At Invercargill City Council’s infrastructure meeting on Tuesday a lengthy discussion was held about the city’s waste minimisation and relationship with WasteNet.
Mr Clark said he had sat in on recent WasteNet meetings, and Invercargill had the worst waste minimisation results in the country.
"That’s nothing to be proud about."
The issue was not with staff, but with the lack of leadership from councillors, he said.
"We are not forceful enough with our colleagues in the other two councils."
WasteNet is a joint venture between the city council, Gore District Council and Southland District Council that oversees the region’s waste management.
Mr Clark said he did not think a strategic review was needed, as the dysfunction sat with the other two councils.
"I heard people say the things we could do.
"Well you need to be very careful because what we want to do as a council is not necessarily what the collective wants to do.
"I spoke at the last [meeting] about the need to deal with glass.
"Glass is a big issue for us. "[Southland District Council] said we are not going to go down that track, ‘we are not going to do glass collection in bins, we will just have little bins out sitting around our rural areas’, and I understand that.
"When I asked Gore what their response was, the mayor just looked at the table and didn’t respond.
"That’s because they are not doing any recycling."
"Even though they’ve had a mayor come in that said he was right into all this stuff, nine months down the track he hasn’t done anything."
Cr Ian Pottinger, who represents the Invercargill council in WasteNet, said sitting with delegates from the two district councils was "a bit like pulling teeth".
He said he presented to WasteNet a recommendation requesting waste minimisation funding for a project.
"It was our money to use, but it required both Gore and Southland district to approve us using our money and really after a-half an hour of debate we only just got it through."
Cr Alex Cracket did not agree, and said she was uncomfortable with some of the comments being made about regional partners.
There was no misalignment between what councils wanted, she said.
"Whether or not they haven’t been actually collecting it because of political reasons is irrelevant; the fact is everybody wants waste reduction."
