It’s been a wee while since the last update. Just reporting in that I’m still here, working on a few things in the background. Stay tuned!
It’s been a wee while since the last update. Just reporting in that I’m still here, working on a few things in the background. Stay tuned!
All animates stores participating in the Terracycle / Royal Canin pet food packaging recycling scheme have now been added to the soft plastics recycling map page.
There were quite a few of them, and so I’m pretty chuffed to say the site is now at 4002 location markers across all the categories!
This one took a while, but I got there in the end. 347 Re:Mobile mobile phone recycling locations are now live on the Mobile phones map category.
Next up, I will look in to adding participating pet stores that support soft plastic recycling. This tends to be limited to just the pet food packaging…but if you’re anything like my household, there’s quite a lot of that!
That’s right, RecycleMap turned 1 on 22nd August!
In that time, there have been 3400 unique visitors, and just under 4000 recycling location markers added across 18 map categories.
I’ve spent probably a bit over 200 hours working on this project in the evenings.
I’ve emailed all New Zealand councils twice, once asking for data, and another time updating them on where the site was at. Responses varied wildly from super supportive to super skeptical!
Also emailed a number of recycling scheme providers, supermarkets, charities etc, and had great support.
…So whats next?
There’s still a few more categories I want to add. But then I need to try my hand at marketing/advertising the site. It’s *great* that without any real advertising there have been over 3400 visitors to the site, but that’s still pretty low, and my grand vision of the site becoming self-sustaining with user-submitted locations hasn’t quite worked out. Maybe with more traffic it will?
Additionally, with almost 4000 recycling points, there’s a lot of juicy data to be analysed. It’s just begging for some spatial analysis to be performed to determine where in the country is best supported for recycling, and where is crying out for more facilities. What this space!
I’m still working on populating all the different mobile phone recycling drop off locations, but with over 100 locations on the map already I decided to make it live!
I’m just finishing off adding all Repco stores that take car batteries for recycling, and then the Car Battery category will go live. I’ll then be adding in all council facilities and other stores that take car batteries, along with Gas cylinders, scrap metal and whiteware.
Just a small update regarding a bug fix, where previously on some of the map pages, the site footer was appearing on marker listings, obscuring the listings. This has now been fixed!
In other news, the site is now at 3130 markers!
The E-waste and electrical items map is now live. I am still populating it, but there is a reasonable amount of markers to make it live. E-Waste pretty much covers anything with a battery or a plug. A sub-category includes old mobile phones. Note that many places have fees for the disposal of E-Waste, but will take phones for free.
In other news, we’re now at 2938 map markers. Very close to 3000 markers across RecycleMap!
Also, Waste Oil recycling and Childrens Car seats are still being worked on in the background. They will be coming soon, once I’ve worked through the majority of council facilities that would take them.
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!