Taking a closer look at our city's waste - literally
7 December 2020
Examining kerbside rubbish and recycling will help Council learn more about the way the Rotorua public deals with waste.
Bin audits will take place from 9 -15 December, with contractor Waste Watchers Ltd randomly selecting up to 350 kerbside rubbish and recycling bins over a 5 day period, to collect data on their contents.
Initially, the bin audit was scheduled for August of this year but had to be postponed due to COVID-19 Alert Level 2 restrictions. Under Alert Level 1, Council is able to do the bin audit with precautions in place to keep staff and the community safe.
The previous bin audit was completed in 2017. It was the first waste audit since the kerbside rubbish and recycling collection services were introduced in late 2016.
Why do we do bin audits?
Bin audits help Council understand what waste services the public needs to dispose of their waste. By understanding what is thrown away, Council can provide waste services to help minimise the impact of the city's waste on our environment.
The combined contents of the randomly selected bins are used as a representative sample of the city's rubbish and recycling. Data is collected on a range of categories and is used to review what improvements, if any, should be made to public waste services to increase the amount of waste diverted from landfills.
This year, Council has been exploring if an organic waste collection is a viable option to add to the existing kerbside service. The waste audit would provide Council a data-based estimation of the volume of organic waste in Rotorua, and assist in a proposal for this to the Long-Term Plan.
Recent changes to what materials are able to be recycled in NZ have made restrictions on recycling tighter, and highlighted recycling contamination as a major problem toward increasing amounts of recycling ending in landfills. Kiwis' recycling habits have also been affected as a result of COVID-19 and temporary suspension of recycling activity. Waste audits help to get a picture of the types of items, nature and volumes of contaminants in our recycling bins, so that we can create strategies to lower the level of recycling contamination.
Read more about what items can and can't go into recycling bins, here.
Councils are required by law to undertake waste audits every three years. The data collected from these audits helps to inform the future of the public waste service, and guides the Waste Management and Minimisation Plan (WMMP). The WMMP must be reviewed every six years.
What happens during a bin audit?
Kerbside rubbish and recycling bins are randomly selected, and the contents are emptied into separate plastic bags. The location or address of each selected bin are not collected, for privacy reasons. The collected rubbish and recycling waste from individual bins are confidential.
After collecting an estimated 700kg of waste per day, staff from Council and Waste Watchers Ltd will manually sort and assess the contents by their categories. Data is collected on the volume and types of items as a representative sample of the city's kerbside rubbish and recycling.
At the end of each day of the audit, any rubbish is sent to landfill and recycling is sent to Materials Recovery Facilities for sorting and processing.
What do the waste auditors look for?
Below is the information collected from the 2017 bin audit: