Annual Summer Football Tournament on Mangere Mountain – 15th March 2015

By Janine Nillesen

Each year the summer soccer season is well supported by many teams that enjoy the sport and love playing on the awesome fields on Mangere Mountain. To celebrate the end of the season, a tournament is organised. Our Ambury Farm Crew Team, which includes farm rangers and volunteers, has played for the past eight seasons and one year we even won the tournament!

     Tournament day is great fun! There are teams, families, gazebos, chilly bins as well as plenty of kai and competitiveness. These things are always the same. And although we’re not winning these days, our team camaraderie remains the same – enthusiastic and loyal supporters of the tournament.

     Those of you who play football know it’s thirsty work and generates a lot of rubbish from drink bottles of various shapes and sizes. The small rubbish bins on the mountain simply don’t have the capacity to deal with the waste created on tournament day. Every year the rubbish bins on the mountain overflow with recycling.

     This year I decided to take action. My aim was to reduce the recyclables going to landfill. Following the approach of our Friends of the Farm group, I resolved to Keep it Simple. I took two bins from the Friends Kit and clearly labelled them as recycling bins. I placed them next to the landfill bins by the fields.

     I’m proud to say that at this year’s soccer tournament there were no rubbish bins on the mountain oozing with recycling, no bottles left lying around the fields and no litter left scattered on the ground. Instead we had two wheelie bins full of recycling, which would never have been able to fit in the existing bins and would have created a real eyesore.

     Our Friends of the Farm group is spearheading a ‘wastewise’ initiative across the community, to encourage individuals, households, businesses and groups to take action – small and big – that will reduce the amount of waste going to landfill and minimise our impact on the environment.

     What can you do? If your group is organising an event think about how you might reduce the waste it produces. We have a great resource to share – Ten Top Tips – that might give you some ideas and we’re also on hand to give advice and encouragement. We’re planning to launch a wastewise household pilot project in a couple of months and if you want to take part, contact us through our facebook page (www.facebook.com/FriendsoftheFarmMangereBridge).

     Giving people the option to recycle at our annual soccer tournament worked a treat! Fancy that! By giving people the option to put their waste in the right waste stream they embraced the opportunity and showed respect for the special mountain we all love. And it was simple!

     So our wee dilemma was easily solved on the day and our collective wastewise achievement was celebrated with a drink from a water bottle. A well-deserved beverage from another type of bottle also went down well at the end of the day!

Coordinating efforts to minimise our environmental impact

By Frances Hancock

This month Bronwen Turner, deputy chair of Manukau Harbour Restoration Society, Janine Nillesen, park ranger of Ambury Farm Park and leader of Friends of the Farm, and I (Frances Hancock) also of Friends of the Farm, met at Ruby Red café in Mangere Bridge to discuss how our organisations can work together (and with others) to maximise our shared commitment to caring for our enviornment – especially, the farm, foreshore and harbour.  Brian Pilkington, long-time resident and secretary of Mangere Bridge Residents and Ratepayers Association, sent his apologies and also expressed their support for this initiative.

The meeting builds on work currently underway by Friends of the Farm to foster a more “wastewise caring community”, and in particular to develop a community calendar of local events and opportunities for our growing number of community volunteers. Over the past couple of years we’ve been assisting various groups in the community with their events through our wastewise activities.  We’ve also been working with others to organise community working bees. We realise we need a more coordinated approach.

Bronwen, Janine and I quickly began to identify existing and new opportunities to work together, such as Seaweek activities held in March, annual foreshore clean-ups (held in autumn and spring), and mangrove working bees. We also discussed ways to ensure a coordinated approach, including promoting events through our databases, facebook pages, websites, our local Neighbourly website, and local community newsletters. 

 In beginning to map out the calendar we recognised other key events in the community, such as the annual Portage Crossing in February, the Business Association’s Village Food and Wine Festival in April, Ambury Farm Day in October, the wonderful Trolley Derby in November, and of course the Christmas Parade in December.  There are, of course, many other local events that happen on an annual basis such as car boot sales and school fund-raisers.

Friends of the Farm hosts an annual community visioning evening called “Sweet Talks” in May (the second one is coming up!) and we want to put that on the calendar. We’re also planning to host an annual Community Picnic and were looking at the best time for that special event, given other community activities.  Regrettably we had to postpone the planned community picnic last year because of poor weather, so we hope to avoid another disappointment this year.  

As time goes on we plan to connect with other groups in the community so we can grow the calendar of events and also talk about how we can support one another.  For example, we discussed reconnecting with Sea Cleaners to see if they can be regular supporters of our foreshore and harbour clean-ups. We also discussed teaming up with Watercare to do a working bee on the bird roosts, and Janine offered to coordinate that event with Watercare and the Friends group. We considered the ongoing need for mangrove removal in the bird habitat areas.

