November’s Waste Thoughts – 2023

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

Actions:

  • All Please get in touch if you can help with the CASaV stall on Stokesley Market on Friday 8th December.
  • All Please send any Tombola prizes to Wendy in support of the Moorsbus refreshments in Stokesley Town Hall ahead of Friday 22nd December.
  • All Get your individual community quilt square to Kate by end of November for incorporation in the quilt to be presented to Rishi Sunak. See links on UFWH website for ideas for squares.

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 upcoming 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 14th November 2023 CASaV Waste Group Meeting

Matters Arising

CASaV Stall at Stokesley Market Friday 8th December

Anne has booked a Stall at Stokesley Market on Friday 8th December, primary aim is to highlight how to make optimum use of kerbside recycling where else to recycle other items and to get people’s thoughts on recycling and help people with recycling.

We will be joined by Tracey Flint, North Yorkshire Council Recycling Officer, to help. Tracey gave us a breakdown of some of the challenges.

“The most common contaminants we get are the following: soft plastic e.g. plastic bags, crisp packets, film wrappers; Batteries are a big problem and gas canisters; Black plastic; Nappies; Pizza boxes; Textiles; Food Waste. There are a lot of things which can’t be recycled at the kerbside but can be recycled elsewhere, these are the items highlighted above. However, we want to get the message across about all the things you can recycle which at the moment often end up in the general waste bin:- e.g. Items from the bathroom not just the kitchen, i.e. shampoo bottles, toilet roll middles, soap dispensers.  Above all we also need to promote reducing waste.  I will bring along lots of examples of what can and can’t be recycled and ideas for reducing waste. I’ve attached a leaflet showing our most common contaminants (link to leaflet).  Please bring along your oil bottle, I’m intrigued as to why it can’t be recycled.”

We also plan to highlight other CASaV acitivites particularly Christmas related – Fight Climate Change at Christmas leaflet, getting the vote out for the CASaV Christmas tree, making decorations from waste materials (see workshops below) and other upcycling for Christmas. We can also highlight how to open a crisp bag for the Night Light sleeping bag.

We need volunteers for shifts between 10am-2pm, time on the stall then time to warm up in the Town Hall at the charity coffee event – volunteers so far Jenny, Wendy, Anne, Kate.

Action: All Please get in touch if you can help with the CASaV stall an Stokesley Market on Friday 8th December.

On Fridays different charities run provide refreshments in the Town Hall, for example Wendy will be there for the Moorsbus on Friday 22nd December.

Action: All Please send any Tombola prizes to Wendy in support of the Moorsbus refreshments in Stokesley Town Hall ahead of Friday 22nd December.

Updates

Fred

Guisborough Eco-group are also looking into holding a Recycling stall at Guisborough market – basically trying to help people to understand “why is recycling so complex?”

Guisborough Eco Group’s Repair Cafe is facing some challenges, initially with arranging hall, but now with insufficient repairers, next one next planned for January.

The trip to the South Bank recycling plant visit has proved not possible to organise at this time.

Guisborough Eco-group is moving its meetings to Guisborough library – 4pm – 6pm.

Some success with stopping bikes going to scrap – seems obvious to reuse books and bikes – hand it down – hand it on. The GEG has been offered 2 bikes from Great Ayton, these have been picked up by Tony from Route 1 Coffee House CIC in Redcar – like Sustrans they take bikes do repair and restore to riding state. This has involved RCBC, Sustrans and Climate Action Middlesbrough, so hopefully will build on what Sustrans’ presence in Stockton, Redcar – where they do cycle repairs.

Sustrans and Stockton Borough Council have partnered to set up the Stockton Active Travel Hub.

Guisborough market – Caroline’s Homemade preserves – wants jars back so she can reuse them, now a cafe in town takes in jars for reuse, then Fred takes jars to her on market day.

Sadly “What Planet are We On” is potentially closing see the discussion / information on Facebook. For Goodness Sake also does refill in Guisborough.

Wendy

New Scientist highlighted that toys are a far larger contributor to electronic waste than vapes, in fact 77 time more electronic waste than vapes. We wondered why toys ended up in waste and weren’t being passed on, but it is the sheer quantity and many ways in which toys can be broken in ways that can’t be repaired. For example often single custom integrated circuit fails or the plastic breaks and can not be glued. We hope people are using charity shops, Stokesley Christmas Toy Bank and Guisborough Recycling Hub. Electronic toys can be included in Macmillan Charity Recycling for good causes blue bag (see below).

