Wild Ferment - Crate expectations

There’s a lot of stuff in my garage: firewood, pinecones, a lawn mower, gardening tools, redundant kitchen appliances, garage sale bargains, boxes of books, boxes of papers, boxes of books and papers….

There’s so much stuff there isn’t actually room for my car, but there will always be room for my recycling depot. This is a neat arrangement of five crates that after a few weeks turns into a not-so-neat arrangement overflowing with glass bottles (screw caps off), cardboard, glossy paper, newspapers, plastic bottles (no lids), aluminium cans and tins. I carry them out to my car and drive 20km to the Resource Recovery Centre in Blenheim, where I take each crate out and post all the bits carefully through the correct slots. I get back into my car, pausing briefly to polish my halo, and drive the 20km home.

I will have to run my own recycling depot for some time yet, but as from October 4 it will be a whole lot easier for people living in Blenheim and Picton. The Marlborough District Council has bit the bullet (19 years after the first trial in Riversdale) and introduced kerbside recycling. A maroon council crate, itself made of recycled plastic bottles, has gone out to each household. Instead of everyone driving up to the recovery centre, it will be a short walk to the kerbside on rubbish collection day.

I look on with envy and encouragement – depending on the success of the scheme it may be extended to outlying areas including Seddon, Renwick and Rarangi. In the meantime, my halo took a tarnishing at the Ecofest in Nelson where I met Matthew Luxon, who with his wife Waveney and pet dog Jess, set a target of having only one bag of rubbish over a whole year.

They recycle heaps. But the aim is to try to avoid creating any landfill waste in the first place: this is the “Reduce” bit in the Reduce, Re-use, Recycle mantra.

They take a good hard look at what they’re buying. They avoid anything with lots of packaging, especially non-recyclable plastic, Styrofoam trays and things covered in Glad Wrap. They buy in bulk from Bin Inn and take glass jars instead of plastic bags. The butcher puts their meat direct into a Tupperware container. They now choose foil-wrapped Disprin instead of plastic-packaged Panadol. A year’s worth of bottle tops, aluminium foil and toothpaste tubes earned them 70c from the scrap metal dealer. By the end of the year their landfill waste filled just one supermarket bag and they set up www.rubbishfree.co.nz to spread the word.

It would be easy for Matthew to sound like a bible-thumping evangelist, but he doesn’t. They are just seeing what they can do to cut down on rubbish. If they lived in Blenheim or Picton they’d get a $30 refund from the council for their unused rubbish bags.

When I get home I eye up my packet of Mint Slice biscuits in the pantry. All that plastic packaging, but they taste too good to give up. I’ll start with clearing out stuff from the garage for The Blue Door Re-use shop.