March’s Waste Thoughts – 2024 – Climate Action Stokesley and Villages

Full notes below, quick summary – follow links for the detail:

Waste:
- When is waste useful, when nature uses it (dead leaves, composted food scraps) to make your garden more nature friendly, as Helen and Bridget highlighted in their talk on Gardening for Wildlife.
- CASaV’s March Newsletter had several waste related items – Leisure loop – recycling sports gear, how Howard’s Court is ensuring flowers live long after weddings, the Coats of Hopes has come to our part of North Yorkshire, are you doing your Big Plastic Count?
- In Iceland they are looking to find productive uses for all parts of the fish caught to reduce waste.
Clothes:
- Period kits from waste fabrics.
- Rounton’s Coffee have a new rag rug courtesy of what Wendy does with their old coffee sacks also a great use of small scraps of fabric.
Recycle / Reuse / Circularity:
- New CASaV leaflet “Fight the plastic peril” – how to reduce plastic in the environment.
- Reduce waste by sharing, lending and borrowing.
- Even M&S are now getting the refillable bug.
Food:
- Do you want to be part of the cooperative to run What Planet are You On in Guisborough?
Repair Cafes:
- The Guardian has discovered Repair Cafes and wants people’s experience, which it is using to write articles about them.
- On Saturday Stokesley and Villages Repair Cafe in Swainby will repair the 1000th item
CASaV Wide
- What events should we run for Great Big Green Week (8-16th June)? Come to next Tuesday’s CASaV meeting or get in touch.
- We don’t do a great job with the waste we can see, how about what we can’t see, the waste of knowledge as people get older.
- Jem Bendell’s and Hannah Ritchie’s books present contrasting views of climate change, what do you think?
- Do you know local business with great green practices which we should profile for others to learn from?

Actions:

Kate – offer surplus unsuitable fabrics donated to Repair Cafe to Wendy for use in rag rugs.

Background – Our Monthly Waste Discussions

If you have just signed up to the Waste Group, then welcome, I hope these notes of our discussion make sense.

We meet once a month to talk about topics connected to waste and plan / report progress on our ongoing activities such as the Repair Cafes, Foodshare, Refill scheme and events such as the Bilsdale Show. If you visit the “Thoughts on Waste” page on the CASaV website you can find all our past discussions – https://climateactionstokesleyandvillages.org/waste/thoughts-on-waste/

Please get in touch if you have any questions.

Notes form 13th February 2023 CASaV Waste Group

Updates

Kate

25 people attended a great talk last night in Faceby where Helen Herring and Bridget Holmstrom talked about Gardening for Wildlife, there were 25 people to hear the really practical and simple approaches to making your garden wildlife friendly. Lots of the ideas were relatively easy to implement and obvious why they help e.g. not having hard edge with grass flowing into borders creating new habitats,;not sweeping up leaves on lawn as they will be dealt with by the worms helping to aerate the lawn while encouraging worms who become the food that attracts more birds; how layering creates the different levels that attract a wider range of insects with trees, hedge, tall plants, shorter plants, down to grass; let your lawn grow a bit as this will create deeper grass roots and so give more underground biodiversity; leave piles of logs, stones, tree stumps as these all create homes for different insects; allow access to your garden so hedgehogs can get in and out; don’t dead head as these dead heads are the winter hibernating homes for all sorts of insects; … Lots of organisations have great practical tips – RHS, Wildlife Trusts, The Royal Parks, Woodland Trust, .. get in touch if you know of even better resources.

Today, Joy and Pete’s grandchildren were really excited when they spotted lots of newts in his 18 month old pond which was built with advice from Helen Herring. Great to see how fast things can change in wildlife’s favour when we do our bit.

Helen found it ironic that somebody from down her road, where she has lived for 40 years, complemented her when she was removing an invasive species, as they thought she was obviously a new resident who was tidying up the messy garden. Sadly many people’s idea of tidy has no biodiversity and is useless to wildlife.

New CASaV leaflet – Fight the plastic peril – background to the challenge which plastics face, why governments need to act and how to reduce your use through simple actions. Less Plastic has a great set of simple infographics showing how to reduce plastic use such as this one:

Thirsk Friends of the Earth has some nice green profiles of local businesses e.g. Earth Unwrapped. It would be great to do something similar and this could also be a good way of showcasing best practices to show to other businesses for example as mentioned above Howard’s Court best practises for reducing all waste.

M&S have introduced refillable aluminium bottles for a £2 deposit which is redeemed as £2 voucher when you scan in container for refill. M&S also offer dry goods in refillable form – Adventures in food.

YorKits in York repurpose waste fabric as period kits for use in developing countries. YorKits alleviate period poverty / social stigma and avoids additional waste in areas of the world with poor waste management systems. York is too far to go to help, but YorKits are happy to share their process with other groups, anyone interested? They took over York Minster on International Women’s Day as factory inviting everybody in to help make more YorKits.

