Do you know what happens to your kerbside recycling once it leaves your place in the truck?
At the recent Visy Open Day, 142 Aucklanders got a behind-the-scenes look at how their kerbside recycling gets sorted.
The Visy Onehunga Material Recovery Facility is where the contents of your Auckland Council recycling bin ends up and its ongoing journey begins. As the largest material recovery facility in New Zealand, it sorts Auckland's kerbside recycling materials into their individual types – paper, steel, glass, plastics and aluminium.
The open day offers Aucklanders the chance to attend one of four half-hour educational sessions to learn about what Visy do with different recyclable materials, as well as how to recycle right.
A maximum of 50 people can attend a session and all four sessions were fully booked for the 8 June open day. Despite bad weather, attendance was the highest yet.
“The world’s recycling infrastructure is under pressure. One of the biggest problems is when people put rubbish and nonrecyclable items or dirty recyclable containers in their kerbside recycling bins as it affects the quality and value of these materials,” says Councillor Penny Hulse, Chair of the Environment and Community Committee.
“Recycling contamination significantly reduces the quality and value of recyclable materials. We need clean recyclables in order to provide recyclers with high-quality materials that can be recycled into other useful products.
“It was great to see such a strong community turnout for the Visy Open Day sessions and encouraging to see Aucklanders keen to find out more about how recycling works and what can and can’t be recycled. Lots of community groups and representatives were present, eager to learn and to go back and share with their local communities, so that people know how to recycle right.”
If you missed the chance to attend the Open Day and would like to learn more about the Visy Recycling Centre and what they do, watch this video.
Another day of Visy Educational Sessions is planned towards the end of this year.
To learn more about how to recycle right, read this OurAuckland story.
