What started as thousands of dumped rubbish bags in a neglected stream has turned into an award-winning crusade to better the Dunedin environment. On Friday night, Aroha Kaikorai Valley (AKV) chairman and local businessman Paul Southworth won the pod award at the Keep Dunedin Beautiful award ceremony. He said while it was his name on the award, it was really for everyone who gave up their time for AKV. “A lot of people put a lot of work into this — we’ve just clocked 3033 predators trapped [on Saturday].” AKV works to restore the Kaikorai Valley environment by removing weeds and rubbish, planting native trees, setting pest traps and monitoring air and water quality. The idea and work began shortly after Mr Southworth bought a site in Kaikorai Valley Rd for his Turboweb business. It had sat empty for two years and was overrun with “rats and gorse”. To make matters worse, the stream about 10m behind his business was a popular fly-tipping site and inundated with “thousands” of Pak’nSave bags stuffed with household rubbish. “It was terrible, it was just absolutely disgusting . . . so we cleaned it all up. “Then we thought, ‘we should do something that’s not just for the business’, a little bit more community . . . then we cooked up this idea.” Cleaning the mess planted a seed in his mind to make it a community-wide project and in 2021 it was officially made a trust. There were now about 190 volunteers ranging from backyard trappers, to cleanup volunteers and people who regularly set traps and checked lines. They operate within the Kaikorai catchment area which extends all the way to Waldronville and covers an area of 54sq km. “Eradication’s probably not going to be feasible, so this is about suppression, keeping the numbers down, unless we can get some smarter technology,” Mr Southworth said. “We’re really tech-focused just because of how we started from a tech company . . . a lot of this is building tools to enable us to do our stuff better and faster and more efficient.” It was a lot of work, but becoming more efficient in what they do was their ultimate goal, he said. Their model and values were proving to be an inspiration to others and Cambridge — a town in the North Island — had recently set up their own version called Aroha Cambridge. “They use all the same branding and everything, so this thing is going to end up like a little franchise that you pick up and take somewhere else — a franchise for good.” laine.priestley@odt.co.nz
