Refuse plan ‘wasteful’

Press, 17 July 1980, Page 18

Refuse plan ‘wasteful’

The Christchurch metropoli t a n refuse-disposal scheme uses redundant technology, according to the Labour member of Parliament for Papanui (Mr M. K. Moore), who recently studied waste disposal in European cities. Officials he had spoken to had been aghast that Christchurch’s system would not recycle waste, he. said. “They now see money in rubbish and private people are competing for the opportunity to turn rubbish into money,” he said. Paris, Amsterdam, and The Hague had generated electricity from waste for many years, on average producing 8 per cent of the cities’ power needs. ""fhe , "three cities also used magnets to extract ferous metals from wast and sorted out glass and other recycleable metals. “It may well be that the rubbish tips of yesterday . will be the treasure troves of tomorrow and that in a hundred years a resourcestarved world may dig up these tips,” said Mr Moore,. His interest in waste disposal stemmed from the Redwood transfer-station issue in his electorate and because he was Labour’s shadow Minister for the Environment. His talks with European officials had been part of a tour through the United States and Europe attending conferences as a representative of the Parliamentary Opposition! The English town of Chichester, with a population smaller than Hamilton’s, had obtained impressive results with an experimental scheme to remove metal, glass, ash, and vegetable 1 matter from waste. One of- the town’s local bodies processed waste into pellet fuel and intended to supply this to a power station and local horticulturalists. This had tremendous relevance for . New Zealand;