Recycling at big public events would make a real cut in the amount of potentially useful material being sent to landfill, a recent study has found, but making it work will need the support of many groups, including the City Council.

Lincoln University’s Dr Pip Lynch helped organise the study through a voluntary group called the Public Events Waste Management Initiative Group (PEWMIG). The group’s aim is to establish recycling at major public events. It wants to keep useful material out of landfills and to widen education about recycling.

Dr Lynch says Christchurch households and some businesses and other organisations are strong supporters of recycling through the City Council’s kerbside recycling programme, but there is still little public recycling happening.

“The concept of recycling is only selectively adopted because the message isn’t consistent,” she says. “The message to householders is to recycle what is recyclable; the message to those same householders when they’re in public places and attending public events is to treat everything as rubbish.

“By public, I mean shopping malls, public parks, city streets, sports and events stadia, and public events. Public events vary in size. The larger events attract 100,000 people or more and generate considerable amounts of waste. Some of this waste can be diverted from the landfill by being recycled.”

At last year’s A&P Show, the PEWMIG group did a study to work out what is involved in public recycling and if there would be support for it. The group’s volunteers did an audit of the waste generated during the two days of Show Weekend and ran a questionnaire of stallholders and the public to see what support there was for recycling outside the home.

The audit looked at what was thrown away in 10 per cent of the wheelie bins provided for the event over two days — the Thursday and Friday. About a third of the 742kg of the waste material sorted was found to be recyclable (including 34kg of qualifying plastics, 42kg of aluminium cans, 56kg of cardboard and 99kg of glass).

“Based on these figures, an estimated 3.2 tonnes of recyclable material was produced over those two days of the event, indicating that a recycling scheme at this particular event would divert significant amounts of materials from the waste stream,” Dr Lynch says.

The surveys found that support is there for recycling. The problem is that compared to simply dumping, recycling is costly. Special bins are needed and, even then, work must be done downstream to separate the recycled material and ensure it is clean enough to be useful for end users. That requires all groups at an event to work together and for there to be some agreement about how the costs will be apportioned. The payoff is worth the effort, however, Dr Lynch says.

“The challenge for all agencies is to work together to find solutions. Recycling at public events isn’t something that is likely to occur without multi-party commitment and co-operation. Public events do generate considerable amounts of recyclable materials, though, so are worth the effort of converting to minimal waste events through recycling.”

Alongside the PEWMIG group initiative last year the Christchurch City Council is working with waste contractors and event organisers to establish workable systems and a guide for event organisers is being developed alongside a policy which should be considered by Council this year. The Council’s Solid Waste Manager, Simon Collin, says the Council is also taking another look at the recycling bins it has in City Mall.

“Really, they’ve not been effective so we’re going to try a new style of bin,” he says. “They come in a bank of three so there’s a rubbish bin on each side of a recycling bin and there’s some space for signage about public recycling. We want to see if we get a better result with that.”