Clean Up New Zealand Week

It was rather opportune that “Clean Up NZ Week” was taking place.  “Here’s your chance to get rid of some domestic rubbish”, the advertisement in the newspaper told us.  After living in our house for more than 30 years, there were all sorts of unwanted and forgotten items hiding in and behind the garage, and lurking in the shed.  All sorts of things that we couldn’t even give away.   The rubbish collection was very well organised, with six drop off points in our local area, and presumably the same was happening right across the country. 

That’s handy for us

We had a whole pile of rubbish, and Robin had been contemplating going to the tip.  However, now we didn’t need to, and this saved us about $25 in tip fees.  He spent several hours on Friday afternoon packing up the back of the 4WD. 

Loaded up and ready to go

There was a hive of activity in the car park when we arrived at the drop off point.  The rubbish had to go in a huge skip about 10-12ft high – now just how we were to manage that, we wondered?  One of the helpers was standing right on top of the rubbish, and people were throwing their stuff up for him to catch.  There were a couple of near misses as lengths of wood whistled by his head, we noticed.  Robin decided it was easier to stand on the tail gate and practise his over arm throws, rather than stand on the ground.  That’s the trouble when you are vertically challenged, he says. 

Up it goes

The guys from the Earth Link organisation were taking any metal items, old fridges, TVs and the like  back to their warehouse where they recycle the metals and strip out any copper wire from old appliances.  They do a good job, and I told them that we dropped some items down to them last week.

 

Earth Link trucks loading up goods to recycle

Thank goodness we offloaded all that rubbish in the morning.  We are doing very well with our downsizing, but we are not quite there yet.  After our busy morning the cook spent the afternoon slaving over a hot stove to get our energy levels back up.  How about roast leg of New Zealand lamb and all the trimmings for dinner,  followed by apple crumble?  That will keep Robin motivated to keep on tidying up, I think.