The Dunedin City Council (DCC) is ecstatic at how well residents have taken to the new kerbside collection service introduced just over a month ago.

 The new waste and recycling service, which started on 1 July this year, introduced a food scraps and garden waste green-lidded recycling bin and a red-lidded rubbish bin to replace the former pre-paid DCC plastic rubbish bags. The new kerbside bins are in addition to the existing yellow-lidded bin for mixed recycling and blue bin for glass. The expanded system was introduced to enable households to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill.

 After one month of the new service, the DCC is pleased to report that residents and households adapted to the changes with ease.

 “Although there were some teething issues, as happens when introducing a new service of this scale, the vast majority of households have clearly understood the changes and adopted them with gusto,” says General Manager Climate and City Growth DCC Scott MacLean.

 Over the first month, over 665 tonnes of food and green waste was collected in the green-lidded bins. This made up 45% of the total waste collected for the month of July, with the remaining 55% (822 tonnes) collected in the red-lidded waste bins.

 “Prior to the new service, most of that food and green waste would have gone in the rubbish bags and sent to landfill. Instead, it is being composted and reused. As predicted, we have almost halved the amount of waste going to landfill,” Mr MacLean says.

 “These numbers show the new service has been widely accepted and successfully adopted by Ōtepoti Dunedin. We also congratulate our residents on the low contamination rate in the green-lidded bins. It’s close to zero percent contamination – which is amazing. Keep doing what you’re doing, folks.”

 There has also been a sharp uptake of the improved DCC Kerbside Collections App on both the Google Play and iOS App stores. Over the June and July months, the app was downloaded 18,333 times by new users and those updating the old app. The number of active users jumped from 4784 in May to 15,439 by the end of July.

 Mr MacLean says it’s great to see the new app is being used frequently by so many residents to help manage their kerbside collection. The updated app has information on what to sort into each of the kerbside bins, plus users can turn on notifications to alert them to put their bins out and let them know if there are delays due to weather events or changes to collection days. They can also use it to report if their bin was not collected or needs fixing.

 “It’s a much-improved app and we’ve received a lot of positive feedback about it. There were bugs to sort out when loading addresses into the system, but we’ve largely ironed those out thanks to people reaching out to us,” Mr MacLean says.

 Delivering the new bins and information guides took place from March until June 2024, and involved ensuring over 52,000 households had everything ready to go in time for the new kerbside recycling service to start.

“We always knew there would be difficulties rolling out such a vast new service. Our customer services team did a magnificent job fielding questions from a community keen to get it right. There were a few missed collections as the pick-up system bedded in, but we are definitely pleased at the positive response from residents,” Mr MacLean says.

 We thank them for their understanding and patience while we work on further perfecting the system and addressing any issues as quickly as possible, he says.

 The new kerbside collection system was introduced following consultation with the public in 2020. Feedback from the consultation showed strong support for introducing kerbside collection for kitchen scraps and garden waste. We received over 10,000 responses via formal submissions and social media, and over 9500 of the responses supported change in this way.

 Making this change brings Dunedin into line with central government’s Aotearoa NZ Waste Strategy regulations requiring food scrap collection to be made available to properties in all urban areas by 2030.

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