Club members once again descended on the Warrnambool Racing Club to collect and recycle containers to raise funds for community service projects. A very big thank you to all those who helped out around the Woodford Cup. Thank you to those who helped set up the bins before the races, those who helped during the race meeting, and those who helped sort and transport the containers in the days after. A special thank you to Brendan for constructing an excellent sorting table for us at short notice.
Once again, the event proved to be a learning experience. We certainly applied the lessons from the Jericho Cup and collected a much greater volume of containers this time around. We are still collecting more rubbish than we would like and are having containers go into Wheelie Waste’s bins rather than ours, but not nearly as much as last time. A new challenge was that we had perhaps 1500 containers stolen from the racecourse on Tuesday morning.
Our final figure for the Woodford Cup was 6,216 containers collected. Without the theft this might have been around 7,700. This was below expectations, but at this rate would still put us on track to collect 50,000 containers over the May Race Carnival.
Collecting containers at these big race meetings is a small industrial process. We can continue to tweak our process to maximise the return of containers while minimising the labour input required from us. For example, between now and the May races we will get some professional stickers applied to all sides of our bins to make it clearer what the bins are for. Hopefully our returns will continue to improve as the project evolves.
Thanks again to all those wonderful members (and Narelle) who pitched in over the New Year.
