Te Wānanga O Raukawa - Pā Reo

The single biggest hurdles for the project team were finding who could take their construction waste and how they were going to get it there. Waste like cardboard or aluminium already had places where this waste could be recycled. However, a lot of waste generated on-site did not have an easy route for its diversion from landfill. For example, soft plastics from packaging was difficult for the team to divert from landfill. The team found suppliers like ‘saveBOARD’ who could take their soft plastics and turned them into panels which were then bought and used as construction materials on site. The team also sent most of their other LDPE type 4, (e.g. pallet wrap, scaffold wrap, timber wrap, etc) soft PVC and polypropylene to organisations like Second Life Plastics in Levin who turned that waste into things like garden edging to protect lawn edges, or keep mulch contained in gardens.

Te Wānanga o Raukawa placed an emphasis on trying to divert as much of their waste locally as possible in order to reduce the distance the waste would have to travel to be diverted. As an organisation, they first made unwanted materials and products available to staff and the local community for re-use purposes. After that, they found as many local suppliers as possible who could repurpose waste, with the project team sometimes delivering that waste to those suppliers themselves as they travelled around the community. For example, the local recycling centre took on construction waste like scaffolding netting and used it to make pillow and fabrics for pet beds.

Part of the success of the Pā Reo Campus waste management process was having a space on-site for where the waste could go to be sorted and stored. All waste on-site went to the waste transfer spot on campus, where it was manually sorted by the waste management team. In the beginning, most of the waste was being dumped in one pile, but as the wider team became more educated about the process, most waste was separated out before it arrived at the waste transfer spot on-site.

Having a place to store and sort waste proved invaluable. In the first instance, it let the team separate and send off the easily disposable waste like plastic 1, 2 & 5 (plastic bottles, containers etc) from the more complicated waste that had to be stored first. For example, the team initially struggled finding someone who could take on polystyrene, so they stored all of it in containers until they could find someone who could take on that type of waste.

The project team had done their homework on the products they would be getting for the build, and the products were chosen because they fitted the need and were recyclable. While choices made in the design process meant a lot of the raw construction material was sustainably sourced and recyclable, most of those materials were still wrapped in soft plastics, cardboard & polystyrene. The project team worked with suppliers in a couple ways to minimise this waste:

1. The project team communicated to all of their suppliers to remove any unnecessary packaging before it can arrive on-site. Part of the early work for the team was in setting up networks for diverting waste. Having that korero with product suppliers and finding out how they managed their waste and whether they could collaborate and send all of their packaging waste to the same place was a key part of their processes.
2. The project team looked at how all materials for construction could arrive in a state that was more easily recyclable. For example, the project team chose a different size of glue, because of the differences in the recyclability of the container that held the glue. For example, the team went from a 600ml plastic sausage of glue that they normally buy in bulk, to a 355ml cartridge which was 100% recyclable. They worked with the suppliers to try and get those at roughly the same price as what they would have normally spent on the 600ml bulk quantity.
3. The project team also looked at products that could be sold back to the supplier if it wasn’t used during the construction process. For example, the team used a supplier in Invercargill for their insulation who had a buy-back scheme. That company also arranged for pick up from site of any un-used material, which eliminated one of the larger challenges for the project team in trying to get waste to its destination.

One of the biggest challenges on-site was keeping waste free of contamination. The team found that as they were cleaning up the site and taking waste up to the sorting area, there is always some combination of different dusts, sawdust, food, and other debris that would get mixed in recyclable materials. While building products might have been specified as being recyclable, in the project team’s experience, these products could only be recycled if they were close to pristine, which was a challenge on site, and required a lot of extra effort cleaning recyclable materials at the waste sorting station.

The requirements of the Living Building Challenge meant that the project had no choice but to find an alternative to the landfill. The biggest challenge for the team was always finding a place where a certain type of waste could go, and then figuring out how they were going to get that bit of waste to its destination. For example, the team had very few local options in dealing with timber-offcuts. They tried to re-purpose or re-use as much of their off cuts as they could with the local community, but anything left-over from that process had to be driven up to Kirikiriroa / Hamilton by the Waste Management Officer.

There were other unexpected waste challenges the team encountered like the strapping tape that’s used for packing heavy pallets of timber. Some of that tape was made of polypropylene, and was able to be recycled, but some of that strapping tape was PVC and they looked very similar when sorted into the same pile. Their recycler would only accept it if the project team had done the sorting themselves, and guaranteed it was all polypropylene, which took considerable time and effort.

The project team acknowledged that the steps they took to sort and process their waste would be very challenging for more conventional projects. What the project team demonstrated was that reducing nearly all construction waste is possible, but that the waste and construction sectors need to continue to develop a wider distribution network to support smaller sites and contractors who also want to manage their waste, but don’t have the same resources to divert their waste from landfill.

The project team acknowledged the challenges in diverting all their waste to landfill, and it took a considerable amount of time, money, and effort to achieve this goal. However, there were decisions early on that put them in a good position to reduce their waste. Talking to suppliers about reducing the amount of packaging on building materials. Using the local community to re-purpose waste that would normally go to landfill. Recycling waste that is easier to sort, and finding places to store more challenging waste until you find a place and/or time to divert that waste safely.

The Pā Reo Campus project is an aspirational case for how construction waste diversion can be achieved in Aotearoa. The challenges the project team faced, and the solutions they found them, provide excellent examples for how the wider construction and waste sectors can begin and accelerate their waste diversion practices.