An expanded Dunedin City Council kerbside collection service for rubbish and recycling started last month and the council is delighted with how it has been going.
"Although there were some teething issues, as happens when introducing a new service of this scale, the vast majority of households have clearly understood the changes and adopted them with gusto," climate and city growth general manager Scott MacLean said.
Red-lidded wheelie bins for rubbish replaced council rubbish bags and green-lidded bins were brought in for separate collection of food scraps and garden waste.
Organic material collected from the green-lidded bins in July weighed just over 665.5tonnes, compared with almost 823tonnes of refuse from the council’s red-lidded bins.
This meant the food and green waste accounted for about 45% of the total waste.
"Prior to the new service, most of that food and green waste would have gone in the rubbish bags and sent to landfill," Mr MacLean said.
"Instead, it is being composted and reused.
"As predicted, we have almost halved the amount of waste going to landfill."
The amount of contamination of the organic material was less than 1%.
"These numbers show the new service has been widely accepted and successfully adopted by Ōtepoti Dunedin," Mr MacLean said.
"We also congratulate our residents on the low contamination rate in the green-lidded bins."
Yellow-lidded bins for mixed recycling and blue bins for recycling of glass continue to be part of the system.
The organic material in the green-lidded bins is being consolidated and shredded at Green Island and trucked to Timaru.
A new composting operation for food and garden waste will be established at Green Island as part of a resource recovery park developed in the next two years.
Transport of material to Timaru will stop once the park is operating.
Bins were delivered to 52,000 households.
"We always knew there would be difficulties rolling out such a vast new service," Mr MacLean said.
"Our customer services team did a magnificent job fielding questions from a community keen to get it right.
"There were a few missed collections as the pick-up system bedded in, but we are definitely pleased at the positive response from residents."
Save Money Skips started its own bin pick-up service, Otago Wheelie Bins, because owner Shane Maaka did not believe the council service would suit everyone.
Mr Maaka said yesterday he had been unsure how the operation might fare, but about 2000 bins were now being emptied by the company weekly or fortnightly.
The council has an option available for people who unavoidably produce more medical waste than would fit in a 140-litre bin emptied fortnightly and Mosgiel resident Alister Forgie was one person who took this up, getting an extra bin.
He had also noticed the council’s review of its litter compliance policy, which looks set to impose weight limits on bins.
Mr Forgie was not sure this gelled with council advice about dampening discarded ash ahead of disposal in red-lidded bins.
"Are the council going to supply the ratepayers with sets of scales?"
The council has said exceeding the proposed weight limits is quite difficult to do.
There had also been strong uptake of a kerbside collections app, the council said.
The number of active users jumped from 4784 in May to 15,439 by the end of last month.
"It’s a much-improved app and we’ve received a lot of positive feedback about it," Mr MacLean said.
"There were bugs to sort out when loading addresses into the system, but we’ve largely ironed those out thanks to people reaching out to us."
