November’s Waste Thoughts – 2025

Our next Zoom meeting is on Tuesday 9th December 7pm – Please contact simongibbon@casav.uk for further details.

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

  • Waste
    • On 5th December our Stokesley market stall’s key focus will be making Christmas more sustainable, coming along either to tell us your ways or to learn ways.
  • Reduce / Reuse / Recycle / Circularity:
    • Weather this year means a shortage of straw, so EnviroBed has been created by turning waste paper into a straw substitute for animal bedding.
    • Don’t buy new decorations come to Great Ayton and learn how to make your own upclyced decorations
    • Kate has introduced upcycling as part of the Open Door North East cafe for asylum seekers, volunteer as a great way to learn a new upcycling skill while making people more confident in spoken English.
    • A couple of great YouTube videos explain the whole UK approach to simpler recycling and what this means for waste collection in North Yorkshire.
  • Textiles:
    • NYC’s pilot Halloween costume swaps were a great success with plenty of learning for future years.
    • CASaV’s more informal Halloween Switch locations in the Great Ayton and Stokesley library also worked well.
    • For years Wendy has been turning scrap wool into blankets for the homeless
    • The Repair Cafe’s knitters team have knitted 4 blankets for Redcar Palaces’ Blankets for Teesside.
    • The next project is Blue Light Babies, woollen for paramedics to have for premature fragile babies, do you want to get involved?
    • Do you want to help making sure baby clothes get a second life?
    • Don’t buy a new Christmas Jumper this year, come to one of our opportunities to swap your jumper and give the money you save to a charity.
  • Zero Carbon
    • COP30 is underway come along to the Repair Cafe to get invovled.
  • Communication
    • A key part of this is talking to people to way that engages rather than frightens people about what we can do to help the climate and nature.
  • CASaV Wide
    • Our November Repair Cafe in Swainby Village Hall on Saturday 15th November 10am will include the opportunity to learn and disucss COP30.

Actions

  • Tracey will confirm the exact distribution figures for the Halloween costume exchange for inclusion in the minutes.
  • Tracey will investigate solutions for the remaining 70-odd Halloween costumes (e.g., chopping them up for craft use).
  • Tracey will look into finding existing baby clothes swap models and contact Trading Standards regarding compliance for baby equipment.
  • Wendy will bring the offered teasels to Kate for use in Christmas decorations/stall.
  • Kate follow up on the remaining non-Halloween specific costumes for potential use by charities.
  • Kate following this weekend’s events, initiate a full promotion campaign for the Christmas Jumper exchange.
  • Simon connect Tamzin to Jane Mercer to understand the reasoning behind excluding children’s clothes from the previous clothes swap event.

Background – Our Monthly Waste Discussions

If you have just signed up to the Waste Group or stumbled across this page, 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 11th November 2025 CASaV Waste Meeting

The meeting discussion ranged from the making Christmas more sustainable with jumpers, decorations and toy to blankets for the homeless and fragile newborns, with one thing in common, to do more with less damage to our planet.

Previous Actions

  • Simon – pen reinking – contact Nigel Carden about possibility of doing something similar around Stokesley.
  • Anne look into available dates for a Climate Action Stokesley and Villages Christmas market stall.
    • Stokesley Market stall booked for 5th December
  • Kate look into whether a children’s version of the CASaV monthly newsletter is practical.

Updates

Tracey

Halloween Costume Exchange: exchange event was piloted, collecting costumes via bins at five libraries, County Hall, and Selby council offices.

Recycling officers conducted several events around Halloween focused on minimizing waste and reusing pumpkins.

The intervention from Trading Standards was necessary as Halloween costumes are classified as toys and must comply with safety standards and require appropriate labeling, particularly regarding fire safety. Accessories (like masks or devil’s horns) and anything without original packaging could not be given out.

Approximately 130 costumes were dropped off, and about 60 were distributed. The final figures will be confirmed. The remaining 70-odd costumes are being stored, and solutions are being sought, such as chopping them up for craft activities.

