Recycling Trumps Dumping

Service manager Laurie Witham says everything related to the disposal of rubbish has been about reduction.

“We used to have an enormous rubbish bin and we have reduced the size of it, which reduced the cost of collections and the frequency of collections to half the previous number.

“Although there is a cost to recycle, it is off-set by the savings.”

He says cardboard has been recycled for years but it was the plastics and polystyrene along with soft plastics that were making up the bulk of what was been thrown out.

“There is also a large amount of steel we recycle from the motorcycle crates which we get paid for and the used oil from servicing motorbikes also goes off to be used again,” Laurie says.

Having enormous bins of rubbish going to the land fill, and the cost of dumping them, prompted Cyclespot owners Grant Woolford and wife Melissa to take a serious look at what other options were out there.

Grant says they always felt guilty about the rubbish, and when he looked closely he found the twice weekly dumping of the bins to landfill was not only costly but environmentally destructive as well.

To begin with, it was recycling the office rubbish that got him thinking about what could be done across the whole business.

In the end, it was as simple as rolling out the recycling approach in the office across the whole business.

In short: Instead of dumping all the rubbish in one big bin, taking a little time to sort and separate it, and find suitable recyclers for the different items.

So, for example when a motorbike comes in from a supplier now, the team takes out all the steel from the packaging ready for it to be picked up by the scrap dealer.

“It didn’t cost us a cent,” Grant says.

“We are saving money and I also want other businesses to know it won’t necessarily cost them and it can have a number of benefits.

“The mixed rubbish bin gets emptied way less than it used to and that bin was costing more to empty than the recycling ones do now.”

* For more information on recycling, including what can be recycled and how, visit recycle.co.nz