"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/?)
@strypey
The Sophia Charter is all about community building along roughly similar lines
https://www.otago.ac.nz/about/social-responsibility/sophia-charter/the-charter
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/?)
@strypey
Studentville does get their rubbish and recycling collected twice as often as the rest of the city. We are fortnightly with small red and blue bins alternating with yellow bin recycling. Theirs is all bins every week, so they don't need to exert brainpower on remembering which week for which bins. It's on a Tuesday morning which I guess has the double benefit that you don't need to remember if Monday is a public holiday, and there's another day to recover from any weekend excesses- it can go out Monday evening.
@strypey
Bottle return scheme should be a no-brainer.
Glass bottles can get reused some 16-19 times average. Plastic ones somewhat less. Alu is okay but energy intensive.
Only hard part is getting the polluter to pay for the initial rollout.
What else? Castle St would be a prime candidate to become a Living Street;
There's really no reason anyone needs to drive down Castle St if they don't live there. Instead of a standard, car-orientated road, it could be a pedestrian and bike corridor connecting the uni to the gardens. With a 1 lane road for essential traffic.
This is not without precedent in Ōtepoti, given what they've done with George St from the Octagon to Frederick St;
(7/?)
