“HOW stupid is it that everything can only go out in those green plastic bags?” asks a Wellington rubbish collector who doesn’t want to be named.
“We have customers who fold their cardboard and newspapers and leave them nicely alongside in a carton … how hard would it be to pick that up? But we’re not allowed to. It just makes us look silly.”
He says that City Council recycling changes mean more recyclable items are ending up in general rubbish.  
“If people have too much recycling for those bags or it’s not the right week for that item it just goes into the yellow rubbish bags,” he says. “Less is recycled than it would have been, and it just ends up in the tip. The wheely bins are bigger and many more people could use them.”
Wellington City Council spokesman Richard MacLean says, “We’ve certainly admitted there’s been teething troubles, and I know that there are obviously people around town who are either not understanding the new system or not bothering to change.”
MacLean says the council is monitoring the system, but will not seek to find out if a significantly increased amount of recyclable material is making its way to the tip.
“There have been people putting glass into the general rubbish forever … we’re not going to go and start slicing open rubbish bags. As long as people are wrapping it properly… there’s nothing we can do about it, except say we would rather they didn’t do it.”
As for the collector who’s frustrated he can’t pick up people’s cardboard if it’s not in a bag, MacLean says it’s “just one of those things”.
“We’re trying to stop people from informally using the street as a sort of, ‘oh well, we’ll just put a pile of rubbish beside the recycling bag and that’ll be alright’. There are some things we aren’t going to tolerate… if people are using that system to dump general rubbish on the footpath, we’ll start taking action.”