Sue Coutts

Sue Coutts manages Wanaka Wastebusters. This community enterprise has grown rapidly over ten years, now employing 25 FTE. Wastebusters delivers innovative resource recovery solutions and education for sustainability programmes in a very small tourist town at the bottom of the South Island.

Wanaka Wastebusters actively encourages business and government, to continuously improve the systems and processes they implement to reduce waste. At the moment Wastebusters is focusing on raising awareness around how we can all help to build more effective product stewardship processes.

Sue is the chair of the Community Recycling Network of Aotearoa/NZ (CRN). CRN was established to enable organisations like Wastebusters to share knowledge, skills and resources for the benefit of our local communities. CRN Aotearoa maintains active links with community recycling networks around the world.

Sue is interested in almost everything. She is committed to building more durable and resilient communities by using wasted resources to drive local economic development, community engagement, education for sustainability and awareness raising.