As you can see that's a a solid wood table that wood there is called mataī and these slabs looking
by the grain speak to me of hundreds of years old, if not a thousand years old piece of timber
and you just cannot get it anymore so how valuable that is, what I would call
important that we see it above ground. (speaking to the camera) Understand? Yeah.
Robert Scott from the Netherlands of Danniverke, well looked after here in the Manawatū for the
last 50 years nearly. Mōrena my name is Adrienne Scott. I'll go right to the top
today I'm celebrating my 70th birthday so what a way to celebrate it in front of the camera!
This I guess pioneering adventure that we're on here with the wood
recycling sounds pretty plain but there's a lot more to it than that
and we can see a bright and wonderful future from what we've been projecting here.
That would have been in landfill if we hadn't of grabbed it.
We've got to see this as a better outcome. Bringing gorse into New Zealand we can look back
now and say was a bad move. Bringing possums into New Zealand, we can look back and say it was a bad
move. And digging holes bearing perfectly reusable resources into holes is a majorly bad move.
At the moment this is all to be de-nailed and we have de-nailing stations so if you've got
time today you can start by measuring up all these bits of wood and cutting it for me. But
I hope it gives you an idea of the volume, this is just a smidgen of what's going to landfill right
now as we stand here. There's people overseas would give their back teeth to build a frame
for a window and we had the privilege of working overseas in post-disaster areas in Asia. That
illuminated to our minds the waste wood scenario in New Zealand. What we've got to understand is
it's not waste wood, it is surplus wood. We've got to re-label things to the correct label.
It is perfectly good resources which isn't being well managed at the moment. And that's our first
packets of timber that we reinstated from that mess there, no one has yet convinced
me that deserves to go landfill and that's where it's going right now as we discuss it. There are
avenues for reuse for this material, not under the current building code it can go back into
new homes but we have other places for it like in sheds and of course tiny houses and of course
overseas and post disaster areas. And we did ship a 20-foot container to Fiji after
one of their disasters. We also shipped a 20-foot container from the UK to Pakistan
as a pre-empt to what we're doing now. So we know it can work.
And we've proved it's cheaper to do that but that pile of wood there,
keep little industries going for weeks with the surplus we bury in the ground here everyday.
And for us too, it's not just about the timber it's about the people.
What we're providing is somewhere for people to go, that have nowhere to go during the day.
Currently we're all volunteers and it gives people things to do. We have people that have gone from
not having employment, our refugees, our migrants, into employment.
We can take people who are on a road that need to come back to being straight again,
to get off the alcohol, to get off the drugs and get back into employment. What a privilege
it is to work with people for all different reasons.
So it's all about sustainability of our beautiful country but we are offering what we believe could
be very big industrial change. We have enough experience to want to pass that information on.
That resource that we have no second thought about throwing away should be gathered, should be
restored, should be made available again for other projects around New Zealand or in other countries.
The call of the kōkako was what initially
attracted me to this species, it's like yeah he's calling to your wairua.
What I'd like to see and when I'm gone and then my kids have taken over,
i'd like to see a healthy forest.