~Recycle Devon Awards

Devon’s recycling heroes were recently celebrated at the Recycle Devon Thank You awards, which were created to recognise the unsung recycling heroes across the county. Cllr Mel Lucas said, “We wanted to say a special thank you for everything that they do to ensure that Devon does not go to waste. We have been truly amazed at the enthusiasm and unselfish efforts, that all our winners go to reduce, reuse and recycle. On behalf of the Recycling Committee and personally, I would like to say thank you to you all. You are all winners!’ 
This was the second year of the Recycle Devon Thank You awards, which marked the 11th anniversary of the Don’t Let Devon go to waste campaign. Devon enjoys a recycling rate of 55% (2012/13) making it one of the highest recycling counties in the country.
Recycling Hero for Devon  Winner: Dean Mallon from Otter Rotters Composting
Dean has had a troubled background.  This year he started volunteering with Otter Rotters on the garden waste collections in East Devon.  Dean is so committed that he purchased his own safety work wear and paid for physiotherapy so he can be more productive whilst doing this physical job.  The improvement in Dean’s well-being is visible and so is his pride at serving the community.  His aim is to get paid employment and earn a reputation for being hard working and dependable.  Dean’s interaction and team work with his learning disabled co-workers also made him worthy of recognition.
School Recycling Hero (Child) Runner up:  Graham Spry, Broadclyst Graham takes an active role in School recycling ensuring all recyclables are in the right place ready for collection.  He also does the recycling at the Caddihoe Scout Campsite as an assistant warden, where since the age of 5 he has helped to minimise landfill waste and ensure recycling is sorted and put out each week for collection.
Category Winner:  Daniel Salter, Forches Cross Primary School Barnstaple  Daniel asks the school eco co-ordinator every day if there are any jobs that need doing.   He takes responsibility for the eco-notice board to show how well the school is doing with its Green Flag work and has enrolled younger children to help him.  Daniel often has new ideas to make the School even more eco-friendly and he keeps everyone on their toes.
School Recycling Hero (Adult) Runner up - Nigel Rowtcliffe, Great Torrington School Nigel tirelessly organises the recycling of cardboard, plastic, paper, tins and glass at school.  He is always passing on his recycling advice.  Because of this the School only produces three small wheelie bins of non-recyclable waste per week. 
Runner up - Emma Goodwin, Okehampton Primary School Emma organises litter picking events at School and in the community with parents and children, she recycles most of the collected litter. Emma has also involved children in a plastic bag campaign, posters were designed and put up in school and the local Waitrose.
Category Winner:  George Tribe, Bratton Fleming Community Primary School George has worked as a caretaker at the School for the last 21 years. He has lived in the village all his life and he cares very passionately about it.  At 85 years old, he still comes into school every morning. He opens up the school and then spends an hour or so sorting out the school recycling and food bins
ensuring everything is put into its correct place.  George’s dedication sends out a fantastic message to the children about how vitally important it is to recycle!
Collection Crew/Operative (Recycling, Garden, Food or Refuse Collector(s)) Runner up: Andy Clements, SITA Woodbury Salterton Andy is a hard working Recycling Collector for SITA in East Devon.  He has taught his youngest child Korey what  to recycle and which bin it should go into as well. 
Runner up: The Recycling Collection Team, Mid Devon District Council In Mid Devon, recycling boxes are hand sorted at the kerbside.  This is hard physical work that most people do not appreciate.  In the winter hands are usually freezing cold and wet. In summer, heat, wasps, smelly tins, and other hazards are routine. Despite this the Recycling Teams are dedicated to what they do, always happy and do a fantastic job. 
Category Winner:  Dean Mallon, Otter Rotters Street Cleansers Category
Winner:  Mike Hollyer, Cleansing Operative, Exeter City Council Mike was the first operative to pilot the Exeter Looking Good regime in Heavitree, Exeter. He takes pride in his work and is building a really good rapport with  the community.

