The kerbside food scraps bin are for food scraps only. Please place all takeaway food containers in your landfill bin or better yet, bring your own reusable containers to a participating restaurant or café and avoid the waste altogether. 

As long as the contents of the bin are not heavily contaminated with non-compostable items, then the contents are taken to a commercial composting facility where they get turned into compost for gardens, putting nutrients back into the soil.

Food scraps, along with compostable containers and cups, can only break down under the right conditions in a commercial composting facility where there is good airflow and where correct ratios of nitrogen to carbon materials create the heat required for them to break down. Only a small number of facilities in New Zealand process food scraps and even fewer accept compostable containers and cups.

When food scraps and compostable cups/containers end up in our landfills, the materials are compacted and decompose very slowly without oxygen causing them to release methane, a harmful greenhouse gas. According to Love Food Hate Waste, if food were a country, it would be the third largest producer of carbon emission behind China and the United States.

Please call 06 759 6060 or email enquiries@npdc.govt.nz.

Once glass bottles are sorted at our materials recovery facility on Colson Road, they are sent to Auckland for reprocessing into new bottles and jars.

If you would like to learn more about recycling you can arrange a tour of the material recovery facility via the Sustainable Taranaki website.

Lids fall through the sorting machinery and must be cleaned up by waste staff to be sent to landfill, which costs time and money. They can also become projectiles during the sorting process, which is a hazard for staff.   

Please call 06 759 6060 or email enquiries@npdc.govt.nz.

Once recyclable items are sorted and baled at our materials recovery facility on Colson Road, they are generally sent to the following locations:

• Aluminium and steel cans are sent overseas for reprocessing into new metal products.
• Paper and cardboard are sent to a paper mill in Auckland to make new carboard products.
• All plastic containers (grade 1, 2 and 5) are sent to New Zealand-based recycling facilities to be made into new products such as food packaging. No plastic is sent overseas.

 If you would like to learn more about recycling you can arrange a tour of the materials recovery facility via the Sustainable Taranaki website.

There is no market for these hard-to-recycle plastics in New Zealand. NPDC and other councils around New Zealand are collecting only those plastic containers that can be recycled in our country – types 1, 2 and 5, which make up 85 per cent of our single-use plastic containers. You can help by checking plastic containers before you buy them and choosing only those marked as type 1, 2 or 5, or by avoiding single-use plastic containers where possible by refilling your own containers, or bulk buying

Lids fall through sorting machinery and must be cleaned up by waste staff to be sent to landfill, which costs time and money. Lids can also become projectiles, which pose a hazard to staff.

Please call 06 759 6060 or email enquiries@npdc.govt.nz.

Items placed in the landfill bin get transported to Bonny Glen Landfill near Marton, and buried in the ground. Disposing of items in landfills takes valuable resources out of our economy, and requires new natural resources to make more products. Landfills also need to be carefully managed to minimise effects on the environment and our climate, making them expensive to run.

Please call 06 759 6060 or email enquiries@npdc.govt.nz.