Transitioning to a more circular economy here in Tauranga will reduce our city’s waste while also improving the cultural, social, economic and environmental wellbeing of our community.
Why do we need to reduce our commercial waste?
While we have made great improvements in the amount of household waste that ends up in landfill as a result of introducing our new council-led kerbside collections, over 50% of all waste that goes to landfill from our city is from our commercial sector. Our latest Waste Management and Minimisation Plan 2022 (WMMP 2022) concluded that our local businesses and organisations need better services to be able to reuse, recycle or compost more of their waste instead of it ending up in landfill.
What we’re doing
Our role is to promote effective and efficient waste minimisation within our city. We’ve heard from businesses and organisations in Tauranga they’d like support in reducing their waste going to landfill by transitioning to a more circular way of providing goods and services. One way we can support our commercial sector to make this shift, is by funding innovative waste reduction research and collaborating with other councils and private industry to uncover what more sustainable solutions for our city and wider region could look like. Our ‘Circular Economy for the Western Bay of Plenty’ report is a collaboration between Tauranga City Council, Western Bay District Council, Bay of Plenty Regional Council and many local commercial organisations across the construction and demolition, food and beverage and health sectors.
It has uncovered ways we can bring more circular practises to our region and you can read about the findings below.
BOP Circular Economy Report (3.7mb pdf)
What you can do
We need to collaborate and innovate with our community, businesses and organisations to help find solutions to the current challenges identified in the report above, to bring more sustainable circularity practises to Tauranga and Western Bay of Plenty.
If you’ve got an idea for how you might support our journey to circularity, or would like to learn more, you can email us.
Or, if you’ve got a business and are keen to find out more about how you can reduce your waste, you can learn more through our Resource Wise Programme.