Keeping waste out of landfill is a great way to live more sustainably. Auckland Council has partnered with community groups to make it easier for you to reduce your rubbish.
Dispose of hazardous waste responsibly
Do you need to rid of household paints, old car batteries or used oil? Dispose of them sustainably by dropping them off to participating Dulux, Resene, Repco and Supercheap Auto Stores.
More info about what each company takes is available at Makethemostofwaste.co.nz
Book your annual inorganic collection
Households are eligible for an on-property collection of up to a cubic metre of unwanted items that aren’t suitable for your rubbish bin. This service is included in your rates. The booking tool opens at the end of May for mainland Auckland properties.
On a typical week, Auckland Council does 3500 inorganic collections and collects about 180 tonnes of unwanted items. Appliances, furniture, lawnmowers, and outdoor equipment are some of the popular items. Find out what’s accepted, so you can plan ahead for your collection day. More than 150 community groups have registered to benefit from these items.
If you’ve got other items to dispose of or don’t want to wait for your collection day, a Community Recycling Centre may be a good option for you.
New Community Recycling Centres coming soon
The Auckland region has nine Community Recycling Centres from which a combined average of 437 tonnes of recyclable materials are diverted from landfill per month.
The newest ones are coming to Onehunga in July and Western Springs later this year.
Community recycling centres are facilities where you can drop off unwanted items and materials for reuse and recycling. Most centres have shops on-site which sell usable household and building materials. Some centres also accept green waste for composting.
When the next one opens in Onehunga, it is projected to divert the equivalent of more than a quarter of a million wheelie bins of material that would otherwise be going to landfill.
The Ministry for the Environment provided a $10 million investment in Auckland’s Resource Recovery Network to fast track the effectiveness of Community Recycling Centres through developing fit for purpose infrastructure.
Over the next 10 years, the goal is to expand the network to get most Aucklanders within a 20-minute drive of a Community Recycling Centre.
Kerbside food scraps service updates
It is surprising to find out that when food goes into landfill it breaks down and releases methane, a harmful greenhouse gas.
Food waste makes up around half the weight of an average household’s rubbish collection. Auckland Council is introducing a kerbside food scraps service, so we can harness their potential to enrich the land and help grow more food.
Starting in February 2023, every household in urban Auckland will get a food scraps bin for the kerbside and a caddy to use in the kitchen to help them collect scraps. The service will rollout out geographically and be in place across eligible parts of the region by the end of 2023.
The kerbside food scraps service is a great complement to home composting because you can use it for meat and dairy scraps that you might not want in your home compost system. Or, for things your worms won’t eat, like processed foods, citrus, or onions.
The food scraps will be processed anaerobically into clean energy and fertiliser to reduce our reliance on landfills, while also lowering our greenhouse gas emissions.
