Tauranga is the first centre to participate in the government's Love NZ recycling initiative, which is aiming to aid in the handling of the anticipated increase of glass bottle waste during the Rugby World Cup.
The new recycling bins at Baypark are yellow. One is pictured here with Baypark's ground manager Sjaak Schipper who says it will take a little time for people to get used to the new bins.
The initiative was trialled at Baypark last week during the Steamers' match against North Harbour and is now officially launched by Environment Minister Nick Smith.
'The Rugby World Cup is the biggest event New Zealand has hosted,” says Nick.
'This Love NZ campaign is about recycling thousands of tonnes of glass, plastic and paper that would otherwise go to landfill and showing our 85,000 international guests that we care for our environment.
'This is about turning a potential risk from large volumes of waste into an opportunity to reinforce our clean, green brand.
'This initiative in Tauranga involves installing 35 temporary public recycling bins around high profile sites such as Baypark Stadium, fanzones and around the city.
'This is part of a nationwide programme of 445 permanent bins and 1700 temporary bins in 26 centres.
'For Tauranga, the project will see the equivalent of 941,000 million beer bottles, 5.8 million plastic bottles and around 1.2 million cans recycled in the next year.
'Tauranga has a growing reputation for recycling with its waste minimisation programme for businesses, household composting programme and waste education.
'The strength of this recycling initiative is that it has government, local authorities and industry working together in preparation for the Rugby World Cup.
'The government is committing $2 million to the project from the Waste Minimisation Fund and the Glass Packaging Forum is committing an additional $500,000 to support councils like Tauranga in preparing environmentally for the Rugby World Cup.
'I am delighted at the support from industry for Love NZ that will enable TV commercials, billboards, adshels and mobile advertising supporting the message of recycling.
'This campaign is about more than just the Rugby World Cup.
'New Zealanders have made a real culture shift over the past two decades with recycling at home, but we now need to take the next step and make it the norm when we are out and about around town.
'Our aim is to leave a legacy after the world cup of good quality public recycling bins and a new mindset of public place recycling.”
4 comments
less talk more action
Posted on 27-07-2011 13:27 | By claypole
Listen up TCC, how about making it compulsory for every house to have a waste bin + recycle bin. Do away with pre paid household rubbish sacks because: they do not encourage recycling with everything going in them and they split. So if you really care about recycling, start at home with day to day collections and not being show ponies, pampering to central government
Recycling
Posted on 27-07-2011 16:55 | By gadstuff
Rugby fans must be pretty dumb if it is going to take time for them to work out what the bins are for.
Recycling
Posted on 27-07-2011 17:11 | By Glen Clova
In answer to Claypole i see nothing wrong in having a pre payed rubbish bag.I was involved in the first plastic recycling venture in Tga in the early 1990ties which had no subsidies and went down the tubes.What was learn t during that venture was that to get a price for your product it had to be clean.Our problem was that people would not clean their recycling ie dirty tins with labels still on every type of plastic dumped into the bins not just the number 1 and 2 as they are the only ones that are recycled the rest go to the tip,Bottles were no use smashed as they contaminated the plastic(dont know what happens to-day as they use compactor trucks and crush it all up,i suspect that the bulk of the collection lands up in the landfill as they are subsidized and there is no real check on how much of the product is truly recycled) Another problem is that it is still cheaper to bring in the raw product.Now as for the prepayed bags we recycle all our waste and only have half a bag a week and as we live down a long steep drive it is easy to take to the roadside. I manage to get my recycling up to the road by towing on the back of my vehicle.
How many?
Posted on 27-07-2011 18:22 | By tibs
How long will it take to make the equivalent of 941,000 MILLION beer bottles? This seems large for Tauranga. Even the 5.8 million plastic bottles and 1.2 million cans in the next year seem very high that's the equivalent of nearly 16,000 plastic bottles every day and about 3,300 cans every day for a year. But those are both small beer (sic) in comparison to the equivalent of 2,578,082,191 per day for the next year! Maybe there's a typo in the report?
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