New Zealand: Rubbish and Recycling

Recycling helps you save money and protect the environment. It gives valuable resources another life while reducing the waste that goes into landfills.

Depending on what you have to recycle, there are various ways of disposing of goods and materials for recycling:

• in public recycling bins in the inner city
• in weekly recycling collections throughout the city
• in the recycling centre or Second Treasure shop at the Southern Landfill
• the annual eDay household electronic waste collection
• by finding ways of reusing materials yourself, or donating useful items to others.

Public Recycling Bins

Public recycling bins are available in the central city.

These distinctive bright green LOVE NZ bins are for drink containers:

• aluminium cans
• glass bottles
• plastic bottles.

New Zealanders consume approximately two billion drink containers annually, and this is often in public places. Recycling helps reduce this mountain of waste, saves energy and provides material for products such as clothing, irrigation pipes and wheelie bins.

LOVE NZ recycling bin area map

Recycling Collections

Wellington City Council collects recycling materials in the inner city and suburbs.

For collection, materials must be sorted and placed in plastic bags or green recycling bins. Any material not in bags or bins will not be taken away.

Sort your recycling materials, tie them up in bags and leave them on the kerb with your official rubbish bag on collection day. You do not need a bin to recycle, just secure your recyclables within plastic bags.

In the central business district, recycling is only collected in plastic bags.

Reuse supermarket shopping bags for your recycling, or buy Council recycling bags. These are available from the City Service Centre and some supermarkets.

Green recycling bins are available from the City Service Centre, and the Newtown, Kilbirnie, Johnsonville and Tawa libraries.

Sorting Your Recycling

Only some grades of plastic can be recycled. Plastic grades are identified by a number in a triangle of arrows. Information on plastic grades is available on the Plastics New Zealand website.

Plastic Identification Code – Plastics New Zealand website

Putting recycling in plastic bags stops your recycling from blowing away on windy days, and makes it safer for staff to sort and collect your recycling.

In one bag, place all paper and cardboard:

• Paper and cardboard – newspapers, office paper, advertising circulars, magazines, envelopes, brown corrugated cardboard, egg cartons and pizza boxes (remove pizza scraps).

In a separate bag, place glass, plastic and tins / cans:

• Glass bottles – all green, brown, blue, frosted and clear glass bottles and jars.
• Grades 1 and 2 plastic – this includes water, fizzy drink, juice and plastic milk bottles.
• Aluminium and tin / steel cans – including baked beans, fruit, beer, soft drink and pet food cans.

You need to rinse clean all bottles, jars, tins and cans.

Don’t Recycle

• Plastic-coated cardboard containers (Tetra Pak) like soy milk and UHT containers as they also contain a foil lining
• Polystyrene
• Glass tableware, containers, mirrors, windows, pyrex, light bulbs, crystal, ceramics
• Hazardous waste – broken glass, sharp objects, batteries, paint, oil
• Plastic shopping bags and bread bags – but you can use these to bundle up material for recycling
• Plastic wrap from food and magazines
• Grade 3 – 7 plastic, including ice cream, margarine and yoghurt containers
• Aluminium foil, sheets and food trays
• Disposable nappies

Recycling Station

The Council hosts a bulk recycling station at the Southern Landfill on Landfill Road, Happy Valley. Here you can drop off large quantities of recyclables. The material accepted at the recycling station is the same as that accepted through the kerbside recycling scheme.

Computer Recycling Day (eDay)

Taking a computer monitor to eDay

eDay is a free annual computer recycling day aimed at reducing the amount of toxic computer equipment and electronic waste dumped in our landfills.

Only household electronic waste is accepted. The equipment collected is either reused or disassembled for recycling of materials.

On eDay 2009, Wellington households dropped off 97 tonnes of electronic waste to collectors at Westpac Stadium.

Wellington Government NZ: Rubbish and Recycling