The changeover of all Parliamentary offices so waste is sorted at peoples’ desks (into recyclable and non-recyclable) has met heavy resistance from, you guessed it, our party of personal responsibility, ACT New Zealand.
ACT office staff are in full revolt after being told by parliamentary bosses that they must take part because it is Government policy.
ACT leader Rodney Hide said it was an example of the “nanny state gone barking mad”…
In a show of defiance, some ACT staff have turned their recycling cubes into pen holders and are ignoring the instruction to sort their waste.
Full story, with dramatic photo of ACT leader Rodney Hide not recycling some paper
I guess in this case ACT figure that personal freedom trumps personal responsibility, right? Because that makes hella sense.
And they’re pushing the NZ political return of Roger Douglas to solve our economic ills, blithely ignoring that the man’s radical free market reforms in the 80s did incalculable damage to the country from which it’s only now starting to recover… See also Gordon Campbell’s excellent review of ‘Working With Lange’, Michael Bassett’s book on the Lange years that paints the Rogernome as a misunderstood genius held back by selfish fools… Michael Bassett is not much loved by me and this review just gives more confirmation that he’s vile and self-deluded, and we can apparently add ‘virulently misogynist’ to the list as well.
It’s all so very, very sad.
Disappointed am I. I would have thought that of all things for ACT to digs its feet in over, the environment would not be it. But than, business has never been one to care about the environment particularly, and I guess the business party are following that example. When I first got to Switzerland, I was a bit culture shocked by the amount of recycling that goes on here. Pretty much all our paper is recycled. We all have recycle bins by our desks (and I know it doesn’t offset the inordinate amount of flying I do, so I can’t feel smug about the recycling, but it is there) and paper is recycled at home as well as all our PET bottles and all our glass bottles, and all electonic wear (all applicance shops are legally required to received and recycle all electonics (and I guess whitewear as well) irrespective of whether you bought it there or not) and batteries. Looking back I’m horrified to think that we just bury it all in the ground in NZ.
Shame on you ACT.
It is sad and I think its a bad call on ACT part. I recycle recyle recyle, reuse etc. the systems and the principles around the green boxes can work well – in fact its one of the few functional things I can identify in my workplace!) But those green boxes are pretty dam useless. I’d get rid of them. I eat fruit at my desk and the only way to really dispose of it is to walk to the main recyling station in the kitchen. Likewise for other rubbish.
I’ve got quite a few friends whose offices have shifted to this kind of thing; and invariably it’s badly implemented. I would not be even a tiny bit surprised to see that the volumes provided for recycling are pathetic in comparison to the demand, or that the system was unnecessarily arcane.
At my work one of the bosses pushed for re-using paper, and for using recycled ink cartridges and so on. For a year we spent a small fortunte on photocopier and printer repairs from the slight imperfections in those materials. The only winner there was, ironically, our stationery suppliers, in re-prints, repairs and wasted ink.
kiZ – that full-spectrum waste responsibility thing is where we need to get. If the govt. will adopt the Greens Waste Responsibility bill and get it through before the election, that’ll be a big step in the right direction. (It has cross-party support – for now.)
hebe – yeah, fruit and other organic stuff like that just gotta go in the bin. But I think that’s fine. It’s a system change, not a disaster.
a.s. – I’m one of those friends, using the exact system Rodney et al. complain about, and I don’t think its badly implemented at all. I think it’s an excellent set of changes. In the office I work in, the volumes more than cope with demand. The re-use of paper and cartridges etc, man, that’s a step too far. I reuse paper for handwriting and unmussed sheets for printing in simple printer setups only. Recycled ink cartridges scream of being more trouble than they’re worth. That’s a problem to attack at the source, the producers, not at the consumer end.
How can a Party expect to survive in the current political climate by deliberately defying what is rapidly becoming a shared consciousness among the majority of our population? I don’t know anyone who doesn’t accept that we have to do more to protect the environment, and that recycling is one of the easiest things we can all do in that regard. Rodney Hide is showing us all why he did so well on Dancing With The Stars – its because he already has his Head In The Clouds.
We’ve had recycling bins for paper for ages, and polystyrene (lab kit comes with lots of extra packaging) for about a year… and a name and shame policy for computers left on over the weekend:-) It doesn’t at all offset the horrendous (but largely necessary) plastic disposables (in my lab we wash and re-use as much as possible but still our autoclavable waste bins floweth over), but it is something. So I think ACT have just surpassed themselves in arseholiness, (surprise coming, folks) but they were never getting my vote anyway…