Everyone’s problem
A tsunami of rubbish threatens our lifestyle and future

Children shuffle through mounds of stinking rubbish, idly kicking empty plastic bottles, scattering the feral chickens that had been picking at the heaps of mouldy food scraps. Scampering across this fetid playground, several large rats watch the children, scrounging for their next meal.
A nightmare scenario derived from some writer’s fertile imagination?
Guess again.
This is the reality facing Rarotonga, quite possibly in your grandchildren’s lifetime, if something isn’t done immediately to curb the amount of rubbish dumped into the Rarotonga Waste Facility, an area commonly referred to simply as “the landfill”.
Fortunately for our future generations, action is already being taken on several fronts to ensure Rarotonga, and the other islands in the chain, do not sink under the weight of poor solid waste management.
In this feature, we talk to a number of people who are making an effort to stem the tsunami of rubbish that threatens our lifestyle and future.
The Environmental Officer
Keri Herman is a senior environmental officer with the National Environment Service. He’s been at this job for five years, or roughly the same time the latest landfill has been open. That landfill was predicted to take two decades’ worth of rubbish. Those predictions have already been proven wrong.
“Initially, we thought we had 20 years,” says Herman. “At the rate we’re going, we’re probably looking at only 10 years. The quantity of waste that is there is larger than we expected. It just goes to show that people are not recycling the way we wanted them to recycle. Trying to change people’s attitudes and behaviour is the biggest problem.”
In an effort to rectify that situation, the NES has been pushing its message about recycling the likes of plastic bottles and aluminium and tin cans for the past six years.
“Initially, we started off with the children,” says Herman, “because we believe school children are the best ambassadors to carry our initiatives in terms of recycling. From there, the message will get back to their parents and then to their community.”
Herman says new restrictions are being introduced at the landfill in an effort to keep out the items that don’t belong in a rubbish tip.
“All collectors coming up there now will need to be checked to ensure there’s no organic material getting in,” he says. “If you have organic material, take it back. Just a lot of recyclables? Take it back.”
Herman says he’s disappointed the landfill hasn’t been managed better.
“If people had done their jobs, then the landfill wouldn’t be in this state,” he says. “It makes you wonder what we’ve been doing for the past five years.”
Herman says the NES has nearly finished putting together a National Waste Strategy.
“Once that’s completed, it will at least provide a road map where we should be going, in terms of managing our waste,” he says.
But will the strategy make a difference to the island?
“I like to believe it will,” says Herman. “It will be environmentally more friendly and cleaner.”
The Rubbish Collector
Teariki Heather has a right to be doubly concerned about the management of solid waste on Rarotonga.
First of all, his company, T&M Heather, collects the household rubbish six days a week. And, more importantly, the current landfill is located on his family’s property. So, all your garbage ends up in his backyard, as it were.
“I believe rubbish is the responsibility of every individual on the island,” he says of the 10-20 kilograms of waste each household produces every week.
“The big question for me today is, if this landfill fills in over a short period of time, where are we going to put the next one?” he says. “People don’t want this type of landfill on their land, so where are we going to dump it? The future of our grandchildren and the rubbish in this country concerns me a helluva lot.”
While proper recycling is a good first step to reducing the amount of rubbish in the landfill, Heather says Government also has to show it’s serious about preserving the environment.
“We are doing a lot of work but the Government is not doing their bit,” he says. “They promote keeping the environment clean, and all this carry-on, but they’re not actually doing it.
“Every new politician in this area says they will do this when they become minister, but when they get there, they forget about the landfill,” he adds. “I don’t think many of them have ever been to the back.”
Recycling is the key to slowing the volume in the landfill, says Heather, but that process has to start with the individual households.
“We have to educate our people about the recycling,” he says. “Endorse that or enforce that, or have the Government bring in some kind of legislation to penalize the people. It’s not only a concern for our company, it’s a concern for the whole island.”
The Tourism Operator
Twelve thousand residents. One hundred thousand tourists every year. When it comes to figuring out who is creating the largest amount of rubbish, the numbers don’t lie.
Thomas Koteka, manager of the Pacific Resort, has done that math, which is why the resort has been recycling for more than 10 years.
“We watch the rubbish coming out of our rooms and restaurants, the food and beverage areas, to make sure we process it so we are minimizing our outputs to the dump,” he says. “What we can recycle, we do.”
The Pacific Resort has a long history of being a responsible entity, dating back to the mid-’90s and the introduction of its sewage treatment plant. For the past five years, the resort’s diesel trucks have been powered by refined cooking oil.
“We are a product that is dependant on the environment,” Koteka says. “The tourists are coming here for that experience, and that’s an experience that we must maintain. It’s one of the cornerstones of how we conduct our business.”
Where once the Pacific Resort sent three or four skips of refuse a week to the landfill, that number has been reduced to one a week, sometimes one every two weeks.
“Suppliers are crucial in that area for us,” says Koteka. “When they bring supplies to us, we don’t want to have to process their packaging. So our footprint of just rubbish is now lower.”
Koteka says the Pacific Resort has nearly completed the process to be certified as a Green Globe product, making it even more attractive to the burgeoning eco-tourism market.
But at the end of the day, Koteka says, when the tourists leave, it’s crucial that those who actually live on the island take care of their own home.
