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Source: Radio New Zealand

Explainer – Too much of Auckland’s recycling is just going to waste – the landfill, that is, and officials say that needs to change.

Auckland is one of New Zealand’s least efficient cities for recycling collection, and an awful lot of that is because the wrong rubbish is being put in the bins.

About 30 percent of what goes into Auckland’s kerbside recycling bins is actually being sent to landfills due to contamination or not actually being accepted recyclables.

The research by the Waste and Recycling Industry Association was based on audits done at Auckland’s Material Recovery Facility, the largest recycling facility in the country.

“A lot of this is people trying to do the right thing, but not really knowing how,” the waste association’s executive director Barney Irvine said in a statement.

“Confusion about recycling rules is still widespread.”

So what’s happening with recycling in Auckland?

What are we doing wrong?

The recycling bin isn’t the rubbish bin, and there are pretty clear rules about what can and can’t be put in there.

Still, some people are just throwing anything they like in there.

“Waste is a growing issue in Auckland because we’re producing more waste and landfills are filling up,” said Warwick Jaine, Auckland Council’s acting general manager of waste solutions.

“Recycling still works, but contamination has been increasing.”

“The concerning aspect of it is that a lot of it is stuff that should just have never arrived in the first place,” Irvine told RNZ’s Nine to Noon.

“Everything from general household rubbish to stones to wood to things like nappies – an inordinate number of nappies – and textiles and old bikes. So that’s really a case of people treating the recycling bin like a second rubbish bin.”

Other people may not be clear on the specific rules, and are doing what’s sometimes called “wishcycling” – putting things in their bin that they hope will be recycled.

It doesn’t really work that way, though, and ultimately gums up the works at recycling facilities.

“If in doubt, leave it out,” Jaine said.

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Can’t they just sort all this rubbish out at the tip?

Auckland’s Material Recovery Facility in Onehunga operated by Re.Group handles recycling from 265,000 households – about 770,000 people or 20 percent of New Zealand’s population.

Much of the facility is automated, Irvine explained and one of the big problems is actually people putting recycling in plastic bags before they put them into their bins.

“People mistakenly assume that there will be people at the recycling centre to sort through those bags and deal with them. The reality is a big recycling facility like the Auckland one is almost fully automated and there just isn’t the time or opportunity for that sort of manual handling.

“There’s this massive volume of waste coming in from this depot area where it all gets dumped and it comes in a conveyor built into this room called the pre-sort. Now that’s the only point in the whole process where you have people manually sorting through.

“They pull off the stuff that is obviously not recyclable and bags of rubbish are included in that.”

It is not possible to manually go through bagged material put in the recycling bin as staff have no idea what’s inside them, he said.

“It’s also really dangerous – these bags can be full of syringes or glass or metal or you name it, right?”

Artificial intelligence has also been trialled as a way to sort out recycling as it comes into trucks before it gets to the facility, Auckland Council has said.

Putting the wrong things in recycling bins ultimately ends up costing the taxpayer more, Irvine said.

“It comes at an environmental cost,” he said. “In terms of a whole lot more avoidable waste to landfill but also in terms of disruption to the wider recycling system.”

OK, let’s get specific – what needs to be done differently?

Here’s some top tips that waste experts offered:

• Don’t put your recycling into plastic bags when you put them in the bin. They’ll just get chucked out entirely into the landfill.
• Soft plastics – packaging, wrapping, bags, et cetera – aren’t allowed – as they get tangled in the machinery. You can instead drop off soft plastic packaging to recycle at multiple supermarkets.
• Plastic lids from bottles are a problem – anything under a certain size can cause problems in sorting machinery. Discard lids in the rubbish bin and put the clean containers in recycling instead.
• Avoid anything that’s dangerous – gas bottles, batteries, rechargeable items. Empty aerosol cans should be put in your rubbish bin instead.
• Recycling that’s overly contaminated with other waste – for instance a pizza box with a bit of grease on it is fine, but a pizza box that’s got huge chunks of yesterday’s pepperoni special on it is not.

People sometimes think it’s become too complicated to sort recycling, but Jaine said it’s actually pretty easy.

“A simple rule of thumb is to place only household packaging and containers from your kitchen, bathroom and laundry in your recycling bin: Glass bottles and jars; paper and cardboard; plastic bottles, trays, and containers (numbers 1, 2 and 5 only); tin, steel and aluminium cans.”

Is there any real enforcement to keep people from dumping the wrong things in bins?

Auckland Council has targeted areas where recycling compliance is particularly bad, such as a trial in New Lynn, Glen Eden and Henderson in 2024 which resulted in a significant decrease in contaminations.

The council will do bin inspections in problematic areas, and education is the primary tool to improve recycling.

However, recycling bins can actually be confiscated from households that are repeat offenders.

“We’re using a smarter, targeted approach that includes confiscating recycling bins if necessary,” Jaine said.

“This includes education, engagement, inspections, and new technology – including data from object recognition technology – to identify hotspots where contamination is high.

“We focus effort where it makes the biggest difference, combining clear messages with follow‑up, and we’ve seen contamination drop and stay down in those areas.”

Is it bad everywhere or just Auckland?

National recycling standards were introduced in 2024 to standardise collections, and food scrap bins were also brought in.

Auckland has other factors that stand out, Irvine said – larger households with multiple family members, the city’s size and it being further to drive to landfills.

Things began to deteriorate around the time the pandemic started, Irvine said.

“Something seems to have changed during the Covid period. That’s the widespread sentiment in the sector.”

“There is still behavioural differences that … have been visible for the last five or six years and getting worse and that’s the really concerning bit.

“The concern that we’ve got is that if this continues to deteriorate over time people are going to start to say ‘well, why bother recycling if most of it is going to end up in the landfill anyway?’”

Somewhat ironically, the high-tech Material Recovery Facility also is a factor in the amount of discarded recycling.

“One of those is that the facility has a higher level of technology, so it does a better job of sorting than the other facilities in other parts of the country.

“On the one hand that makes for better quality recycled material at the end of the process, but it also means that there’s more waste, there’s more that gets stripped out.”

Irvine has said that the first step to improve Auckland’s efforts of what goes into the bins should be a large-scale public education programme on recycling, funded by central government.

“This was promised, but never delivered. It now needs to be made a priority.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

LiveNews: https://nz.mil-osi.com/2026/04/14/what-auckland-is-doing-wrong-when-it-comes-to-recycling-and-how-it-can-change/