"A major step forward would be to take out the glass, and the university had submitted to the local Alcohol Plan for that to happen, [University vice-chancellor Grant Robertson] said."
Why just for O-Week or Castle St?
When is someone most likely to impulsively smash glass? When they're drunk. What do we sell alcohol in? Glass bottles. It's like giving people a box of bullets with their beers.
(1/?)
@strypey Dodger Stadium banned glass bottles a long time ago. Last time I was there they opened the bottle in front of you and poured the beer into the cup.
I would suggest a ban on selling alcohol in glass. But I think a ban on glass stubbies would do it. Put beers, RTDs and other stuff that currently comes in stubbies in either aluminum cans, or plastic bottles.
So you can still have wine and spirits in glass. There's a whole lot less of them, and they're a small fraction of the smashed glass pollution problem. They're almost never the ones I find smashed on streets, in green belts, or at festival sites.
(2/?)
Coming back to Castle St though, back in the Cretaceous I lived there for a few months (long story). When I lived in Ōtepoti again in the 2010s, I walked through there a lot.
I've seen the mountains of glass, and the remains of the odd burning couch. But I've also seen vacuum cleaners being passed around from flat to flat. There's an incredible sense of community, even though almost nobody lives there for more than a few years.
(3/?)
There is *so much* a bit of thoughtful urban design could do to build on that sense of community and student tradition, and mitigate the persistent rubbish problem and other issues that have plagued studentville for decades.
Maybe Otago Uni could deploy some of the world class anthropologists they have on staff to do some ethnographic fieldwork in studentville? Workshop solutions with the DCC community engagement team and the welfare team from the student union?
(4/?)
For a start, houses with 5-7 busy students are obviously going to generate far more rubbish than a normal household. Yet houses in studentville only get the same size and number of recycling and landfill bins as a regular family home. This creates the conditions for overflowing bins and loose rubbish, regardless of how conscientious students are about using their bins.
(5/?)
Let's get creative here;
* The simplest option is for DCC to just give anyone with a student ID more bins - especially for glass - at no extra cost
* The worst of the rubbish is generated over the weekend. Why not send the collection trucks around studentville on monday morning? Then they've got empty bins for anything that didn't make it in there, and for the rest of the week
* Maybe consider a second rubbish collection on Thursday morning, so the bins are empty for the weekend
(6/?)
