An annual town cleanup is expanding – in length and coverage. The EPIC Te Puke Spring Clean will be on again in September.

In past years, the cleanup had been a quick, done-in-a-couple-of-hours event ending with free pizza at The Daily café. This year, that will still happen – but it will be the culmination of a week-long drive to encourage people to pick up litter.

Now named the Great Te Puke Tidy Up, the rubbish gathering event will be from September 15-19 to coincide with Keep New Zealand Beautiful Week.

More interesting

EPIC Te Puke’s Sally Benning said the hope is that schools, community groups and businesses would all become involved, collecting rubbish during the week.

“What we are doing is trying to make it a bit more interesting – we’re opening it up to schools and maybe we’ll get a bit of a competitive thing going – we’ll get a few small prizes.”

Schools would be able to do audits of the litter collected and collect litter around their grounds, expanding the area covered by the cleanup, and take what has been collected to The Daily on September 19.

Benning said it might be an opportunity for students to show leadership or accumulate hours for community work.

Community groups were also invited to be part of the litter collection, with Te Puke Scouts and Poutiri Trust already expressing interest in being involved.

“We really want to get it to be a little bit more than just a couple of hours because that’s not very long and not everybody can be there.”

Keep Te Puke Beautiful co-ordinator Craig Wallace had been involved in helping organise the tidy-up week.

Epic restart

*EPIC Te Puke is restarting its networking get-togethers for local businesses, with the first one on July 31.

Called EPIC Connect, the monthly events would be similar to the previously held BA5 events.

“Nothing has been done here for a little while in terms of networking in the evening and it is something a couple of the business owners have talked about,” said Benning.

The idea is that there will be a short guest talk, a talk from the host and a talk from EPIC.

“It will be quite casual and a chance for businesses to connect,” Benning said.

Email EPIC Te Puke for more details at: events@epictepuke.co.nz