Waste is an interesting thing because really it is
just a reflection of consumption. There is no lying about what's in your rubbish bag.
This is our lovely office team.
Kia ora. Multi-talented.
Kia ora Dallas. Kia ora. How are ya?
Lovely view of our resource recovery center. Whāingaroa, Raglan's resource recovery center.
So that area over there is an old landfill and it's capped with lots of clay and they've
planted trees on top. We can't use any of that because it's potentially dangerous and unstable.
("Is there kind of like a time limit on that or is it just condemned forever?") Forever.
Yeah it's oozing. You know there could be agrichemicals in there, there could be
asbestos and who knows what, so and it still leaks out of the bottom into the little watercourse.
Now in the country we have these super landfills that are
filling up way too fast. Their capacity is not great enough to cope with what's being produced.
They have a lifetime. They're lined with membranes, but those membranes don't last forever.
I
mean you're looking at intergenerational effects. It's totally flawed, yeah we can't keep doing it.
So Xtreme Zero Waste is a community enterprise. It was formed by the community for the community
twenty years ago to manage Raglan's escalating solid waste issues and over the last twenty years
has turned what we used to bury in the ground into 42 jobs and about 1.6 million dollars
injectors every year back into the local economy through contracts or spending in local shops.
"Yeah you ready Shane? Yeah you're looking good."
Our staff are expert in sorting metals so they've learned how to recognise
different kinds of metals because the metals have different value and different purposes and need
to go to different places. Wood yard person is really good at fixing stuff, he knows the
quality of the timber and we're able to sort it ready for people to reuse so it's nice and easy.
I think it's extremely important to make the centre welcoming and easy to
find your way around. We're lucky here because it's all going on in one space and it gives people
another chance to see the potential that they can be involved in, in diverting and what they're
wasting. The yard staff and the shop work closely together. The yard staff know what standard
the shop can receive so the shop will do their best to reuse and get back into the community.
We're at the organics yard now, which is my favourite place. *laughs*. We chose a very
simple system of in-vessel but not high-tech composter. We do take meat because we reach
a pasteurising temperature so we know that the meat is not going to smell and not be hazardous.
At the moment we're doing a simple range of products to our community.
When we started you know 100% of the waste went into a landfill and within a few years we were
up to 50% diversion. And now we're sitting around 70-80% diversion. We don't seem to
be able to climb over that. We really need some changes in legislation, national changes about
importation or manufacture of certain types of particularly packaging. The most important part
is to realise that we don't actually have to landfill anything. We never used to and waste is a
relatively new concept. Nature doesn't have waste either so I think it's important to
get beyond the conversation about how we waste and ethically the best way to do it and start to talk
about setting up systems for not creating waste in the first place. The legacy of Xtreme Zero
Waste is it's not about one or two people with a crazy idea, it's actually a whole community
movement. They're all very proud of it and when we go, Xtreme Zero Waste will continue on.
If we can do it with these, if we can do it here in Raglan and hit 80% we can do it all over New
Zealand. So let's just get to 80% and worry about the last 20% collectively you know at the end of
that process. You know maybe we don't actually need the local and central government. Maybe they
become less relevant in the new world that we're all participating in. And in fact we can do a lot
of this activity because it is about behaviour change, a lot of the activity by ourselves.
My role is really starting to grow connecting with these youth in particular, to watch them
grow and then become mentors as well that's really rewarding. What our future generations
would say about us, I would hope that they would say they tried and they cared.