Coast To Coast Clever Thinking

Phillippa Peddie recently made the move from the West Coast to the East, but one thing that didn’t change with her location was her interest in environmental issues and her use of reusable resources. While living on the West Coast Phillippa was part of the Lighthouse Trust Centre (LTC) in the Buller District, which was very active in lobbying for waste management policies that were more environmentally responsible and could recognise ‘waste’ as a potential resource. That potential is something that Phillippa’s own reuse clearly demonstrates, and a dedication to reusing resources has been integrated into her lifestyle.

Her contact with Waste Exchange provided a perfect source of reusable and recyclable resources. Phillippa first met TerraNova Waste Exchange facilitator Jim Forsman about five years ago through the Wastebusters network. Through her contact with Jim, Phillippa became aware of the resources available via Waste Exchange, and through the service she accessed a range of items useful in her local community.

Large steel tins that had been used to contain printers’ ink were sold as a fundraiser for the LTC. The tins were sold as ash buckets for $2, and proved ideal in a place where hot ash in rubbish bins caused several house fires a year. Phillippa’s next acquisition was timber that been used for windscreen packaging. With some clever thinking the timber packaging was covered with sheeting and used to create partitions at a Natural Therapies festival Phillippa was organising with fellow LTC advocate Dawn Chandler.

Phillippa now lives in Lincoln in Canterbury but she is still making use of Waste Exchange, this time for herself. Recently she collected large coffee sacks to create a shade sail for her granddaughter’s sandpit. Phillippa unpicked the bags, and reused the string they had been sewn together with to crochet them together to form the sail – totally closed loop reuse!

Phillippa also sourced 20 litre plastic buckets, again for fireplace use. Phillippa has a solid fuel fire in her house and was collecting bulk coal from a supplier. However, she found lifting and using the sacks it came in heavy and difficult. Now she takes the 20 litre buckets to the supplier and fills them directly. “They are much easier to lift and use” she says. “You take one bucket inside at time as needed, rather than collecting a bulk load and then having to shovel it into a coal bucket.” Phillippa lateral thinking is a brilliant example of how something totally useful (and free) can be created from materials previously thought of as ‘waste’ – the lonely limitations are your imagination.