Overall the pilot has been a great learning experience, also highlighted there may be gain in better understanding how charity shops deal with standards issues and equally who we need to better educate the donors on the importance of labelling and retaining packaging to allow reuse. Plus we need to think what could be done with handmade costumes which couldn’t be distributed

Wendy

Knitted Blanket: My most recent knitted blanket made from scraps of waste wool, comprising 84 squares and taking approximately 170 hours to complete. This blanket is tonight due to be taken to Bridget Holmstrom to distribute to homeless people at Nitelight this evening.

EnviroBed: EnviroSystems based in Preston offering EnviroBed, which is 100% recycled paper, crumbled and dried, serving as an alternative to straw for animal bedding. This product is useful due to the straw shortage and can be safely incorporated into slurry storage and AD systems as it is slightly alkaline

Tamzin

Baby Clothes and Equipment Swap: NCT in Stokesley used to do sales of baby stuff – baby clothes “swaps” – have now stoppded. Could we tap into existing organisations like parent/carer toddler groups to reach the target audience.

We need to understand whether this activity might encounter similar Trading Standards issues as the Halloween exchange, especially regarding required labels and safety compliance for equipment and clothes.

Action: Simon connect Tamzin to find out why September’s clothes swap did not include baby clothes.

Kate

Halloween Switch: Kate ran an informal local “Halloween Switch” in Great Ayton and Stokesley Libraries, inspired by the North Yorkshire Council’s pilot. The Switch was initiated by Helen Hornby (Groundworks / REConnect). It aimed to reduce the waste generated by the 20,000 tons of low-grade plastic paraphernalia often used once. Around 25 items were exchanged, and while the event was free, donations to the libraries were encouraged. Remaining non-Halloween specific costumes (like Superman outfits) will be considered for charity use.

Christmas Jumpers: Plans are in motion for an Xmas Jumper Exchange, aiming to curb the “completely illogical” problem of people buying new jumpers every year. The proposed strap line for the campaign is: “cut out the middleman and give them the cost of the jumper you would have bought” to encourage donations to Save the Children’s Christmas Jumper Day instead of buying new items.

Knitted Blankets: Kate and seven friends, inspired by Wendy, knitted/crocheted four blankets using scrap wool (including unraveled jumpers and scrap ends). These were presented to Redcar Palace for their “Blankets for the Teesside” initiative part of “Blankets for the World“. Hannah, a council employee, has joined the knitting group and the Repair Cafe, significantly bringing down the average age.

Blue Light Babies Project: The group’s next project involves using very pale-coloured donated wool to knit premature-sized blankets, hats, and wraps for ambulance services to provide emergency packs, offering dignity to babies who may not survive. You learn about this here, including about how it started locally.

Eco Christmas Crafts: Kate will be assisting Great Ayton Library staff with two sessions on Friday 14th November afternoon (3:30 and 5:00) using waste materials (e.g., old CDs for light catchers, disintegrated books for paper stars) to make Christmas decorations. Some decorations will be used for Bridget’s CASaV’s Christmas tree entry in Stokesley Christmas Tree Competition.

Refugee Crafts: Tracey presented her recycling talk through a translator to Afghan refugee ladies in Catterick, at the end there was a very successful and therapeutic session with making Christmas trees out of old books with the aid of a translator.

English Cafe: Kate runs craft sessions once or twice a month at the English Cafe in Middlesbrough (for asylum seekers and refugees from Eritrea, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iran, etc.) to facilitate incidental English language acquisition and communication.

If any one would like to volunteer, no need to be an English language teacher, you just to be keen to talk as part of the cafe whether playing games or crafting, go to https://www.opendoornortheast.com.

Simon

My son shared a great 12 minute YouTube video,”Recycling in England is about to get better,” it details the historical inconsistency and complexity of household recycling rules across different councils in England, using the example of plastic carrier bag disposal to illustrate the problem. The current system, which stemmed from the vague Household Waste Recycling Act 2003, is contrasted with the high recycling rate achieved by Wales. The video announces significant upcoming legislative changes in England, including “Simpler Recycling” rules that mandate separate food waste collection and legally define specific materials to be accepted everywhere by April 2026 and 2027.

