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Wellington City Council - City Strategy and Delivery Committee
M
City Strategy and Delivery Committee meeting
Um, uh, I'll move the motion. Um, just a couple of things, um, preliminary matters. First of First of all, thank you for the very generous birthday wishes and the cake that went with them. Secondly, an apology too, because this, I know this, since the papers were available on diligent last week, certainly in the last couple of days been circulating a range of sort of alternative suggestions on this, and I put up some alternatives yesterday. It was very late, hadn't been foreshadowed to people, so I acknowledge that that caused some justifiable consternation. So, I just express my apology for that. But it's for that reason that I've took the view that I'll move this really pro forma. The point I want to get to is that we're stuck with two inarguable and conflicting sort of propositions at the moment. One is that the existing Redesigning Rubbish and Recycling Collections project and the organics processing solution is not financially viable viable for a range of reasons, many of which are beyond our control, most of which are beyond our control, but it simply isn't financially viable and so we can't in good conscience proceed with that proposal. The other inarguable proposition is that our landfill capacity is rapidly running out and we have a commitment, we have an overarching commitment to reduce waste, our waste minimisation program, and we need to be doing everything we can to prosecute that objective even in the face of now a significant project which is not viable to proceed. So we need to find something, find a way through this that addresses both factual propositions but gets us to a constructive effective solution. That means we are making progress on minimising waste and particularly addressing the gap in the kind of waste minimisation recycling program that we do, which is to deal with organic waste. So it's my expectation and hope given the various ideas that have been circulating in the last couple of days that we will come up with something that does mean we can make progress It was very impressive hearing the public submissions this morning and what it— in fact, I guess what it highlighted for me was the extent of community effort going into this issue. I was aware of Chi Cycle. That was pretty much the only community effort I was aware of, but when I heard— and the Sustainability Trust. All the others I actually wasn't familiar with, so it's encouraging Encouraging to see that, it confirms the kind of hunch I have, which is that there is community willingness out there in Wellington to want to do something meaningful in this particular space. And to take the lesson from the book, How Big Things Get Done, is that it's basically an account of amazing ideas that councils around the world had that collapsed because sometimes they were too big, often they were poorly prosecuted. But the general lesson is that actually where you can harness effort and willingness from the community, then actually that's a pretty good starting point. And I would say from the submissions we've had this morning, even Garage Project, and I know there were some sort of allergy to profit-making companies getting some money to develop waste minimisation solutions, but it actually demonstrates what can happen when we target our support in particular ways. So throughout the community, across the community, we have people who do have solutions, who can put them into effect, who can harness the communities that they're part of, and we should be harnessing that. And celebrating that and employing that to the best extent we can. So, my hope is that through the debate we have on this, we work through possible solutions, that we get to something that means that we remain committed to that important objective of minimising waste, particularly organic waste, even if it's not the big large-scale solution that was embarked upon in the last year or two but enables us to continue to make progress and engage the community in the solution. And I think that's an important thing, and it's actually what the Council should be doing. So, I've moved it, the recommendations are there, but I would hope through this discussion and debate that we'll find something that we can all agree on as constructive and sensible, practical and affordable and means that we can continue to make progress.
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