Kate

Looking for recycling solutions:
Recycling for good causes – you choose a charity and they send you a big bag to put old electronic gear, watches, computers, phones, currency, stamps and they pay to take the bag back if it weighs over 10kg. We have a bag for MacMillan’s Cancer Support, so we hope to send in over 10kg full bag after collecting at the Repair cafes and the market stall.

The Terracycle / Aldi Blister pack recycling accepts 60 blister packs per person per month in 2 x 30 pack envelopes. The scheme pays postage you just need to collect your blister packs supply an envelope, print the postage label and deposit at a post office. You can use Climate Action Stokesley and Villages to fill in your organisation name on the sign up.
It could be even better if big pharma to were to take take responsibility for their materials – so sign this petition.

United for Warm Homes – a number of NGOs have been running this campaign and Saturday is the action day to take the message to government.

We will be making a Community Quilt to send a soft petition to government (our MP) to take action, part of the craftavism movement.

The idea is people make a square to add to the quilt, each square is 15cm x 15cm which is decorated with their own request, related to the UFWH Themes – help people with energy bills, comprehensive homes insulation, invest in green energy to bring down energy bills. Unfortunately Rishi is unavailable and his diary is more than usually unpredictable. So will present instead at the next Richmond (Yorks) Area Constituency Committee Meeting to Malcolm Warne, one of Rishi Sunak’s staff who attends these meetings substituting for Rishi Sunak. Hopefully NYC Comms will take a photograph of the handover so we get this into the D&S at least. David Hugill will also make a square.
Action: All Get your individual community quilt square to Kate by end of November for incorporation in the quilt to be presented to Rishi Sunak. See links on UFWH website for ideas for squares.

David H

Unseen to all those who had their apples juiced at the CASaV apple pressing event in Faceby on 5th November, I took all the apple pulp waste to feed our cattle – not sure if this was recycling, upcycling or downcycling, but they enjoyed it.

On 21st October the government announced via a press release “Simpler recycling collections and tougher regulation to reform waste system”, by 2026 all councils will need to collect 6 waste streams plus food waste, but it allows exemptions. The new regulation stipulates how councils should handle 6 waste streams and food waste. North Yorkshire Council has made signed a declaration that before 2046 food waste will collected across North Yorkshire, it will happen sooner. However there are challenges, when building work in Swainby stopped rubbish being collected it meant that waste sat in bins for 4 weeks, people were not happy about the smell, would separate food waste have made this worse? One suggestion has been that food waste would be collected in compostible bags with green waste, if this was the case then it would no longer be possible to shred the green waste to put on land. Some of this is slowly delivering on the 2018 Strategy “Our waste, our resources: a strategy for England“, meanwhile we still await DRS and EPR (deposit return scheme and extended producer responsibility).

Joy

What do you do with broken plastic toys, they should be able to go in recycle bins as many are made of polypropylene, but no they are specifically excluded on Tracey’s no recycle list.

How do you make crisp bags into sleeping bags? Open at top very carefully, all washed inside pillow case on low temperature washing machine cycle, then ironed to seal them together using lower melting plastic at top and bottom, then the plastic liner from banana boxes is stuck to the joined crisp bags to act as a backer. One method was described by the Daily Record.

Interesting article in the Guardian article where heat from waste water in the Netherlands is being used to provide a reliable source of energy to heat homes – heat from toilets. You won’t jet get heat from toilets, but also hot shower water, washing up water, bath water, basically any water that is above freezing point, can act as the heat source for heat pumps – so for 1kW of electricity you can get up to 4kW of heat by cooling the water in your sewer. The Dutch are plan get 8% of Amsterdam’s heat this way, you can’t cool the sewer too much otherwise the bacteria needed to breakdown the waste will be killed.

Pete

There is a huge amount of human / animal waste, but we are a bit squeamish about it, so people wouldn’t be keen on using a dry toilet and collecting the watse in compostible bag, which could be taken away. Doing this for animal and human waste would solve nutrient issues in rivers, this is particularly a problem locally as the River Leven is one of the most nutrient rich rivers in the land due sewage outflows, land run off and poor peat moor management. The BBC’s “Why it’s time to talk about poo” shows progress around the world as well as challenges from the chemical pollution that is in our water than can get concentrated in our poo. The Climate Action Accelerator has lots of reasons to be excited about dry toilets.

The Woodland Kids aren’t so squeamish as on seeing 5 tonnes of composted waste being delivered, were quite happy that this had come from our composting toilet (in fact it was rotted farm yard waste, as composting toilet only produced 2 small buckets a year).