Wendy

New Scientist highlight a scheme in Iceland which is trying to make full use of everything from fish, they are turning from Wolf Fish into purses / bags / shoes, using collagen for food supplements, even using skin for human skin grafts. As fish and humans have so little in common fish skin grafts don’t need the strong anti-virals normally used as we share no virus pathogens.

Made a rag rug for Rountons using a Rounton’s coffee bag as the base. Nearly run out of old thin blankets, so need fabric which has colour on both sides, many fabrics are now printed which is unsuitable. Any single complete colour small pieces would be suitable.

Action Kate – offer surplus unsuitable fabrics donated to Repair Cafe to Wendy

Pete

We talk about tangible waste – materials going to waste. We don’t talk about intangible waste – people’s knowledge and skills not being used specifically as people retire and get older. Some of this sharing/reuse of knowledge happens through our Repair Cafes and through things such as U3A. However, other cultures value old people’s knowledge with both men and women moving from child rearing to grand parent roles across a whole community.

Globally The Elders do this on a global scale with largely elder statespeople forming this group which was set up in 2007 by Nelson Mandela, Kate heard Mary Robinson, ex-president of Ireland at the Festival of Thought at the Sage explain how The Elders provided their wisdom to address current global challenges.

There should be opportunities to stop this intangible waste now people were living longer healthier lives.

David

House is going to used as a case study for the LEAD (local energy area demonstator) project, so meeting up with team later this month and Pete has been invited to a meeting involving also the North East and Yorkshire Net Zero Hub at Labman on 15th April 10.30am at Labman.

Simon

After the Guardian requested information on people’s experiences of repair cafe (link to survey – please fill it in if you have time and share your experience directly with us too), there was a Guardian Repair Cafe article on Monday, great mention of getting children involved and exposure of people to repair, but rather made Repair Cafes sound like little BBC repair shops where the real challenge is help reduce the over 450,000 tonnes of material that North Yorkshire disposes of every year by making everyday items last longer.

Sadly What Planet Are You On? in Guisborough was put up for sale earlier this year and now they are looking at whether there are people interested in being part of a cooperative to run it, so there is a meeting on Friday (15th March) at 5pm at the shop. Perhaps you don’t think it’s so appropriate for people around Stokesley to help run the shop, but maybe there is a need for help with finance and administrative support.

Something to mull over, are there other ways we could be reducing waste. We have thought about share shed, bring and take events, …. In Devon there is even a mobile share shed.

The Repair Cafes are doing a great job at reducing waste with our 1,000th item due to be repaired this Saturday (16th March 2024) in Swainby. The Repair Cafe sewing group has been teaching people repair skills, how to use their sewing machines and through darning demonstrations so they go away not only with repaired items but the skills to do repairs themselves.

It was great at the Stokesley Repair Cafe over half term to see so many children, as it is important that they see how things are being mended. Could we take training to groups like Cubs / Guides / Brownies / Scouts? Also the Repair Cafe organisation have lesson plans and the Lake District Repair Cafe have a whole series of mending classes.

Great Big Green Week – perhaps we could run some “Become your own repairer workshops“, bike mending we should be able to get Sustrans to help and they will bring some specialist tools plus Pete would provide the continuity. Are there other organisations we could encourage or partner with to add additional events for great big green week?

Dave the “Builder on a bike” has just moved to Northallerton, fantastic idea while a van is needed to get materials on site, once on site with good planning everything needed for a day can be carried on a bike:

Mike Newton made me aware of a Jem Bendell’s book “Breaking Together: a freedom-loving response to collapse” (available as a free epub) which outlines how what he sees as the inevitable collapse of systems happening around us requires a deep adaptation approach to get to the best possible outcome. I have not fully read this book yet, it worries me that this philosophy could be used as a reason to not act, and while freedom is good physics may necessarily constrain it in the short term as biology did during the pandemic for the long term good. Rather I see it as a wake up call that as much action as possible now is essential to make sure that we get the best possible future.

In contrast Hannah Richie’s “Not the end of the world: How we can be the first generation to build a sustainable planet” takes a very different view based on her day job of crunching numbers for “Our world in data“, that it is not to late and she lays out the solutions which are necessary to avert the most catastrophic climate change and build a sustainable planet.

I hope that both books will reinforce the fact that doing nothing is really not an option, and that urgent action to reduce our environmental footprint is essential.

Matters Arising

Repair Cafes:
10th February – Stokesley – Lots of children, over 80 items repaired or adviced
16th March – Swainby – Coat of Hopes, focus on reducing plastics as end of big plastic count week, chance to see why dark skies are important, ..
13th April – Stokesley, expecting help from Sustrans, plus the Globe has been updated, so electrical will now be around the pillar where the computers used to be, hopefully more space to repair.

AOB

The Globe film club’s film last Saturday was “20 Days in Mariupol” needless to say not an easy watch, but really makes clear the waste that war causes and the horror of what is still going on in Ukraine. You can watch it now online on Channel 4 – https://www.channel4.com/programmes/20-days-in-mariupol