He Pou a Rangi – Climate Change Commission is looking for feedback on its draft advice to government to take action to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions.
If you want to make a submission but don’t know where to start, don’t worry! A whole heap of sustainability advocates have got together to form a submission template to help you have your say before the 28th March deadline.
Wastebusters will be tackling waste – one of the key emissions producing sectors identified in the advice – when we make our submission this week.
The Commission’s advice focuses on reducing methane emissions from organic waste in landfill – which is a massive problem, especially in our district given the most recent audit of kerbside rubbish bins found 54% of what we throw out is organic waste.
But waste is inextricably linked to climate change and, as our friends at the Zero Waste Network point out, there’s so much more we can do to reduce emissions, including:
- Set binding reduction targets for all waste streams, including single use plastics and packaging, e-waste, textile and construction and demolition waste
- Use the Waste Levy revenue to invest in reduction and reuse systems and infrastructure to prevent and reduce waste and grow the reuse economy
- Measure embodied emission through consumer-based emissions data: the upstream emissions cost of consumer goods and packaging from extraction and refining of raw materials, through to manufacturing and transportation
- Effective product stewardship to create reuse and resource recovery systems that keep materials in circulation
- Design out products that can’t be effectively recovered, recycled or composted
- Make right to repair a priority
Deadline for submissions is 28th March
Read the submissions template *here* and make a submission on the Climate Change website
