Small gains
It isn’t only large building companies that are taking their carbon footprint seriously. Auckland Council’s senior waste planning specialist, Mark Roberts, has worked with smaller builders who want to make a difference.
One example was builder Nigel Benton, who contacted Roberts and offered to run a skipless build on an eighttownhouse development in Auckland’s New Lynn after reading an article about him in a building magazine.
Despite being tight for space, all waste was sorted on site and diverted from landfill by Junk Run, or picked up by Unitec, which was conducting research into plastic waste.
Benton’s cold call to Roberts led to a collaboration between Auckland Council, Junk Run and Unitec that saw 90% of the waste from the build on Titirangi Rd diverted from landfill.
But for every Benton or Naylor Love (see main story), there is another developer at the bad end of town that does the exact opposite. Roberts has taken journalists to fast-growing Flat Bush in the city’s southeast to see just how bad it can be.
“The building sites in Flat Bush [for example] are eye-wateringly depressing,” he says. “It’s quite horrific out there. Extremely untidy sites. Huge amounts of waste. Just really bad behaviour. There are builders who throw waste on neighbouring properties, into reserves, onto berms. Their waste spills out onto the street.”
Some of the issues come from oneman-band-type operations. “In Flat Bush, the sections are often sold off individually to small developers. If you go to Paerata Rise, or the developments that Fletcher is doing, you won’t see those sorts of issues.”