Hanmer Springs cafē plating up its pizzas for the environment

A Hanmer Springs hospitality business is plating up its pizzas for the environment.

Hanmer Springs Tea Kiosk Café and Grill at the thermal pools has swapped the traditional pizza box for reusable plastic plates for both onsite café customers and customers who wish to take their pizza poolside.

“We were looking for ways to improve our kaitiakitanga and reduce our carbon footprint,” café manager Holly Keepa says. “Pizza boxes were an obvious starting point on this waste minimisation journey as we knew contaminated pizza boxes are not recyclable and were going into landfill.

“We were using on average 600 boxes a week in our busy summer season. This prompted the change from September 1. We have seen a significant decrease in the use of pizza boxes. Pizza boxes will only be available to customers who are taking pizzas out of the thermal pools complex.”

Hurunui District Council’s Waste and Compliance officer Nicole Hurinui says pizza boxes are often contaminated by food scraps and, when they are, cannot be accepted as recycling in Hurunui.

“Food scraps must be removed and, of course, there’s all that yummy pizza sauce and cheese, which is good news for your tastebuds but not for recycling.

“As with anything, if there is contamination in a recycling bag, the whole bag has to go to landfill.”

Hurinui has been walking alongside the café to support them through their recycling and sustainability programme. She says having a waste plan as a business can deliver huge gains for the environment and reduces landfill costs for the business.

Keepa says other sustainability practices the café has introduced include Bokashi composting, which involves the team sprinkling a powder over the food scraps to speed up the compositing process.

“Reducing our carbon footprint and caring for the environment is important to us, and it’s great to have the support of our customers behind us,” says Keepa.

With school holidays and increased foot traffic through the café, those savings for the environment will keep piling up.