Elliot Chadwick and Emma Smith of Stratford Primary School afloat on a sea of lids. Photo: RNZ / Robin Martin
Taranaki school children have surpassed the wildest dreams of local council staff who set up a scheme to get rid of cream and milk bottle lids from Stratford's recycling collection.
The lids are considered a contaminant because they are a different kind of plastic.
Schools in the district collected a mammoth 135,694 lids - weighing in at more than 230 kilograms - over just 16 weeks.
Water and waste education officer Peter McNamara said the district's recycling had a low rate of contamination of between 3-5 percent, but when there were non-recyclables in a bin about 85 percent of the time, lids were the culprit.
He said lids presented a range of problems.
"If you leave the caps on they count as a contaminate because they can pop off, they can hold liquids in the bottles and the biggest thing is that any bottles about to be recycled have to be emptied.
"Also on top of that when you compact it into a bale they the become projectiles, literally like bullets flying across the room."
Stratford mayor Neil Volzke and Waste Education Manager Peter McMamara in a sea of cream and milk bottle lids. Photo: RNZ / Robin Martin
McNamara said the solution was to incentivise the caps' removal.
"So we came with an idea for how can we get people to remember to take their lids off, so that was the start of the competition.
"We expected to get about 15,000 and we actually ended up collecting over 135,000 caps in 16 weeks. I was very surprised, like I said our goal was 15,000."
Schools were offered cash prizes and certificates for the most lids collected relative to the size of the institution.
"So we started with the milk bottle and the cream bottle as one most children would know about and the idea was to instil in the children to take the lids off.
"Children are better at it and they will then teach their parents 'hey mum, dad take that off you can't put that in the recycling bin with the lid on'.
"So that was the get the children involved and they're our future so that's where we go."
Stratford Primary School teach Marlene Lewis says the school had collected about 45,000 lids. Photo: RNZ / Robin Martin
Marlene Lewis is a teacher at Stratford Primary School, which collected the most lids of any of the district's schools.
"We managed to collect close to 45,000 which was pretty amazing. We just got the whole school community onboard and it was a total focus for just about the whole year really.
"So it's been incredible quite exciting and really exciting to receive the bottle tops in from people off the street as well."
Elliot Chadwick, 12, is a pupil at Stratford Primary. She got it.
"They were polluting our planet and they're not very good for our environment. I know that they're really bad and take nearly a thousand years to decompose sometimes."
Abigail Meyer of Taranaki Diocesan School for Girls thought many people didn't know lids don't belong in the recycling collection. Photo: RNZ / Robin Martin
Abigail Meyer is a year 13 student at Taranaki Diocesan School for Girls.
She thought the competition was a great initiative.
"I think a lot of people don't realise they shouldn't be going in the recycling, so I think this is a really good idea to encourage people not to put them in the recycling.
"Our school just put a big bucket in the office so we all just brought in our bottle caps in in the morning put them in there."
The 16 year old was surprised so many lids had been collected overall.
"I definitely did not expect there to be this many when we came in this morning. I thought maybe 10,000 max, but that's just crazy to have 135,000."
Paige Jordan is from Marco School on the Forgotten World Highway.
"There's only 15 kids at our school and a lot of the parents got lids from cafes because lots of the parents were friends of cafe managers and stuff, so they got them from there, and then the others we just bought the milk home and collected them."
Paige Jordan of Marco School which won the prize for collecting the most lids relative to its size. Photo: RNZ / Robin Martin
She had learned a thing or two about lids.
"They are really bad for recycling unless they are recycled where the meant to be."
Marco School collected 11,700 lids and took out the top prize - $1000 to spend at local businesses.
Since the competition ran in the last two terms of last year the rate of recycling contamination attributed to lids has in the Stratford district has dropped to 35 percent and there were now plans to take the initiative region-wide.
As for the 135,000 lids they were off to a specialist recycling company to be made into new products.
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