Dealing with waste

OPINION: Invercargill city and the district councils are deliberating over the best methods of handling their communities' household solid waste, writes Stuart Collie this week.

Whatever the most appropriate method is, the cost to ratepayers will have an influence on the final decision.

And because cost implications seem to take priority in the minds of the wider community, little consideration is being given to the environmental effects that the waste has on the receiving environment, or even whether or not it is appropriate to dispose of a lot of the waste this way.

While our neighbouring councils have been considering waste disposal and recycling systems, Environment Southland has been formulating a region-wide plan for the disposal of different forms of waste under the innocuous title of the Discharge Plan.

Most of us think of waste as something unwanted that we take to the dump.

Various tips around the province have already been closed because councils could not control the material that was deposited in them. Instead, the region's waste now goes to the managed landfill site at Browns.

The need for such management under strict conditions is to make sure that material that could have effects through leaching off-site is contained.

There are many other activities that need base plans to deal with their effects.

These include discharges to air that can have a major effect on community values (either from smoke particulate or odour); discharges to water from sewage outflows and industrial sites; offal holes for the disposal of dead animals; on-farm dumps; cleanfill sites used mainly for the disposal of demolition materials; dairy shed effluent and much more.

It's obvious that there must be base rules to govern these activities.

In some cases activities need to be consented; in others guidelines are enough to assure neighbours and the public that receiving sites are suitable for the purpose, and that the effects on the receiving environment will be contained and not affect bores or surface water.

People's perceptions of waste tend to be focused on what goes into their wheelie bins.

They seldom think about the plethora of other activities which have an impact on the quality of air, water and land.

Southland has the dubious honour of being the poorest recyclers in the country and waste minimisation as a goal is essential to save filling our landfill at an unnecessarily fast rate and to capture the value of recyclable materials rather than meeting the very substantial cost of burying valuable product.

It's much more helpful to think of waste materials as a potential resource, and the dairy industry provides an excellent example. Effluent that was historically discharged as a nuisance product with a damaging effect on water quality is now recognised as a valuable source of nutrients worth many thousands of dollars when applied to land as fertiliser.

This is a classic win-win situation where the farmer and the environment both benefit.

The same principle should be applied to the recyclable materials that can be recovered from homes and businesses. The community discussion on the proposed two and three bin systems being advocated by the various councils is focused primarily on the costs associated with the additional bins.

The green waste issue seems to have overshadowed the benefits the proposed system could provide.

Whatever the outcome of the green waste argument, it is imperative that we do not lose the opportunity to catch up with the rest of the country by capturing all of the recyclables we can.

The current recycling bin system is inadequate and is a disincentive to householders to become more conscientious about removing recyclables from the waste stream.

As with the recovery of the value from dairy effluent, it is a no-brainer to recover the value from the waste stream of a marketable product as an alternative to discharging it to land fill.

Other provinces that have adopted a household service that accepts all recoverable material in a co-mingled bin have seen a massive reduction in material going to landfill. I hope it happens here.

» Stuart Collie is the chairman of Environment Southland.

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