Covid 19 coronavirus: returnees criticize ‘unacceptable’ waste of isolation meals

By RNZ

People in controlled isolation fear they are drowning the country’s landfills with roughly 100,000 take-out containers, bottles and cutlery each week.

Garbage is not recycled from the rooms of the 32 border hotels in the country, to reduce waste management and the possible spread of Covid-19.

Three meals a day are also served in fully disposable containers, a startling revelation for British returnee Luke Ross, who was held in managed isolation at Auckland’s Rydges Hotel last month.

The staff assured him that they were using the most “compostable and sustainable” packaging options they could get, yet said he couldn’t choose not to opt for the extras he didn’t want, leaving him swimming in an endless supply of plastic pots to sauce and wrappers.

“Every meal … we have a large plastic container, one or two smaller circular containers, a bottle or a can of drink and condiments, things like napkins, silverware, condiments like ketchup or butter,” he said.

Returnees at all managed isolation hotels in the country are asked to seal all their garbage in a bag and then leave it outside their room every day in shared non-contact containers.

A spokesman for government-run isolation said it was collected and disposed of as “general waste,” while recycling is currently not an option, according to the Health Ministry’s criteria for alert level 4 to reduce the risk of Covid-19 infection and “prioritize the safety” of returnees, staff and contractors.

With an average of around 5,000 people in isolation administered each day, roughly 100,000 meals of waste are dumped into landfills each week.

More than 60,000 people have passed through hotels managed isolation and quarantine since March 26, bringing an estimated 2.5 million meals to waste.

Ross said that was “unacceptable”, and that he wasn’t the only one who came back who felt that way.

After two weeks at Auckland’s Grand Millennium Hotel in August, Milli Steele surveyed 77 other people about their experience of managed isolation in New Zealand, and found that 80 percent thought waste was higher than expected or ” excessive”.

He also asked people general questions like “What would improve their stay?”

“Seventy-seven percent of people said less waste would have improved their stay, and that was also by far the most selected of all the options offered,” he said.

Ross wanted to see guests cleaning and sorting their trash into plastics, papers, glass, cans, and food waste, so hotels could recycle it without additional handling.

Steele wanted hotels to provide guests with cutlery and glasses to wash in their rooms and reuse.

The people she surveyed told her that the current system is the opposite of what they do at home, “especially with a lot of the messages at the time that people are used to recycling and reducing their waste,” she said.

“It feels really challenging when you go into managed isolation and there are very, very excessive amounts of packaging.”

Greenpeace activist Phil Vine wanted managed isolation and quarantine hotels to completely eliminate takeout containers.

He said there was little evidence that using disposable products was safer, with a growing consensus in the scientific community that reusable products can be easily and safely sterilized, protecting people from Covid-19 and the environment from additional contamination.

The waste from the managed isolation hotels joins thousands of tons of recyclable products already diverted to landfills by municipalities at alert levels 3 and 4.

Vine thought that showed something about the recycling system across the country.

“We need to look for alternatives. We need to go back to glass and other alternatives. We need to change the system because it was broken before Covid and it is even more broken now,” he said.

A spokesperson for managed insulation said systems and processes are always reviewed to ensure hotels reduce waste where possible.

Not knowing how long managed seclusion hotels will be operating, concerned guests hope that a more sustainable system can be introduced soon.