Whakatāne District Council plans to bring in strict penalties for people who continually put incorrect items in their recycling and green waste bins.

Three strikes and perpetrators will have their large yellow or green-lidded bins confiscated for three months.

Solid waste manager Nigel Clarke presented the council with a plan for how to tackle the problem.

High amounts of unrecyclable waste are entering the Material Recovery Facility in Tauranga every week and getting into the compost being made at the Keepa Rd green waste facility through kerbside collections.

Unrecyclable items dumped at the Tauranga Material Recovery Facility from Whakatāne kerbside bins. Photo / Supplied

The Tauranga facility reports that incorrect items can sometimes make up as much as 65% of recycling received from the Whakatāne district. The average so far this year has been 25%.

The facility will not accept kerbside recycling from Murupara at all because of the high level of contamination. The Murupara recycling bins must first be pre-sorted in Whakatāne.

Clarke said the contractor that recycles Whakatāne green waste into compost will no longer accept kerbside green waste.

It had not been able to sell the finished product because of the large amount of items that are not compostable.

The council recently had to dispose of over 475 tonnes of compost from the Keepa Rd site to landfill at a cost of $143,000.

Clarke said people needed to think of recycling and green waste as a product that they were trying to sell. Contamination devalued it.

“Imagine if you go to the supermarket and buy a sealed bag of potatoes. If you open up that bag and find it’s 50% soil you’re not going to buy that brand of potatoes again. It’s the same with our kerbside recycling. If it’s full of things that shouldn’t be there, the industry doesn’t want it.”

Compost made from kerbside greenwaste bins could not be sold because it contained too much rubbish. Photo / Supplied

Most households did the right thing, and educational programmes did work up to a point, but there was evidence that some households just didn’t want to recycle correctly.

“Some don’t want to be educated. Some will purposely hide contamination underneath other items.”

He plans to launch a green waste contamination education campaign in July which will introduce a system in which anyone placing incorrect items in their green waste bins will be issued a warning letter and flyer.

If a third letter must be issued, their bin will be confiscated for three months.

The perpetrator would not be eligible for a deduction in rates due to this service being removed.

A similar programme for recycling bins was planned for October.

Clarke said the problem of kerbside recycling contamination was not restricted to Whakatāne but was a nationwide issue. He said several other councils around the country had taken similar steps to address the problem.

Information about items that can be placed in green waste and recycling bins is available on the council’s website.

LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.