“We need to just get out there and look after our mother, which is Earth,” he says. “It’s a huge job. Not everyone’s got the right answers, but we try to do the best we can where we can.
“Everyone has to do it. It’s not one person’s problem, it’s everyone’s problem.”
The Recyclers
When Brian Fleeth came to Rarotonga from Auckland four years ago to join his partner, Caryn Chiwell, he brought with him 40 years of experience in the recycling business.
Shocked at the sight of scrapped car bodies being buried as a means of disposal, he knew someone had to step up and save the island from becoming one big auto graveyard.
“We actually bought, out of our own money, the only Hiab truck for sale on the island,” says Chiwell of the formation of Rarotonga Recyclers.
Since its start-up, the company has sent 10 containers of scrap to New Zealand and continues to work in conjunction with the public and the likes of the National Environment Service, Public Health and T&M Heather to collect such items as whiteware, vehicles, tractor parts, air conditioning units, cables, telephone wire and roofing iron.
It’s mostly been a labour of love, as the company has yet to attract financial aid of any kind. While extra funding would be appreciated, Chilwell says the company’s main goal is ensuring their grandchildren don’t inherit a polluted homeland.
“We are very worried about the island’s environment,” she says. “And what all this waste does to it. This is why we do it.”
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John Wichman’s first brush with recycling came in 2004 when he was still with Foodland. Faced with the mountain of boxes that is a fact of life when operating a supermarket, Foodland started baling the cardboard and shipping it back to New Zealand.
Then came the cyclone season of 2005, when a number of storms resulted in large amounts of corrugated iron strewn across the island. Wichman suggested the loose iron be baled and shipped off Rarotonga. When no one put up their hand, he and Malcolm Sword formed a company to do just that.
This is how Recycle Cook Islands was born.
“In terms of the solid waste stream, you’d call us hazardous waste,” says Wichman. “That’s anything that’s dangerous or big to handle. So it would include things like car batteries, construction machinery, any ferrous or non-ferrous metal. We also do aluminium cans.”
Filled containers are shipped to New Zealand to be recycled, although items such as roofing iron can be sent straight to market, usually in Indonesia.
Wichman is encouraged at how the various recycling programmes have worked so far but would like to see more support for the effort from the executive level.
“Let’s put in place the economic instruments to deal with the disposal,” he says, “and then let’s actually divert some of the funding to the waste streams that actually cause the issue.”
He understands there will always be costs involved with recycling, but says the alternative could come with a higher price tag.
“What’s the backbone of the economy?” he says. “Tourism. What’s the backbone of tourism? The environment. If you don’t have that, then kiss your tourism goodbye.”
The Glass Crusher
Brad Fraser and Ngere Puia are the first to admit they were thinking of their own needs first when they started crushing glass at Brad’s Auto Body Repairs in Nikao.
“It’s because we’re currently building our home,” says Puia.
The original plan was simply to run enough glass bottles through a crusher to use as a foundation under their flooring.
“It’s just perfect under a concrete floor,” says Fraser. “You can’t use soil because it dries and shrinks. But you can’t compress glass. Once it’s settled, that’s pretty much as far it’s going to go.”
With the barrels of crushed glass starting to accumulate, Fisher found other uses for the material as well, from making paving slabs to kitchen bench tops.
“Using the glass for construction purposes is just endless,” he says.
In the process, the couple are saving thousands of bottles from taking up valuable space in the landfill.
“I can’t think of anything else that would take up as much area as these bottles,” Fraser says. “They’re round and very strong. There must be millions of them in the landfill.”
Over time, the likes of Trader Jacks, the RSA and the Pacific Resort have started dropping off their empties to be crushed.
“I even have tourists who pedal all the way from God knows where with an empty bottle of wine or four or five bottles of beer,” says Fraser. “They have that concern.”
While Fraser and Puia are happy to do their part to help the environment, they wouldn’t say no if Government offered to help defray expenses.
“It would be good to receive some funding from Government for taking care of their landfill,” says Fraser. “It’s just a matter of talking to the right people and getting the interest drummed up.”
The Landfill
Tai Nooapii may be the most optimistic man on the island.
Nooapii, who works fro the Ministry of Infrastructure and Planning, watches the bulldozer compact the rubbish at the Rarotonga Waste Facility and offers his estimation that the landfill is good for another 15 years.
With one large proviso: Each and every one of us must improve our recycling habits.
“We still have some work to do in terms of waste minimization and getting more people to separate at source,” he says.
During the visit, Nooapii displays the press that crushes plastic bottles and alcohol and fizzy drink cans into compact stacks that are then placed in containers and shipped to New Zealand for recycling.
The bottles and cans have been brought here by T&M Heather from its weekly rubbish rounds, as well as by contractors hired by hotels and restaurants to dispose of their recyclable waste.
The ministry, Nooapii explains, is in the planning stage of introducing a transfer station, where household owners can bring their rubbish and then separate the recyclables onsite.
Asked for his example of a perfect world, Nooapii says it would be one where not a single recyclable item ended up in the landfill.
“We’re trying to get there,” he says. “It’s an ongoing process. But it is happening. Most of the people are doing it, but there are still improvements to be achieved.”