Palmerston North, the main city of the Manawatu-Wanganui region of the North Island of New Zealand, has taken the charge to stop piles of recyclable aluminium beverage cans and bottles from polluting the environment.

The city council is pushing a proposal to introduce a national deposit and refund scheme to ensure the aluminium drink cans are returned, not wasted. Palmerston North mayor Grant Smith, supported by the Auckland Council, will put the case for the recycling scheme to Local Government New Zealand's annual conference in Dunedin on Sunday.

 

The plan would encourage consumers to return more glass, aluminium and plastic drink containers by making them worth about 10c each.

Smith will ask councils to endorse the concept of a nationally mandated beverage container deposit system (CDS) and ask the government to require industry to develop and implement the scheme within two years.

The importance of doing something about the volumes of recyclable containers being wasted was backed up by a 2015 report by environment consultancy group Envision New Zealand. It estimated New Zealanders drank about 2.23 billion beverages each year, and more than half of the empty aluminium cans, nearly 46,000 tonnes a year, ended up in landfills or as litter.

One of the city council members pointed out that the costs of disposing of containers that were thrown away actually fell on ratepayers. The product stewardship programme would shift the burden back to producers and consumers.

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