We should be very proud of our Northland Tradies and their commitment to sustainable waste management
Northland Tradies need to pat themselves on the back, when everybody said Tradies wouldn't do it; that they wouldn't take the time to sort their waste and they didn't really care about what happened to their waste after it went into the skip bin. Well, they couldn't have been more wrong.
Over the last twelve months in association with the Northland Tradie community, Marsden Waste and Recycling have been working on a very special solution to reduce waste in an area renown for those huge skip bins on construction sites fill to the brim with timber, nails, gib-board, plastic and demolition debris... all headed to a landfill near you.
The solution: sorting construction waste at the source using a modular metal frame to hold a selection of colour coded waste bags for: timber/wood, plasterboard, card-board, scrap metal, plastic and green waste.
An average new home build can generate up to xx tonnes of waste, by using Tradie Bags and sorting waste at the source we can reduce that down to xx tonnes.
How it all got started
A couple of years ago, our co-founder Janine Abernethy was looking at the total weight volumes of construction waste that we as a small waste management company in Northland we were sending to landfill and thought there has to be a better than dumping all of these reuse-able building materials. But like all great inventions, coming up with the solution took a lot of trial and error. Not to mention a few detractors who said it would never work, "tradies will never sort their own waste, they don't have time and time is money!".
Well they were wrong, the world is changing and even before the horrific climate events of this year, Tradie's all over Northland have been making a significant contribution to reducing our overall waste by taking the time to sort their waste at the source. So just like your home waste; Northland builders and their sub-contractors now seperate their waste into different bags.
This means that the waste doesn't get contaminated and can be reused or recycled. One example is plaster-board, once it is sorted and separated, it doesn't get covered in contaminants like paint/oil/debris and can then be recycled and used as Gypsum, which is an excellent source of both Calcium and Sulphur for the horticultural and agricultural sectors.
While other solutions like sorting the waste after it has been collected in the skip bins are being used throughout the country. These solutions are labour intensive, resource intensive (carting waste around before it is sorted) and the waste gets contaminated often making it difficult or impossible to reuse or recycle. Sorting at source with Tradie Bags offers a huge number of benefits:
1. The number of times a piece of waste is handled is reduced
2. Reduced costs associated with transporting heavy skip bins to and from building sites/landfills/waste management yards. Both when they are full and also when they are empty (Tradie Bags fold up just like your reusuable shopping bags and the modular frames are also collapsable so Tradie bags can be delivered to site in most small vehicles - no more heavy trucks carrying empty steel bins.
3. Sorting at source significantly reduces contamination
4. Reuse of waste: timber, scrap steel, cardboard and plasterboard means we reduce our reliance on virgin materials and keep items from creating emissions in landfill
5. Waste management cost savings - the cost of dumping waste in landfill is rising and so it should as a deterrent to what we throw away, so reducing overall waste volume we are able to offer a reduction in the costs
6. Money back from valuable waste like scrap steel
On the back of the success of Tradie Bag's in Northland we are now rolling out Tradie Bag's nationally and are about to launch a solution for our local Northland consumers too.