road resurfacing.
“We know that we need to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill and this proposal will achieve that,’’ she said.
Under the manual system used in Southland to sort mixed recycling, contamination from broken glass was a safety issue as well as an environmental and economic one.
Another option the council put forward was to introduce six new bottle banks in Invercargill, and two in Bluff, for glass recycling.
However, the council acknowledged this would mean any glass collected from homes would then have to go into rubbish bins and would increase waste to landfill, which in turn would increase waste disposal costs.
The bottle banks would cost nearly $48,000 to introduce and annual operational costs would rise by $277,000, increasing the annual targeted rate by nearly $13 per household to $255.
The bottle-bank option may also prove a temporary measure, Crackett said.
The Government was moving towards standardising the separation of glass from existing mixed recycling collections, so it also made sense to get ahead of that change now.
However, she stressed that the council remained open to both options.
“We want to hear what residents think about the proposal before we make final decisions.’’
More information on this and other aspects of the long-term plan is available on the council’s letstalk.icc.govt.nz website and copies of the consultation document are available from Te Hīnaki civic building in Esk St. In-person engagement sessions are being held throughout the consultation period, which closes on April 2.