The long awaited opening of Timaru’s revamped $3.8 million materials recovery facility (MRF) took place on Tuesday, as the region’s biggest resource recovery hub got its public debut.
The MRF takes kerbside recycling from Timaru, Waimate, Mackenzie, Ashburton and Central Otago district councils, as well as commercial businesses, and has the capacity to sort five tonnes of material – mixed plastics, aluminium, steel, paper and cardboard – an hour.
The three South Canterbury councils came together to award the 15 year, $112m Envirowaste contract in 2020. The upgraded MRF has been operating since March 2022, but the unveiling was delayed due to Covid-19 restrictions and scheduling difficulties.
EnviroNZ chief executive Chris Aughton said EnviroWaste has made “intensive investment” in new equipment, technology and processes at the facility.
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He said “that wouldn’t have happened without the collaboration of all three councils”.
“To create a leading edge facility like this, to be putting in optical sorters for fibre, you need to have volume, and you need to have scale.
“An individual council wouldn’t have been able to make this level of investment, and we wouldn’t have been able to do it without the councils support.”
He said these type of arrangements – joint contracting, amalgamation and collaboration – are becoming more common.
Aughton acknowledged New Zealand’s reliance on offshore markets for much of our recycling is less than ideal.
“Ultimately, we all aspire to want to get to this concept of a circular economy.
“New Zealand has always wanted to recycle, and has recycled. But of course, everything was sent offshore to be processed – and as regulations have tightened on the overseas markets, what that has highlighted is that we didn’t have the infrastructure to be able to do the sourcing, the sorting, and creating a marketable product.
“And there are certain products, for example, organic material, food waste and green waste, which we’re seeing councils adopting now – that’s a great material that you can process on shore and then reuse into the agricultural markets here.
“We’re an importing nation… so it really comes down to the sort of the packaging and the materials that we receive, and because a lot of it comes from off offshore, it almost needs to go back offshore to be reprocessed into that material.”
The facility is only taking recyclables from Ashburton and Central Otago, but Aughton said they are likely to look at expanding to organic waste.
“We’ll be looking at what our options are there.”
Aughton said some of the decline in recycling may be due to public education dropping off in recent years, but he praised the approach by Timaru, Waimate and Mackenzie councils, which he said “really focuses on educating the householder”.
Envirowaste has two education officers in South Canterbury, as well as bin inspectors, and a “big focus” is going to be on education and behavioural change, he said.
But he said recycling cannot be seen as the whole solution.
“We see ourselves as a little bit of the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. By the time we receive it [rubbish and recyclables] the amount of waste and the type of waste has already been created – so absolutely waste minimisation starts in the household.
“In Timaru, for example, the plastics that go into the recycling bin are the ones, twos and fives – PPE plastics and HDPE (milk bottles and polypropylene).
“Other plastics are very, very difficult to recycle, be it here or offshore, they’re just not made for recycling.”
Sideloader operator Graeme Badman has 14 years’ experience in his role in the recycling truck and said he has seen improvements in the technology of trucks and facilities, but there are still issues with the way people are recycling.
“Nappies are the worst, disgusting”, Badman said.
He said soft plastic and food are the other main culprits, andcan contaminate an entire load.
Cameras and an in-cab screen allow drivers to monitor what’s in the bins as they are collected, but Badman said many years on the job, gives him an added advantage.
“You can usually hear it anyway as it goes in, stuff that shouldn’t be in there.”
Supervisor Trish Wharepapa has also worked at Redruth for 14 years, and despite a promotion, is determined to stay hands on alongside her team on the sorting belts.
“I started out working in the MRF before I got my new role, and I really wanted to stay involved and be part of it.”
She said the new optical sorter assists, but does not remove the need for human expertise.
“It’s a good machine, but you still need people to do the work after the machine.”
She said it’s disappointing there hasn’t been more of an improvement in how people recycle, although it can vary.
“You can put all the advertising out, but it’s down to the people themselves, if they don’t want to, they just won’t.”
Once at the vanguard of recycling – Timaru was the first place in New Zealand to introduce the three-bin waste management system, and the first in the Southern Hemisphere to include a composting facility – in recent years recycling habits had slipped drastically.
So much so that in January 2021, Timaru District Council revealed almost half (48%) of all recyclables were ending up in landfill due to contamination from non-recyclable items.
Following a high profile public education campaign, that figure fell to 40% by May 2021, and further improvement followed the introduction of the separate blue bin for glass.
By mid-2021, the council reported the contaminated amount dropping by 32% to 16%, but in the wake of Envirowaste taking over the amalgamated contract, it’s no longer possible to tally individual council contamination rates.
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