25/10/22

York Valley Landfill opened in 1987 and is the only operating landfill in the Nelson/Tasman region. They have 7 years of airspace left. So we need to reduce our waste! We had a tour of the landfill

Here are our key takeaways:

• There was a noticeable smell!

• Lots of seagulls were taking advantage of the free food!

• It is estimated that in Nelson/Tasman 769kg of waste is produced per person per year!

• Gas is produced in landfills due to anaerobic digestions by micobes

• The burn off of gas is by an enclosed flare and destructs 98% of the methane and reduces air pollution and smell.

• York Valley Landfill supplies Nelson Hospital with 60% of the energy needed for heating, hot water and steam

• Lots of waste in the landfill could have been recycled

• Each day the heavy vehicles need repairing due to waste being caught in the motors, wheels (fishing lines, cables, cords, plastic wrap)

• Lithium batteries are the main cause fires in landfills.

Recycling Centre

25/10/2022

Today the Waste Warriors went to the Recycling Centre in Richmond. We had a safety sessions and dressed in our PPE. Matua Andy then took us on a tour of the centre. We looked at 3 days worth of recycling collected from around Nelson/Tasman.

Here are some of our key takeaways from this visit.

• Glass is sorted by colour and must be clean

• Cans can not be crushed when we put them in the recycle bin

• Cardboard must be dried and bigger than A5 size

• Milk bottles must be rinsed and no lids on

• Soft plastic bottles must be rinsed with no lids and must be a number 1, 2 or 5

• Metal tins are sorted using a magnetic

• The factor is VERY LOUD

• We send our paper recycling overseas - it is not processed here in NZ

• There is a back load if recycling sitting in Richmond

• We need to sort our recycling better as there is a lot of general rubbish in the recycling

What did we think and feel when we looked at our waste?

Disgusted, empty because i didn’t know how much plastic we produce in a day, disappointed, grossed out, pōuri, annoyed, I felt bad for our community, sad for the sea animals because rubbish ends up in the sea, bad because I thought our school was clean

It looked disgusting, gross, it stunk, it scared me because our whole school is dumped with rubbish, pōuri because I felt bad for Papatuanuku, I was surprised I didn’t know there was that much rubbish in the school, our kura would have so much rubbish if Matua Scotty didn’t take it away everyday, there was a big pile compostable rubbish which is better for the environment, it made me feel like i should make more of an effort to use reusable items to lessen the amount of rubbish I make, it gave us time to think about what we could change