| Introduction | Objectives | Activities | Swap Shop | How can you help? | What do I do with...? | Links |
Our best known activity is the Swap Shops which have their own page. Click on photos to enlarge.
Every year, UK landfills take over one million tonnes of nappy waste. Disposable
nappies can take 250 years to decompose in a landfill, but there are alternatives.
The washable nappy has come a long way since terries and safety pins.
In 2005 we collected 5000 plastic beer cups for recycling. In 2006, much hard work by one of our members, with help from the rest of the group and the Bunkfest organizers, achieved the recycling of 77% by volume of the waste from the public bins on the Kinecroft – a great success. The 2007 Bunkfest was much smaller and our involvement wasn't required; we were involved again in 2008 and we hope to be involved in 2009. Click here for the Bunkfest site and here for news about our contribution to Bunkfest in 2006. The bins that we used are available for hire to improve recycling rates at other events; contact the CAG project for more information.
Tetrapaks and similar cartons are hard to recycle as they contain a mixture of materials. As there were no local facilities for recycling them, we began collecting them at our Swap Shops in July 2005. Our efforts to find a good home for them bore fruit in March 2008, by which time we had enough for Tetra Pak to send a large lorry to collect them for recycling (click here to read more). Under the new SODC waste collection arrangements these cartons are now collected every fortnight in your green recycling bin (or sacks), and they can also now be taken to the usual recycling bank locations, so we will no longer be collecting them at Swap Shops.
We are privileged to have been invited to join the Town Council working party, which aims to make Wallingford a plastic bag free town. Shop traders in the centre of the town have been approached regarding their views on the idea, and most are very supportive. Our input has been to advise and source a suitable bag which was launched in July. This was printed using water based inks, depicting artwork chosen from a wonderful selection provided by Wallingford School students. The slogan was chosen from many thought up by St. John’s School Year 6 pupils, when they chose to concentrate on the bag issue for one of their curricular activities. Their work is displayed in the old Waitrose shop window – do have a look. It is very encouraging to see more and more people around the town reusing bags and not picking up yet another carrier bag.
This was run by the Centre for Environmental Studies in the Hospitality Industry at Oxford Brookes University, with support from the government-funded Waste Resources and Action Programme, but Sustainable Wallingford members helped to recruit businesses into a scheme for recycling their business waste. 350 businesses were contacted, and 120 expressed sufficient interest for them to be visited again to encourage them to sign up. A number have now done so, with more expected to – a very good success rate.