Zero waste advocate’s ‘step change’ pitch to council
A network of community-led resource recovery centres could be a “step change” for Hamilton as it faces rising waste volumes, says a zero waste advocate.
Raglan-based Xtreme Zero Waste’s Michelle Howie urged Hamilton City Council to consider pursuing community resource recovery centres (RRC) as a way to divert the amount of waste going to landfill.
Howie was addressing councillors at the regulatory and hearings committee on Thursday as part of public consultation for the city’s draft waste management and minimisation strategy. The draft strategy, which focused on six key areas, received 85 submissions.
Resource recovery centres divert waste from landfill by allowing people to put waste into a facility where it can either be reused, repurposed, recycled or recovered.
Hamilton’s waste had increased by 28.5% since 2017 and without action would continue to rise as the city’s population grew, according to council documents. A recent waste assessment found a third (34%) of the city’s kerbside waste comes from food scraps and 54% of what goes into the red bins could be diverted from landfill.
Construction and demolition waste was also a “hugely significant waste stream in our city,” the report said.
Zero Waste was successively diverting between 70 to 80% of all waste collected from kerbside away from landfill, Howie told the committee via audio visual link.
“We have a very successful organic waste collection and this is a metric we talk about regularly, we monitor closely and report on in detail to Waikato District Council with whom we hold the contract for kerbside and rubbish collection services in Raglan and the rural area surrounding it.”
Xtreme Zero Waste projected Hamilton could sustain up to nine centres should the council wish to pursue a strong waste reduction vision, she said.
“Experience has shown that RRCs work well to support between 10,000 to 20,000 people. So what that would mean in Hamilton would be an intentional and strategic network design across suburbs of smaller and larger centres or hubs that collaborate around common waste reduction goals.”
Auckland Council worked with a well established network of RRCs and was a great example of how it could work, Howie said.
“As one submitter said a landfill pit with a shop attached is not what we're talking about here. If Hamilton is up for it, an emergent network of two or three community-led RRCs building through a mature network of eight to nine would demonstrate a real step change for the city. We need to make RRCs accessible local and vibrant locations where real people are driving the solutions to our waste problems.”
The draft strategy focused on six key areas, including to further reduce the amount of organic waste going to landfill, ongoing efforts to reduce construction and demolition waste and supporting the move to a circular society.
Xtreme Zero Waste offered to share what it knew about RRCs with the council, if it wished to move forward with the idea.
Letting the community own their waste issues could lead to Hamilton designing their way out of the problem, according to a zero waste advocate. The draft strategy will be considered on May 2 at the Infrastructure and Transport Committee.