Celebrating Recycling Week

Reduce, reuse, recycle. It’s a catchy phrase that’s been engrained into our minds since we were young. Over the years as awareness of sustainability and recycling has increased, it’s become even more important to be aware of the waste we’re all producing, and how we can reduce it.

Recycling Week, which runs from the 21st – 27th of October, is a great time to get a refresh on how to improve recycling habits and better understand what large contributors of waste, like The Warehouse Group, are doing about it.

Moving from a linear economy to a circular economy, where waste is turned into something new instead of being sent to landfill, is something we’re championing across our brands.

One key initiative we support is the Packaging Forum’s Soft Plastic Recycling Scheme. Currently, 14 of our The Warehouse stores in Auckland, Waikato (and soon to be Wellington) regions offer soft plastic recycling in-store. See a list of stores participating in the scheme here.

Since the re-launch of the programme in May 2019, The Warehouse stores have recycled more than 1.5 tonnes of soft plastics per month. Once collected, the plastic is sent to Second Life Plastics in Levin to be turned into garden edging, and to Future Post in Waiuku to be transformed into fence posts. Have a look at the FuturePost development process in the video below.

Starting this week at our Store Support Office, we’ll be offering team members an on-site recycling bin for toothbrushes provided by Colgate and TerraCycle. Plastic toothbrushes are a small but mighty presence in the plastic landscape. Most of us will replace around 300 toothbrushes during our lifetime, which when multiplied across a population is an astounding amount.

In our Noel Leeming stores, mobile phone recycling is kicking off this week across all 89 Noel Leeming stores. Customers will now be able to bring in those old phones that have been gathering dust in the drawer and have it properly recycled and disposed of through the Re:Mobile recycling scheme.

“Through all of these initiatives, we want to make it as easy as possible for our customers to make smart decisions about what they purchase and how they dispose of an item at the end of its use,” says David Benattar, Chief Sustainability Officer at The Warehouse Group.

“While something like a toothbrush might seem inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, it’s about creating a shift in the way we think about waste, where those seemingly small things become just as important as the big ones. We’re proud to be helping our customers think more about their impact on the planet.”

Our recently opened Torpedo7 flagship store in Westfield Newmarket took recycling to the next level by incorporating fixtures made of recycled bags into the store footprint. Collaborating with Critical Design, Torpedo7 has turned thousands of its former plastic bags into functional, eye-catching in-store pieces, from changing room doors to the front counter. Take a look behind-the-scenes at the creation of the store fixtures in the video below.

For those looking to purchase sustainable products for everyday use, The Warehouse and Warehouse Stationery stores offer several ranges of product, from Bamboo travel cups, to reusable food pouches, recycled gift wrap, printer paper and much more.