Councils are slicing every dollar they can manage, but when it bites into the core business of rubbish, is there a chance they've gone too far?
Rubbish bins are being removed from the streets and parks of Auckland Photo: Alexia Russell/The Detail
The weirdest thing he's found is an octopus.
"A whole rotting octopus. I would say stretched out it would have been a good five to six feet long. That was bizarre."
Jason Valentine-Burt is a rubbish picker-upper - a plogger, if you prefer - on the streets of Avondale in Auckland. The octopus was found in a car park and it certainly hadn't walked there.
Valentine-Burt also runs the Clean Avondale community group of like-minded citizens who go around making sure chip bags, Chupa Chup sticks, soiled nappies, used condoms and nitrous oxide containers don't lie around, using a pick-up tool to pluck them from hedges and gutters.
But the group's activities are on hold - the problem lately has become overwhelming.
The street he lives on - with two schools housing 3000 students - used to have five bins. But thanks to the council's new policy of stripping out about 30 percent of them, to save more than $9 million, there is now just one bin. (He points out that's actually closer to an 80 percent reduction.)
"As far as the council is concerned, obviously it is a money-saving venture for them. That's great, we all love to have our money saved," he says.
But the former principal says the pie wrappers and the drink bottles are now being poked into people's hedges as school kids dispose of their rubbish less than thoughtfully.
"Yes, in a Utopia they would all put it into a bin," he says. "They would all carry on walking on to school with their empty chippie packet or whatever and put it into the bins in the school."
But they don't.
He's asked the council to put a couple of the bins back, and it's offered to relocate bins from another part of Avondale to put near the school.
That would "disadvantage another part of the community, who will be left without a bin. Unbelievable really. My response was to just get some bins back out of storage!"
You might think that's enough time dedicated to an upstanding resident concerned about a small issue, but to many Aucklanders this issue isn't small at all.
RNZ's The Panel host Wallace Chapman talked to Valentine-Burt about the issue and says there was as much feedback about the story as any other, including hot-button topics the state of media and bootcamps.
"'Where are all the rubbish bins?' locals are asking. Devonport locals, as one example, are irate. 'Where do we put all the dog poos and fish and chip wrappers now,' they're all saying."
(For more on dog poo, listen to the podcast.)
Taryn Crewe, Auckland Council's general manager for parks and community facilities, says trying to find savings for ratepayers is behind this "bin optimisation" move.
"Essentially it's saving $9.5 million over eight financial years, so it's roughly $1.4 million per annum of operational expenditure savings, but also it lessens our costs in terms of bin replacements and renewals further down the line as well, so the eventual cost is actually more."
Crewe says the council has received more than 100 complaints so far after removing about1900 bins.
"The level of complaints is actually quite small, we've got particular areas, it seems to be more localised. So it will be a number of complaints about a particular park and group in the community who want to see their bin put back into the park. We're working through those instances but we have a number of local board areas where there's actually been no complaints at all, and no increase in litter or any of those behavioural activities."
Four local boards have decided to use community money to keep their bins at full complement for the meantime.
The missing bin decisions were informed by contractors who pointed out the nearly empty bins they encountered on their daily rounds - about 20 to 30 of those contractors have since lost their jobs as a result of this move.
Meanwhile, Jason points out that you can get a plogging stick from Mitre 10 for 16 bucks, if you want to do your bit for the environment and get your walking steps in at the same time.
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