? Lighting up the night with Carol services
Curb side recycling still worth it
Although a drop-off in world demand for recycled plastic has seen recycling costs skyrocket, waste companies are still finding buyers for our ?good? trash. Jackson Street Programme manager Robert Hutton says businesses on Jackson Street pay an extra cost for their recyclables to be picked up, which are taken to a Seaview station for sorting. ?For some councils the recycling of glass and plastic has become uneconomical, and they have dug holes to place [the rubbish] in, not to bury it, but to stockpile until the prices rise. ?I?ve been recycling since it was introduced, and people do it because they believe in the whole process,? Mr Hutton says. Recycling is part and parcel of doing business on the strip, and encouraging people to recycle organic material is the next step. Organic waste is one of the worst things to enter landfills as it produces methane and other global warming gases. Jackson Street?s most prolific waste is organic, and to combat this Mr Hutton has launched an organic recycling programme. Organic Waste Management Ltd is proving organic recycling is profitable with the cost of chemical fertiliser rising by 300 percent this year. The company reports, ?Farmers are screaming for this stuff, for grass, for vineyards, and it?s much better than chemicals?. Both Hutt City Council and Wellington City Council use Transpacific All Brite Limited as their recycling companies. AllBrite?s Seaview logistics manager Doug Williams says they have no stock piles of recyclable waste and their buyer in China is still receiving goods. ?We have no backlog, we have managed to get all the product out [of the country],? says Mr Williams. The company?s profits have fallen over the past year but they say the market for New Zealand?s recycled goods is still profitable. Around 5 percent of the waste that comes to them has to be moved to the landfill. WCC city operations manager Mike Mendonca says it costs the council $2.5 million per year to collect the city?s curb side recycling. Because of the governments Waste Minimisation Act the price of rubbish bags has increased. ?As it stands we have no stock piles [of recycled waste], but for other councils there have been a few issues. ?We have managed to send all our [recycling] exports to Asia,? says Mr Mendonca. He says recycling rates have increased slightly as people demand a cleaner city environment. Porirua City Council solid waste manager Eddie Klaassen says since they centralised the recycling depots from around the city to Trash Palace the amount of waste being recycled has increased. ?Sometimes we would have to take all the recyclables to the tip because they were so contaminated with other rubbish people had dumped there. ?Now only around three percent of that is going into the landfill because of contamination,? says Mr Klaassen. The PCC uses Transpacific Industries, which owns the red Waste Management trucks, to do curb side recycling. What do you think? What could be done to make recycling more accessible for residents? How can we reduce the amount of green waste going to the landfill? Phone The Petone Herald on 237 3208 or email