Unfortunately it is not possible get a private visit to Bran Sands sewage treatment plant, they only do school visits. Obviously this is a work site and has some inherent dangers, but it is a shame that we can’t see what happens to what we just flush away. Bran Sands already feeds biogas into the gas grid.

David B

Advanced plastic recycling plant at Wilton using a process developed Australian process, the plant is now operational and will provide 150 jobs. What is quality of mixed plastics going into system? Some details in the Mura brochure. Could it deal with clothes as well? Breaking down nylon and polyester fibres.

South Australia is great success story for proper renewable energy deployment made possible in part by the investment in a huge battery (manufactured by Tesla in 100 days, so the battery would have been zero cost). The battery is necessary to balance out the solar and wind generation on the grid, but not only does it balance this out, but it is also able to stop grid failure due to accidental issues, as the battery can react instantly to either spikes in generation or breaks in generation due to damage to the grid. 1 in 3 houses has solar panels on the roof – Guardian article – “Go hard and go big“.

Jenny

Organising “Food Share over Christmas”, please get in touch with Jenny if you would like to volunteer at Christmas or any other time of the year.

Bridget

CASaV is creating a tree for the Christmas Tree Festival which happens every years in Stokesley Parish Church. We are having 2 workshops to create upcycled decorations for yourself and for the CASaV tree, in the Great Ayton Discovery Centre on Wednesday 22nd November 3pm – 5pm and in the Stokesley Globe Community Library on Saturday 25th November 10am – 12noon. Materials will be available but it will be great if you are able to bring anything you want to make into decorations – plastic bottle tops, card board, buttons, old christmas paper, ….

Helen and Bridget are working with the North York Moors Dark Sky Reserve to look at surveying light pollution around Stokesley. The Dark Skies wants to extend the buffer zone around the reserve, so need to control light around us. Excess light at night is not good for animals or us, it is bad for biodiversity – moths can’t help but around lights, night flying birds trying to follow moon are unable to if light levels are too high and our bodies can no long tell the difference between day and night, upsetting our fundamental circadian rhythms. An initial survey has spotted that the business park (in the parish of Great Broughton) and the school are some of the biggest contributors to local light pollution.

We have a meeting on 8th December as part of the North Yorkshire Climate Coalition (NYCC – grouping of all North Yorkshire climate groups) with North Yorkshire Council Highways to talk about verge management. NYC are already working with Plantlife (the group behind no-mow May) to improve biodiversity. On of the big challenges is what to do with the big piles of arisings (cut grass etc) that are expensive to remove from the verges.

Also on 8th December NYCC are meeting Mike Leah from NYC about the councils approaches and plans to decarbonise property and procurement.

On Monday DeSmog webinar on carbon capture and storage (CCS) to brief journalists on what questions / stories should they be asking / writing. CCS is basically pushing CO2 into old oil fields, now CO2 is currently used to extend the life of oilfields as pushing in CO2 pushes out otherwise immobile oil reserves, so current CCS plans mean that for every 1 tonne CO2 2-5 barrels of oil will be extracted. Not exactly reducing oil production. So releasing even more oil companies can sell means even more CO2 will need to stored releasing even more oil, great for oil and gas profits, rubbish for the planet.

To make CCS work we will require an industry the size of the current oil industry, but not sure they have the planets best interests at heart.

DeSmog have a great CCS Reporting Tipsheet aimed at journalists, but is a great source of information and tips on how to read oil/big industry / government press releases on CCS.

Simon

The World Beyond Waste podcast from the Chartered Institute of Waste Managers had an episode on the circular economy which is interesting for a number of snippets that give insight into how waste works.

Some wrong things jump out for example in the way UK recovers materials by weight whereas Japan does it by value, so Japan recovers indium from LCD screens but UK buries/burns LCD screens but the indium concentration is greater than in the ores that indium is mined from.

Government all to keen to accelerate building new incinerators but won’t resist manufacturer lobbying to delay implementation of the 2018 promised extended producer responsibility (EPR).

Good to hear the Middlesbrough Materials Processing Institute (MPI) on a waste webinar – great to talk circular. Easy for steel / iron which are massively recycled even before electric arc furnaces (EAF) recently in the news, so good to hear Chris talk about reducing materials usage in the first place. Recognising our language doesn’t help calling things waste rather than materials or resources, I liked his use of symbiosis to describe one plant’s waste being used as raw materials / feedstock by the plant next to it. Chris described this as a “wicked problem” (basically one that is incredible complex because of all the interrelationship and so unpredictability of what happens when you make any change), to make this symbiosis happen more generally really shouldn’t be a “wicked problem”, climate change is a wicked problem, tweaking regulations / taxes to make waste an attractive resource for another plant should be a whole load simpler.

