Category: Plastics

Reminder – first open day at the new Sustainable Future Centre at Queenswood, this Saturday

Climate change, Community, Engagement/ education, Environment, Events, Global issues, Plastics, Soil, Wildlife Leave a comment

This Saturday, 14th March, is the opening day of the Queenswood Sustainable Future Centre!

The Jubilee building will be packed with information, so come along between 10am and 4pm, take a look & chat to staff about how you could get involved, plus get a free glass of Orchard Origins apple juice & 20% off eco-products in the shop!

We welcome your input into future plans for themed exhibitions, literature, films and workshops that highlight different areas of sustainable development. From climate change and biodiversity loss to plastic pollution and water management: come and tell us what you want to see.

Want to get involved ?

Wendy Ogden and Pete Norton from New Leaf will be on site on Sat. 14th March to talk about volunteering opportunities at the centre which will be open every Saturday from then on.

Contact pete@herefordshirenewleaf.org.uk or wendy@herefordshirenewleaf.org.uk for more info.

Best RUBBISH Fashion Show

Plastics, Waste/recycling Leave a comment

Hereford Community Clean Up are calling out for groups who would like to join their High Town Catwalk on 11th August dressed in their best ‘rubbish’ costumes to encourage people to think about the amount of litter that is found on our streets. They will also be encouraging people to sign up to the ‘Stop the Drop’ litter pledge with Herefordshire Council.

If you or your group would be interested to get involved please contact Hereford Community Clean Up group to Facebook, or click here for more details.

#PlasticActionHere!

Plastics One comment

Huge thanks to our team of Plastic Auctioneers who were out in force over the May Bank Holiday weekend at Hereford River Carnival (.. and possibly also at Spring Greens…).

We stamped many paper bags with our gorgeous #PAH! logo …& gave them away (to stall holders, the public, the Etsy market) … we enthusiastically engaged the public with ideas about how to reduce their plastic … we made ingenious paper bags & plant pots out of folded newspaper (thanks Annie!) … we had so much fun with biodegradable glitter wrestling (thank you @FairyLove!)! … we made and enjoyed some fabulous recycled plastic arts (thanks to the wonderful Arts Lab) … our Recycling Angels did an amazing job of sorting and collecting Carnival waste dressed in tutus & glitter … and we started to hatch plans for phase 2 of our actions…

So – next steps… (amongst other things…) will be persuading Herefordshire supermarket shoppers and supermarkets themselves to swap their plastic vegetable bags & wrappings for paper / cloth.

If you would like to be part of this action, please get in touch! Email kate@hgnetwork.org and we’ll let you know what we are planning…

 

And don’t forget this excellent ‘Living Without Plastic’ workshop from New Leaf at Queenswood on 19th May:

The Big River Clean Up

Community, Events, Plastics, Waste/recycling Leave a comment

The Big River Clean Up

28th April 2018

Join us as we support Hereford River Carnival’s mission to make this festival the greenest yet.

Meet 11am: Castle Green Pavilion

Finish and Cake:  1pm

Fully family friendly, pickers supplied and prizes for biggest bag collected, and most imaginative plastic re-use idea!

Sign up here

We now have a line up for the HEnergy area at carnival – come join us!

Before the River Clean Up Day you can…

  • Print a Big River Clean Up Poster and put it somewhere near the carnival site
  • Share posts on social media, and tag and share with our partners @WyeCarnival @HfdsGN @HerefordshireWT on twitter, Stop the Drop, Hereford Coracle Club and Hereford Community Clean Up 
  • Use hashtags #pah #plasticactionhere #CleanUp

Thank you!

Carnival and Beyond: Be Part of the Plastic Action

Community, Events, Plastics, Waste/recycling Leave a comment

Herefordshire Green Network are busy helping to make this year’s River Carnival the greenest yet.

Please be part of the team that will encourage us all to ditch our plastics on carnival day and beyond.

