Glass Recycling Takes Off At More FM Winery Tour

Glass Recycling Takes Off At The More Fm Winery Tour

Following two successful Rap concerts in Auckland last year to promote recycling to young people, the Glass Packaging Forum teamed up with the 2010 More FM winery tour to take the message to a wider audience.

The 18 shows started on Friday 5th February at the Ascension Wine Estate in Matakana, Warkworth and rap up back in Auckland at the Villa Maria winery in March with a nationwide tour of 16 locations along the way. The Glass Packaging Forum is on the road with the show organizing glass recycling at each location and promoting GLASS MATTERS to the estimated 50,000 people attending the concerts.

These spectacular events present Tim Finn, Bic Runga and Dave Dobbyn: On Stage Together; along with Boh Runga and Che Fu.

At each concert the audience is reminded from the stage how important it is to preserve the beautiful location and environment and how recycling helps do this. “Every single bottle can be recycled back into new glass containers”.

John Webber, General Manager of the Glass Packaging Forum said the decision to support the winery tour was a natural next step after the rap concerts:

“Our research shows that whilst the majority of people polled said they supported any initiative to promote anti litter and recycling messages to young people, many suggested that other age groups need to be targeted through their own musical genre. The performers at the More FM winery tour appeal to all ages and we believe that they will have as powerful an impact as the rap artists have had with our young people.”

“Research also highlighted the importance of having the right recycling infrastructure to allow public place recycling. 74% of those polled said they wanted to see recycling at concerts. We need to make it easy for people to recycle so that’s what we are going to do with our GLASS MATTERS recycling bins.”

New Zealanders are now recycling 64% glass each year and an improved infrastructure for recycling at events and away from home is key to continual improvement.

Darryl Soljan, owner of the Ascension Wine Estate, Matakana said that recycling glass makes a huge difference:-

“The Winery Tour concerts at Ascension Wine Estate are the two largest individual events we host each year, with several thousand people attending. Of course guests want to enjoy our Ascension wines and the odd beer while they soak up the cream of NZ music and that generates a fair amount of glass. As a business operating on sustainable principles, managing waste at these concerts has been a challenge we haven’t always met as successfully as we would wish to. So we were thrilled in 2010 that the Winery Tour joined forces with the NZ Glass Packaging Forum to reduce the amount of glass going to landfill.”

“We did think that asking thousands of guests to sort bottles into different colours would meet some resistance but in fact patrons welcomed the chance to contribute to the recycling effort. I believe that this initiative will lead the way in the future and that eventually all large events in New Zealand will make the same effort to reduce waste and increase the use of recycled glass.

The Glass Matters team did an awesome job of removing bottles from our site after the concert, and we also know that there is about 2 tonnes of glass heading back to become wine or beer bottles all over again!’

ENDS