~Most Wasted Household Foodstuff

“Cutting food waste in the home needs to be one of the UK’s biggest environmental priorities” - British Retail Consortium. A recent report on food waste by WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) has identified that UK households are chucking out the equivalent of 24 meals a month, amounting to 4.2m tonnes of food and drink every year, including 86 million chickens. The top three discarded foods are bread, potatoes and milk. The equivalent of 24m slices of bread, 5.8m potatoes and 5.9m glasses of milk are being wasted daily, while even cakes and pastries make it into the top 10 most wasted items.
Supermarkets To Provide Data on Tonnages of Food Waste
The big supermarkets, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrison’s, M&S, Waitrose and Co-op, under pressure from food waste campaigners, will regularly publish tonnages of food thrown out by stores from 2015, in an effort to cut down on the millions of tonnes wasted each year. The situation was highlighted recently when Tesco admitted it generated 28,500 tonnes of food waste at its stores and distribution centres in the first six months of last year alone. The chain said approx. two-thirds of bagged salad was thrown out, either in-store or by shoppers, and 40% of apples were likewise wasted. Supermarkets have been moving to divert their food waste from landfill, mostly sending it to anaerobic digestion. Just 6% of food waste went to landfill in 2013 compared with 47% in 2005, and they are now committed to sending just 1% of food waste to landfill by 2020. However, with the rise of food poverty and food banks in the UK, the spotlight is on retailers to work with food charities like Fareshare, to enable unsold food to be re-distributed to people in need.
Andrew Opie, director of food sustainability at the BRC (British Retail Consortium), said he believed the new reporting regime would help drive change as part of a broader effort to make retailers more sustainable. He criticised the government’s focus on “marginal waste issues” such as plastic bags, where there are plans to introduce a tax in England in line with systems in place in Wales and Northern Ireland. Opie said “That has been a bit of a distraction from bigger issues on waste”. “Once the issue around carrier bags is over we can really concentrate on the areas which will make the  most difference.” Opie said it was important to look at the whole life-cycle of products, from production to selling, use and disposal, to help cut down on waste and create a “circular economy” in which resources could be re-used.
Friends of the Earth said: “Food waste has been growing over the last few decades because of the way supermarkets have driven consumption. (Supermarket food waste data)… will indicate how over- purchasing and other poor buying practices are occurring, but retailers need to really examine whether their marketing strategies are fit for purpose in today’s resource-confined world. Supermarkets will also commit to cutting absolute carbon emissions by 25%, based on 2005 levels, by 2020. Between 2005 and 2013 retailers have cut total emissions from their stores by just 8% because more outlets have opened, offsetting an average 30%  cut in the amount of carbon emitted  per store.

~The more I read about food waste.....

The more I read about food waste the angrier I get really. Ideas like the ‘Pig Idea’ (feeding food waste to pigs) and using food waste to generate energy, I feel we are all missing the point a bit! Are we not looking at the wrong end of the pipe line? Surely we need to really look at why so much food is being wasted in the first place and cut that down before we start thinking it is ‘sustainable’ to do creative things with wasted food. Huge investment will be needed in waste food treatment infrastructure and collection. And then to read about the Freegans, (people that liberate food thrown away by supermarkets) threatened with prosecution in the public interest! 
Of course, the food waste hierarchy should be: prevent food waste first, divert surplus food to be eaten by people, compost food waste at home where possible, unavoidable food waste to be used as animal feed after appropriate treatment, then send remaining food waste to anaerobic digestion/composting to recover energy and nutrients, ensuring no food waste goes to landfill. During farming processes not only is there a lot of wastage due to weather and crops damaged by pests and diseases but also because of the power of supermarkets to reject crops, which they do, in huge quantities. This could be because the crops are not, in their eyes, cosmetically up to scratch, or the supermarkets could just be using that as an excuse because they suddenly have an oversupply in that area. Crops are then graded, with top notch quality fruit and veg commanding higher prices, with ‘grade outs,’ often sold on street markets at a lower price.  Add into this mix the fact that food (and fibre) crops now compete on a world market controlled by transnational corporations at every stage of the supply chain, with the pursuit of profit the bottom line. We also have become used to spending a lower percentage of our income on food, food has become cheaper and so we waste more, but we are learning that there is no such thing as a free (or cheap) lunch and actually there are many hidden costs in food production that we are paying the price for, such as cleaning agri chemicals from our water, health costs from spray drift and much more. Professor Jules Pretty at East Anglia University has extensively researched and written on this subject (e.g. ‘The Living Land' 1998 published by Earthscan). We also, through our water flushing sewage systems, waste valuable nutrients such as phosphorus, which is a finite mined resource from Morocco and China, but now phosphorus is being recovered from sewage – see article on  pages 14-15. On the other hand we have a huge rise in food poverty. So, whilst we are ploughing in cosmetically unacceptable crops, and grading out at the harvesting and packing stage, then throwing away perfectly edible food from the back of supermarkets. We are simultaneously asking for food donations to give to those who are living below the poverty line through Food Banks and Fareshare.  Of course, the waste doesn’t end at the back of the supermarket. Of three bags of shopping, one is effectively thrown straight in the bin at home. We are confused by ‘sell by’, ‘best by’ and ‘consume by’ dates and throw away an astonishing amount of perfectly good food. We are bad at using up leftovers and cooking generally and the UK is the largest consumer of ready meals in Europe. A new initiative Growing Devon Schools Partnership (see www. growingdevonschools.org) is helping schools engage in the whole food  cycle in schools to help redress  this situation.

