Chafer Place Warehouse Office, Te Rapa, Hamilton

We drove to Hamilton for a $6,000 job and came back with a load of polyester offcuts.

The install was an Autex acoustic fitout of the office attached to a large warehouse at 25 Chafer Place in Te Rapa, delivered for Savory Construction. Autex acoustic to the office walls and an Autex acoustic ceiling. On the trade side it was completely straightforward, a clean run down the motorway and a job that behaved exactly as quoted.

The part worth writing up is the offcuts.

Polyester insulation, which is what Autex products are, is recyclable. Autex operate a take-back scheme where offcuts and waste polyester go back to be reprocessed rather than into a skip. We run that pickup as standard on our Auckland work. What we do not usually have is a reason to be south of the Bombays with a vehicle and capacity.

So while we were down for Chafer Place, we extended the recycling pickup beyond our normal Auckland range and collected polyester waste from the Waikato at the same time. The job effectively paid for the trip, and the trip did something useful on the way back.

It is a small thing and we are not going to inflate it. But construction waste is one of the largest waste streams in the country, insulation offcuts are a real component of it, and the reason offcuts end up in landfill is almost never that somebody objects to recycling them. It is that the logistics do not line up. Somebody has to be going that way with room in the vehicle.

That is the honest version of most site sustainability. It is not a policy. It is noticing that you are already driving past.

If you are running a project in the Waikato with Autex or other polyester products and you want the offcuts collected rather than skipped, ask us. If we are coming down anyway, we will take them.