-
Source: ONE News -
Watch Video
Auckland's image as a clean green recycling machine is regarded by some as a pile of rubbish.
When you chuck that empty bottle in the recycling bin you probably expect it to be reincarnated in a timely fashion, but avid recyclers say it is a big green elephant.
"It's huge...and most people in Auckland would be pretty shocked to find a mix of recyclables stockpiled there," says Warren Snow from Envision .
"To me this looks like a company that is having serious problems managing and recycling their product," Snow says.
The trash heap has been growing since last May, first with 12,000 tonnes of glass that Visy got from another supplier and is contractually required to recycle.
The state of the art plant opened nine months ago but since then it has had - in the company's words - "teething problems" with its glass line not filtering out other waste material, resulting in a contaminated pile of rubbish.
"We've started a big new flash recycling system and people are excited about it... but here's a huge quantity of it simply sitting here.," says city councillor Richard Northey.
ONE News checked out the growing heap that some have dubbed Mount Visy and found newspapers dated as recently as February, suggesting new rubbish is being added to the pile - something Visy itself admits.
Since the plant opened last year it has collected and processed 22,000 tonnes of glass but just 4000 tonnes of that glass has been recycled back into glass products, leaving 16,000 tonnes in the pile.
The glass had to be put back through the sorting plant because the rubbish was not adequately filtered for recycling the first time round. Glass of different colours and types has to be separated out.
Visy says it needs to make "design changes" to the plant, saying it has experienced "anticipated but unpredictable teething problems of building a new plant for a new type of waste stream".
Auckland City Council has told ratepayers its recycler does not stockpile rubbish and the collection will eventually be recycled. And it says there is a market for it once it's ready.
In a telephone interview Visy told ONE News: It's just a delay in processing material it's not an indication that we have nowhere for the material to go...we are just holding it."
The council says it has no issues with Visy and is comfortable with the way the pile of rubbish is being handled.
But at least one councillor is troubled by the stockpile.
"If there are hiccups in what's actually happening I think people have a right to know," Northey says.
The changes to the recycle plant are expected to be finished by the end of April and it will then take several months to shrink the pile.
