It’s the school summer holidays, and I’m using my extra time and energy to try and catch up with some jobs around the house, and also things I have been trying to get done for the plastics campaign for some time.
I have been going round the cafes in New Mills, asking for support for a scheme where you get your coffee or tea a bit cheaper if you take your own reusable cup in. In the UK, we buy 7.5 million disposable coffee cups every day. I have tried to imagine all those in one place and failed. That is every day, almost all going to land fill. Well every cafe I went into today was agreeable that you will get your coffee cheaper if you take your own cup. I haven’t been to them all yet, some bosses were on holiday, one cafe changes hands in a few weeks, one cafe was shut, but it was a positive and heartening response. So watch this space.
Next job is to try to work out a coordinated way of dealing with the recycling problems we have here in High Peak. For instance, we have spent months trying to find catering ware that can be composted in HPBC’s systems so that our street events and festivals can be greener, only to be told that HPBC will not collect commercial composting. I think we need to try to get all the interested parties together to try to exert some pressure with a concentrated joint effort. Or come up with an alternative, like composting our own food waste.
Another bit of the campaign that is going well is to get a chance to involve our young people. This is on hold for the holidays, but hopefully in September I will be able to drive this forward.
I am going to be spending some time in the middle of nowhere in a tent before I go back to school. This should give me a chance to write some of the blogs and articles for local groups that have been waiting to be done for weeks (or months.)
Last but not least, I have been try to think more holistically about plastic, that is, how our problem with the stuff sits with all our other serious difficulties, namely pollution and that huge one, climate change.
Each 500ml plastic drink drinks bottle takes an average of 83g of carbon to be made, filled and transported to the shop. At the rate of a million a minute round the world, that’s a lot of carbon, even if it’s only 1% -2% of the total. I haven’t even looked at the figures for coffee cups. This makes me feel even more strongly how ridiculous it is for us to be making anything for single use at all, ever. Convenience has got to go. Time to shape up.

Liz Longden

Latest in the series of Rethink Plastic blogs by Liz Longden:

Plastic news gets better – more people talking , thinking and acting, and plastic news gets worse – more and more plastic being found polluting the world, even in the most remote and uninhabited parts of our planet.

There is still so much we don’t know about the way this plastic is getting into the waterways and oceans. I don’t think we know yet how long there has been such widespread contamination, and we certainly know very little about the long term effect on human, animal and plant health.

Because of this, I always feel a little wary of embracing any of the myriad ideas you see on social media about ways to reuse plastic either before or after it has been through a recycling process.

For instance, plastic roads. Would they not produce plastic dust from the wear and tear of the passage of traffic? I don’t know, I am not a scientist, but it would comfort me to find out that this has been looked into before we start laying down roads left right and centre. So often mankind produces a solution to a problem without thinking it through, and it becomes just as big a problem. That’s how we got in this mess in the first place, isn’t it?

We have some ‘thinking though’ to do in respect of how we manage the several events every year when large amounts of street food are sold and consumed. We thought that it was an obvious move to say ‘no plastic’ to all the traders who wanted to have food stalls at these events. However after a lot of research into alternatives it appears that, as I write, there are no viable alternatives that we can use here and now. Nothing is as straightforward as it first seems, and products advertised as ‘compostable’ , will not break down in the system used by High Peak’s contractors. If we had gone ahead and asked for the food  traders to only use these type of products, they would have had to go into landfill, where they would decompose and produce methane, which is a powerful green house gas.  We may have to shift our focus completely onto making sure the maximum plastic gets recycled, at least for the present time.

All this is intensely frustrating, but still I think it is really important that we do no harm whilst trying to do good. So, slowly, slowly, and get it right. Patience.

The 7th in our series of blogs by Liz Longden.

