Not only are our houses and cars getting smarter, our rubbish bins are too.

Tauranga City Council installed 10 ‘smart technology' waste and recycling bin stations in Mount Maunganui in December as part of the national ‘Litter Less Recycle More' project developed by The Packaging Forum in partnership with Be a Tidy Kiwi.

Each bin has an Eye-Fi which provides an alert system to the collector so they are emptied on demand, not on a schedule.

A centre recycling bin is book-ended by two rubbish bins in a bid to reduce contamination, with people typically using the first bin they come to if they are uncertain if something is recyclable or not.

Tauranga is one of five locations, including Marlborough, Queenstown Lakes, Rotorua and Wellington, trialling the bins in a bid to make it easier for people to recycle.

Kath Yule, from TCC's resource recovery and waste team, says there was a great response from the community to the bins over the summer.

'Council ran a summer recycling ambassador programme alongside the bins for 12 days, where the bins were manned by trained ambassadors managed by Keep Tauranga Beautiful,” says Kath.

'Surveys were taken which found 95 per cent of people liked the bins and 92 per cent of people think it's important to have public place recycling bins.”

There were issues, however, with residents stacking up household recycling in front of the bins along with rubbish over the Christmas and New Year period.

This was mitigated by installing ‘No Household Recycling' stickers and producing an educational pamphlet to deliver to residents within the vicinity of the bins informing them not to dump household materials at public litter bins, says Kath.

Lyn Mayes, project manager for The Packaging Forum, says one of the main reasons preventing organisations from installing recycling bins is contamination.

Lyn says: 'Early signs from Queenstown Lakes, Marlborough and Tauranga are that volumes collected in the recycling and rubbish bins are higher than in ‘standard' bins and contamination levels in the recycling bins are lower.”

A waste audit of the Tauranga bins by Waste Watchers sampled three smart bin stations from three different locations over a three-day period.

Nearly 100kg of materials were sorted and counted, with approximately 13kg (27 per cent) of recyclable materials found incorrectly placed into rubbish bins.

More than 6kg of materials found in the recycling bins were not recyclable.

The bins in Tauranga are a muted blue colour, however in other centres they are an eye-catching red (rubbish), blue (glass bottles) and yellow (other recycling).

Kath says the decision was made by the resource recovery and waste team to use the same colour as all other rubbish bins in the area for the trial, so as not to create an eyesore for local residents with the bins being so close to the beach.

She says there are no plans to get any more of the bins at this stage.