Reader mailbag: Dunedin plastic mountains edition

In the inbox, from our Professor of Finance:

Oh the irony - the 'sustainability' of recycling

Ratepayers are going to be charged more to keep producing a 'good' that nobody apparently wants or needs! Now that's certainly a 'sustainable' policy…

The ODT article forwarded me by the good Professor Glenn Boyle notes:

As a stockpile of the city's plastic waste grows ever bigger, the Dunedin City Council is being warned it may have to increase rates if returns from recycling do not improve.

The amount Dunedin people recycle has increased by a third since a new service was introduced in 2011.

That increase, combined with the high New Zealand dollar and a four-month stay on sending some plastics to the main Chinese market following a crackdown on contaminants in recyclables that has put traders off selling to China, resulted in the council running the service at a loss last year.

...The situation has prompted council solid waste manager Ian Featherston to warn the council this week that although the exchange rate was falling and new markets for the materials were being sought, the reduced target of a $210,000 return this financial year might also be difficult to achieve.

In that case, the kerbside recycling targeted rate would need to be increased next year from $64 to $69, he said.

Mr Featherston said Dunedin people recycle about 30 tonnes of material a month.

The stockpile of plastics being held had now reached about 150 tonnes.

Recycling programmes can still make sense even if they run at a loss, but only if the costs of disposing of this kind of plastic via the recycling system is lower than the costs of disposing of it via landfill. If it costs $30/tonne to get rid of waste at the landfill and the net costs of a recycling programme are $20/tonne, we're still $10/tonne better off by having it.

When I'd run some ballpark numbers on Christchurch's system in 2009, it looked like we were paying at least twice as much to get rid of waste via recycling, on average, as we were paying for disposal at Kate Valley. Some recyclables are of high value and are worth sending through a recycling system, but most of it is not worth the cost.

The numbers in Christchurch have likely changed with our newer bin system that separates out composting waste; the Otago numbers too could vary. I'd be surprised if it made sense to be stockpiling plastics in hopes of shipping them to China, but it's not impossible.

Council Debt for Dividends

My colleague Professor Glenn Boyle provided a few rather insightful comments on what's going on with Council-owned assets in Christchurch. I've hoisted them up from the comments section:

The first question to ask is: what are these increased dividends going to be used for? There are two possibilities - greater council spending or lower rates. It's hard to believe it couldn't be anything but the former.

That being the case, what really matters is the quality of the intended spending, i.e., is it covering its cost of capital? (which is more than just the cost of the borrowing used to finance the spending) Since we don't know what the increased spending is going to be on, it's impossible to say anything definite about this. But the quality of council spending over recent years, and the quality of the 'analysis' underpinning it (e.g., the $70m cycleway), means the most plausible assumption is to place 0% probability on these borrowed funds being spent wisely.

There are other interesting undercurrents in all this though. First, by getting CCHL to do the borrowing, the council is avoiding the need to reveal it on its own books, i.e., it's cunningly 'hiding' the extent of its indebtedness. Second, and more importantly, the council is effectively saying it can invest new capital more productively than CCHL. This is intriguing, given that we're repeatedly told what great investments the CCHL assets are, that they return 15% per annum, and how rates would be so much higher if we didn't have them. If all this were true, then the best strategy available to the council would be to reinvest the borrowed funds in the CCHL assets to provide for further growth. By implicitly saying it could do better than this, the council clearly doesn't believe its own spin.

This is hardly surprising. The arguments trotted out to justify the 'keep-the-CCHL-assets' line are so transparently flawed that the only plausible explanation for the council's behaviour is good old fashioned empire building (something that those of us who work at the University of Canterbury are familiar with).

But now the chickens are coming home to roost. As well as the disturbing announcement identified by Eric, this week we've also learnt that (i) Red Bus earned basically zero profit in the last financial year and will pay no dividend, and (ii) the council has sold one asset (Jet Engine Facility - what on earth was it doing owning it in the first place?) in order to prop up another loss-making subsidiary (VBase).

It's like living in an episode of Mad Men (without the fun parts).

Glenn is entirely right. Council drawing funds out of the Council-held firms is inconsistent with Council's repeated assertions that the rate of return on Council-held firms is very high.

Council should be in the business of providing decent roading infrastructure, working and reliable sewers and waterworks, and a few consumption amenities. They are not the best owners of things like ports. The temptation to tunnel assets out by deferring maintenance and loading the companies up with debt ... well, some perils are just too perilous.