We’re always looking to the best community zero waste solutions; Whāingaroa has done and continues to do, an awesome job of washing, squashing and sorting recycling. However not every town manages waste like us. Recycling contamination from dirty or un-recyclable items is a big challenge.

This year, national standardisation of kerbside recycling rolled out across Aotearoa. Standardising recycling will help divert an estimated 30kg per household of waste from landfill each year. For Whāingaroa this means only the below items that are clean from food can be collected at the kerbside to then be bailed and sent to existing recycling facilities:

• Glass bottles and jars only, with lids removed and no metal lids in the first crate.
• Plastics #1 #2 #5 and aluminium and tin cans in the other crate. Tin can lids can be squished inside cans, but no other lids.
• Cardboard and paper flattened and contained, either boxed between crates or secured under glass crate. Stacked cardboard must not be bigger than crate size.
• Food scraps in the green 20 litre bin, with all scraps in Xtreme Zero Waste starch bags, not loose. Leave a visible note between the lid for more bags.

There are a few extra items we’ve been xtreme and collected at the kerbside, but collections of these will stop from Tuesday July 30th to support consistency with recycling across Aotearoa. We can still recycle these items if clean and dropped off at the Recycling Wall at Kāhu’s Nest:

• Clean, stretchy, soft plastic film (clear, without text, labels or stickers, like cling wrap)
• Empty aerosol cans
• Aluminium tinfoil and baking dishes
• Metal and plastic lids