Collaboration – the key to optimising waste and resource recovery services

Delivering cost-effective waste and resource recovery services requires a careful balance between community expectations, tightening regulations, and constrained budgets. Councils are being asked to increase diversion from landfill, reduce contamination, improve customer experience, and plan for resilient infrastructure. They often need to do this while managing ageing assets and complex contracts.

Trying to navigate these pressures in isolation is difficult. Instead, there is an opportunity to optimise waste and resource recovery services through collaboration across councils. Done well, this opens the door to services that deliver better outcomes for cost, performance, resilience, and customer experience.

This can be achieved by using existing resources more effectively, aligning what we can across council boundaries, sharing capability where it helps, and planning infrastructure as a connected system. Local decisions still stay local. This is not about removing local identity or decision-making. Instead, it is about collaborating to achieve a common goal.

Waste and resource recovery systems don’t stop at district boundaries. Materials flow across regions, and contractors and suppliers operate across multiple council boundaries. Infrastructure, including collection networks, transfer stations, processing facilities and disposal sites, often serve more than one community. Customer behaviour is also influenced by consistency (or lack thereof), with people moving between districts expecting similar services, rules and messaging.

When councils plan and deliver services in isolation, effort is duplicated, and system performance can suffer. Procurement cycles are out of sync, contract requirements and reporting vary, and data can’t easily be compared. When this happens, the market receives mixed signals, buying power is diluted, and councils spend time solving the same problems in parallel. The alternative is working regionally, which doesn’t mean losing local priorities; it means recognising shared challenges and collaborating where it adds value.

Many councils are already collaborating through joint Waste Management and Minimisation Plans (WMMPs). They are synchronising procurement cycles for waste and resource recovery contracts and running joint education campaigns. The opportunity for them now is to make this regional approach more deliberate and future-focused, so decisions about services, data and infrastructure needs are made with a whole-of-system view.

Achieving better outcomes starts with alignment. That means agreeing on the outcomes that matter to communities, such as material recovery, contamination reduction, affordability, and public health and confirming how success will be measured.

From there, councils can reduce duplication by standardising the basics, such as definitions and terminology, which ensures councils, contractors and operators are using a common language and measuring the same things. By specifying minimum dataset requirements and reporting templates, measuring performance can be made comparable and trends visible. And having aligned service settings and contract requirements (where appropriate), supports increased buying power and reduces costs associated with duplicated tender processes.

We’ve seen the benefits of this approach through the standardisation of kerbside recycling with clearer rules, more consistent messaging, and easier delivery across multiple council areas. Suppliers also benefit from more coherent requirements and fewer bespoke processes, which can support stronger pricing and performance.

Just as importantly, comparable data builds a clearer picture of waste flows across a region. This improves planning, supports smarter investment decisions, and helps councils respond to market volatility with greater confidence.

Regional collaboration works best when it is practical and incremental, building trust through early wins and creating the structures needed for more complex initiatives later.

A useful starting point is a simple forum with neighbouring councils and, where relevant, shared contractors and operators. This can be used to confirm common issues and opportunities, service standards, procurement timing, infrastructure constraints, data gaps, and customer pain points. From there, a small number of actions that deliver visible benefits can be prioritised, such as building shared capability. Establishing a small, shared services function to support councils in areas such as contract management, data analytics, or communications can lift capability and continuity, particularly where councils have limited scale or struggle to resource specialist roles.

Aligning procurement cycles and contract approaches can reduce duplicated tender effort, improve market interest and increase buying power, while still allowing councils to retain local choices where needed.

Ageing waste and resource recovery infrastructure is a growing challenge. Joint infrastructure planning, as a connected regional network, helps councils optimise upgrades, avoid over- or under-investment, and improve resilience. It also helps ensure new infrastructure decisions reflect region-wide trends, not just local snapshots.

Over time, these foundations can enable more joined-up delivery, coordinated education and behaviour change campaigns, shared digital platforms and contamination reporting, and regionally consistent performance management. The intent is not uniformity for its own sake; it is to remove unnecessary variation, reduce duplication, and strengthen the system as a whole.

Across the Waikato and Bay of Plenty, councils have been working together to strengthen waste system performance, resilience and resource recovery outcomes. This began with councils coming together to share information and collaborate on research to improve waste outcomes. The development of these relationships has led to larger projects, including the Circularising Organics Project, which aimed to support the development of a robust and resilient organics material system, leading to improved soil health, the growth of healthy food, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, new jobs, and increased mana of the community.

In 2025, led by Waikato and Bay of Plenty Regional Councils, supported by Tonkin + Taylor, and funded by the Ministry for the Environment, the councils developed a shared Cross Regional Waste Strategy. The Strategy built a common view of the current state, key drivers for change, and priority opportunities to reduce waste and emissions and support a circular economy across both regions. The strategy’s development involved bringing together councils, industry and community organisations to imagine what the future could look like and to develop agreed collaborative actions over 30 years to achieve it.

The strategy now provides the foundation for an indicative waste infrastructure plan, helping align local and regional direction and assess fit-for-purpose, value-for-money infrastructure and waste and resource recovery systems. This plan focuses on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of existing infrastructure and aims to fill any infrastructure gaps through a business case approach. Prioritisation, design and implementation of identified projects is being developed with iwi/Māori, industry and community organisations to identify governance, partnership, funding and commercial opportunities across the sector. The project has already highlighted opportunities for further investigation, such as regional resource recovery parks and enhancing resource recovery centre networks, and is helping set up the Waikato and Bay of Plenty communities for a more resilient future.

So, let’s move from intent to implementation by starting (or continuing) the conversation with your neighbouring councils. Agree on a small set of shared outcomes for the region and the metrics for measuring them. Establish the basics so that decisions are grounded in comparable data and agreed shared outcomes. Then select a small number of “quick win” initiatives (such as shared capabilities or coordinated communications) and use those successes to support larger opportunities, such as coordinated procurement and joint infrastructure planning.

Collaboration isn’t a compromise; it’s how we build resilient, high-performing waste and resource recovery systems under real-world constraints, delivering better outcomes for our communities.

Hannah Kelly | Senior Waste + Resource Recovery Consultant 
Hannah is a senior waste and resource recovery specialist with over 10 years’ experience in consultancy and the construction industry in the UK, New Zealand, and the Pacific. She designs and executes solid waste strategies, translating them into actionable plans to improve efficiency, outcomes, and service delivery. With expertise in construction-sector environmental compliance, Hannah targets reducing construction and demolition waste, enhancing data accuracy and reporting, and elevating sector performance.

Kimberley Hope | Principal Waste + Resource Recovery Consultant
Kimberley has over 20 years of experience in the waste sector, spanning local government and consultancy. She applies a comprehensive, system-level approach to strategy, connecting local government projects to economic and community development to drive broader impacts. Throughout her career, Kimberley has facilitated collaboration on resource recovery and circular economy initiatives, including regional planning, strategy implementation, and joint procurement of waste services and recovery facilities, with a focus on holistic outcomes.