Council adopted a new Waste Management and Minimisation Plan on 26 June 2024.
We have a new plan for managing and reducing Palmy’s waste over the next six years.
We review and update our Waste Management and Minimisation Plan (WMMP) every six years. It's the one big plan which sets out what we're going to do to reduce waste in the city.
In 2024, we reviewed it at the same time as our draft Long-Term Plan, to make sure both align.
Submissions on the Draft Waste Management and Minimisation Plan closed at 5pm on Thursday 9 May.
Read the summary of consultation
We can do better in sorting our waste
In 2022, we sent nearly 55,000 tonnes of waste to landfill and nearly half of this could have been reused, recovered, recycled or composted.
A massive portion of this was food scraps or garden waste (like lawn clippings and weeds), and most of this comes from our kerbside collections. We know that households who use wheelie bins throw out more food and green waste compared to households that use rubbish bags. And the bigger the bin, the more they throw out.
What we’re planning to do
Some of the key actions in our draft plan include:
- Introducing a city-wide kerbside food scraps collection by 2028: This could potentially include green waste as well. Since a lot of what we throw away can be composted, doing this could really cut down on how much we send to landfill.
- Replacing our recycling processing plant: Our machinery in our recycling processing plant (known as the Materials Recovery Facility in Awapuni) is no longer fit-for-purpose to handle the large volume and types of materials that need to be sorted and processed.
- Reviewing our kerbside collection services: Currently, we’re the only council in New Zealand directly providing waste collection services, and so we want to see if there are more effective ways that this can be done.