Keeping our district sparkling

10 March 2016

Did you notice how good our district looked last weekend? It didn't happen by magic! Our team was busy cleaning up all the litter ahead of the Kellogg's Nutri-Grain IRONMAN New Zealand event and we think they did a great job!

Litter and fly-tipping has been increasing across the district this summer and our team spends a lot of time cleaning up rubbish and messes that we, as a community, shouldn't be making.

We collect a staggering 1.8 tonnes per week. This includes everything from pizza boxes left alongside rubbish bins to boxes of beer bottles left in parks and reserves to takeaway containers dumped in car parks.

Parks operations manager Andrew Moor said the entire parks team helped out with the litter effort - everyone from gardeners to lawn mowers to sanitation workers - because litter was everywhere and a clean district was what we were all aiming for. The problem was, it just kept piling up!

"We were picking up litter all week before IRONMAN and on Saturday morning, more had appeared in the places we'd just been," he said. "It's a real struggle to keep on top of it."

There were some major problem areas, he said, such as Reid's Farm, the parking bays along Lake Terrace, Spa Thermal Park, Control Gates Hill and Broadlands Road.

"People throw takeaway rubbish out their windows and litter blows off trailers on the way to the dump," he said. "We really want people to take care with how they dispose of their litter. If we all do our bit, we can live in a beautiful place that people want to visit."