RecycleMap is now almost 6 months old. What started as a small project to help out my fellow Rotoruans, has turned into something with a national scope. There are currently 12 map categories, and over 2600 map marker locations. The frame of the site is now quite well established, and the site has been averaging a little over 200 visitors a month, with a total of 871 unique visitors since the site went live. I’m quite proud of this number, given that the site has not been actively promoted at this stage!

The next phase of the RecycleMap project will be to add more map categories. These will include waste oils, E-Waste, and child car seats, and probably a few more. The intention is to cycle through all the district councils again, revisiting the Resource Recovery Parks and Transfer stations, to add any other categories that each district covers.

Once that is done, I’ll begin reviewing the existing data, and tightening up the site. As this is going on I’ll also start ramping up promotion of the site to recycling facilities and schemes to help drive traffic to RecycleMap, and hopefully increase the number of location submissions provided. The overarching aim of RecycleMap is to have enough traffic, and enough user participation, that internet-trawling for recycling facilities takes a back seat to “crowd sourced” data.

If you have any thoughts on this, as always, I’d love to hear them!