How to kill your landfill (and create jobs doing it)

When the Raglan landfill closed in 1998 the community was faced with the options of digging another hole or transporting its waste elsewhere – and chose neither. Instead, says Rick Thorpe, co-manager of the town’s new refuse system, they voted to “recycle as much as we could, to minimise our impact on someone else’s back yard and turn waste as a negative into resources that were positive”.

That was the birth of Xtreme Waste, a community-run waste-management centre that has an annual turnover of over $1 million and employs 26 people. The centre provides the community with full refuse services – including kerbside recycling, prepaid bag collection, business waste collection, and mini-skip hire – and diverts a whopping 76 per cent of the town’s rubbish away from landfill, with all eyes on that 100 per cent target.

The driving force behind the project, Rick grew up bouncing from place to place as his family followed his father’s career in the army. It was his dad who encouraged him to study Marine Biology at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji with the goal of becoming a wildlife ranger. A role with the Department of Conservation followed, including seven summers on the Chatham Islands helping save the Black Robin – then the world’s rarest bird, with only five individuals left alive.

People first

Later Rick would also be pivotal in setting up the marine reserve at Cathedral Cove on Coromandel Peninsula, though the experience left him disappointed. The original reserve was supposed to cover a site sacred to local iwi, but when a bureaucrat changed the boundaries with a pen-stroke, leaving the site unprotected, Rick decided his energy was best directed at social enterprise.

“That was an awakening for me,” says Rick. “We were always the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.” The experience helped him see that human social behaviour had the greatest effect on the environment.

So when it came to working out a new waste system for Raglan, Rick and his partner Liz turned to communities like Kaitaia, Kaikoura and Ashburton that had found creative, socially-driven answers to their waste issues. The couple spent two years visiting waste centres around the country before building their own business plan and founding Xtreme Waste in 2000.

Trash to cash

A centre was built around a refuse transfer station, with wood and metal yards, worm farms and an oil recycling depot added over time, and Rick’s team started looking for easy targets in their waste reduction plan.

First on the agenda was Raglan’s large volume of green waste going into landfill. Time spent working for the World Wildlife Fund in the Pacific had taught Rick that any organic matter is a valuable resource that can give back to the soil and improve crop growth, so the centre started wood-chipping and composting – and now has a busy trade in valuable mulch and compost. “It was our community’s first closed-loop system,” says Rick.

The next task was to pull paper and cardboard out of the waste stream and sell it to paper mills for recycling. This was all easy stuff, says Rick, who by now was effectively creating money out of thin air.

Now, with a team of passionate locals to call on, Rick and Liz are processing all manner of so-called trash through the refuse centre and diverting anything of value to the community through a reuse shop on site. “People are generous in giving us stuff, because they know we will find a good home for it, says Rick.

Today Xtreme Waste is part of the Raglan community fabric – helping with education, and providing free resources to schools. Rick even helped draft the Waste Minimisation Act, which levies every tonne of waste disposed to landfill, providing funding for dozens of commercial and creative green ideas to reduce our impact on the environment.

“The centre has moved from a rubbish dump, to recycling, to a shop, to a community resource centre,” says Rick. “We are immensely proud of what we have achieved and we have a lot of fun along the way.”

Rick’s tips for reducing waste

• Buy in bulk
• Eat food that is in-season (out-of-season food requires much more resources)
• Grow your own food
• Compost your green waste at home – your garden will love you for it
• Remember the order of the three ‘R’s – there is a reason why “Reduce” is the most important, then “Reuse” and then “Recycle”
• Start a collective where members specialise in the food they grow best, then swap it with others within the collective

Handy links

Want help setting up your own community waste centre? Visit www.communityrecyclers.org.nz for support and advice.

Get composting tips here.

Share your waste tips by commenting below.