~Nicky Scott

~The Happy Heap

~Stop Food Waste

A new study, Vision 2020: UK Roadmap to Zero Food Waste to Landfill sets the framework for a food waste-free UK by 2020, and is backed by local authorities and industry experts.  The ambition is to save the UK economy over £17bn a year through the reduction of food wasted by households, businesses and the public sector, and preventing 27m tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year. Composting food waste through processes such as anaerobic digestion could return over 1.3m tonnes a year of valuable nutrients to the soil, the report says, and generate enough power for over 600,000 homes. The report highlights where and why food waste is happening at each stage of the UK supply chain; what actions are being taken to tackle food waste in each sector and what more can be done in the future to drive the positive environmental, economic and social outcomes. Compulsory food collections by local authorities are key to the new campaign – currently only 40% of councils have separate food waste collections. The Local Government Authority, which was involved in the report, says if "food contamination" of recycling
was halved by 2020, it would save £1bn. The devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are now consulting on banning food into landfill, but not England. The campaign is led by food waste recycling company ReFood – in collaboration with BioRegional, a sustainable business charity – as part of the Vision 2020 campaign supported by national and local government as well as industry. Sue Riddlestone, chief executive of BioRegional said: "Achieving zero food waste to landfill within the next seven years is a big challenge and we will need the support and actions of individuals, businesses and the government if this vision is to be realised. However, the case for change is compelling. We will save billions of pounds. We will prevent millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases from entering our atmosphere. And crucially, we will ensure that food is treated as a precious resource."

~You Can Leave Your Cap On!

 

A campaign called “You Can Leave Your Cap On” is urging householders to leave the metal screw tops on their bottles for recycling, instead of throwing them out separately, in a bid to increase the recycling of aluminium. Aluminium recycling body Alupro says that 5,000 tonnes of aluminium, worth £2m, could be recovered from glass bottle metal screw tops during the glass recycling process. Metal screw caps are most commonly found on wine bottles and tend to be thrown away separately by householders , but the campaign, backed by Alupro and British Glass, the first of its kind in the UK, aims to highlight the behaviour change required. Local Authorities are beginning to sign up to the communications initiative, which aims to encourage residents not to throw metal screwtops away separately.

~Break The Bag Habit

Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has announced plans to bring in a 5p charge on single-use carrier bags in England from October 1st 2015. An unbelievable 19 million carrier bags are given out daily in England.  During the Christmas sales, this figure rises but in the 600 days until the change, says the ‘Break the Bag Habit’ campaign, (www.keepbritaintidy.org) we will use more than 12 billion bags, and spend nearly £2bn on cleaning up litter. The campaign urges people to make a small change in shopping behaviour by taking re-usable bags to the shops, and help reduce the huge amounts of waste, litter and danger to wildlife from 12 billion plastic bags.  This comes as Environment Agency figures show that carrier bag usage may have fallen by as much as 80% in Northern Ireland since a 5p levy on single use bags was introduced in April. The NI executive has also submitted plans to increase the minimum charge for single and multi-use carrier bags to 10p from April 2014. Similar charges are due to come into effect in Scotland from October 2014, while the Welsh Government introduced a levy on thin gauge bags in September 2011 – with results showing that bag
usage in Wales may have fallen by up to 76%. During the same period, the number of carrier bags issued in England had risen by 4.4%. There are plans to exempt small businesses from the charge, and incentivise businesses for using more biodegradable plastic bags. However, plastics recyclers have voiced concerns that biodegradable plastic bags undermine the recycling process by contaminating conventional plastic recycling, and criticised bio-degradable bags as being ‘designed to be waste’, whereas conventional plastic bags could be reused and recycled. A spokeman said: “Even a small amount of oxy-degradable polymer in a carrier bag is a barrier to its recyclability. If significant amounts of this material was to enter the waste stream it could undermine some of the plastics recycling targets going forward because  you would not be able to reprocess this fraction of bags (or separate them from conventional plastic).” Oxy-degradable plastics are made from petroleum-based polymers, usually polyethylene, with metal salts - such as cobalt, iron, nickel and manganese - accelerating degradation when exposed to heat or light

