Green schemes tops

Photo: MATT BOWEN

FINALIST: Community house co-ordinator Sandy Ryan says a win tomorrow will be a fitting recognition of the team behind its successful projects.

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A white sock fixed to a car exhaust pipe isn't your typical learning tool.

Unless you’re taking part in Manukau’s first sustainable living programme at Howick and Pakuranga community houses.

The initiative is one of many that helped the organisation to a finals berth in the Auckland Regional Council’s biennial environmental awards.

The programme is made up of a series of workshops including waste minimisation, organic gardening, energy efficiency, fuel emissions and shopping choices.

"When we do travel and have fuel emissions, we go out and start up a car and put a white sock over the exhaust pipe," says co-ordinator Sandy Ryan.

"It turns black pretty quickly – so what happens when that goes into the air? Nobody thinks about that and they get a real shock."

Mrs Ryan says all their projects are practical, hands-on and use visual examples.

The raft of successful and often innovative programmes cemented their place as a finalist in the awards.

They include the healthy edible gardening course, the national certificate in horticulture level two with Manukau Institute of Technology, a foundation course in gardening, language, literacy and numeracy with MIT (initially developed from a community house initiative), the preserving surplus food course and a cooking class focusing on health and nutrition.

Mrs Ryan says she initially had Chinese immigrants in mind because "they didn’t know what Kiwis grow or eat".

"So we started teaching them how to grow stuff."

At the time she says there were "letters in the paper" and "a lot of snide remarks" such as "my Chinese neighbours don’t look after their place – the grass is this high".

So Mrs Ryan set about setting up a service to help "new settlers" manage their properties better.

But many locals faced similar problems.

"We actually haven’t ended up with a huge number of migrants. We’ve ended up with a lot of New Zealanders who wanted to get back to growing things for themselves. They wanted to know what was in their food and that it was safe.

"People are really interested in living sustainably, trying to reduce their waste and lessen their impact on the environment."

Manukau City Council owns the community houses and pays Mrs Ryan but doesn’t fund the initiatives.

Another finalist in the individual category is Friends of Mangemangeroa committee member Graham Falla.

Mr Falla is helping to restore Mangemangeroa’s coastal bush through eco-sourcing, propagating and planting natives as well as controlling weeds.

The Saint Kentigern College vegetable market day project is a finalist in the general schools category.

The school’s enviro group donated all their profits to the Motutapu Restoration Trust.

Winners will be announced at 6.30pm tomorrow in Auckland city.

- © Fairfax NZ News