Recycling rubbish proves expensive

Press, 6 December 1979, Page 6

Recycling rubbish proves expensive

The Christchurch City Council may seek money from the Department of Trade and Industry to help it continue with rubbish recycling experiments.

But there are doubts, after I examination of a report on the year-long recycling pilot scheme in some neighbourhoods, about whether a citywide project would be practical. Some members of the council’s works and traffic committee yesterday gave a warning that large amounts of recyclable materials collected from the entire city might not find a market. The cost of collection almost certainly would always be more than the price obtained for materials. New Trade and Industry grants will be primarily for projects which are commercially viable, or selfsustaining. Such grants will lalso be limited to start-up expenses for recycling projects. Since the local pilot scheme, the council has been doing recycling with volunteer groups, and through suburban bins at the weekends. Cr Vicki Buck said yesterday that the pilot project had been a moderate success, but was very costly because it involved special collections. Any future system should be done with regular rubbish collections. The rising cost of burying rubbish should be one incentive to keep experimenting. “This is not the end of

pilot systems,” said the committee’s chairman (Cr Newton Dodge). “We are still looking at alternatives.” In a full-time scheme, the gap between costs and returns would be “substantially reduced,” according to a report by the council’s resource recovery subcommittee. Estimates suggested that the cost-return ratio would be better than 4:1 in a perma-

nent scheme, compared with a 6:1 ratio in the experiment. Even so, there would be a big difference between costs and returns because of low prices paid for recovered products. “The development of resource recovery on a wide scale demands stable markets and adequate prices, which can only come about with Government and industry support,” the report said.