Reusing and Recycling vital
Last week, members of the Howick Local Board were offered an opportunity to tour the Onehunga Community Recycling Centre and the Materials Recovery Facility (MRF). I joined Deputy Kai Zeng and Members Adele White, Jack Collins, Luke Collings, and John Spiller on the tour.
Community Recycling Centres (CRCs) are facilities where you can drop off unwanted items and materials for reuse and recycling. Using these centres supports your community as profits are reinvested locally. It was wonderful to meet the team behind this awesome mahi (work) and understand how they work with the community to reduce waste and rehome previously loved items. They've got an amazing deconstruction team who remove re-usable materials from buildings (they helped with the Eastern Busway) reducing the amount of construction waste going to landfill.
Items donated or recovered are then sold to the community at exceptionally reasonable prices, ensuring they end up in a new home (rather than landfill). The shop is open to the public and worth a visit! I've been there before while looking for items and they always have a great selection with friendly staff to help.
The Howick Local Board has been advocating for a CRC in our area and we continue to do so - we think it's important that locals have easy access to places where useful items can be reused and recycled.
Left to Right: Howick Local Board Members (Deputy Kai Zeng, Members Luke Collings, John Spiller, Adele white, Jack Collings, and Damian Light) with staff member from Re:Group.
Next we went to the Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) which handles ALL the recycling bins for Auckland. Operated by RE:Group, the council-owned facility receives around 700 tonnes a day (next largest facility is Christchurch which handles 200 tonnes). They operate 24 hours a day, 5 days a week to handle trucks arriving from all across the city, sorting the materials using a combination of people and technology to separate them.
Materials are then packaged up and sent for processing - around 50% are processed here in NZ (including East Tāmaki) and the remainder exported (coloured plastics, aluminium and paper/cardboard). One of the biggest barriers to re-processing is contamination - non-recyclable materials like gas cannisters, green waste, and even dirty nappies.
Because of the huge volumes of materials that they need to process every minute, they have to work quickly. To make their job easier and ensure the most materials are recycled, it's important that we do our part.
🚫No soft plastics (these can be dropped off at your nearest supermarket)
🚫 No bags of materials (people and technology can't see what's inside)
🚫 No food scraps (use your food scraps bin)
🚫 No gas cannisters (15-20 end up here every week which is a major hazard)
🚫 No batteries (drop these off at places like Bunnings)
🚫 No nappies (these go in your rubbish bin)
✅ Do rinse containers to remove food (reduces smell, pests, and improves recycling)
✅ Do remove caps from bottles (allows them to be easily crushed)
For safety and operational reasons, we weren't able to share photos from inside the facility, but here's a link to a great video that explains the whole process and shows what it's like: https://youtu.be/qxoxa65yj2o?si=55UcFyE-POWuRIJY