Ngaio Crofton Downs Residents Association

From this month (Saturday 1 February), we are going to run a trial to see what demand there is for recycling the blister packs used for packaging tablets. If you have blister packs at home waiting for a solution – this will be your solution!

Bring along the blister packs to our recycling at Ngaio Union Church, Saturday 1 February from 10am to 12 noon.

Please remove the outer cardboard box, and make sure there is no identifying personal information on them.

There is a cost for recycling blister packs, so we want to test the demand before committing to ongoing recycling.

The second guided bike ride is now open for bookings.

Wellington City Council, Ngaio Going Carbon Neutral and Pedal Ready are teaming up to run social bike tours of the recent street changes in Ngaio and the surrounding area. Build confidence and skills to travel safely and efficiently by paihikara (bike) while getting to know the bike improvements in Ngaio!

The ride will finish at Ngaio Union Church, where there will be the monthly Repair Cafe that runs till 1pm for those who want to attend. A good excuse to bring a friend and get your belongings repaired!

Please allow 2 hours for the ride. Arrive 30 minutes early if you are renting a bike.

The link for this event for more info and booking is Welly On Wheels Ngaio – Confidence & Skills for Biking – Wellington – Eventfinda

Saturday 1 February will be our first recycling day of the year – 10am to noon at Ngaio Union Church, Crofton Road.

Below is a refresher on the items that we collect, and a couple of requests to make the programme more enjoyable for the volunteers:

How to recycle with us

What we take each month includes:

• All plastic lids together – no need to separate into different plastic types – but must be lids or caps only.
• Small plastic items marked with the type 2 recycling symbol, and separated.
• Small plastic items marked with the type 5 recycling symbol, and separated.
• Metal Lids etc –including for eg Crown caps, metal screw tops, sparkling wine wires, metal jar lids, ring-pull caps.
• Household and hearing aid batteries.
• Oral care products and packaging from Colgate (is sent back to Colgate). Does not include electric toothbrush heads).
• Used shaving products – please no safety blades at this stage, they are dangerous.
• Curtains – must be mould free so they can be re-purposed.
• Wool – balls of wool which Crafty Volunteers, can use in their knitting for charity.
• Aluminium coffee pods from Nespresso – these re taken to the Nespresso recycling on Lambton Quay
• Rubber bands from delivered The Posts – which are returned to The Post

Additional Collections

Each month we have one additional collection so plan ahead for these collections for the rest of the year. The February collection will be of other small metal items. To see the complete schedule for 2024, follow this link – Recycling Schedule for 2025:

Each month this year at our recycling collections, we will also have a collection of other items that we will collect. We don’t collect these items each month to make management of the programme more simple, and make our drop off to the recycling stations more efficient.

Below are the additional items that we will be collecting each month, and the dates (first Saturday each month):

Wellington City Council, Ngaio Going Carbon Neutral and Pedal Ready are teaming up to run social bike tours of the recent street changes in Ngaio and the surrounding area.

Build confidence and skills to travel safely and efficiently by paihikara (bike) while getting to know the bike improvements in Ngaio!

The first of the Ngaio guided rides is now live! Happening on Friday the 24^th of January, 4.30 to 6.30pm, finishing up at the Ngaio Union Church for a BBQ and boardgames! You can find the more info on the event registration page:

Welly On Wheels Ngaio – Confidence & Skills for Biking – Wellington – Eventfinda

And the facebook event here:

https://www.facebook.com/share/18LLQQmNYc

A quick reminder to everyone who has the monthly recycling ingrained as a habit – that we miss out the first Saturday of January.

Our next recycling day is Saturday 1 February 2025.

Look out for a post soon, that will recap the changes that happened late last year, and will provide the schedule of irregular collections of “other” items.

Happy recycling
Ian

Entry is free, but you must register so the organisers know the numbers coming. Links to free tickets for the two events are below:

• Bioblitz public day guided walks
• Bioblitz public day stream sampling

Kia ora to the fantastic recycling community of Ngaio and Crofton Downs,

Thank you all so much for your mahi in recycling so much material over the last few years. We have been keeping a record of what has been collected, and soon the Sustainability Trust website will have a page where you can see how much has gone through our collection station.

Now however, I want to let everyone know that there has been  significant and welcome change to the recycling of plastic lids. There is good reason, which I explain below, but first the changes.

We are now accepting ALL plastic lids and caps and there is no need to separate by plastic type, or to check that they are recycle type 2 or 5. These lids and caps can also be unnumbered, the only catch is they need to be a lid or a cap.

We have been collecting other items with the lids and caps, such as pill pots, contact lens cases, and laundry scoops We will continue to take these, but they still need to be separated out for processing.

Items other than lids and caps

• Must still be labelled as a #2 or #5 type plastic
• Must be separated into #2 and #5
• Must be clean

You can find out more on Te Aro Zero Waste’s updated Plastic and Metal Recycling webpage.

Why this change – and why only caps and lids? 

The reason for this change is the Caps and Lids Recycling Scheme which is an industry-funded programme operated by the Packaging Forum, and designed to ensure as many metal and plastic caps and lids as possible are diverted from landfill (more info here). This funding is however only for caps and lids, so other items need to be processed separately. These items will still be sent to the processors who took No2 and No5 plastics in the past, and need to be separated to avoid contamination at processing and consequently a lower quality product.

Assessing Aotearoa’s war on Nature, a talk by Professor Jonathan Boston

• at Ngaio Union Church
• starting 7pm
• on Sunday 1 December

Jonathan Boston is Prof Emeritus at the VUW school of governance. He was seconded to the Climate Commission for a time recently, and has researched managed retreat.

He will address what he sees as the coalition Government’s attack on Nature, and in particular on climate change.

Jonathan’s recent article ‘The war on nature’ was published in the November issue of Policy Quarterly, which can be read by clicking here.

It is time again for our annual photo competition.

The categories for 2024 are: gardens, insects, and could do better – a very wide interpretation of each category will be accepted, and we will put them into one of the categories when they are submitted.

Eligible entries will need to be still photos taken in Ngaio or Crofton Downs, with no restrictions on date . They can be taken at any time – if you have a favourite sitting in a photo album, then that can be entered as long as it was taken locally.

There is also no age limits on the photographer – all budding photographers are welcome to enter.

To submit your entry, email it to  photo@ngaio.org.nz (preferably as an attachment) and we will sort them into a category.  The deadline for entries is 17 November, with the winners announced at our AGM on 20 November.

There are prizes of $50 for the winner of each section, and all entrants will receive a one year membership of NCDRA.