Establishing Resource Recovery Centres in Matamata and Morrinsville to divert more waste from landfill, instead of just transferring waste from A to B, received wide support from the community as part of the 2021 Long Term Plan.

What's happened so far

We started early investigation work on these, but identified that our existing transfer station sites are not fit for purpose for the longer term – all three would require multi-million dollar upgrades. Waihou in particular requires around $4-5 million in upgrades just to keep offering the same transfer station services – that’s before we even start looking at improvements to divert waste from landfill.

New Zealand can’t afford to keep creating rubbish and putting it in big holes in the ground – we need to change how we manage our waste.

Next steps

The three sites we currently operate need significant investment to make them fit for purpose - and those costly upgrades would still only be a ‘sticking plaster’ approach while NZ continues to upgrade its waste infrastructure. We know that providing rubbish and recycling services to the community is important - so we’re proposing to continue with upgrades to our existing sites to keep them compliant and operational.

But alongside these upgrades, we need to think differently about the future of how our district manages waste. As part of the 2024-2034 Long Term Plan we have committed to doing a more detailed business case on resource recovery options than we signalled in 2021, and include an additional option for consideration: creating one custom-built resource recovery hub for the whole district and closing or reducing some or all of our current sites.

We consider this business case a must do, to make sure that whatever we decide to invest in will continue to comply with national standards, benefit the environment, and be more cost effective for residents and ratepayers.

We’ll do more investigation and come back to the community with more detailed options and costs. But this is likely to be a major project in the next 10 years.

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