Why recycle?

The most valuable benefit of recycling is reduction in energy use.

It takes huge amounts of electricity to create raw materials like aluminium. The aluminium smelter at Bluff uses 13 percent of New Zealand's electricity. Recycling aluminium can reduce energy consumption by as much as 95 percent. The Economist magazine says that savings for other materials are lower but still worthwhile: about 70 percent for plastics, 60 percent for steel, 40 percent for paper, and 30 percent for glass.

So recycling existing materials is vital if we're to reduce our energy use - something New Zealand needs to do to meet its Kyoto Protocol obligations. If we can't cut back on our greenhouse gas emissions, then we'll need to buy costly carbon credits on the international market.

An international study shows the benefits of recycling. The Technical University of Denmark reviewed the life-cycles of 55 products. The researchers compared the impact of burying, burning or recycling the products in 200 different situations. They found that in 83 percent of cases recycling was better for the environment.

How do we improve?

Simplicity: We voluntarily recycle, so it helps to make it as simple as possible. Originally, kerbside recycling asked people to put paper, glass, plastic and cans into separate piles. Many schemes are now shifting to "single stream" collection (see Kerbside recycling rules), where you can place all recyclables into one bag or bin. Single-stream collection encourages higher levels of domestic recycling.

Technology: Whether or not your council has switched to single-stream recycling depends partly on the technology available. Around the world new techniques can identify and split materials with little or no human intervention. That type of technology is starting to appear here.

Recyclers of New Zealand (RONZ) chair Bruce Gledhill says: "The current trend towards fully co-mingled collections in New Zealand is benefiting from the 20-year evolution of such systems and plants overseas. As a result, the plants coming into existence here are at the cutting edge of technology."

New technology has solved many of the problems with commercial recycling. For instance, where PVC was once burnt off electrical wiring - creating a harmful greenhouse gas called dioxin - it's now removed through breaking up the covering.

Gledhill talks of "discards" rather than waste. He says: "a landfill should be designed and operated as a mid-term repository, a place where today's discards are 'stored' so that, when a new resource-recovery technology becomes viable, the discards can be mined and the value unlocked."

Timaru District Council - Doing the three-step

Timaru has taken a lead in recycling that shows what can be done. In 2006, the Timaru District Council replaced residential wheelie bins with a three-bin system. Residents were asked to sort their waste at home into:

• a 240L bin for recyclables collected fortnightly
• a 140L bin for rubbish collected fortnightly
  
• a 240L bin for organic material collected weekly.

In one year Timaru reduced kerbside-collected rubbish going to the landfill by 67 percent. Currently, 75 percent of the collected "waste" doesn't go to the landfill. Mayor Janie Annear (pictured right) says:

"At first, people were surprised by the amount of material that's recyclable. A year on, the concept of separating waste from recyclables is now second-nature."