Kerbside recycling in limbo
New options sought after market disrupted
An upheaval in the international market for recyclables means the prospect of a councilfunded kerbside collection in Whanganui remains in limbo, Whanganui District Council waste minimisation chairman Rob Vinsen says.
China has been phasing out its collection of recyclable materials since 2017 and prices for paper and plastic have collapsed. New buyers are now entering the market, but it has yet to settle down.
In this environment, the council was lucky it did not have a ratepayer-funded kerbside recycling collection, Vinsen said.
“The state of the recycling marketplace makes it high risk to start collecting a lot more product at this point in time.”
In a survey last October, 60 per cent of residents said they wanted some form of council-funded
kerbside collection; 44 per cent wanted it for both rubbish and recycling, and 16 per cent wanted it for recycling only.
The council has since contracted specialist waste consultants Morrison Low to advise on how to implement the result but following the drop in recyclable prices, they have been asked to provide options other than kerbside collection. The options are likely to include adding smaller satellite resource recovery centres in other
parts of Whanganui town and district. They could also advise on how to provide competition to the only transfer station in Whanganui that’s open to the public, the Liffiton St station run by Waste Management.
Morrison Low are due to report to council’s property and community services committee on July 10. But Vinsen said there was unlikely to be any implementation of their advice until after the local body elections in October.
The change in markets has hit New Zealand councils hard. Plastic
is a big component of waste, and eight New Zealand councils are no longer collecting the plastic coded 3, 4, 6 and 7 because they cannot find markets for it. The Whanganui Resource Recovery Centre (WRRC) is still taking them, and can stockpile them for six months.
“We would ask our community, if they wish, to not deposit those plastic grades at the centre. That would ease our storage requirements,” Vinsen said.
In the meantime, WRRC still has good markets for plastics coded 1, 2 and 5. WRRC users are asked to check the numbers before they deposit these plastics.