Green Gorilla

Waste is a cumbersome issue that civilization has to deal with. It is a fact of life that humans will continue to produce waste, and that cannot be changed. On an average, each household in the world produces more than a ton of waste every year. Add this up, and it equates to a total of 31 million tons per year, which is equivalent to the weight of three and a half million double-decker buses!

The story however doesn’t end here. All this collective waste is dumped into landfills which are known to have a distinctive effect on air pollution, nature, land, and humans. Due to low costs and high availability of marginal land, although landfills have become the most commonly used waste disposal method, the adverse biodiversity impacts it brings makes it unfit for waste management.

The question that arises here is: how to tackle the waste disposal problem?

Green Gorilla has the answer. As the largest non-landfill owning, full-spectrum waste services provider in New Zealand, the company is committed to maximizing recycling and diversion from landfills.

With expert services for the commercial, industrial, construction, and residential markets, Green Gorilla leverages effective waste management solutions to assist in clients’ sustainability journey. The company plays an active role in the complete range of waste assessment, collection, recycling, reuse, and disposal services. Credits to its founders who made a big call in 2010 and said “NO” to landfills. The founders put their intuitive minds together, fueled by ambition, innovation, and kiwi ingenuity to brave an uncharted territory to maximize recovery, reuse, and recycle for a cleaner, greener New Zealand. Fast forward to 2021, Green Gorilla is Auckland’s leading commercial compostable waste management collection service.

Breathing New Life into the Soil
The uniqueness of Green Gorilla stems from the fact that it doesn’t own or operate a landfill. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Green Gorilla is breathing new life into what was once an Onehunga landfill site. “Our site sits on the former Galway Street Landfill which was filled between 1950 and 1978.

We are proud to play a part in its regeneration by turning a 2.7 ha portion of it into New Zealand’s largest waste processing facility where over 150,000 tons of waste per annum is delivered, and approximately 50 percent is diverted from Auckland’s landfills,” says Elaine Morgan, CEO, Green Gorilla. The company’s Onehunga plant is already home to a construction and demolition processing facility, which opened in 2012 and diverts more than 75 percent of incoming construction and demolition waste from Auckland’s landfills. It even manages a wood-chipping operation that turns treated wood into biofuel and untreated wood into landscaping chip and animal bedding, plus a plasterboard processing plant that successfully separates gypsum for use in the horticultural and agricultural sectors.

Waste minimization is a philosophy Green Gorilla is committed to. Launched with the aim of maximizing recovery, reuse, and recycling of commercial, construction, and industrial waste, otherwise destined for landfill, the firm’s state-of-the-art waste processing facility is expected to divert over 30,000 tons per year of waste created by Auckland businesses. The proficient team at Green Gorilla realizes that systematic breakdown of organic waste in landfills produces toxic methane gas that contributes greatly to climate change–the reason why the company chooses to compost organic trash. This turns it into a valuable resource that further enriches carbon content in the soil.

Transforming Waste into Resource

Not only does it manage construction and demolition waste, but Green Gorilla leaves no stone unturned in transforming commercial, industrial, and even timber work by product into useful solutions. To better understand how to let us take a closer look at Green Gorilla’s waste processing facility operation. First, the company collects commercial waste materials that include metal, cardboard, paper, glass, plastic bottles, and others as well as construction and demolition waste and delivers the same to its resource recovery facility in Onehunga. Not to forget, the Green Gorilla collection service eradicates the need for multiple waste bins and considerably brings down bin rental charges, waste collection charges, and operating costs. In fact, the single bin concept also frees up valuable commercial footage. Proceeding next, its wood-chipping operation turns treated wood into biofuel and untreated wood into landscaping chip and animal bedding. Furthermore, Green Gorilla’s plasterboard processing plant separates gypsum for use in the horticultural and agricultural sectors. With a 3,000 square meters of building in place, Green Gorilla operates large-scale mechanical and manual sort lines to process industrial, construction and demolition waste to achieve greater than 70 percent diversion from landfill.

The new facility has the potential to decrease the environmental impact of thousands of Auckland businesses, as well as reduce their requirement to sort their own recycling onsite. Elaine mentions that the processing facility will be a game-changer for Auckland’s commercial waste producers. In addition, despite the anticipated economic downturn related to Covid-19 and the majority of Auckland businesses’ heading into uncertain economic times, Green Gorilla is fixated to reduce waste generation significantly. “As consumer patterns and behaviors change there will also be a change in the type of waste and where it comes from–however, we still expect a steady stream to be processed through our new recycling plant. We are now focused on planning for business continuity while prioritizing