I am currently training to be an En-ROADS facilitator, “En-ROADS is a powerful simulation model for exploring how to address global energy and climate challenges through large-scale policy, technological, and societal shifts. With En-ROADS you can create scenarios that focus on how changes in taxes, subsidies, economic growth, energy efficiency, technological innovation, carbon pricing, fuel mix, and other factors will change global carbon emissions and temperature.” It incorporates all the latest science and was developed by Climate Interactive, MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative and Ventana Systems, it is widely used across governments, companies and civil society to empower people to take action.

The plan is use this as a tool to discuss with people what the impact would be of changes that are designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. So the objective is that through the learning from using the tool people will build the capacity to take effective action.

En-ROADS combined with other tools such as Climate Fresk and Impact are great ways to make the change we can make to tackle climate change real and show the impacts of what our actions could be.

Actions from last meeting

All get in touch with Bridget (bridgetholmstrom@hotmail.com) if you would like to see Allerton Waste Recovery Park where our rubbish goes to get burnt.
Fixing date for 4 who are interested in attended, space for more
Simon send Northallerton Climate Action contact details to Kate / Bridget
CASaV attended Northallerton Eco-fest to help get a Northallerton Repair Cafe started
Simon email Tracey Flint to see if she can help on a recycling stall at Stokesley Friday Market.
Tracey Flint on board, planning for 8th December.
Jenny talk to Nadia about getting some small sleeping bags for Stokesley School.
Underway
Kate contact library about restarting crisp packet collection for Nite Light
The Globe is now collecting crisp packets for Nite Light

Ongoing Activities

Repair Cafes
Stokesley 14/10 – Good atmosphere / variety of things bought for repair / conversations / give advice / items taken away / 100 year old portable record player / magazine journalist / vegan apple cake went well, good idea to publically use up excess produce / draught excluders were popular too.
Swainby 16/11 – will be making more draught excluders / don’t forget your 15cm x 15cm square for the United for Warm Homes Community Quilt you can either take away or do there – see details in Kate’s update above.
Stokesley 9/12 – Christmas theme – hats at least, with mince pies using chopped apple from local apples.
Other Local Repair Activities –
Saltburn – mentored planning for 1st weekend in February – watch this space.
Middlesbrough – helping planning for mid January – watch this space.
Guisborough – held first sewing repair cafe, planning another in January.
Northallerton – collected over 20 names at Eco-fest – looking for co-ordinator to get everything underway.
Laura Hallett sustainability manager for South Tees Hospital Trust has been in touch – Mathew Brown suggested holding one at James Cook University Hospital – South Tees – potential for joint repair cafe with Middlesbrough – Laura suggested sort of pop-up version during work time Monday-Friday.
Action: Simon – discuss possibility of JCUH pop-up repair cafe with repairers.

Recent/Upcoming online / physical meetings

Yorkshire Post Climate Change Summit 2023 – Tuesday 21st November at the Royal Armouries in Leeds – register for a summit ticket here using the code CC-FREE.

Mystery of the Teesside crab deaths: algal bloom or preventable cover-up? – 30th November – Wild Ideas on Zoom – Simon is one of the panel who will be discussing what happened – Stan Rennie will describe what happened as seen by a Hartlepool fisherman and how its impact on the fishing community, Dr John Bothwell will talk about the marine science and how the marine ecosystem works, Sally Bunce will both describe how she sees the river as a seal medic and as an environmental activist how answers don’t make sense, Simon Gibbon will explain how as a chemical scientist who the public documents don’t add up – lots of contamination is known to be there but little is done it mitigate them, finally Paul Widowfield will explain how the fisherman have had to change how they operate to cope with what happened. There will then be space for a general discussion.
If you want to swat up in advance then you can find my research and thinking on https://northeastfc.uk and why I think it is likely as not that Teesworks could have caused the die-off – The Crab Die-off and Teesworks.
The North Yorkshire full council meeting on Wednesday 15th November will discuss the crustacean deaths along the North Yorkshire coast and also the need for uprating of the North Yorkshire power grid.

AOB

Prof. Aimee Ambrose from Sheffield Hallam is looking for 10 local houses which are off-grid as part of a project to develop the best ways to decarbonise such properties. The project is joint with Northern Powergrid, Northern Gas Grid, and the architecture departments of Cardiff and University College London.

Next meeting

Tuesday 12th December 7.00pm