Where does our recycling go?
A big thank you to Taupō Blue Light for providing the van.
Our KGT coordinators got to join Taupō teachers and Shannon from TDC on a van tour! They got to visit the Taupō Materials recovery Facility and Taupō Landfill and learn why it’s really important to get our recycling right. Did you know every year each person in Aotearoa throws away over 700kg of rubbish! Only about one quarter of this can get recycled.
On the 1st February, nationwide changes were made to recycling, to make sure everybody across the country is doing the same thing so that there is reduced contamination of all recycling. Contaminated recycling ends up in the landfill and we don’t want this! The main change for us in Taupō is that we can’t recycle any plastic lids (even if they are labelled 1, 2 or 5), or any containers larger than 4 Litres. It might feel like we are having to throw more stuff into the rubbish but these changes are expected to save an additional 36,000 tonnes of rubbish going to landfill, which works out at 30kg per household. Why is this? Well the machines that sort the recycling don’t currently recognise plastic lids as plastic and they sort them out into the paper and cardboard, causing contamination! We can still recycle plastic containers labelled 1, 2 and 5, glass, steel and aluminium cans, and paper and cardboard. Another positive is that plastic lids on bottles made it harder to make really neat dense bales of plastic, as the bottles don’t squash well. Without including lids in the plastic bales we actually have halved the amount of trucks on the road needed to transport these bales. Our recycling is sorted here, but it is not processed further in Taupō. It is transported to many different locations. Some of our waste paper goes to Hawkes Bay to make apple trays, whilst glass gets recycled in Auckland. We do recycle some plastic here in Aotearoa, but we still export overseas up to 18,000 tonnes a year! Here is an interesting recycling fact, did you know that three quarters of all the aluminium ever produced is still in use today whilst we can only recycle plastic 2-3 times? Next time you are going to buy a drink, choose one in an aluminium can rather than a plastic bottle. It’s a better choice for our environment and makes no difference to how good the drink tastes.
In addition to the kerbside recycling you can also recycle electronic waste ( TVs, computers and phones) car oil, childrens car seats, batteries, used plant pots and more at the Broadlands transfer station .
There was lots of great learning on this trip. We all understood reducing our rubbish has a positive impact on biodiversity and recycling correctly is important. We need to get it right to keep our more stuff out of the landfill. In Taupō our landfill is located at the base of Mount Tauhara. This landfill is nearly full, so soon our council will have to decide where our future rubbish will go. Other than recycling how can we help? Reducing the amount of rubbish we throw away is really important. There are many ways we can do this, we can buy less stuff and reuse and repair what we have. On the 6th April there is going to be a repair cafe in Taupō this is a great opportunity to be part of the solution. Don’t miss out!
