As the Christmas party and wedding season kick off this month, Jade McNab and husband Lyndon, owners of the Port Molyneux School, are predicting that guests will consume upwards of 6000 bottles of beer and wine as part of the celebrations held there this summer.

With no glass recycling available in the Clutha district these bottles would be destined for the landfill, and while The Clutha District Council is encouraging the government to look at a refund scheme for glass containers, the McNab's, who purchased the abandoned Kaka Point school in 2015 and spent a year converting it into a waterfront wedding venue, have taken a more hands-on approach to the problem.

"We believe that our success in business should never be at the expense of another person or our local environment" explains McNab. "Realising that all those bottles were going to end up in a hole didn't sit right with us."

The McNab's have invested in a portable GL Sand Glass Bottle Crusher from Marlborough based company, Expleco. Bottles get fed into a chute by hand, and seconds later, the crusher produces a safe to handle sand bi-product that the McNab's plan on using in the venue's landscaping. "We're stoked that instead of a mountain of glass clogging up the landfill, it's going to be turned into something useful instead," says McNab. "We might end up with heaps of sand so will let the community know if we have some spare"

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