As community recyclers and big Australian exporters fight for control of our waste, Peter Malcouronne meets the people in charge of our recycling system and discovers what we’re throwing away—and who’s paying. Is there a better way?
Is recycling a waste of time and money? Doesn’t it all end up in China? Is zero waste an unrealistic goal? Are plastic bags really so evil? Peter Malcouronne meets New Zealand’s disenchanted recyclers, and discovers some surprising truths about recycling
PHOTO: Chris Skelton
It’s the noise that hits you first: the loaders’ engines straining, blades graunching on concrete, the rasp of rubbish bags being dealt to. It’s as if the Waitakere Refuse and Recycling Transfer Station is alive. And then you notice its breath: the mingling of diesel and the detritus of a throwaway society.
Peter Bunting, an affable ex-builder, scours the beast for treasure. He’s the station’s Trade Me man: he loots antiques, microwaves, chainsaws, jetskis, trampolines, boats and bikes—“a million bikes”—and sells them online, raising around $100,000 a year. “That’s an $800 lawnmower right there,” he says. “Got the late-model five horsepower motor, alloy body … nothing wrong with it.” He fiddles with the throttle, then fondles an old oak cabinet. “The quality of stuff here’s incredible. Had a 30-year-old Korg synthesiser come in recently that we sold for $1,480.”
Now he takes me on a tour, to the hazardous waste bay where paint’s snaffled up by DIYers almost as soon as it’s dumped, and where oil—1,500 litres a fortnight—is recovered. There’s also a designated greenwaste area, a huge firewood stack, a cage for retired gas bottles, and several scrap metal bins. In the rubbish-tipping area itself, four staff slog full time rescuing the recyclable. It’s an impressive operation.
We head out back, to the station’s materials recovery plant, run by contractor Onyx. Here Waitakere and North Shore City’s recyclables are sorted, crushed or baled, and moved on to buyers around the Asia Pacific. The plant recycles 18,000 tonnes of rubbish from Waitakere, 23,000 from the Shore. The figures look just as impressive nationally.
The Packaging Council, the packaging industry’s mouthpiece, boasts that the total quantity of packaging recycled increased by 14 percent in the three years to 2007, whereas consumption increased by just 1.3 percent. “Overall, we’re recycling 60 percent of the packaging consumed,” the Council opined in a 2008 press release, claiming impressive recycling stats for aluminium (88 percent recycled), glass (62 percent), paper (78 percent) and plastics (23 percent).
These are the numbers that enthuse us as we virtuously sort through our paper and bottles. At last we’re getting it right. Living more sustainably. So why the dissenting voices, like the cantankerous neighbour who interrupted my rubbish delineation the other week? “You’re wasting ya bloody time,” he grumped. “It all goes to the tip anyway.”
Suddenly, rather unexpectedly, recycling’s been getting a bad rap. There have been reports of great mountains of glass, of carefully sorted plastic stockpiles dumped in landfills or, worse, shipped off to China. A slew of newspaper stories, groaning with puns like ‘Recycling: a load of rubbish’, claim our efforts are expensive and pointless. Perhaps the most damning critique was ‘Indecent Disposal’, a report on TV One’s Sunday programme last October that revealed ten container loads of plastic bottles leave New Zealand each week, heading for Chinese towns no one’s heard of, where workers toiling in hellish conditions try to clean up our mess. Not recycling as most of us imagine it.
Recycling’s annus horribilis was compounded by the recession: the notoriously variable price of recyclables dived; paper prices fell 80 percent; top-grade PET plastic prices halved; and a tonne of copper scrap, worth $14,300 in 2007, fetched just $5,300.
And then, since June, the sort of publicity an ailing industry doesn’t need. Auckland City Council, eye on the bottom line, awarded Waiheke Island’s rubbish contract to the Australian-owned Transpacific Industries. Problem is, Waiheke Island had developed an impressive in-house recycling operation—Clean Stream Waiheke—that employed 22 people, turned over $1.3 million a year and even ran its rubbish trucks on 25,000 litres of used cooking oil from local restaurants.
Though Transpacific’s bid is understood to have been slightly cheaper, Waihekeans weren’t happy. In June, protestors scaled Onehunga’s ‘Mount Visy’, the 16,000- tonne heap of glass beside the Auckland motorway that’s the unfortunate face of Auckland’s new $22 million recycling processing plant. A banner—‘Recycling? Yeah Right’—was hoisted. A public meeting, protest and website followed; the Waihekeans, bless them, even composed their own anthem, ‘Kotahitanga Waiheke’.