~Soil Makes You Happy

We are inextricably linked with soil, we need to play in soil and let our children get some in their systems. The obsession with antibacterial soap and cleanliness is not good for our immune systems which need to come in contact with microbes to build up our immunity. So perhaps we should be telling children not to wash their hands before they eat. I remember reading about a doctor who went to work in India and he took a small amount of water from the waterway each day and gave it to his children to build their immunity. "It's called the hygiene hypothesis”, says Mary Ruebush PhD, author of ‘Why Dirt Is Good: 5 Ways to Make Germs  Your Friends.’ “It’s been around since 1989. It's not new information. But, absolutely, the failure to expose your children to normal environmental things causes the immune response to turn inward on itself. So the development of allergies and what we call auto-immune disease is clearly related to the increase in cleanliness in our society."
So a little bit of dirt is definitely good for you, difficult to know where to draw the line, but just washing with normal soap and water is fine. Now research has shown that there’s a natural antidepressant in soil, it’s called Mycobacterium vaccae, and has been found to mirror the effect on neurons that drugs like Prozac provide. The bacterium may stimulate serotonin production, which makes you relaxed and happier. Studies were conducted on cancer patients and they reported a better quality of life and less stress. Serotonin has been linked to such problems as depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder and bipolar problems. The bacterium appears to be a natural antidepressant in soil and has no adverse health effects. These antidepressant microbes in soil may be as easy to use as just playing in the dirt. See http://discovermagazine. com/2007/jul/raw-data-is-dirt-the- new-Prozac

~Urban Mushroom Farm

The first urban mushroom farm opened by Rob Hopkins on the  23 September in Exeter. Rob said, “this really is a fantastic project - growing food from waste in the middle of a city. What an inspirational idea, and one that’ll spread to other cities I’m sure!” Half a tonne of spent coffee grounds are collected by bicycle and trailer, from local cafés within a very short distance of the farm, based in a disused office building in Exeter city centre. The coffee grounds are ideal for growing oyster mushrooms as they require a sterilised material to grow on and much of the energy used in mushroom farms is spent on the heating required to sterilise the substrate before the spawn is added. Coffee grounds, have of course been effectively sterilised by having boiling water poured over them. Because less than 1% of the coffee is actually extracted to make a cup of coffee the rest is just ‘waste’ however the grounds are rich in nutrients and ideal food for fungi. GroCycle, the team behind the idea, say the project is partly driven by the fact that coffee waste is such a huge environmental problem. Approximately 80 million cups of coffee are drunk every day in the UK, yet less than 1 per cent of the bean actually ends up in the cup. The vast majority of the remaining grounds are buried in landfill, decomposing to produce methane, which is 25 times more harmful to the
earth’s atmosphere than CO2. “It’s crazy that most large cafes are throwing their coffee waste away,” said Adam Sayner, company director. “It is still packed full of nutrients which can be turned into delicious Oyster mushrooms. We are making it possible to grow gourmet food from it instead!” Urban community composters and recycling projects could easily add growing oyster mushrooms to their activities and GroCycle do run training events to teach prospective mushroom growers how to do it. See www. grocycle.com for more information.     “Growing mushrooms in this way is absolutely ideal for Urban Agriculture,” said Eric Jong, company director. “It is where both the waste and demand for food are highest. We hope our farm will serve as a flagship model for more urban farms in the future.” To spread the concept further, the company has also devised a popular and simple to use grow-at-home kit – bringing the process of growing mushrooms from coffee grounds into people’s homes all around the country. More than 10,000 of these kits have been sold the last 2 years.

