Container Recycling.
It has been a huge week for us down at the racecourse over the May Racing Carnival. Thank you to all those members, partners and friends who helped over the three days. Whether it was people contributing for an hour or two, or all those hardy souls who pitched in over the full three days, it was all greatly appreciated. It is difficult to single people out, but special mention should be made of Brendan, who build much of the infrastructure from recycled materials that allowed us to sort the containers and then worked tirelessly over the carnival. We also need to thank Hutto, who set up the project, did so much of the organsing, and was our liaison with the Racing Club and Wheelie Waste when anything needed to be sorted out. In addition Hutto put in long days at our recycling project and in the committee room.
It was great to partner with the Warrnambool Racing Club in this project, and they should be congratulated on another successful carnival. Thanks also to Jason and the good people at TOMRA, who couldn't have been more helpful. Actually, TOMRA went above and beyond to assist us over the week.
Over the three days we collected and recycled 53,880 cans, plastic bottles, and glass bottles. This both kept this material out of landfill and provides much needed funds to support other club projects.
TOMRA's records show that our Rotary club has recycled 64,333 containers since November 1st last year. Of the 1065 charities and community groups registered with TOMRA across Western Melbourne and Western Victoria, we have recycled the greatest number of containers by some margin. Not a bad effort for a small bunch of feral Rotarians!
Well done and thank you to all those members, partners and friends who contributed over the carnival.
For people who were not there, it is difficult to convey the volume of material we recycled. TOMRA had thirteen of these big skips (see below and see blue wheelie bin on left of image for scale). When we deposited the containers collected on Thursday, we filled all thirteen of these skips and the count had to be stopped so that the TOMRA staff could empty the skips with the forklift before continuing the count. The Thursday collection represented about half the volume we collected during the week.
Someone saw this photo on Facebook and wrote,
'A pocket square while dealing with the bins - well played sir!'
Next year we plan to sink a bore, pump up and bottle the ground water, and market it as ‘Central Rotary Natural Springwater’.
