Less than a week after her decision to stand down, Karen Hunt came has received unexpected praise from one Rotorua councillor.

Charles Sturt, once a kerb recycling critic, lauded Karen's zeal in pushing to install plastic and recycling bins for each household some years ago.

The praise came as part of Thursday's economic and operations sub-committee meeting.

At last week's full meeting of the council, Karen says she would not stand for a fourth term as a councillor.

Her popularity had plummeted at 2016 elections. Behind on election night, she retained her said to leapfrog over Mike McVicker in the final count.

She says this was not a factor in her decision, rather the planks on which she stood in 2007 had been realised.

The potential loss of a plastics market pointed to a 20 per cent loss to the local contractor and whether the council was protected from such a loss.

'Though the plastics are no longer taken by previous markets I'm a little uncomfortable; although the council is financially comfortable for now, if we're going to be putting unnecessary pressure on our contractors to take that loss and for how long that would be – was profit or loss for three years for example?”

Infrastructure manager Stavros Michael was first to acknowledge to the value of recycling, which he was happy to continue to monitor.

He says the council was in the third year of a 15-year contract over the recycling programme. At 20 per cent above, the contractor benefited; at 20 per cent below the contractor wore the risk.

When enacted, an estimated revenue from recoverable was half a million dollars.

'It is quite important to us as a part of a large local authority family to put some pressure on the Government to work in addition to stating objections come with a business plan of what we can do in the business economy and to leverage a national scale of economy to achieve something,” says Michael.

He said if the council had ceased the collection, the significant advantages of the last 20 years during which recycling was promoted would be lost

'But I'll wait and see and in due course report in a regular basis.”

Meeting chair Charles Sturt says the concerns earlier expressed by councillor Tania Tapsell and other councillors were that while it was all good having a contract, the council did not want to see people going under.

'But we also have a role and responsibility as (Tania Tapsell) said,” says Charles.

'To actually get kerbside recycling … took a huge paradigm shift around this table as well as within our community – it took five years to get to this stage,” Sturt said.,

'And I was one of the Philistines who said ‘No, no, no'. I was one of those who said why don't the lazy buggers go down to the (recycling) centre?

'Things have changed. And they will change, like the discussion we had on climate change and carbon footprints and all those sorts of things,” says Charles.

Any major changes to the present recycling contract would return to the council chamber, says Charles.

Chief executive officer Geoff Williams says one of the strategies in place was partnership strategy and a mitigation of risk programmes. Multi-national companies were aware of risk strategies.