Taranaki school children have surpassed the wildest dreams of local council staff who set up a scheme to get rid of cream and milk bottle lids from Stratford’s recycling collection.
The lids are considered a contaminant because they are a different kind of plastic.
Schools in the district collected a mammoth 135,694 lids – weighing in at more than 230 kilograms – over just 16 weeks.
Water and waste education officer Peter McNamara said the district’s recycling had a low rate of contamination of between 3-5 percent, but when there were non-recyclables in a bin about 85 percent of the time, lids were the culprit.