Pre Carnival:

  • Clean-Up Sessions
  • Stamp-the-bags prep

Carnival Day: UPDATE – we have a running order and activities – it’s looking packed and fun! Click on the image to see more.

  • Handing out paper bags in the H Energy area
  • Sharing the facts around single-use plastic with carnival-goers
  • Signing people up for future supermarket actions around the county
  • Plastic Activity: Making planters out of plastic bottles with Hellens Garden Festival
  • Supporting all recycling stations at the carnival
  • Talking to stall holders about how best they can recycle, what they’ve been able to recycle this year and what might work well in the future

Beyond:

  • Encouraging local shops and supermarkets to use paper bags with actions around the county

A few reasons why from lessplastic.co.uk

A few reasons why from lessplastic.co.uk

Sign up here and we’ll be in touch. If you’re part of, or lead a group that would like to be involved together – or maybe you’re already taking action around plastics – you can sign up as a group.

We are also on the look-out for large used plastic drinks bottles for a recycled bottle greenhouse activity… Email events@hgnetwork.org with any leads… thanks!

Plastic Free Action!

Events, HGN news, Plastics Leave a comment

Last week 8 members of HGN met to discuss how to take forwards actions from our Gathering that took place in February. We agreed a 3 pronged approach to some local plastic action:

 

1 The Black Stuff

We will research & develop a campaign across Herefordshire and Worcestershire to address the lack of infrastructure to recycle black plastic locally. This would be a positive campaign – and would facilitate us working with Transition West Midlands / Worcestershire Transition groups. It would also address a big issue for a rural county where every grower has a garden shed full of black plastic pots…

 

2. Single-use plastic action… 

Targeting unnecessary single use plastic, we will launch a campaign over the weekend of Hereford River Carnival and Spring Greens (5th – 6th May).

Our actions will include a Great Paper Bag Giveaway. Thanks to possible local sponsorship (tbc) we will buy FSC paper-bags – large ones with handles to give away at the River Carnival and small vegetable size bags to put out in supermarkets over the coming weeks. We will develop a logo, some wording and a rubber stamp so that the bags can be stamped with a message about what we are doing and why…

The launch of the campaign at the Hereford River Carnival will include:

  • A high profile pre-Carnival river & site clean-up team
  • Recycling Stations on site on the day of the carnival
  • A dream green team who can go around the site giving away paper bags and talking to stall holders about alternatives to plastics
  • A stall in the h.Energy Village – where we will be rubber stamping paperbags / giving away the bags / having conversations with the public

All of this will be supported by an array of arts activities happening in the h.Energy Village, including plastic weaving and sculptures (Fun Palace), plastic placards (New Leaf), and plastic planting (Hellens)

We will follow the launch event with engagement with local supermarkets and shops, including paperbag give-ways on a regular basis.

 

3. Resources

We will support all this activity by making sure that we have accessible online information about all aspects of plastic recycling, including:

  • Myth Busters – a guide to our current local recycling options
  • How to deal with compostable plastics & PLA
  • Our existing #PlasticFreeHere listing of ideas and inspiration for local and personal action: www.hgnetwork.org/plastic-free-here

 

If any of you would like to get involved with any of this activity, please get in touch…

We need lots of volunteers to take up the various roles described above and to engage the 10,000+ visitors who will make their way through Hereford River Carnival on the 5th May. We will also need volunteers to take our message to Spring Greens.

Ideas, support, action is welcome! Message contact@hgnetwork.org

Plastic Free Here!

Plastics Leave a comment

A number of you said you might be interested to be part of a small meeting to plan some local activity raising the profile of alternatives to single use plastics, and reducing our reliance on unnecessary plastics across the city (and county).

A few of us will be meeting on Wednesday 28th March from 1 – 2pm upstairs in Little Black Dog, Hereford.

If you would like to come and join the discussion please contact kate@hgnetwork.org to let us know, so that we have an idea of numbers.

… and then once we have decided what we will do – we’ll let you all know!

If you can’t make the meeting but have some ideas you would like to feed in, please email them over.

Plastic Free Here!

