Alanna Smith
Te Ipukarea Society, Rarotonga
Alanna Matamaru Smith currently lives in Rarotonga Cook Islands. She has been working with the environmental NGO Te Ipukarea Society (TIS) for the past 5 years. Of TIS five strategic areas, waste management has been a busy focal area, particularly with the Cook Islands being (once) economically driven by a booming tourism industry. Through Alanna's work she has worked closely with local schools raising awareness on how we can better manage our waste, witnessed the pressures our one and only landfill has had to endure over the past five years, as well as beared witness to the impacts of drifting Fish Aggregation Devices/ abandoned fishing gear on our uninhabited national park Suwarrow. Recent Masters graduate in Conservation Biology from Victoria University and an undergraduate student in Environmental Management from Otago, the warm life in the Cook's is definitely the life for me.
PARTICIPATING IN...
ZERO WASTE CULTURE
Zero waste is an approach that envisages a world where nothing is wasted and all resources are valued and reclaimed. This is a significant shift from the current make-use-waste model our society operates under.
Achieving zero waste will involve shifts in the social, economic and political structures we live in, and the behaviour of groups and individuals.
This panel will explore a range of perspectives from practitioners across Aotearoa and the Pacific on what’s needed to develop a strong zero waste culture, looking at some of the initiatives they’ve been involved in and key learnings they’ve made on their own zero waste journeys