Most days we drive past the shop to ensure that anything that is dropped there is taken inside.
There’s two reasons for that. Firstly to make sure that we get to it before someone else ransacks it, and secondly, to honour those who have chosen to drop off their pre-loved belongings, by ensuring they can be properly recycled, before becoming a rain soaked mess.
She reckons that presenting the shop and its exterior, in a tidy cared for fashion, encourages others to drop off their “good stuff” to enhance that image.
As with cast-off clothing, so with other stuff we no longer have a use for. The proliferation of littering and fly-tipping is getting some community airing, as to the best ways to deal with this problem.
One issue is cost. It was extraordinary to learn recently, that picking up roadside litter on state highways in Northland costs NZTA almost $1M per year, all of which could be going to enhanced road maintenance.
Another thing is that the litter ends up in waterways and the wider environment creating further polluting problems. Then, how does it make a community look if the streetscape is a mess, suggesting that no one cares about it?
This was characterised in 1982 as the “Broken Window Phenomenon” described as “Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.
This is as true in nice neighbourhoods as in run down ones. Window breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window breakers, whereas others are populated by window lovers.
Rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing, and it’s a fun thing to do!”
If we break windows when no one seems to care, we are also dropping more rubbish than ever.
Keep New Zealand Beautiful is a charitable organisation committed to inspiring, educating and empowering the communities of New Zealand to restore, preserve and improve our environmental future through active participation. It conducts evidence-based research, and last year published the latest National Litter Audit for 2022.
This found that, compared with the previous stocktake four years earlier, more litter was being found, whether by items, weight or volume. Plastic is the biggest issue with a 72% increase by items, while there was a seven-fold increase in the estimated volume of littered paper and cardboard, with a three-fold increase in the volume of waste illegally dumped.
While we might consider that KNZB has a special interest in the issue, the fact remains that we produce an increasing amount of waste as litter, much of it thrown away without thinking about it. Much of it finds its way to our roadsides and streetscapes where roading authorities and local councils need to deal with it.
In this context, under ratepayer pressure to reduce costs and save money, Auckland Council is on a mission to remove 30 % of the public rubbish bins with a ratepayer saving of at least $9m.
That’s 3,000 of the 10,000 council-owned rubbish bin stocks, with the principal criteria being: bush parks and walking tracks, low use neighbourhood parks, bins not co located with other streetscape, and historically under utilised bins. With that sort of saving other councils are showing interest.
There is already outrage about overfilled and smelly bins as the council shakes down the policy, but the literature suggests that there is room for creativity and more efficient use of collection resources. Bin removal could force people in the road and streetscape, to take their rubbish with them.
The literature also suggests that better identified, creative and attractive street furniture, more strategically placed, has effective potential. Apparently bins can have a sensor fitted which indicates when the bin is almost full, which then communicates this through an app, to the collection contractor.
We could also just sort it at home, dispose of in our rubbish bins and sort it for the op shop. But be kind to the op shop workers, they don’t need to be disposers of your household rubbish.
