A great place to start living more sustainably is to think about how you, your family, your school, your business and your community can reduce, reuse and recycle.
You can reduce waste making small changes – buy reusable rather than disposable products, taking your own bags to the supermarket, choose products with less packaging and buy only what you need.
Compost your food scraps (eg fruit 🥝 and vegetable 🥕 peelings, teabags and coffee ☕ grinds) and gardening waste (eg leaves 🍃 and grass clippings).
Before you throw anything away, think whether any part of it can be reused and given another life.
Recycle plastic, cans, glass, paper and cardboard by putting them out in your kerbside recycling service.
We are part of the national Love Food Hate Waste NZ campaign which aims to help Kiwi families to waste less food. For practical tips on how to reduce your own food waste and save money, visit lovefoodhatewaste.co.nz.
👉 NZ families waste about $560 each year on food which is thrown out uneaten
👉 This adds up to a staggering $872 million for the whole country.
👉 We throw away 122,547 tonnes of food annually.
👉 Enough to feed 262,917 people or 4.5 times the population of Porirua for a year.
👉 Bread is the most wasted item, with 20 million loaves thrown away each year
(and that doesn’t include the bread we throw to the birds!)
Keen to save some moolah, while helping the planet? Check out Kate Meads, who runs regular Waste Free Living, Waste Free Parenting and Food Lovers Master Class workshops in Porirua. Visit Waste Free with Kate
There are a handful of places in Porirua where you can take your clean, dry soft plastics for recycling. For further information check out the Soft Plastics Recycling webpage.
The Recycling Rewards Programme is designed for shopping villages, helping them to reduce their waste going to landfill through recycling.
For more information, contact us on (04) 237 5089.
All councils in the Wellington region have adopted a new regional Waste Management and Minimisation Plan (2.4MB pdf).
The aim is to reduce the amount of waste produced, to better reuse waste resources and to recycle more. The councils are working together on a number of national and regional education initiatives to overcome the waste issues.
We want to help your school reduce waste and to educate and inspire students to contribute to this.
If your school needs help with other waste minimisation actions (e.g. recycling, waste free lunches), please email or phone us.
For more information, contact us on phone (04) 237 5089.
