Today Hutt City Council announced that contracts are now in place for a modern, lower carbon kerbside rubbish and recycling service that will be rolled out to all Lower Hutt residents in July 2021.

An eight-month public tender process has concluded and contracts for rubbish and recycling services have been awarded to Waste Management NZ until 2029.

Waste Management NZ will actively work to reduce recycling contamination, meet key performance targets for customer satisfaction, conduct regular reviews to ensure services keep pace with advances in technology, and pay all contracted staff the Living Wage.

Lower Hutt Mayor Campbell Barry welcomed news of the contract being signed and said Council’s priority is a swift and successful rollout of the new service.

"This is a major milestone for the city and people of Lower Hutt. Finally, we will have a fully modernised rubbish collection service, something that our people strongly supported in our consultation. The new service will be cheaper for the majority of our residents and will increase access for everyone in our city to good quality waste collection.

"This is one of Council’s biggest contracts, and I’m really pleased that the staff employed to deliver this service will be paid the Living Wage. Both parties have agreed to implement a system that is not only fair for the consumer, but fair for the company’s employees too."

This morning's announcement was made outside Council offices, in front of one of the new all-electric trucks. From 1 July next year, half the fleet will be electric and will move to become a fully electric collection service in 2024. Hutt City is one of the first councils in New Zealand to have set this new standard for the entire collection fleet. 957 tonnes of carbon emissions will be avoided each year for the 11 EV trucks that will be on the road in July 2021 equating to the annual emissions of 473 cars or flying 7,500 people from Wellington to Auckland.

There will also be a significantly reduced number of rubbish and recycling trucks on the road as the service is centralised under one Council contract and will move to a weekly collection for rubbish and fortnightly for recycling.

"Over 50% of our greenhouse gas emissions in our city are directly attributed to transport. We need to be more environmentally friendly in our city, and introducing EV rubbish and recycling trucks is a significant step forward as we work to reduce our emissions to zero," says Mayor Barry.

"By modernising our rubbish collection services alongside our recycling changes and new green waste service, we have created incentives for people to produce less waste. Ultimately, this will decrease the amount of rubbish going to landfill, which bodes well for the future of waste disposal in our city."

David Howie, Waste Management NZ’s GM Lower North Island says the team is looking forward to delivering a top quality service to all residents.

"We proudly employ over 100 people who work from our offices in Seaview and most of our collection staff live in the Hutt Valley. We’re committed to employing locals and this will deliver significant economic benefits to the wider community.

"We’re also pleased to announce that we will be paying all of our permanent staff the Living Wage," says Howie.

In addition to the new rates-funded rubbish and recycling service a new opt-in green waste service is planned to be offered to households for collecting gardening material. David Howie says, "We’re looking at how this will be implemented including contracting local owner-operators."

Later this month rate-payers will be asked to select their bin sizes and let Council know about any accessibility requirements they have. People have until 31 January 2021 to advise Council of their choice. This is because the differently sized bins need to be ordered in time for the delivery of the new service on 1 July. If a response is not received by the due date property owners will receive the standard size bins.

More information on the changes can be found by visiting hutt.city/binchanges and people can sign up to hutt.city/binupdates to receive updates on the roll-out.

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