Neville Raethel with trash collected by a team of volunteers around Mourea.
Eight years after he led a community drive to tidy up Rotorua, Neville Raethel is at it again.
The 46-year-old Te Arawa father is whipping up support for a big citywide clean-up this Saturday.
He has already had supporters out doing weekend cleans this month, including hauling more than 200kg of waste out of Lake Rotorua and off land in Mourea last week.
Raethel, who is “mad about fishing” and runs a fledgling fishing school, Te Kura He Ika, started his Let’s Clean Rotorua “experiment” in 2019 with a Facebook page.
He said the kaupapa was instilled in him from a young age of looking after the environment in the rohe (area) he was born, raised, and is raising a family – and where his ancestors walked before them.
At first, it was just him and his five children out filling rubbish sacks, but he said numbers gradually swelled over the 12 months the project ran.
“For the last six months of that, we regularly had 15 to 20 people involved and collectively took over 10 tonnes of trash from our parks, reserves, lakes and streams.”
Raethel said he was inspired to restart the effort after noticing rubbish was getting bad again around the lakes and other regular fishing haunts such as Kaituna Cut, near Pāpāmoa, in recent years.
When a friend who ran a similar Facebook clean-up community up North proposed a challenge to make May a full month of cleaning up New Zealand, Raethel decided to get his group on board.
One of his whānau’s Mother’s Day traditions was ensuring the “always forgotten” Papatuanuku, Earth Mother, was looked after. This year, 40 adults and a dozen children joined them to pick up litter all over the city.
“Most of the rubbish was what I call normal roadside trash – bottles, food containers, paper and old clothes, as well as a lot of polystyrene cooler bins,” Raethel said.
The upside was that they found no plastic shopping bags, which used to be common until they were banned in 2019. “Regulation does work”.
He arranged the Mourea clean-up in anticipation of a visit by the Māori Queen, Ngā wai hono i te pō, to Ōpatia Marae, Taheke.
Raethel was joined by environment prefects and kapa haka members from his old school, Rotorua Lakes High School, as well as Rotorua district councillors Don Patterson and Karen Barker and the council’s waste minimisation officer, Meghan Cooper.
His goal for Saturday was to get “all of Rotorua involved” in a clean-up – whether just around their own neighbourhood, or joining one of the group efforts he was planning.
One would be in the Linton Park area, and another around the Ngongotahā Skate Park.
The clean-up would start at 9am and run for one hour. Volunteers were encouraged to take before and after photos and note any trash they spotted that was too big or too dangerous to remove.
Rubbish bags, gloves and a guidance sheet were available from him or at the Rotorua Lakes Council reception, and would be available at the group clean-ups.
“If we want to keep Rotorua beautiful, then we need to clean it first, then keep it that way.”
He said it was about changing people’s mindsets to encourage them to “just bend over and pick up that one little piece of rubbish that normally you would walk past”.
“What motivates me is my kids and my mokopuna, as it’s them that will suffer if we don’t clean it up.”
Raethel’s been posting videos “calling out” everyone from politicians and businesses to other outdoors-lovers, sports teams, and iwi to get involved. He particularly encouraged big brands whose packaging he often saw littered – beverage and fast-food companies, supermarkets – to do their bit.