Furthermore, the source explains the UK-wide “extended producer responsibility” scheme, which forces manufacturers to pay for the recycling of their packaging based on material type and ease of recycling. Finally, it notes the planned introduction of a deposit return scheme for drinks containers, all aimed at significantly improving and simplifying recycling efforts.

Wayne and James explain what the changes mean to North Yorkshire waste collections, which are being rolled out across North Yorkshire, currently Ryedale, Hambleton will follow in the future.

Matters Arising

Stokesley Market Stall (December 5th): The stall’s focus will be promoting sustainable Christmas ideas. Kate will be making and giving away sample Christmas decorations (like book paper stars) alongside ideas for people to create their own. We are thinking about have the Christmas Decoration Swap/Exchange, which will be a continuation of the already advertised start at Saturday’s Repair Cafe. The aim is to combat the waste caused by low-quality, often plastic, decorations bought when people change decorative themes (e.g., from red/gold to blue/silver). The stall will be used to promote the Christmas Jumper swap/exchange.

Teasels were offered by Wendy for use in Christmas table decorations at the stall, which Kate gratefully accepted.

Visitors are attracted by Christmas-related items (like decorations and the draught excluders used previously), as it helps draw in people they wouldn’t normally talk to us.

Could we find a way to promote sustainable manufacturers (like those who make to order, e.g., Unfolded), perhaps Ethical Consumer Reports or even Which reports could be incorporated. While bearing in mind that we don’t want to dilute the overall message to buy less.

Repair Cafes

Stokesley Repair Cafe (October 11th): Reported as very successful, with a large number of items repaired. The logistics of balancing the library’s operations with the cafe are working well.

Swainby Village Hall Repair Cafe (This Saturday 15th November): We will occupy the whole hall – using 2 rooms for repairing and 1 room for climate advocacy. Helen is attending with her granddaughter, who is looking for skill development opportunities. Helen’s granddaughter is a “terrific baker,” will choose her preferred role upon arrival; suggested roles include sewing team (unpicking zips/learning), front desk, or refreshments. Hopefully, this will get other peers of Helen’s granddaughter wanting to be involved.

COP 30 Display: Kate is producing a free-flow, three-fold display board. This board will cover: (1) what COP is, (2) the impact of climate change on North Yorkshire and a summary of the North Yorkshire Council climate plan, and (3) actions individuals can take.

The display links well to the future big event being planned in Stokesley Town Hall by Bridget, Barry, and Helen, focused on sharing small personal contributions to climate action. Of course we already have a large library of leaflets which detail positive actions individuals can take to address the climate and nature emergency.

Climate Outreach’s report “Britain Talks Climate and Nature” is a great resource to frame how we talk to different people, based on their seven segments approach, you can get an idea of this from the launch webinar for the report. Anything that helps us to talk about climate change effectively without causing fright or putting people off.

Meetings

Repair Cafe – 15th November Swainby Village Hall – 10am – 12pm, 13th December Stokesley Globe Library

CASaV Group Meeting – 18th November Stokesley Library – 7.30pm

AOB

River Trust Presentation: Chloe from the Tees Rivers Trust is scheduled to give a presentation on the management of non-native species on the River Leven on the 18th November, before a shortend CASaV meeting.

YorWaste Toy Sorting Volunteers: Tracey announced that YorWaste is asking for volunteers to sort toys at their Northallerton headquarters, as part of Reuse Santa, starting around November 17th. Last year, they received 5,000 toys, which are distributed to various charities. You can read more on their Facebook page or contact marketing@yorwaste.co.uk for more information.

Stokesley Toy Bank: The Rotary (formerly organized by George Carter/Stokesley Town Council) is holding their toy sort on November 16th in Labman in Seamer, if you would like to help sort / repair toy then contact Rob Hodgson – rhodgson@labman.co.uk.

Next Meeting

Tuesday 9th December 7pm – Please contact simongibbon@casav.uk for further details.