Litter & Illegal Dumping

Dealing with our waste has a cost and this must be recovered. Fees at landfill transfer stations mean households who generate more rubbish than their kerbside bins can hold cover those additional costs rather than having these applied to waste rates for all ratepayers.

Landfill fees cover:

• A waste minimisation levy, currently fixed at $70 per tonne of waste from July 2026 and rising to $75 from 1 July 2027
• Purchase of carbon credits to cover greenhouse gases created by waste. This is part of the Emissions Trading Scheme set up by the Government to mitigate climate change – tougher environmental effects monitoring requires landfill and waste management operators to incur much higher costs than earlier years
• Landfill and transfer station site operational costs e.g. staff costs, insurance, resource consent fees, environmental monitoring, security and power.

In general terms, littering refers to someone throwing a piece of paper on the ground or throwing fast food wrappers out the window of their car. Illegal dumping refers to larger amounts of rubbish being dumped in one location.

Both activities are considered littering and are governed by the Litter Act 1979.

The average cost of illegal dumping each year in Rotorua is about $180,000. We clear around 150 tonnes per year of illegal dumping. This is a small amount (0.5%) compared to the total waste created in the district of around 30,000 tonnes, indicating that most people are acting responsibly and dispose waste through the appropriate channels and collection services.

It is difficult to catch people in the act of littering or illegal dumping and to gain enough evidence to conclusively prove they were the culprit. Photo evidence, or an eyewitness who can provide details of the time, place and offender, would assist Council.

Prosecution requires a high threshold of evidence – even mail with names and addresses is considered only circumstantial evidence. Prosecuting also comes at a significant cost to Council with no guarantee of a positive result. To be able to prosecute someone, Council must have evidence that will be considered credible in court, such as CCTV footage clearly identifying the person(s) carrying out the dumping, or a witness willing to be heard in court.

Council has deployed and will continue to deploy selective cameras to monitor dumping hot spots. Unfortunately, in the past, cameras have been either stolen or wilfully damaged. We are also required, under the privacy statutes, to disclose that a site is monitored and evidence gathered might be used for prosecution, so we cannot stealthily monitor the activities of people.

While they may act as a deterrent for some, the likelihood is that people aware of a camera at one site will simply go somewhere else to dump their rubbish. Cameras also require power which is not always easily accessible in some parts of the district such as rural areas.

The cost of providing free access to landfill would be disproportionally and significantly higher than the actual cost to clean up illegal dumping each year. Making the landfill free also means the burden of covering the full cost of disposing everyone's rubbish would fall on just those who pay rates.

In most cases, illegally dumped rubbish is made up of items which should have just been recycled or placed in household wheelie bins at no extra cost to the household. This includes glass bottles, drink containers, bagged rubbish, clothing and general household bric-a-brac.

The goal is reducing the amount of rubbish produced overall, not creating enough space to dump everyone’s rubbish. The increasing waste volume in Rotorua is not sustainable. We need action now to reduce the amount going to landfill.

Council must balance being practical and having enough bins while not taking away from the natural character of our environment. We’ve found increasing the number of bins attracts more rubbish and that having bins in the wrong places can make littering worse. It is well demonstrated in research that people are more likely to litter in an area where there is already litter present.

By optimising litter bin placement and encouraging correct recycling and waste disposal we can reduce service and maintenance costs.

Removing or relocating public litter bins in natural areas like parks and reserves links to Council’s Infrastructure priority of protecting and restoring our natural environment.

Inorganic collections generally cause more problems than they solve. People place items on the street that end up blowing into drains, waterways or neighbouring properties and often limits are exceeded, leaving rubbish on the side of the road for residents to clean up. An inorganic collection cost would need to be recouped through rates which means the cost of removing everyone's rubbish would again fall on the ratepayers, rather than on the people producing the rubbish.

Even in areas where collections operate once or twice a year at a significant cost (in the region of $1 million per year), illegal dumping is not time disciplined. It is opportunistic and highly unlikely to be deterred by collection cycles. The people who offend in this way are unlikely to be disciplined or conscientious enough to stockpile and wait for collection times.

It is very difficult to try and stop illegal dumping because people just move the issue to another location. The issue really lies with people's behaviour.

The best successes have come from working alongside the community, including for example supporting community litter collections and removing scrub and trees from problem areas in parks.

Bins at busy areas get cleared once a day in peak season. On occasion they may be cleared twice a day. Often within an hour of bins being emptied, they are filled again. A lot of the time we see bins are full of people's household rubbish rather than items typical of a visit to the park e.g. picnic items.

We encourage people to take their rubbish home with them. This will help stop public bins from overflowing in popular areas. If bins are already overflowing, don't add to the pile, take the rubbish home and dispose of it in your wheelie bins.

While some people take their rubbish away, sadly many dump it, causing safety and hygiene issues and attracting undesirable pests. Removing or relocating litter bins encourages less rubbish taken into our natural environments and reduces the amount of litter we are likely to see.

One in three public bins are being misused. They’re increasingly used for illegal dumping of household and business waste with Council spending a significant amount disposing of waste dumped by public bins and roadsides, incurring an avoidable cost to ratepayers.

The bulk of litter managed by Rotorua Lakes Council in our urban, suburban and local recreational spaces originates from people living in the district.

Many other councils and organisations, including the Department of Conservation, follow a similar ‘leave no trace’ principle. Visitors should have access to waste management facilities at their usual place of residence, and tourists at their accommodation. Pay-to-view tourist attractions provide their own litter management.

Finding and collecting litter would require a lot of extra staff and resources that would cause more cost to our community. During routine collections, contractors collect any litter around where public bins are located. Our inner-city team also clean the CBD and surrounding parks every day which includes litter pick-ups.

We rely on information from the community about litter issues so we can organise targeted clean ups. Prevention of littering is more effective than managing it through constant collection.

Council has a Waste Minimisation Officer who can come and speak at schools or any community group gatherings. Get in touch via info@rotorualc.nz.