As Recycling Week kicks off, Fair Go's Pippa Wetzell takes a dive into the issue of too much recycling going to landfill and too much waste going to recycling.
I thought I was pretty switched on when it comes to recycling, only to discover last week, that the cottage cheese and sour cream pottles I throw in the recycling bin can't in fact be recycled.
I'm not the only one to get caught out. To mark Recycling Week, we took a bunch of items out on the street to test people's recycling knowledge, and no one got them all right.
This goes some way to explaining why the contamination rates at our Material Recovery Facilities (or MRF's as they're called) are so high. I visited the Visy plant in Auckland's Onehunga, where they receive the kerbside recycling from 500,000 Auckland households. That's one thousand truckloads a week but nearly a quarter of it has to be trucked right back out to landfill.
"A lot of people want to remove their guilt of putting things into landfill by putting it in the recycling bin and wishing, hoping that it gets recycled unfortunately it doesn't," Reclaim Recycling's Sustainability Manager Nathalia Gonzales told me.
The contamination figures in the other main centres tell of a similar problem. The Hamilton City Council reports contamination of 35%. In Tauranga it's 23%, Wellington 15%, Christchurch, has an impressive 11% and Dunedin 24%.
At the Visy Facility in Auckland, contamination comes in all forms. Soft plastics make up a lot of it, but you name it, we saw it. There was a heap of clothing, shoes, carpet, appliances, green waste, food waste.
Unfortunately, they also get things like dead animals. Bear in mind, that there are people working at the facility who have to deal with these things.
Most of what's sent to landfill is just simply items that the facility doesn't process. A small amount, less than 2%, could be recycled but is too contaminated. That's the likes of plastic bottles covered in rotting food waste. The truth is, it's not worth anyone's time to clean these items so they can be recycled properly.
Ironically, while the recycling facilities are sending truckloads of contamination to landfill, at the landfill there's a whole heap of stuff that could be recycled. Around 30% in fact, so there's definitely some work to be done.
There are changes afoot in the recycling sector - far more standardisation across the country will hopefully lead to less confusion.
"What we need to be thinking about is the circular economy," said Nathalia. "The more we can find materials that are becoming themselves again the better it is for everyone."
While getting the recycling right is great, Nathalia said it's not the absolute answer to our waste problem.
"Before we recycle we should avoid or reduce how much you consume of that material you should refuse as much as you can and reuse what you can't refuse or avoid and then you recycle so recycling is the fourth thing you should do."
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