Marty Hoffart wears many hats with the various organisations he currently heads or is involved with. Organisations ranging from Paper4trees, which incentive schools to recycle, rewarding that recycling with native trees, through to his commercial focus with Waste Watchers Ltd. He also heads the National Board of Zero Waste Network, which coordinates local recycling networks in New Zealand. Marty is determined to make a difference and when he finds a gap, he fills it. He noted Tauranga was missing a branch from the Keep New Zealand Beautiful campaign and helped set this up. Last year his work was recognised in the Kiwibank Local Hero award.

Waste Watchers’ slogan is “We’ll Slim your Bin”. Through this company, Marty assists businesses and industry groups to minimise waste and implement zero waste principles. It can work as simply as looking in your rubbish bin and finding out where it ends up. Marty details an example where one of his client’s staff members were diligently separating recycling into three bins, only to have all that good work undone when the commercial cleaners added the contents of each bin into the same rubbish bag, which meant everything ended up in landfill!

Waste Watchers has worked alongside many local body councils with different projects to measure, reduce and re-use waste. On average “eighty percent of all waste ending up in landfill has been generated from business”. With this in mind, many councils have started assisting businesses to undertake their processes in a more sustainable way and are actively involved in helping businesses reduce waste. The Western Bay of Plenty District Council initiated a project that Waste Watchers were involved in studying the Kiwifruit Industry and waste from packhouse operations. Tauranga City Council has many case studies on their website of exemplary businesses, with examples including the Mount Maunganui Beachside Holiday Park and Devan Plastics, a water tank manufacturer. In the case of Devan Plastics, they implemented a comprehensive recycling programme including recycling toner car-tridges, obsolete computers, and plastic from factory offcuts, packaging, copper wire and shrink-wrap, resulting in a reduction to landfill of 80%. Mount Maunganui Holiday Park initiated a trial diverting food scraps from landfill, and now compost five tonnes of green waste annually and has a commercial worm farm on site. They also recycle 20 tonnes of paper, cardboard, plastics, glass and metal containers each year. For these businesses, as well as operating more sustainably, they are also making savings to their bottom line.