Well into 2018, and plastic pollution is being talked about in mainstream media more and more. Even the BBC have recently featured a family who agreed to try to go completely plastic free for ten days. It’s possible now that most families have at least been giving some thought to the way they shop. It’s all very encouraging, isn’t it? But from the start of our campaign we have never thought most people or families can live a plastic free life, because we have to stay in our ordinary lives at the same time. We use computers with plastic housing, we fill our plastic rubbish bins, we are constrained by our incomes to buy the food we can afford, in the time we have, in the shops that are available to us.
At the same time, we have become accustomed to comfort, convenience, and a huge range of choice in products, in drinks, shampoos, conditioners, and laundry products. Huge range of fresh fruit and veg all year round. It’s hard to do without these things. It’s very easy to persuade yourself that what was a luxury has become a necessity.
So, this is a blog about not needing to beat ourselves up. About recognising that it is impossible to be absolutist, and that we can all only do what we can do. My friend Lorrie is writing a blog about how she has changed her shopping habits, which is full of information and ideas about replacing plastic with alternatives. Lots of information in there for those that are able.
However, this is also a blog saying: ‘no more excuses’! I am coming to think that it’s time that EVERYBODY should be thinking about this and taking what action they can. No matter how busy and stressed your lives, there will be some changes you can easily make that will make a difference. I understand that all we have been talking about, for some people, is very difficult. For instance, a few people really need straws to be able to drink safely and independently, or without pain. But most of us don’t. That’s what lips are for, and for most of us they work really well. So, ditch the straws, and replace them with nothing.
Yes, nothing.
Go back to powdered washing powder. It’s cheaper, lasts longer, and for most people, will cause no problems for your skin.
Go for the unpacked fruit and veg whenever you can. You don’t need to bag it.
Put your leftovers in a bowl in the fridge, and put a plate on top. No expense, zero waste , zero carbon, zero consumption.
DON’T BUY BOTTLED WATER! You know that plastic contamination has been found in your bottled water now? I have to admit that that kind of made me laugh, but not in a good way.
These changes would require no extra time, effort or money. They may lead you to make more changes, maybe not; either way they will make a difference, and they will start you thinking.

So, I am no longer asking will you, can you, could you? I’m asking, why aren’t you? And I’m saying, I think you can, and I think you have to.

The sixth in the series of blogs by Liz Longden.

I’ve been feeling more and more hopeful about the plastics campaign in the past few weeks. I see my friends talking on social media, even starting campaigns of their own. Bollington, a very similar town to New Mills and about six miles away, is starting to do the same and asked Transition New Mills to go and talk at their inaugural meeting.
Although it still feels like wading through treacle sometimes, increasingly it feels like plastic pollution is being taken seriously. So far, so marvellous. However, the more I know, the more I realise I know almost nothing.
When I first started to think and talk about these issues, I had what I suppose was a fairly simplistic view. Just replace single use plastic with something else and all will be well. Now I know that it is all a lot more complicated than that.
For instance, our councils have to decide how to organise their waste collection to maximise effectiveness within the constraints of their budgets, and although it’s easy to see them as simply obstructive, I am sure they are coping with issues we know nothing about, and they have to stay within a legal framework I am just now beginning to get a handle on.
Then you have to start thinking about consumption of resources. If you stop using one polluting consumable, but just replace it with another, what have you actually achieved?
Suppose we all start using huge amounts of PLA, plant based plastic, (compostable if you have the right composting system,) what will be the consequences in terms of the land needed to produce the plants to make the plastic? I don’t know. How do I find out? I don’t know.
We are asking people to stop using plastic shopping bags and start using bags made from other things, for instance, cotton. The cotton has to be grown, (water, land, fertilisers) and processed, (water, energy, probably pollution) and it has been estimated that a cotton bag would need to be used 143 times before it is environmentally ‘cheaper’ than a plastic bag. Are we doing that? As above.
Suppose enough of us realise we can’t sustain the mindless consumption of ‘stuff’. Well, people are making that ‘stuff’, and it’s how they make their living. Who decides whose job or business survives? What is available for the less well off in our society if the cheap clothes and toys disappear from the marketplace? As above, I don’t know.

So often, human society seems to create a problem when they were trying to solve a problem. So that when plastic bottles were first routinely available, they were hailed as a real benefit in cutting down transport costs for bottled drinks. Twenty years on, we now have a huge proliferation in the sales of bottled water, soft drinks, energy drinks, cheap alcohol, and I would dearly love to know how much we spend transporting them. Now we have the problems of obesity, dental decay, and what to do with those seven billion plastic drinks bottles used every year in this country alone.
These are huge problems. I can talk about them, research the issues, try to influence people but in the end the only persons behaviour I control is my own. But I have come to the realisation that there is no such thing as an action (large or small) that has no consequences. Some of the consequences will perhaps be the ones that you intended, but there may be others that are less desirable, even if your intentions were of the very best. I am learning to develop the mindset of ‘what will happen if….’ and to take that thinking a lot further into the future than I have previously. Scary stuff.
So lots more thinking and research needed. But some things at least are perfectly clear to me. Plastic industries are huge and powerful, and have every intention of continuing to grow. We cannot continue in our dependence on single use plastic in the way we are. I will keep on asking questions, talking, blogging, asking, talking, blogging. And in the meantime, we have some simple and straightforward guiding principles: Refuse. Reduce. Re-use. Recycle. Every day. I don’t think we can go far wrong with these. Cheers.