In just twelve months, a scheme cooked up in Tauranga has cut the amount of waste going to landfill almost in half. Now other councils are ringing them up to see if that plan could work in their cities.
Previously, all rubbish in Tauranga was treated equally.
Anything you didn't want got chucked in a plastic bag and left out on the street to be taken away by the rubbish fairies (AKA private waste management companies) who carted it all off to the landfill.
Then the council introduced a four-bin service.
As one resident explained to The Project: "The first one we've got is for recycling glass. The second is for food scraps. The red bin, all your general waste goes in here, and the yellow one is where we recycle all our cardboard and plastics, tins and cans."
The plan was to reduce the amount of landfill waste by 50 percent by 2028.
Instead, Tauranga residents did it in just a year.
Did sustainability and waste manager Sam Fellows think it would be so successful so quickly?
"No way," he told The Project. "We've probably gone from being one of the worst in the country to being up the top. That's amazing in just one year."
Lending a helping hand is Tauranga's friendly neighbourhood curbside contamination officer. Essentially, a rubbish cop.
"He rocks up and looks at the bins and gives you a green sticker if you've done it perfectly," Fellows explained. "An orange if you've got a few items wrong. Or a red if it's not going to get picked up."
A red sticker means a visit from the rubbish cop and a discussion about what you can do better. It also means the entire street has seen your red sticker and knows you've been chucked in the naughty corner.
Another thing Tauranga residents had to get their heads around: the four bins are not all collected at the same time.
One week, rubbish is picked up. The next, it's the recycling and glass. The food waste? You've got to haul that bin to the kerb every week.
Luckily, they've got an app to track it all.
"It'll remind you at 6pm the night before to put your bins out," Fellows told The Project. "We had a guy who said it's ultimately saved his marriage."
New Zealand's waste management is still decided on a local level, but after Tauranga's success, Fellows wouldn't be surprised if their scheme got picked up around the country. Recycled, as it were.
"We've been talking to a number of cities, and the Ministry for the Environment is quite keen for this to be the way the rest of the country rolls out. I think a whole bunch of cities are lining up and have already signed contracts, and this is the direction that they're going."
