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!