A community effort to recycle material from Whangārei's old Harbour Board building has come to a close and after two and a half years of chipping, project leader Andrew Garratt is counting nearly 40,000 bricks to be used in the new Hundertwasser Arts Centre.
"Part of Hundertwasser's philosophy was to build out of recycled material. So when the old Harbour Board building was demolished, the decision was made to recycle the bricks and the timber," Garratt said.
Deconstruction work, on what used to be one of Whangārei's oldest buildings, started in July 2018 and shortly after Garratt and his team of volunteers picked up the bricks and started chipping off unwanted mortar.
He said all the recycling work was entirely done by volunteers so the project remained within the community and was resident-led, rather than outsourced to an unknown entity.
Since 2018, Garratt held weekly working bees, with a longer project break in 2019, and gathered on average 10 volunteers on site.