Recycling plays its part

In 2006, Police took close to 740,000 kg of waste to landfills.

Estimates suggest this amount could be reduced by as much as 75 - 80 percent if a comprehensive recycling programme is introduced, reducing the impact on landfills by half-a-million kilograms per year.

For the past two years in Dunedin, Detective Mike Bracegirdle has taken his personal concerns for the environment to work and implemented a recycling scheme at the Central Police Station.

“We’ve all been trained pretty well to do it at home, why can’t we do it at work?” he asks.

“When you see the volumes coming out of a big station like Dunedin, it’s a crime.”

And being a police officer with an interest in recycling, Mike’s doing his part to solve that crime.

Yellow recycling wheelie-bins have been placed on each of the four floors of the station and smaller yellow bins in every kitchen - taking care of everything from plastic sandwich wrappers and aluminium cans to glass and cardboard.

Contents from the secure blue wheelie bins - housing confidential papers - are also recycled.

“It’s been an educational thing that we’ve got to keep hammering,” says Mike.

“By and by the guys are getting trained and it’s becoming second-nature to most of them now. Some are resistant to it.”

Mike says once a week the building supervisor wheels out the bins to the backyard for the ‘envirowaste’ collectors to take it away. Once a week vast amounts of cardboard stacked in the station loading bay are also taken away.

“We could work on this ad infinitum and really get the station waste down to a real minimum. But when everyone’s running around policing, it’s a matter of slowly, slowly catch the monkey.”

Mike says the next step in his plan is to get all the outstations recycling.

Giving recycling a push. From left, Dunedin Detective Mike Bracegirdle

and Dunedin Central Building Supervisor John Geeves amidst the yellow

recycling bins and cardboard.