Zero Waste

Para Kore have been volunteering at Market Central & Dinner at the Lake over the last year in a huge joint effort to reduce our market waste.

Para Kore means Zero Waste.  Humans are the only species on the planet that don’t live by zero waste principles.  The natural world does not create waste.  Everything at the end of its life, whether it’s a plant or animal, becomes part of another system.  A dead insect becomes kai for another insect, a tree that falls in the bush rots and provides nutrients to the earth for new growth.  Everything in nature is part of a closed, continuous, endless cycle.

Zero Waste is a call to action that aims to end the current take, make, and dispose mentality of human society.  Zero Waste is a policy, a path, a target. It is a process, a new way of thinking.  Most of all it is a vision. It’s a new planning approach which closes the loop so that all waste is a resource for another process.

The Para Kore programme has been working with us at Market Central & Dinner at the Lake to increase the reuse, recycling and composting of materials, thereby helping to reduce the extraction of natural resources and raw materials from Papatuanuka.