Southland District Mayoral candidate Kirsty Pickett says southern councils need to get back to working together on recycling services to champion and take advantage of exciting progress being made in the local private sector.

“I was privileged to visit two sites this month where really exciting things are happening that have the potential to significantly reduce Southland’s waste stream,” she said.

McGregor Concrete, at Winton, has spent the past year perfecting glass crushing techniques that means Southland’s recycled glass (currently stockpiled because there is no market for it) can be returned to a sand-like texture suitable for use as roading aggregate and as infrastructure fill.

Meanwhile, at Makarewa, Recycle South (formerly Southland disAbility Enterprises) is in the final stages of commissioning its new pelletiser plant that can convert used agricultural bale wrap into pure resin pellets ready for export to be manufactured back into bale wrap. In just one hour the plant can turn one tonne of waste into a valuable commodity. Already more than 200 tonnes have been successfully converted and there is potential for hard agricultural and household plastics, including the likes of milk bottles, to be converted in the future.

“However, to reach their full potential, both of these innovative projects, located in the Southland District, require glass to be collected separately from other recyclables,” Pickett said.

Since the early 2000s, the Invercargill City (ICC), Gore (GDC) and Southland District (SDC) Councils have committed to a shared business unit for waste management and minimisation, under the name WasteNet. But an inability to agree on whether to renew the recycling contract with Southland disAbility Enterprises (now Recycle South) in 2020 resulted in the councils ending the shared recycling arrangement. Since then, ICC has negotiated a contract directly with Recycle South, SDC has subcontracted to ICC so its recycling still goes to Recycle South but without any direct contractual relationship, and GDC has made its own arrangements independent of Recycle South.

Pickett said the significant progress made in the private sector should be the impetus to get the councils revisiting the shared recycling model for the overall good of the province. 

“Co-mingling of glass is currently causing $100,000 of equipment damage every year to the Recycle South plant – not to mention the risk of harm to those sorting it and the contamination of other recyclables – only for it to essentially be discarded anyway. But the councils also need to be engaged at another level and that is investigating how they might use the crushed product in infrastructure projects, because the carbon footprint will be significantly reduced if it doesn’t need to leave the province,” she said. 

“The separation of glass would also pave the wave for future pelletisation of domestic hard plastics, significantly increasing the value of those unwanted plastics. But, again, that is only able to happen if we first separate glass from the recycling collection.” 

“We can do better – we must do better, and we can do it better together,” Pickett said.

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