Events, Plastics Leave a comment

Following up on our HGN Gathering a few weeks ago, a number of you said that you might like to be involved in some local action on plastics.

So – lets get together and decide what to do first!

If you would like to come along & contribute to plans / thank about what you would like us to do, please add your availability on this doodle poll to let us know when you are available to meet up… and we’ll put in a discussion and then get doing!

https://doodle.com/poll/qt9i68m9e4s5nh38

#pointlessplastics

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For those of you who came along to our HGN Gathering ‘Plastic Detox’ and have felt compelled to so something this is a neat campaign from Green Gumption. Back in November, they launched a #pointlessplastics campaign. It had a very simple premise: people could take photos of examples of unnecessary, excess packaging and other pointless uses of plastic, and tweet them using the #pointlessplastics hashtag. People have taken to the campaign in their thousands, and there have been some jaw-dropping examples of pointless plastics coming through on Twitter. Green Gumption will select the ‘best of the worst’ examples of #pointlessplastics at the Global Good awards ceremony in May.
And for those of you wanting to do something in Hereford a few of us are going to meet in the next week and decide what our first action should be… get in touch if you would like to be involved!

Plastic… Here?

HGN news, Local Groups, Plastics, Waste/recycling Leave a comment

February’s Herefordshire Green Network Gathering was a lively upbeat discussion & workshop, with a focus on the growing and ever more complex issue of plastics in our environment.

Those who came along included representatives of communities and businesses from around the county including the Orcop Plastic Reduction Alliance, Hereford Community Clean Up, Sun Valley, Low Carbon Ledbury and Herefordshire Wildlife Trust local branches. There were also many of us for whom reducing plastics in our day-to-day lives is feeling increasingly urgent.

Cllr Elwyn Vaughan, who is part of the Plastic Free Powys group, kindly made the trip across the border to encourage us to Refuse, then Reuse & Recycle. Powys is busy addressing the issue of plastics by challenging mindsets, and the Plastic Free Powys group has received a good amount of publicity for their supermarket days of action – buying vegetables and then good naturedly unwrapping and returning the single use plastic packaging to supermarket. Jane Denny of Herefordshire Council joined the discussions with information about Herefordshire’s ‘Stop the Drop’ campaign to reduce plastic litter, and agreed that reducing unnecessary plastic packaging at source is what is needed.

Plastics have grown into the fabric of everything we do – the way we eat, sleep, shop, play, communicate… It is a multisystem problem and will demand a systems approach to resolve it. With this in mind we separated off into ‘open space’ based table discussions about how we can address the issues of plastics throughout our culture: in our personal lives, in our communities, in the role of corporates and supermarkets, and at government and legislative level, nationally and globally.

Outcomes of the discussions for further possible action included:

  • Finding out more about the Courtauld Commitment 2025, and how we might get involved..
  • Banning recycling!
  • Working with local supermarkets to request a plastic free aisle (thanks Phil Hughes for this!)
  • Following the lead of Plastic Free Powys – but maybe going along to supermarkets with bundles of paperbags as a suggested alternative for shoppers
  • Supporting local and national water refill campaigns
  • Educating ourselves and our friends and families about the issue in order to begin to make changes in our habits.

Opportunities that emerged over the course of the evening that would be helpful in supporting these aims included:

  • Stop the Drop’s links with local businesses including BID and Old Market,
  • The benefit of relationship building with local supermarkets through litter picking – as in the work of groups such as Emma Jones’ Hereford Community Clean Up
  • Opportunities we might have to raise public awareness through activities at local events such as the Hereford River Carnival (4 – 5th May)
  • Links with Herefordshire Wildlife Trust community groups around the county

 

We also agreed that those of us who would like to get some local action going should meet and discuss next steps.

If you would like to be part of some local action on plastics, please email kate@hgnetwork.org and once there are a few names on the list we’ll decide a time to meet – and where to start!

In the meantime check out the Plastic Free resources lists on the Herefordshire Green Network website, and send along your own additions.

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