Author(s)

C. Dean

Abstract

Waste education in the Deep South of New Zealand is anything but boring! For the past four years, schools and the general public have been enchanted, outraged, challenged and overjoyed by a steady stream of characters, storylines, clubs, events and challenges that have sprung forth from Southland’s local waste educators. This lively approach to education is often so entertaining and engaging that the unsuspecting public barely even knows they’re being educated. This is the pain-free method of education that we find works best. Our educational messages are delivered through a wide variety of mediums and we regularly enlist the help of some ‘larger than life’ characters. These characters capture the imagination of our audiences and provide a ‘face’ that people can relate to easily. The cornerstones of this successful approach to waste education are collaboration between agencies, offering a wide variety of opportunities for education, and providing comprehensive support for further exploration of the waste topic. This paper describes the various aspects of our approach and discusses how we continue to make waste minimisation a high impact activity in Southland, New Zealand. Keywords: waste minimisation, education, promotion, mediums, entertaining, collaboration, schools, community, Southland, New Zealand. 1 Introduction Waste education in Southland is something of a success story, despite being afforded a relatively small budget in relation to many other regions’ education programmes.

Keywords

waste minimisation, education, promotion, mediums, entertaining, collaboration, schools, community, Southland, New Zealand.