Finally, we talked about identifying local groups, residents and businesses who may be willing to join with others to take responsibility for looking after “a patch” of our beautiful local environment – such as an area of the foreshore. The “MY PATCH” approach is about encouraging groups of people to put their heart and their labour into an annual working bee, with the support of Friends, Residents and Ratepayers Association, and Manukau Harbour Restoration Society.

The discussions are ongoing but we made an exciting start and Carol-Anne Armitage, the former Mangere Bridge Village business manager, is going to help us take the project forward. Importantly, we all recognised that we need to work together to achieve more and also focus on doing things as well as we can, to build interest and commitment among our growing group of volunteers. We also know that our efforts build on those of many others who have done so much over the years and in whose footsteps we walk.

Showing the Manukau Harbour we care (by Frances Hancock)

Looking back, it was an impressive haul and a sorry sight. On 28 February 2015 around 20 community volunteers from different organisations joined ranks to pick up rubbish along the rocky foreshore under the new Mangere Bridge, near the muddy Waka Ama launch site off Mahunga Drive, and under the flaxes shouldering the motorway off ramp.

After two hours of scaling rock, tramping through mud, and bush whacking their way through the flax to clear rubbish caught in its leaves the volunteers had picked up two boat loads of rubbish, amounting to 5,800 litres, and showed the Harbour “we care”.

The event was organised by Manukau Harbour Restoration Society (MHRS) in conjunction with Seaweek, an annual week-long event that creates a myriad of learning and volunteer opportunities across the country to raise awareness about the health and wellbeing of Aotearoa New Zealand harbours, foreshore, bird and sea life.  

MHRS was joined by a crowd of Waka Ama enthusiasts who came with a great attitude and members of the Mangere Bridge Residents and Ratepayers, The Onehunga Enhancement Society (known locally as TOES), and our own Friends of the Farm. 

This year Sea Cleaners also came to the party with its boat. At the helm was the fearless, energetic and visionary Captain Hayden on a quest to work with community volunteers to clean up the harbour.  For over a decade Sea Cleaners have been trawling the Waitemata for rubbish and with the support of Watercare was able to invest its resources in supporting local efforts to clean up the Manukau.

“It was terrific to work alongside people from different organisations who feel the same way about our Harbour,” said Bronwen Turner, deputy chair of Manukau Harbour Restoration Society. “And it’s very rewarding to see the change a group of volunteers can make when we work together.”

The two hour stint was long enough to make a noticeable impact and create new friends, without being overly taxing. All involved are keen to work together again to care for “our harbour”.

“We spend so much time on the water,” a Waka Ama enthusiast said, “it’s important for us to give back and show we care.”  

I (Frances) love our community working bees and always come away feeling a huge sense of pride and satifiscation for what we can achieve together. I have driven alongside the rubbish-laden flax by the motorway off-ramp leading to Mahunga Drive for a long time and felt upset by what greeted visitors and residents taking this first exit off the motorway and into South Auckland. I went to the working bee with a sense of mission – to clean up this eye sore and show our visitors and residents that “we care” about our patch.  I collected three huge bags of rubbish from that 100 metre stretch alone.  A huge thanks to my “pick-up partner” Karen for the great work she did alongside me. We talked as we worked and afterwards I visited her home and met her husband and daughter who also participated in the clean-up. It was a great way to spend a few hours on a gorgeous Saturday morning with them and others. I now feel inspired to organise a community working bee in May – so watch this space.

Portage Crossing event diverts 90% of its waste away from landfill 7 February 2015

Our waste reduction skills and expertise were called upon once again this month, when we were asked to assist with the annual Portage Crossing event at the Mangere Bridge waterfront domain. Friends of the Farm drew on our faithful volunteer base to monitor bins and help people sort their rubbish into recyclables, compostables and landfill waste, a now familiar process for many Mangere Bridge locals!  

“(The rubbish sorting) was pretty successful and very well received by the event goers, who were very co-operative, as were the stall holders” said one of our WasteWise environmental educators. Of the 198kg of rubbish collected, 130kg was able to be composted and 48kg recycled.  This means we achieved a whopping 90% diversion of rubbish away from landfill! 

Our team is keen to support event organisers with their planning for next year’s Portage Crossing and would love to pass on our skills and knowledge to enable the club to take the reins on waste reduction for themselves.  We’ve recommended that vendors be required to use only recyclable or compostable packaging (rather than polystyrene) to increase the diversion from landfill even further.  We’ve also suggested a more prominent position for bin stations, as it was difficult for people to spot us amongst the huge crowd. 

Thank you so much to all of you who gave your time and energy on your long weekend to help out.  A lot of people found out about our group and our commitment to a WasteWise caring community and loved what we were doing.  Thanks also to the organisers of the Portage Crossing event who’ve shown huge commitment towards reducing waste at this popular community event.  Dale, the MC on the day, did a fabulous job of promoting our group and encouraging people to sort their rubbish into the right bins.  We look forward to supporting you in your WasteWise efforts next year!