School’s struggle to recycle

A rural school which has been without a recycling service for more than a year after being overlooked in a council shake-up could soon be going green again.

Rawhitiroa School, near Eltham in South Taranaki, lost its fortnightly collections when Taranaki’s three district councils entered into a region-wide refuse collection contract with EnviroWaste in late 2015.

Although the previous contractor, Waste Management, had collected the recycling, Rawhitiroa was 3.5km past EnviroWaste’s last collection point.

The only option was to get a private contractor, which it could not afford.

Rawhitiroa and its 38 students had been involved in a number of green schemes, such as Enviroschool, which encourages environmentally-friendly habits, and the Paper4schools programme, which offers schools a free native tree for every two cubic metres of waste paper they recycle.

But since the recycling collections stopped the youngsters have been putting their plastic, cardboard and paper into a skip bin on the rugby field.

‘‘We used to get two (wheelie bins) picked up once a fortnight,’’ principal Jan Westfield said.

‘‘At the moment there’s no recycling facility at the school...it can’t go anywhere else.’’

She said although the school wanted to be sustainable, it was a matter of weighing up the best use of its budget.

South Taranaki District Council said it had been unaware of the problem until it was brought to its attention on Tuesday.

Operations manager Herbert Denton said: ’’Rawhitiroa School’s recycling had been collected by our former solid waste contractor, Waste Management, but it wasn’t officially recorded.

‘‘When the solid waste contract moved to Envirowaste Ltd, because the school wasn’t on our records, we weren’t aware the service was needed. We look forward to working together with Rawhitiroa School and coming up with a solution that will make recycling easier for them.’’