24 hours: Keegan Barnard

FLEUR COGLE

The busy season is just starting for green-waste decontaminator Keegan Barnard. Fleur Cogle investigates.

The days are getting longer and so is your grass.

That marks the start of the busy season for Keegan Barnard, a Redruth Recycling Centre decontaminator.

Mr Barnard's day starts at 6am when he gets up and has breakfast (Crunchy Nut Cornflakes and a cup of Joe – coffee). Then he makes lunch and leaves for work at 6.40am for a 7am start.

"On arriving, I wait at the office for my lift up the top [to the green-waste section of the centre, which is a short drive from the office]. Once we're there, I get the gumboots on, and the correct [safety] gear on.

"We do the machine checks and give them a good warmup ready for the day. The shredder and the cat are generally the first ones we get going.

"We warm them up, ready for when the trucks come in, which is about 8 o'clock. Sometimes we'll wait for a couple of trucks to build up before we go through it.

"Trucks come in and dump their green waste on the infeed area, and I basically pull out anything that's not supposed to be in there, that can't be composted.

"When it first comes in, it's laid out, the truck drops it, the digger comes down [and] we'll just sort of peel back the layers of bins."

Up to nine trucks a day can drop off a load of waste from green bins. Each truck can bring in from six to nine tonnes of green waste.

"The busy season is starting now. This time of year, every day, we are getting, on average, 30 tonnes [of green waste] a day.

"A couple of weeks ago, we were getting 20 tonnes a day."

Mr Barnard uses a long stick with a hook on the end of it to remove items from the pile. "I keep my eye – my eagle eye – out for anything that's not supposed to be in there."

Like what?

"Plastic bags are a big one, treated timber or ash – any kind of ash.

"Plastic bags ... just full of rubbish – they stand out. Speaking of plastic bags, lately we've sort of had ... I don't know if they are a new line of bags, but they are claiming to be biodegradable bags and a lot of people are putting their greens in them and then putting them here – but they are not actually the right kind of biodegradable bag, because although they do break down, they break down over a lot longer time than it takes for the compost here to go through the process.

"Only corn-starch bags can go through the compost."

So how do they deal with ash?

"Ash from treated timber contains arsenic, and the composting standards for New Zealand have a very small allowance for arsenic, very small. So, basically, a couple of bags of treated timber ash could screw up the whole row.

"The method we use for going through the heap, we're basically peeling off a bin at a time. We can spot it sort of 80 per cent of the time. It's not 100 per cent. Stuff's always going to go through."

But council campaigns are having an effect and people are learning.

"In the two years that I have been here, I've seen probably a 30 per cent decrease in contamination coming in."

Once contaminants are removed from the waste, it goes through the shredder.

"We have the shredder, which is an absolute beast. We can put anything through there, absolutely anything. You can put a tree trunk through and it breaks it up in 10 seconds."

On to the next stage, steam pours off the top of long, covered rows about three metres high, which can heat up to 80 degrees Celsius.

"I think if you really wanted to, you could put a can of something in there for a couple of hours and you would have quite a tasty [meal]," Mr Barnard says.

The green waste rows are formed on concrete pads over narrow, covered channels. A blower blows air all the way up through the pile.

"There's a couple of probes, a temperature probe and an oxygen probe and they can be monitored from the office on the laptop."

If there isn't enough oxygen, the blowers are used.

"They need oxygen to keep cooking. Otherwise, they go anaerobic and start to produce methane.

"Once this row has been completed, it will be covered.

"Weights will be put down each side and it will be left for four weeks to cook. And then, uncover, shift, turn, cover again for two weeks and repeat process."

A cover unwinder – a machine not unlike a pedestrian bridge over a railway – is used to cover and uncover the rows.

"You actually stand up on the top [of the machine]. I love it. We do have to wear masks while we're up there, because when you uncover it, a tonne of steam comes out and that contains all sorts of nasty greeblies and pathogens."

At the next stage, the green waste moves on to a maturation pad, where it is left to mature and becomes Eco Compost – a great product, Mr Barnard says.

"The best part of the job? The satisfaction of making a good product. That's honestly true. We make great compost here."

You can tell a lot about a person from their rubbish, he says.

"You can sort of see, almost, how someone's week plays out. For, maybe, young parents, you see the nappies and cigarette packets and then, later in the week, you get the bottles turning up in the green waste – beer bottles."

Nappies and bottles are another problem in green waste.

He's not without sympathy.

"I myself, being a father [son Alex is one], I know how hard it is to find space for nappies.

"Several times we've had plastic bags full of them sitting in the washhouse just waiting [for collection]. It would have been easy to stick them in the green bins.

"I can see why people do it. It is easy not to sort your waste. The amount of recyclable material that we get through the green waste is quite amazing. They could easily just throw it in the yellow bin."

He thinks about 80 per cent of contamination is deliberate – "just laziness" – but the other 20 per cent is lack of education.

He politely declines to say what the strangest items found in the waste have been. "A couple of things come to mind that probably wouldn't be suitable for the article."

Work doesn't stop for Mr Barnard when work day finishes at 4.30pm.

At home he's passing his knowledge on to Tyler, his financee's six-year-old son.

"I get about one hour's rest a day. Getting home, my financee is straight out the door to her job, so then I have Alex and Tyler both up and loud and playing and getting into everything. Alex's is off to bed at about 6 o'clock, then I have homework with Tyler.

"Tyler, he knows what he's up to and where the recycling goes and where the greenwaste goes."

While he knew how to sort his rubbish before he started work at the centre, Mr Barnard says a friend now calls him a "compost Hitler" and a trip to a friend's house is a chance to do an inspection.

"I always check other people's green bins."

- © Fairfax NZ News