Grey Lynn 2030 Chair’s Report for 2014

The Trustees of the GL2030 Transition Community Trust are myself as Chair, Pippa Coom, Suzanne Kendrick, Sarah Guppy, Chris Olsen, Charlotte Gordon and Lynn Green. We have three active focus groups being the Car Boot market, the Waste Away Group and a project team looking at Resource Recovery.  These community gardens were also one of the focus groups until earlier this year when they were transferred to the care of Fionna Hill and her team.

We have transformed our brand image this year with new logos for the Trust and the various focus groups.  You may have seen the new logo displayed for the Waste Away and Car Boot activities and we are working on updating the look of the GL2030 website which will also include the new logo.

We have issued three newsletters this year together with the Grey Lynn Farmers Market in order to keep our community updated on our activities.  (Chris provided an overview of the Finances, Sarah the gardens update and Suzanne an update on the Car boot market) 

The Waste Away group has been particularly active this year.  We had several new members join the group and now have 10 active members, 20 people on our mailing list as well as 184 Facebook followers.

We celebrated Plastic Free July and approached all retailers in the Grey Lynn and West Lynn shopping precincts asking them to go plastic free for one day on 31st July.  We had a great response and most of the retailers got into the spirit of this initiative.  We were extremely pleased to get the two Countdown supermarkets on board and they removed all plastic bags from their stores on the day.  We even managed to get some press coverage on this which was fantastic. We held a movie night to show ‘Bag It’ during the month as well and had a great turn out – the movie inspired a lot of people to cut down on their use of plastic bags!  We also showed our support for Marine Biologist Steph Borelle and her petition to the mayor of Auckland to make our city plastic bag free – we hope this will be successful one day in the not so distant future!

Waste Away partnered up with Auckland Zoo and held a rummage sale on Saturday 1st November on the zoo grounds as part of their Conservation Week efforts.  This was a great day and we were pleased to receive many fabulous donations.  The Waste Away team worked tirelessly to make this day happen and many thanks to Barb, Lisa, Marianne, Winnie, Louise, Nikki and many other volunteers who put in a lot of hours to make this a success.

Resource Recovery is currently at the top of the agenda for GL2030 as Auckland Council is starting to implement a network of Resource Recovery centres around Auckland.  A booking system for collecting unwanted goods from households will start to replace the inorganic collection and these goods will go through the network to be reused or recycled rather than dumped into landfill.  The first centre is in the process of being started up in Waiuku and was awarded to a community group that, till now, had been a men’s shed.  They will be working with Xtreme Waste Raglan to get this centre up and running over the next months.  GL2030 is very keen to be involved in plans for a centre in the Waitemata / Albert-Eden area.  We have set up a project group to focus on this and are currently in the process of trying to obtain funding to have a capability study done as well as keeping in contact with the relevant groups and Council on how the network is developing.  We have recently joined the Community Recycling Network who are very involved in the plans and will be able to offer us a lot of support and guidance.

As all of our current activities are around waste reduction – Car Boot, Waste Away and Resource Recovery, we are considering the future of our Trust and wondering if we should make this the focus of our group going forward and become a Zero Waste trust.  This will give us direction and clarity and put us in a good position to become involved in the Resource Recovery Network.  We have a number of Trustees that are looking to step down in the near future so if you are interested in joining us and being involved in setting the future direction of the Trust please let me know.

Colinda Rowe, Chair Grey Lynn 2030