Kia ora koutou katoa.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak today about my work in the waste space. I’d like to start by saying I have known Tamati my whole life. He’s not just a great mp, he is an awesome person, and he is our friend.
This year I started year nine at Whakatane High School. When I was at Whakatane Intermediate School my teacher, Jade Raynes, got me involved in the William Pike challenge.
You might remember William’s story. In 2007 while sleeping in the dome shelter at Ruapehu, William’s leg was crushed by rocks which came from an unexpected and violent eruption. Lucky for us, he survived.
This event had a big impact on him and he wanted to use his story and his successful recovery to help kids learn to be explorers, and learn to overcome their own challenges. Based on his experience in the Duke of Edinburgh/Hillary Award when he was at High School, he started the William Pike Challenge programme for young people, encouraging us to be leaders.
When I first became involved, I read William’s book. I was so inspired by him. I was very shy, not a happy boy, and not really interested in exploring. After reading his book I changed. I took up mountain biking, community volunteering and just wanted to live better. It is because of the William Pike Challenge that I became a volunteer for Waste Zero Whakatane, and what I have learned has given me a feeling of wanting to be part of changing things. This year I followed in William’s footsteps and I joined the Duke of Edinburgh Hillary Award.
For my Duke of Edinburgh/Hillary Award, I have tasks to complete - community service, outdoor activities, new skills and two adventurous journeys.. I have my Bronze award now, and am working on my silver. My six months of community service will be spent working in the waste space, researching, writing and talking to people about what I learn.
I am glad I have learned how to properly research things - how to check facts and always look to see who paid for the research. Here is the thing about learning though - it makes you responsible. I know what it means when you can’t unlearn something - even if you want to.
Learning about the seriousness of the state of our environment and how irresponsible we are with waste is something that I sometimes wish I could unlearn - it makes me disappointed in people. We need to do better.
Here is an example. We all agree we really want to stop burning fossil fuels, but just recently, BP has decided to keep investing in new fossil fuel exploration, and they changed their goal to reduce greenhouse gasses - they have almost halved their planned goal. With everything we know about the impact of greenhouse gasses on climate change, it's hard to imagine why they would do this - purposely adding to the problem. They will get away with this more easily because we are not managing our battery resources properly.
Did you know that we recycle less than 1% of household batteries? More than 99% of our household batteries are dumped into the toxic soup that we call landfill. That is not good at all.
Did you know that there are not enough raw materials in nature to build the batteries we need for the future - that is what Mum calls “settled science” - that means we know it is a fact. But we are wasting the resources that we have already mined.
It is easy to state problems, but for this I think I actually found a small part of a solution. People would be more willing to recycle, if when they buy a battery - the cost of recycling the battery, is included in battery sale price. If you sell anything, you should let people know how they can recycle it. Batteries matter more than a lot of things, so that is a great place to start. If people know they have paid for recycling, they might be more willing to do it. We won’t know until we try. Let’s try.
I really love to write my articles for the Whakatane Beacon. It's the learning that I enjoy the most about writing. If you don’t get the paper and you’d like to read the articles, you can go to my blog, the waste space with jack.blogspot.com - that is all one long word. When I leave school I am going to go into the New Zealand Army as an officer, and study Engineering. I want to be ready to help our climate affected communities - I think that problem will get worse for us.
There is not much we can do now to meet our climate goals, and there is not much NZ can do to change the habits of the rest of the world.
But there’s a lot we can do to care for our land, our waterways, and to manage our own waste here in Aotearoa.
Let’s do all we can, please be a good ancestor for the future generations to look back on.
Please recycle your batteries.
Bring all your waste to the right place.
No reira, tena koutou, tena koutou, tena tatou katoa.
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