The as-yet-unresolved furore sums up the recycling debate. On one side, you have small community-based recyclers with their ideological commitment to zero waste and local answers to local problems. This is our mess—we’ll clean it up. On the other, the big boys: monoliths, largely Australian-owned, with state-of-the-art recycling plants and economies of scale. Their focus is unashamedly commercial: they’re quite prepared to export our rubbish anywhere if the price is right.
The two camps are poles apart, even in the actual manner of collection. The locals favour labour-intensive ‘source separation’, where paper, bottles and cans are kept apart. Companies such as Visy, the world’s largest privately owned recycling company, prefer ‘comingling’, where recyclables are all thrown in together and sorted out later. It’s simpler for the householder but at a cost: bottles inevitably break, shards get into the paper and the result is a lower quality, often unsellable product.
The problem, says Bruce Gledhill, executive director of Recyclers of New Zealand, is that for most of our recycling services the main objective is cost-cutting—despite consumer willingness to pay more. “In 1993, Auckland City Council researchers asked 400 households what they thought was a fair rates impost for a comprehensive recycling service. The response: $27.50 per house per year. The contract was signed for about $6.50 per house. The public were willing to pay 53 cents a week, but some bureaucrat set the contract at 12.5 cents.”
As ever, there’s a duelling dichotomy between rates and rubbish.
We are what we waste
Back at Waitakere, beside a bin of old computer monitors, three stooped figures sort through a gargantuan rubbish pile. “We’re sorting 100 bags a day for five days from around Waitakere,” explains Bruce Middleton, director of the environmental consultancy Waste Not. Standing at a waist-high table, the workers tear open the bags and sort their contents into 30 categories, including plastics, paper and organics. And some rather unpleasant ones. “‘Other organics’ is everybody’s least favourite. It’s a catch-all for anything that rots that isn’t food or garden waste. Dead rats and birds, hair, animal poop … you name it, sooner or later it shows up in a rubbish bag.”
It’s no fun, especially in summer when mouldering meat’s frequently crawling with maggots. But it’s an important task: this audit tells Waitakere City Council what its residents are chucking out. On today’s evidence, you could say Te Atatu people are enthusiastic smokers. Whereas, Middleton says, “Hendersonites use a lot of disposable nappies, Swansonians like shellfish, and Titirangians throw nothing away at all.”
There’s a purpose to this: the councils want to know how successful their kerbside recycling is. There are “bugger all” Coke cans, plastic bottles and Heralds being tossed here. “People know the materials that are accepted—and do a damn fine job recycling them. You can sort ten bags and find only one or two bottles.”
But it costs. “Kerbside recycling’s an expensive exercise and comes nowhere near to paying for itself,” says Middleton. ”Authorities aren’t doing it because it’s economically viable—they’re required to by law.” The Local Government Act and the Waste Minimisation Act compel councils to reduce waste.
As recyclers search for the lowest-cost solutions, the cost of chucking stuff in a landfill remains a mystery. It has never been measured properly, says Middleton. “It’s future generations who have to deal with any mess. And that cost is unknown.” Councils have been encouraged to apply full-cost accounting, taking future costs into account. “But it’s impossible to determine. You don’t know what a landfill’s going to be doing in 200 years.”
Says zero waste tsar Warren Snow of the consultancy Envision: “If you factored in all the real future costs of maintaining that waste in the landfill—the carbon cost, the mitigation of methane gases [21 times more potent than CO2], the containment of leachate, the waste of resources—then we couldn’t afford to throw things away.
“There are very few places where you can leave something indefinitely for a one-off fee. You can’t say ‘I’m leaving this forever—here’s 50 bucks.’ Really, we should be paying a monthly fee to keep all that crap in the ground. We’re discounting the environment. If the true cost were met, we’d have zero waste within a year.”
We’re some distance off that: the Ministry of the Environment’s New Zealand Waste Strategy, published in 2002, talked grandly of “zero waste and a sustainable New Zealand”. Progress towards this, the Ministry admits, has been “variable”.
There have been spectacular successes. Opotiki District Council, the first local authority in New Zealand to adopt a zero waste strategy in 1998, slashed its waste volume by 85 percent by June 2002. And by 2006, 73 percent of New Zealanders had access to kerbside recycling, up from 20 percent in 1996, with drop-off centres available for the rest.
So we’re on track, then? Middleton mulls over this as a loader grabs a clump of scrap metal and dumps it into a bin. “Watch for a while and it’ll seem like they’re pulling out mountains of stuff, but there’re bigger mountains going to landfill.” Indeed, the amount of waste disposed of in New Zealand landfills in 2006—3.1 million tonnes—is almost identical to 1995 figures.