~Soil

Soil is one of Gaia’s great recyclers and restorers of planetary health and yet much maligned, little thought of and mostly abused. We need to change that. 2015 is designated to be the international year of the soil. Why are soils so important? How much thought do we actually give them? What are they? How are they made? Most of us give soil very little thought, yet we all owe our very existence to the soils, that have taken millions of years to form’ to feed us. Yet we tend to view soil as merely a medium which plants anchor themselves in, whilst we feed them with chemical fertilisers and chemical sprays to stop pests and weeds. Soil scientists are now classifying more and more soil in the UK as ‘dead’. It’s projected that the earth has only 60 years of topsoil left, and some 70% of
the world’s topsoils are already seriously degraded.  This process globally has only been happening significantly in the last 60 – 70 years, which makes it all the more shocking. Soil is not just broken down rock, sand or clay, the underlying rock will give the soil certain characteristics but it is a living ecosystem, the ‘ecstatic soil of the Earth’ as Bill Logan subtitles his book ‘Dirt’. See a review of ‘Dirt, the movie’ in this issue. It’s not all doom and gloom though and there are so many great stories in the film about what is happening to rebuild soils through a whole range of techniques Healthy soils, which have not been over ploughed excessively for monoculture  and smothered in chemical fertilisers and pesticides, have an astonishing amount of life representing every kingdom of life on the planet. A teaspoon full of healthy soil can have literally billions of microorganisms, bacteria, yards even kilometres of fungal hyphae, algae, protozoa, nematodes, mites and much more.  (see www.soilfoodweb.com) Soils sequester carbon, methagenic organisms trap methane and convert to food before it can escape into the atmosphere, but through digging and ploughing we release it into the atmosphere. There are plenty of great stories out there too though, check out John D. Liu at www.whatifwechange. org for some truly inspiring large scale projects which are tackling the root causes of soil degradation.
~Nicky Scott

~Plastics Recycling Guide for Devon

YOUR PLASTICS RECYCLING GUIDE PLASTICS ACCEPTED AT DCC RECYCLING CENTRES RIGID MIXED PLASTICS - PLEASE MAKE SURE EVERYTHING IS CLEAN 

• All plastic drink bottles (squash and put lid back on) Plastic milk bottles (squash and put lid back on) 
• All plastic household cleaning bottles Pre formed biscuit or chocolate box trays
• Plastic sandwich containers Yogurt pots, margarine tubs, Ready meal containers etc Plastic fruit containers (unless made from expanded polystyrene)
• Plastic flower pots (must be clean) 
• Containers for hand and other skin creams (must be clean) Shampoo bottles (must be rinsed clean) 
• Plastic bags are acceptable if several are bagged into one bag (except Deepmoor and Macklins Quarry)
• Not acceptable: cling film type material, contaminated plastic, any other type of plastic BULKY PLASTIC ITEMS NOW ACCEPTED AT RECYCLING CENTRES, WE TAKE (PLEASE MAKE SURE EVERYTHING IS CLEAN) Buckets, Bowls, Bins, Water Butts, Plastic Garden Furniture, Plant Pots,    
• General Housewares, Plastic Children’s Toys (some metal inclusions are  acceptable, Collapsible Crates, Clean Paint Pots
• NOT ACCEPTED IN THE BULKY PLASTICS CONTAINER Items not listed above are not accepted – such as: Plastic Film, Plastic Bags, Builder Bags, PVC Doors, PVC Window Frames,   PVC Pipes and Guttering, Flexible Plastic (e.g. vinyl flooring and hosepipes),  Video Tapes, Fibreglass (e.g. Bathtub)
•  www.devon.gov.uk/bulky_plastics_acceptable_list_web.pdf
• SOFT PLASTIC WRAP, FILM, BAGS etc SUITABLE FOR SUPERMARKET SHOP FRONT PLASTIC RECYCLING BINS  Plastic bags Cereal packet plastic inners, Frozen vegetable bags MID DEVON, CREDITON AND UFFCULME AREAS Uffculme Compost Magic - Contact email: compostmagic@hotmail.co.uk) For Crediton area information see: www.sustainablecrediton.org.uk