Published 15 July 2020

Time to Have Your Say to Support Reducing Waste to Landfill  

Today, Minister Eugenie Sage announced the Government’s plan to change the way we deal with waste - by increasing the cost of sending waste to landfill and by investing $124 million into on-shore infrastructure to deal with recycling.

Currently, New Zealand’s landfill levy is too cheap at $10/tonne. Increasing it to $60 per tonne will encourage people to think twice about what they send to landfill.

“Economic levers are a proven method for encouraging behaviour change and this increase should make people think twice about taking a load of waste to landfill. With the levy eventually reaching $60 per tonne, there is a real incentive for waste generators to divert materials for re-use, repurpose or recycling” said Minister Sage.

The $124 million investment from the Covid-19 Response and Recovery Fund signals a real opportunity to create more jobs and find better ways to deal with recycling.

“In particular there are significant opportunities for construction and demolition waste to be repurposed, and for organic waste to be diverted to composting and anaerobic digestion,” said Minister Sage.

Most significant changes:

• $124M Government investment in recycling infrastructure

• Slowly increasing the landfill levy to $60 per tonne over four years. This will divert material from landfill and new revenue will be reinvested into programmes and infrastructure to minimise waste (projected $267M per annum by 2024/25)

• Waste levy increases will cover additional landfill types, including construction and demolition fills. At present, the waste levy only applies to municipal landfills that take household waste, with no levy on the remaining almost 90 per cent of landfills throughout the country. 

Why this is important.

We have a real problem with waste. Disposal to municipal landfills increased by 48 per cent in the last decade. These changes will help reduce climate pollution, it will make us more resilient to volatile global markets post-Covid and it will create more jobs.

Although it is still very early days, we’re supportive of this initiative and look forward to seeing what happens next.