Resource Recovery Park celebrates 20th birthday
Published on 12 February 2024
Waitaki’s resource recovery park will be celebrating its 20th year of operation this weekend. This Sunday, February 18, there will be an on-site sausage sizzle and ice-cream truck from 11am to 2pm to celebrate twenty years of saving stuff from landfill. There will also be some giveaways during this time.
The park is run by the Waitaki Resource Recovery Trust, and is self-funded with supported funding from Waitaki District Council.
The Trust runs the park as a social enterprise, providing employment and opportunities for the community. Park Manager, Trish Hurley, says: “There is a real sense of family amongst the team. It’s an inclusive space where we all come together to help our community and environment and we’re all really proud of the work we do.”
The Park also hosts the MenzShed, a great place for those who love to make stuff, and Garden Corner, catering to the green fingered and thumbed in the district.
The park diverts as much as possible from landfill, either through recycling or repurposing, and in recent years has diverted around 85% of the material received. The Park receives all recycling collected from the district but also accepts many other items to recycle or repurpose on-site, including batteries, tetrapak, soft plastics, lids, toothpaste tubes and polystyrene.
Resaleable items are available for purchase in the on-site Get Sorted shop, while green waste is converted into mulch which is also available for sale.
Users will also be able to come and have their say about the future of waste in the district. Council is currently consulting on its Waste Minimisation and Management Plan, which determines what waste solutions the district will focus on for the next six years. Last year Waitaki sent 9,433 tonnes of waste to landfill or around 386kg per person.
We diverted 2,460 tonnes to be recycled. And a lot of that waste could be recycled, or reused, rather than being sent to landfill. Having your say on how we do that will help Waitaki towards a cleaner, waste-free future.
ENDS