Te Mahere Whakahaere me te Whakaiti Tukunga Para 2024 - Ki te Para Kore Waste Minimisation and Management Plan 2024 – Towards Zero Waste

Our goal is to achieve ‘zero waste’ in Tāmaki Makaurau by 2040 and avoid sending waste products to landfill. To do this we need to:

• care for our resources and reduce waste
• redesign products to make them more durable and reusable
• repair broken items, rather than throw them away
• recycle materials like food scraps, garden waste, paper, plastic and metals.

A zero waste view includes valuing and restoring the health of te taiao (the natural world) so we can take better care of people.

Much of our current waste represents a loss of valuable resources. We need to reclaim these resources through designing new processes to reduce waste, reuse, repair and recycle products. This will create more jobs, assist our economy and help us protect the environment while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

We can all take steps – whether as individuals, organisations, or communities – to reduce waste and preserve valuable materials. The Waste Minimisation and Management Plan 2024 (WMMP) helps us to achieve this goal.

Our WMMP sets out what we will do to reduce waste over the next six years. There are 12 key actions, grouped under four topics.

• Help to build strong partnerships with iwi and the community, including delivering on Māori outcomes and strengthening the Resource Recovery Network.
• Target specific activities and materials (including construction and demolition waste), five priority materials (including plastics and packaging) and a focus on climate change and being prepared for a disaster.
• Support future action on moving up the waste hierarchy – where reusing and redesigning products is encouraged and disposal is the least preferred option. We also want to adopt product stewardship – where product producers accept more responsibility for returning and recycling resources.
• Deliver direct action through our kerbside services, our litter and illegal dumping prevention programme, plus reducing waste across the council group.

The WMMP also includes two other sections of support information. The first explains the background and evidence behind the proposal to move Aucklanders from weekly to fortnightly rubbish collections. The second sets out the strategy for improving and expanding the Resource Recovery Network.

To help form our WMMP plan we produced a waste assessment looking at:

• the amount of waste produced in the region
• existing services
• future needs.