In 2006, Middleton’s Waste Not was commissioned by the Ministry to calculate how much we dump. In addition to the three million tonnes landfilled, a further three million tonnes of clean fill (earth, concrete and other construction materials) are dumped: an annual average of 1,500 kilograms per New Zealander. We recycle an average of 95 kilograms each. Some way off zero waste.
But that’s not the point, argues Wellington waste expert Richard Webster of Less Waste. “Zero waste is unrealistic with existing systems and technology. But the concept of zero waste is very strong as a message.”
10% plastic, 25% food
Spend time with the beast, watching the trucks roll in and the bags pile up, and you realise recycling presents a classic green ‘collective action problem’. How do you reconcile the local—doing your bit, however inconsequential—with the global, where the scale of the problem is immense (and the trends depressing)? When you’re trying to persuade individuals of the case for recycling, you need to show that everyone else is mucking in. And here’s where you need numbers.
Unfortunately, reliable stats are hard to come by. In September 2009 the Packaging Council released its ‘mass balance data’ for 2008. “Recycling up by 26 percent,” the council brayed, noting the industry had met all the targets in the five-year voluntary Packaging Accord it implemented in 2004.
But take a closer look at these numbers. The recovery of aluminium has slumped from a scarcely believable 88 percent in 2007 to 74 percent in 2008, paper recycling from 75 to 70 percent. The amount of packaging we used surged 14 percent, from a 1.3 percent increase the year before. The most telling stat—the collection rate (as a percentage of consumption)—has dropped from 60 percent to 58 percent.
“The Packaging Council stats have never been audited,” Snow rails. “They’re highly spurious in my view—the government’s just been too lazy to question them. It amazes me that those who create this waste are given control of the agenda, while public, community and environmental groups have been locked out.”
Snow scorns the voluntary Packaging Accord he says the industry brought in—belatedly, reluctantly—to stave off more onerous central government legislation. It’s a textbook case, he says, of greenwashing. “Go to a computer or hardware store and see how packaging has grown [under the Accord].”
Snow has a reputation as a maverick—a man who awkwardly straddles the roles of lobbyist and consultant. But Middleton, a rather more cautious character, is also critical of the Packaging Council. “Some very good people working within it have tried to get things done. But it’s basically run by corporates that are resistant to change. Very little’s actually been accomplished.”
Concludes Snow caustically: “The Packaging Council’s main role is to come up with PR spin on how good packaging is. They’re constantly claiming packaging’s only a small part of the waste stream. That it’s not a big issue.”
But the hapless Packaging Council’s claim that the nation’s rubbish piles are not all of their making does have some credence: Waste Not’s analysis of household rubbish showed that, by weight, 44 percent is organic, with 25 percent of the total being kitchen waste (plastics make up 10 percent). Staggeringly, the average New Zealand household tosses out one-third of its food.
If we ate more of it—and composted the rest—we’d be making a huge difference, says Less Waste’s Webster. But not only that. “We should focus on big-volume contributors such as construction and demolition, which makes up a large percentage of waste to landfill.”
Interestingly, plastic shopping bags, the great evil of our age, make up less than one percent of the content of landfills. Inconsequential? The Sunday Times’ Richard Girling certainly thinks so: “The last thing we need,” he wrote in July, “is the kind of worthy spasm that made people think they could save the planet with jute shopping bags.”
Girling—and others—argue the plastic bag campaign has spared government and the supermarkets the cost of meaningful action.
In August, the Packaging Council announced that a voluntary agreement by big retailers (Foodstuffs, Progressive Enterprises and The Warehouse) has reduced plastic bag use by 157 million bags a year—almost a quarter. But Foodstuffs’ paltry five-cents-a-bag charge was ditched within a month of its introduction (laissez-faire Ireland has seen consumption fall 90 percent after introducing a compulsory 45-cent charge). And plastic bags are still being dumped in our landfills at an astonishing rate: 40,000 bags an hour—bags that can take 1,000 years to break down.
Snow contends the campaign has significant symbolic value (though he lambasts its effectiveness). Nevertheless, there’s a certain frustration in the recycling industry as the focus on plastic bags risks obscuring more important questions. Such as, should we just burn it all?
Some argue we’d be better off, fiscally and environmentally, burning our waste in high-tech combustion chambers that vaporise 85 percent of its weight. Vienna’s remarkable Spittelau incineration plant, designed by eco-architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, is a model of what can be done.
“I wouldn’t dismiss incineration outright,” says mechanical engineer Michael Henry, an energy efficiency specialist. “The organics, paper and timber that make up about half the waste stream are the source of methane from landfills. While 60 percent of this could potentially be captured—even turned into electricity—the other 40 percent has a devastating greenhouse gas effect. Incineration could, in effect, sterilise this biodegradable material and maybe recover some energy in the process.”
