There are now 2792 markers on RecycleMap. I’m still working on adding Council drop off locations for E-Waste, Oils, Tyres, and Paints, it’s slow progress as every councils website is slightly different, with different amounts of information available.

I am however refining the behind the scenes processes, making it quicker and easier to add markers to other map categories, which is great!

I’m hoping to have Tyre recycling locations live and available on RecycleMap by the end of this coming week.

30 more locations added across various Community Recycling Centres throughout the Auckland area. These include new locations for Polystyrene, Batteries and E-Waste! (E-Waste is currently not live, as I’m populating it in the background along with Oils at the moment!)

Anamata, Devonport, Helensville, Manurewa, Onehunga & Tāmaki Community recycling centres added to maps where required (Cardboard, Batteries, polystyrene, Op Shops, Cans & E-Waste)

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!

A new location submission form is now live! This offers an improvement on the old generic contact form. All required information is asked for in a structured manner, making it much easier to submit location changes, as well as much easier for me to process them.

The Soft plastics map was one of the earlier maps that was populated with data. In the early days, the markers just pointed to drop off locations, store opening hours was a feature that was added later on as more maps and features were added to RecycleMap.

I’ve now gone through all 320 soft plastics location markers, and have added or updated the store opening hours for them. A few markers have also been removed as the stores have closed down.

Up until now, I have been using my email address from my personal email domain, which is a .xyz TLD. I’ve had this domain for a few years, and still encounter people and organisations that have never heard of it, and don’t believe it’s a real domain. On top of that, I occasionally encounter email bounces as .xyz domains are often falsely identified as spam.

Well, I’m pleased to say that I’ve now enabled a @recyclemap.co.nz email address, and have updated the contact form accordingly. Hopefully this will help ensure all emails get to and from this website in the future!

Feel free to use the contact form and test it out!

In small news, Woolworths has granted permission to use their logo on the RecycleMap maps! The soft plastics map has been updated to adopt the new icon for participating Woolworths stores.

I’m still working through tidying up some of the earlier markers that were added to the site, with things like opening hours. This will take a few days I expect.

On an unrelated note, I’ve been considering whether there would be value in adding an online discussion board feature to RecycleMap. I’m not sure the traffic is at a level that would sustain such a feature just yet, but I can see the potential in having a discussion board/community, giving people and organisations the ability to communicate about and discuss recycling across the motu. If you have any thoughts on this, whether you think it’s a terrible idea, or think it would be great to have a “hub” of sorts to discuss recycling, please do let me know.

Permission has been granted by Dulux to use their logo on the paint and paint containers recycling map, for all Dulux Trade Centres. This logo has now been added to the map!