Waste warriors or dumplings?

Youth Council visited Innovative Waste Kaikōura yesterday to check out their operation. IWK's Chloe ensured we had the appropriate people cones (fluoro vests) for leading and following the group while we looked through the whole site. 
We were really impressed with the changes to the yard, the professional worksite and logical flow for recycling. 
A visit to the landfill site was eye-opening to say the least - plastic, plastic and more plastic - stunning to see how much is coming in as 'dump' rubbish and going into the ground.
We visited the sorting shed where Wendy showed us (and had some very keen helpers) to sort recycling into the appropriate fadges and cages. Sonya then showed us how a fadge is compacted - 35 fadges to make one bale of plastic to be sent off for recycling.
Chloe had spot prizes for answering questions correctly and we learned something amazing - 11 KYC members weigh 764kg!
So what did we learn from all of this? 
We can do our bit by recycling correctly at home. This means WASHING the recyclables (especially meat trays!) Putting recycling out in the correct bins is really helpful and making sure that if we drop recycling off at the yard that we sort it properly. The biggest change we can make? INFLUENCE what our whanau purchase. Check out which products come in the least amount of packaging. An example is buy a big bag of chips and break it down into small re-useable containers in our lunches instead of buying minipacks of chips. 
Thanks for IWK for the invite to see what you do and to see the challenges you face. We've got our thinking caps on to see what we can do to support this going forward.