Mangere Bridge Food and Wine Festival

Our First Measurable Success: 140kg diverted from landfill!

Our WasteWise team contributed expertise and people power to the annual Mangere Bridge Food and Wine Festival last week, making this our first official Zero Waste event.  Our environmental educators Meredith and Caroline (along with our organiser extraordinaire, Janine) put their Zero Waste training to work, liaising with Carol-Anne (Village Manager, Mangere Bridge Progressive Business Association) before the event to ensure that as much of the waste produced as possible was compostable or recyclable.  Most vendors cooperated with the packaging advice given, although some of the regular market stallholders continued to use polystyrene packaging. This is something we will need to assist them with in the future.

Using our community networking skills, our WasteWise team rallied local residents to act as waste champions. Prior to the event, we worked together with 10 new recruits to achieve a flyer drop to 2500 Mangere Bridge households, using the opportunity to not only advertise the festival but also draw attention to our Mangere Bridge WasteWise project and invite residents to our next event. On the day, six new volunteers helped to supervise our two (very professional-looking!) bin stations, bringing fresh enthusiasm and passion to our efforts.  

We all donned Zero Waste caps and aprons and positioned ourselves strategically between bins so we could assist people in sorting and disposing of their rubbish appropriately.  Pictures and actual items of rubbish were displayed on the bins to make the job easier for festival-goers (and ourselves!).  A myriad of waste items were in use on the day, from compostable wooden cutlery, vegetable-based plastics and paper towels, recyclable containers, bottles and cans, to polystyrene containers and plastic wrappers destined for landfill. 

Most people were co-operative and enthusiastic about our efforts to reduce waste.  Once again, children and young people were particularly good role models for their parents and other adults!  Several people were interested in the upcoming changes to kerbside rubbish collection and asked for more information.  Only a few people resisted the opportunity to sort their rubbish and expressed their disapproval of what we were doing.

However, the results spoke for themselves.  At the end of the festival we weighed the rubbish bags for the first time, which meant that we were able to accurately ‘measure’ the impact of our work.  And what an impact it was!  We were able to divert almost 90% of the waste produced at the Food and Wine Festival (or 140kg of rubbish) away from landfill.  Over 50% of the total rubbish collected was taken away for composting (Thanks to our faithful friend, Steve Rickerby of We Compost, who delivered the bins, brought the scales and took away all streams of waste, free of charge).

“The waste was really clean and well sorted”, said Steve, after the event.  Festival organiser Carol-Anne expressed her sincere thanks to everyone.  “The WasteWise team raised a lot of awareness and were commended for the initiative”.  Local businesses were pleased that the regular sidewalk bins were covered over because the WasteWise stations made for a much tidier event.

With another successful WasteWise event under our belts, our group is continuing to refine our strategy so we can make the biggest difference possible in our community.  From here, we will continue to support Carol-Anne in encouraging the market vendors to change their packaging to compostable or recyclable alternatives.  For future Zero Waste events, we would like to find a way for the rubbish collected during the clean up to be sorted before it is taken away by contractors, to ensure that no opportunities to reduce waste are missed!

All in all it was a wonderfully successful event that helped to raise our profile in the community and to invite more local volunteers to join our growing endeavour.