Street Champion Kate.
Project: Community Recycling Drop-off Station
Suburb: Banksia Park, South Australia
Kate is a Street Champion who, along with their family, have started a “Community Recycling Drop-off Station”.
They have provided a location for people to drop of tricky items such as batteries, ink cartridges, milk bottle lids, bread tags and pens. All of these items are recoverable and don’t need to be landfill, but we found that lot of people don’t know this. We wanted to make it easy for people as we believe that if something is easy, more people will do it. We then take the items to approved collection points which we were going to anyway with our own personal collection of these items.
“I wanted to pick one thing, and do it to the best of my ability. I have met so many more people in my community because of this project, which has been wonderful.”
Kate, what’s your best piece of advice for anyone embarking on an ‘In Our Street’ project?
“Find out what support you will have before you embark on the project, and find out if there is a need for it in your community. Make your message clear, and make it easy for people to participate. Figure out how you will get your message out to people that you’re doing this project.”
What has this project meant to you?
“Providing this for my community has been really important to me, to be able to help items that are recoverable from ending up in landfill. After visiting some of our waste resource centres, I wanted to do more to help our environment. I wanted to pick one thing, and do it to the best of my ability. I have met so many more people in my community because of this project, which has been wonderful. I have been able to engage them in conversation about why we are providing this service. I believe that if people know better, they have the chance to do better.”
