Dunedin is proving to be one of the country's most successful recycling cities, gathering more than 9000 tonnes of recyclables at the kerbside and through community facilities each year.
The city also leads the country in glass recycling, with kerbside colour-sorting resulting in ''zero contamination'', thereby allowing 100% of the city's glass to be recycled.
Recently, the New Zealand Glass Packaging Forum announced that glass recycling across the country had reached a record high of 72%, matching the EU average for the first time. This put it on track to reach its target of 78% by 2017.
Forum manager John Webber told The Star the Dunedin City Council ran a ''particularly thorough'' recycling programme, and the community ''does it [recycling] very well''.
Dunedin City Council acting solid waste manager Catherine Irvine said glass recycling had been popular in the city since kerbside blue bins were introduced about 2002. And with the glass colour-sorted at the kerbside by Envirowaste drivers, Dunedin's glass was easy for glass recycling company O-I New Zealand to handle.
''The company are one of the most sustainable glass recyclers in the world and they just love our glass because it is so clean,'' Ms Irvine said.
''Our glass ends up as glass again, and it stays within New Zealand, which is great.''
Dunedin recycled a ''massive'' volume of glass, including 3324 tonnes collected at the kerbside from May 2014 to April 2015. On top of this, a further 646 tonnes of glass had been recycled since 2012 through community bottle banks and glass collection pods, Ms Irvine said.''
We are collecting oodles of glass, but the really good thing is that we are asking people to colour-sort it themselves and we are still getting less than 3% contamination,'' she said.
''Dunedin has the best public places recycling in the whole country. We are really conscientious recyclers.''
The separation of glass and wider recycling helped to ensure Dunedin also got a higher value from the rest of its material, she said.
The introduction of the yellow-top kerbside recycling bins in 2011 had resulted in a ''boom'' in recycling, with volumes remaining fairly steady since then at about 700 to 900 tonnes each month.
In the year from May 2014 to April 2015, the greatest volume of kerbside recycling by weight was paper at 3797 tonnes, followed by glass at 3324 tonnes, cardboard at 946 tonnes and the three main types of plastics.
These materials are collected by Envirowaste and taken to the Fullcircle Dunedin facility in Green Island for sorting and baling. Most of it is sold in New Zealand or elsewhere in Australasia. ''We are pleased with the effort people are putting into recycling, and it is flowing through to reducing household waste at the landfills,'' Ms Irvine said.
''And it is important that we recover these resources. We can't just keep digging up and using raw materials, or we are ultimately going to run out.''
