Illegal Dumping & Litter

Dealing with our community's waste has a cost and this must be recovered. A user-pays or targeted rates system means people pay for their own waste. Making the landfill free would require a change to Council's current funding policy.

Landfill fees cover:

• A waste minimisation levy, currently fixed at $60 per tonne of waste
• Purchase of carbon credits to cover greenhouse gases created by waste. This is part of the Emissions Trading Scheme set up by the Government to mitigate climate change
• The operational cost of collecting and disposing all the waste produced by the people of Rotorua: organisational overheads such as staff costs; insurance; resource consent fees; environmental monitoring; security and power.

Carbon credits or New Zealand Units (NZUs) are a type of tax on certain industries that produce harmful greenhouse gases e.g. petrol companies, landfill operators or forestry companies. By putting a price on emissions, the Government encourages industry to look at ways to decrease the amount of harmful gas they produce and lower the cost to their business.

View a video about the Emissions Trading Scheme and carbon credit purchasing

Operators must pay 100% of the cost of carbon credits. In addition, tougher environmental effects monitoring requires landfill and waste management operators to incur much higher costs than earlier years.

In general terms, littering refers to someone throwing a piece of paper on the ground or throwing fast food wrappers out the window of their car. Illegal dumping refers to larger amounts of rubbish being dumped in one location.

Both activities are considered littering and are governed by the Litter Act 1979.

An infringement can be up to $400 and fines resulting from prosecution can be up to $5000 per individual involved. If the litter could endanger someone or cause injury or sickness, for example broken bottles, the fine can be up $7500 per person involved.

The average cost of illegal dumping each year in Rotorua is about $120,000. We recover around 150 tonnes per year from illegal dumping. This is a small amount (0.3%) compared to the total waste created in the district of around 50,000 tonnes, indicating that the vast majority of people are acting responsibly and dispose waste through the appropriate channels and collection services.

In most cases illegally dumped rubbish is made up of items which should have been placed in household wheelie bins. This includes glass bottles, bagged rubbish, clothing and general household bric a brac.

Prosecution requires a high threshold of evidence – even mail with names and addresses is considered only circumstantial evidence. Prosecuting also comes at a significant cost to Council with no guarantee of a positive result. To be able to prosecute someone, Council must have evidence that will be considered credible in court, such as CCTV footage clearly identifying the person(s) carrying out the dumping, or a witness willing to be heard in court.

Council has deployed and will continue to deploy selective cameras to monitor dumping hot spots. Unfortunately, in the past, cameras have been either stolen or willfully damaged. We are also required, under the privacy statutes, to disclose that a site is monitored and evidence gathered might be used for prosecution, so we cannot stealthily monitor the activities of people.

While they may act as a deterrent for some, the likelihood is that people aware of a camera at one site will simply go somewhere else to dump their rubbish. Cameras also require power which is not always easily accessible in some parts of the district such as rural areas.

The cost of providing free access to landfill would be disproportionally and significantly more than the actual cost to clean up illegal dumping each year. Making the landfill free also means the burden of covering the full cost of disposing everyone's rubbish would fall on just those who pay rates.

Regardless, evidence indicates that illegal dumping is opportunistic and laziness on the part of those who commit it. We also suspect some illegal dumping comes from people travelling from out of the district which means they wouldn't be part of any free ticket scheme.

Inorganic collections generally cause more problems than they solve. People place items on the street that end up blowing into drains, waterways or neighbouring properties and often limits are exceeded, leaving rubbish on the side of the road for residents to clean up. An inorganic collection cost would need to be recouped through rates which means the cost of removing everyone's rubbish would again fall on the ratepayers, rather than on the people producing the rubbish.

Even in areas where collections operate once or twice a year at a significant cost (in the region of at $1 million per year), illegal dumping is not time disciplined. It is opportunistic and highly unlikely to be deterred by collection cycles. The people who offend in this way are unlikely to be disciplined or contentious enough to stockpile and wait for collection times.

It is very difficult to try and stop illegal dumping because people just move the issue to another location. The issue really lies with people's behaviour.

The best successes have come from working alongside the community and implementing strategies that the community has suggested, for example in Mamaku, Council worked with the community and the school to create murals that were used to encourage people to do the right thing. There has been a reduction in illegal dumping in this community since then. Another community got together and organised a clean-up day and skips. Funding was sought through Council's Neighbourhood Matching Fund so there was no cost to the community and people could get rid of items that don't go in wheelie bins.

Supporting community litter collections and removing scrub and trees from problem areas in parks are other ways Council continues to support deterrence of illegal dumping.

Our data shows one in three public litter bins are being misused. Instead of being used to dispose of small pieces of pedestrian litter, they are increasingly used for illegal dumping of household and business waste. The misuse of public litter bins is also resulting in more illegal roadside dumping where these bins are located.

We’re on a mission to encourage residents and visitors to rethink, reuse and reduce the amount of waste generated from daily activities.

Find out more about the mission to rethink, reuse and reduce waste.

Bins at busy areas get cleared once a day in peak season. On occasion they may be cleared twice a day. Often within an hour of bins being emptied, they are filled again. A lot of the time we see bins are full of people's household rubbish rather than items typical of a visit to the park e.g. picnic items.

We encourage people to take their rubbish home with them. This will help stop public bins from overflowing in popular areas. If bins are already overflowing, don't add to the pile, take the rubbish home and dispose of it in your wheelie bins.

Like illegal dumping, it is difficult to catch people in the act of littering or to gain enough evidence to conclusively prove they were the culprit. Photo evidence or an eye witness who can provide details of the time, place and offender would assist Council.

Finding and collecting litter would require a lot of extra staff and resources that would cause more cost to our community. During routine collections, contractors collect any litter around where public bins are located. Our inner city team also clean the CBD and surrounding parks every day which includes litter pick-ups. We rely on information from the community about litter issues so we can organise targeted clean ups. Prevention of littering is more effective than managing it through constant collection.

We provide interactive talks and education session to a range of audiences, including schools and community groups. If you would like our Waste Minimisation Officer to come to your class or group gathering, get in touch via info@rotorualc.nz.

Throughout the year there are a range of educational campaigns such as Plastic Free July and Sustainable Backyards month. We encourage the community to get involved and change their habits to reduce the waste they produce. Council also works closely with local community groups to organise clean ups, gain funding for projects and other initiatives to encourage change on a neighbourhood level.