Still, recycling makes sense for other waste. A Technical University of Denmark study compared the impact of burying, burning or recycling 55 different products in 200 situations. Its conclusion? In 83 percent of cases, recycling was better for the environment.
Aluminium’s the poster-child: recycling a single can saves enough energy to operate the telly for three hours. And the US Environmental Protection Agency calculated that recycling a tonne of paper saves 17 trees, two barrels of oil, 4,100 kilowatts of electricity, 26,500 litres of water and three cubic metres of landfill space.
Impressive as these figures are, Webster’s quick to remind us recycling’s just one part of the ‘waste hierarchy’: the mantra that positions waste prevention as the first goal, followed by minimisation, reuse, recycling, energy recovery and, finally, disposal. “The impetus is on consumers to reduce and reuse. Recycling fits well within our consumption-based society. It doesn’t involve changing consumption habits—indeed, it creates a new industry!”
Currently, that industry’s about damage control rather than remaking economic structures. And if recycling remains an ongoing battle between the way the world is and how a few enlightened individuals would like it to be, perhaps mitigation is as good as it’ll get.
“We have to be much more serious than that,” says Snow. His vision is altogether grander. “It’s about taking responsibility. It’s no longer acceptable for manufacturers to relinquish liability once products leave the factory gate.” He cites Fisher & Paykel’s “rudimentary” disassembly line in South Auckland as a forerunner of things to come. “Recycling in the future will be far more sophisticated than just scrapping. Everything will be designed to be dismantled. Taken apart and used again.”
Snow will gladly talk rubbish all day. A sustainable design evangelist, he envisions a cradle-to-cradle cycle where every product (and its packaging) moves in a ‘closed loop’ circuit, where every building has a dismantling, as well as a construction, plan. He foresees industrial recycling parks— “discard malls”—where businesses cluster together to feed off the rubbish, employing hundreds.
“We’re not going to become a sustainable society just by doing a bit of recycling. We’re going to have to go for durability, reparability and ‘dismantibility’, if that’s a word. The old values of build-to-last. More recycling is meaningless if it’s paralleled by more consumption. Or if it allows us to justify consuming more.”
The answer? Cash back for bottles
“Every day I walk on 90 Mile Beach and bring home the catch of the day—various items of packaging waste. It’s impossible to keep up with. I’ll be accused of being alarmist, but I fear if we don’t get a handle on reducing and eliminating packaging waste harm, sea life may not survive it. There’s an area twice the size of Texas that’s literally a sea of plastic waste.”
If anything, Warren Snow’s understating the problem: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a vortex of 100 million tonnes of plastic debris in the North Pacific—ranges over five million square kilometres, killing uncountable numbers of fish and seabirds each year. It’s the unintended, if inevitable, consequence of living in a world that pays lip service to recycling, but which produced as much plastic in the last decade as it did in the entire 20th century.
The numbers are numbing. You wonder if it’s even worth trying to make a difference. The irrepressible Snow demurs: a good place to start, he says, is pressuring politicians to introduce container deposit legislation (CDL). Take in a container—a bottle, can, pretty much anything—and get cash back. New Zealanders of a certain age will fondly remember the days when you’d take bottles to the local dairy for lolly money. On a good week ‘scabbing’ you could pull in $2, a fortune at the time.
It seems an eminently sensible idea: CDL would double the recycling of beverage containers, the largest proportion of our litter, saving a billion containers from landfills each year. The cost, Snow calculates, would be minimal: $6.6 million annually or just 0.3 cents per container.
And yet the Packaging Council—notably the beverage manufacturers—are agin it. “They’ve opposed it all over the world forever,” says Bruce Middleton. “Anytime CDL is threatened, Coke and Pepsi fight against it. They opposed it in South Australia and they lost. They opposed it here and they’ve won so far. There’s no good reason: CDL works.
“It immediately solves litter problems, your recycling rates for containers go up hugely, and it’s self-funding. It’s still worthwhile for local government to offer recycling services because some people will continue using kerbside recycling, so the system continues working. It just works better for everyone.”
Take Germany. “They now have a 97 percent recovery rate. And each bottle’s reused an average of 13 times.”
Too good to be true? “Putting a price on a container would put up the price of food further at a time when shoppers are already struggling with the cost of their weekly groceries,” says Packaging Council spokeswoman Lyn Mayes. She rubbishes Snow’s figures and reckons the cost would be much higher: $48 to $90 million per year. And for little gain, she says. “Independent studies show a deposit refund scheme would reduce waste from landfill by approximately 45,000 tonnes.”
That’s about 1.5 percent of our annual dump. Once more, we’re back to arguing over numbers.
