Whangarei made national headlines last week for its environment; well, for the trashing of the environment by people dumping rubbish on the roadside. The illegal dump reported in the news story had some eight tonnes of waste which cost $30,000 to recover. The total annual cost to the council to clean up illegal roadside dumping is around $200,000.

Of course the workers and council staff featured on the news said the right things and condemned those responsible as despicable and vile individuals; locals most likely it was surmised. And then there were the images of council workers searching through rubbish bags for evidence that would lead to the identification of those responsible.

Of course it is totally wrong for people to tip rubbish on the roadside. But it was also totally predicted before user pay charges came into effect on 31 October 2005. Until then the costs of solid waste disposal costs were collected as a fixed uniform charge (around $100 if I recall correctly) included in the rates bill. The user pay charges were pushed through the council of the day under a waste minimisation ideology and to encourage recycling - which had been introduced earlier that year.

Opponents of the scheme pointed out that charging at the "tip face" would result in significant volumes of waste being dumped on roadsides or in private landfills, with negative environmental consequences, and add unnecessary administrative costs (about $1.5m a year at the time - and considerably more today).

All of those predictions have proved to be the case: more rubbish is being dumped into the environment, the financial cost to ratepayers is higher, and transfer station hours in rural areas have been reduced.

The user charges regime for waste is a nice ideological idea but it is a disaster when those paying can avoid the cost by avoiding the council’s waste collection scheme. The trouble is that some of those who promoted the introduction of the scheme in 2005, are still sitting around the council table today, and will never admit that their pet project has not worked. For that reason ratepayers are going to be stuck paying more for their waste disposal than they should, and we will continue to read stories of illegal dumping and see images of the rubbish police searching other people's waste. Perhaps it's time to reflect on the way it used to be before the waste minimisation ideologues had their way.

The views expressed are those of the author alone and may not reflect the views of Better! Whangarei.