It was trash talk of a constructive nature during a political debate about the country’s waste problem, including a hike in landfill levies hoped to fund better waste infrastructure
Politicians put forward their policies for dealing with New Zealand’s growing waste problem in an online debate.
Per capita we have one of the highest rates of waste production in the developed world and moves to cut this back through reducing waste, recovering items or recycling materials have been patchy.
Associate Minister for the Environment, Eugenie Sage, describes our waste problems as an area where we are “punching way above our weight in the wrong direction”.
The size of our waste issue
We may be a nation of tidy Kiwis but for the most part it seems we’ve relied on the the easiest and cheapest option, tidying waste into landfills.
Without change, New Zealand could become the land of the long leaching landfill.
In the 2018/19 year, around 3.68 million tonnes of waste went to municipal landfills. To try to visualise this, imagine a rhinoceros. One tonne is around half the weight of a rhinoceros, 3.68 million tonnes is the equivalent of 1.84 million rhinoceros getting dumped into municipal landfills – in a single year.
There’s little data available on non-municipal landfills. These can range from large-scale commercial landfills to an estimated 46,000 private landfills on farms.
A levy introduced in 2008 of $10 a tonne for waste for rubbish going to municipal landfills has been ineffective. We’re dumping 48 percent more per capita now than we were when it was first introduced.
Construction and demolition waste has had no levy at all. Nobody counts how much waste goes into ‘class 2’ landfills that take construction waste but it’s estimated to be 2.9 million tonnes per year. It’s thought around 50 percent of construction site waste could be diverted from landfill.
It’s been such a cheap option, even brand new items are dumped and international cruise ships have offloaded plastic deck chairs and used mattresses here.
Legacy landfills have also become an issue. In 2019, flooding tore open an old landfill on the Fox River, scattering debris 300km along formerly pristine beaches. The clean-up took months and cost close to $1 million. It’s estimated up to another 163 dumps are at risk of being exposed due to sea level rise.
There have been moves to address some of these issues. The levy on household waste will progressively increase over four years to $60 per tonne. Construction waste will also attract a $20 per tonne levy, which will take effect in 2022, eventually increasing to $30 per tonne by 2024.
The money from these levies – estimated to be around $269 million per year from mid 2024 – will help with efforts to minimise waste. Even with these funds it’s estimated there’s still a $1.2 to $2 billion infrastructure shortfall.
WasteMINZ, a representative body of waste-related bodies, including commercial operators and councils, hosted the debate with CEO Janine Branston describing waste as a “critical election issue”.
She said the debate was a chance to hear different parties on whether they will continue, change, or introduce new waste policies.
Participants in the debate included Labour’s David Parker, Green’s Eugenie Sage, National’s Scott Simpson, ACT’s Simon Court and The Opportunity Party’s Adriana Christie. NZ First’s Jenny Marcroft was to attend but pulled out the night before.
The landfill levy
There were some grumbles about the levy, but no promises of reversing it.
National and ACT’s representatives expressed concerns, without outlining changes they would make.
National’s Simpson said he was supportive of expanding the levy, but pointed out going from $10 to $60 was a 500 percent increase. He worried fly-tipping would become a greater issue in his Coromandel constituency.
“There are already people in my neck of the woods, and I know in other parts of the country who simply want to save themselves what [to] many people would seem like a very small number of dollars by just hoofing waste over the nearest bank, cliff or hole at the back of the farm.”
Referring to the National Party as taking a blue-green approach to environmental sustainability matters he said people responded better to incentives than proclamations from the Beehive.
He said consultation on the levy had been too limited.
“Associate Minister [Sage] may well think that she’s done a good job in terms of consulting with the sector, but I can assure you that many of those sector organisations have been beating a pathway to my door, telling me about how unhappy they are with the consultation process.”
ACT’s Court also raised issues with consultation.
Rather than having people beating a pathway to his door, he thought the construction industry wasn’t unaware waste going to landfill was going to incur a fee in the future: “I’ll tell you there’s nobody in the construction industry who knows that every truck leaving the site with a load of wet muck in winter is going to incur a landfill tax at the local clean-fill site. They have no idea. It’s going to push up the cost of construction phenomenally.”
Almost 500 submissions were received to the discussion document. These included 96 business and industry submissions, 264 individual submissions, 41 local government submissions, 35 submissions from NGOs, two from iwi or hapū and 41 submissions which weren’t classified.
The majority of submitters thought the waste levies should be increased.
The proposed levy for construction landfill is estimated to increase the levy-related cost of a new house build from less than $10 at present to between $70 and $75. Levy-related demolition costs would increase the waste costs from the estimated 2000 to 8000 house demolitions per year from $25 a house to between $280 and $300.
Overall, it’s been estimated levy-related costs will increase from $6.6 million a year to between $68 and $75 million.
Waste to energy
A hot issue for Court was a Resource Management Act amendment that rules out waste-to-energy. He said places in Europe introduced high landfill levies, but at the same time incentivised waste-to-energy projects.
He said ACT would repeal the ban on waste-to-energy.
Sage was open to waste-for-energy for some waste, but cautioned done poorly this could convert burying rubbish in the ground to “using the atmosphere like a landfill” and didn’t provide an incentive to reduce waste.
Both Parker and Simpson highlighted technology of how to turn waste to energy is advancing, even for municipal waste, and options beyond incineration are available.
“Those technologies are coming, but they all require scale. Some things we don’t have scale for, and we’ll need to send them overseas, some things do have scale but will need coordination of a central government role to bring sufficient scale from our waste streams,” said Parker.
Spending the $269 million-a-year levy
There was no discussion around the $1.2 to $2 billion waste infrastructure shortfall, but there was plenty of talk around how funds from the levy could be spent.
Sage said work was being done to identify where there were gaps in the waste management infrastructure to prioritise investment of the levy funds. She also was open to the idea of encouraging innovative projects, including waste-to-energy projects for some forms of waste, such as meat waste.
Court also suggested innovation was needed. “All I hear is local and central government intending to dump tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into existing, profitable recycling businesses and I find it appalling.”
Simpson also supported the fund being used to investigate new technological options which could be useful for New Zealand.
The Opportunity Party’s Christie, who runs a social enterprise converting pallets into furniture, raised the need for innovative solutions, challenging parties to look beyond old-fashioned ideas.
She said TOP didn’t have a set idea of what it would spend the levy on but raised a company in the United States that could recycle food and animal waste as well as all seven types of plastic. She suggested investing in this sort of infrastructure could not only help current waste, but could be used to process waste in legacy landfills.
“How many landfills do we have, and how much plastic do we have to get rid of first? We’re not just going to leave that there are we?”
