Plan to halve landfill waste

Council takes aim at tip trips, with ‘ambitious target’ for 2030

Waste sent to landfill will drop by 50% in the next seven years if the Wellington City Council’s new waste strategy goes to plan.

The new strategy will encourage the city’s residents and businesses to dispose of waste without sending it to the tip. The Southern Landfill is the 37th landfill in Wellington since the city was established, and the council wants it to be the last one.

Deputy mayor Laurie Foon was ready to crack the champagne over the draft Zero Waste Strategy which outlines ways to reduce the biggest sources of landfill waste in Wellington – wastewater sludge, organics, construction waste and waste from products like clothing and food.

‘‘We just could not go on with the current waste system. We are taking a new step on this lowcarbon, zero waste transition, and this strategy is one of the major building blocks,’’ Foon said.

The strategy would see food waste collections introduced across the city and 50% of construction waste diverted away from landfill for reuse.

‘‘This is bloody exciting stuff, just really cool. It’s a hell of an ambitious target,’’ said Takapū/ Northern ward councillor Ben McNulty.

The Tawa community was really excited about it, said McNulty. Northern residents saw the region’s waste problem as they dealt with the unpleasant smell from the Spicer Landfill.

Diane Calvert said she was ‘‘less enamoured’’ by the plan and the council needed to take the ‘‘rose-tinted glasses off’’. ‘‘We talk a lot about waste, but it’s actually [about] doing stuff.’’

Councillor Iona Pannett said: ‘‘We need to deliver this now, we’ve been talking a lot.’’

Council officers said reducing waste by 50% in seven years was an achievable and realistic target even if it sounded difficult.

Since 2016, the waste collected per person in Wellington has already dropped by 48kg – from 466kg to 418kg.

While much of the strategy encourages behaviour changes from residents and businesses, the new sewage sludge treatment plant – which needs to be constructed by 2026, when resource consents for landfill sludge expire – will do a lot of the work.

Around 20% of the total waste currently sent to the landfill was sludge which would be processed by the new plant instead.

Diverting construction and demolition waste from the landfill is a core part of the strategy – the report notes that timber makes up almost half of the waste dropped off at the tip.

Under the Zero Waste Strategy, businesses would be incentivised to design waste out of their products or take responsibility for the waste created by their products. Reprocessing facilities would be developed in collaboration with businesses. The council was not ruling out establishing its own reprocessing facilities.

The strategy aims to treat landfill space as a finite resource by eventually allowing only resources which cannot be reused or recycled to be dumped.

The broader Wellington region is also developing a waste minimisation strategy, with input from different councils.

The council’s draft Zero Waste Strategy will go out for consultation in March next year.