Charlbury Area Waste Action Group

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1. REDUCE

Last updated 16 June 2010

"Reduce" is the first part of the slogan Reduce-Reuse-Recycle. Reducing your consumption is by far the most effective way to reduce your impact on the environment and reduce your carbon footprint. If you reduce your consumption, choose to buy things made from recycled materials, reuse things, and reduce the waste you generate. You will then reduce the natural resouces used, reduce the energy and transport involved in manufacture and distribution, and reduce the energy involved in disposing of waste materials. Spend a few minutes watching the powerful short film "The Story of Stuff" to see what is really involved and yet hidden from view. The government's Waste Strategy 2000 says the key is reducing waste rather than reusing and recycling. In May 2008, CAWAG produced a Quick Guide for Charlbury giving some ideas about reducing your impact on the environment, also have a look at CO₂ What Can I Do? for lots of simple ideas from people of Charlbury - many of which will save you money. Local businesses can apply to the Green Tourism Business Scheme for an award to show they are reducing their impact on the environment - The Bell Hotel was awarded a Bronze award in 2009 for its green tourism policy.

Food is a huge topic - growing food, buying food, cooking food, consuming food, wasting food - these all have a enormously significant impact on the environment and reducing this impact is really important.
Love Food Hate Waste
Buy Local Seasonal Produce
Grow Your Own

Cut Your Consumption
Cut Out Packaging
Cut Your Paper Footprint and Save the Forests
Cut Your Water Footprint
Change to Low-Energy Lightbulbs

Cut Your Consumption

• In June 2009, Neal Lawson wrote in the Guardian about the dark side of "retail therapy". Compulsive shoppers tend to spend when they feel down, buying things they don't need, often returning or rapidly disposing of them and running up large debts in the process. At the extreme end of the spectrum are kleptomaniacs, driven to steal by the same compulsive urge that fuels gamblers and drug addicts. Then there are those who resort to stealing to maintain their lifestyle in these recession-gripped times.

• In July 2009, battling the consumerism in his life, Leonardo di Caprio accepted Dave Bruno's "100 Things Challenge". Dave started his year with 100 personal things in his life in November 2008 (socks and underwear count as one item). 

• Consumer companies have the power to put pressure on their suppliers to reduce their impact on the environment. The link between forest destruction and the expansion of cattle ranching in the Amazon led four of the biggest companies involved in Brazilian cattle farming to join forces to stop the purchase of cattle from newly deforested areas of the Amazon. The food group Princes and footwear manufacturers Clarkes, Adidas, Nike, and Timberland, have threatened to cancel contracts unless their beef and leather products are guaranteed free from raw materials linked to Amazon destruction. Apart from illustrating the direct link between consumer goods, the rainforest, and climate change, it does show how important it is for shoppers to ask the retailers where the leather and the meat comes from.

• In January 2007 William Leith wrote in the Independent on Sunday about the complex relationship between happiness (or rather unhappiness) and the constant desire to acquire more possessions. The Independent reports that people throw out their own bodyweight in rubbish every 7 weeks.

• In January 2007 Janet Street-Porter wrote in the Independent on Sunday: "I hate resolutions, life-changing regimes and free advice. There is no way a "new" JSP is going to emerge from the gloom of January. But one simple bit of philosophy I read about last week has given me a lot to think about. A year ago, nauseated by rampant consumerism and growing piles of waste surrounding them, 10 ordinary people who lived in the San Francisco area formed a group calling themselves the Compact. They chose their name inspired by the Mayflower Compact - an agreement drafted by the original pilgrims who landed in America in 1620. The new Compact, for the 21st century, redefined the way that this group of New World citizens would run their lives. They signed up to give up shopping for a year: no new clothes, gadgets, cars, CDs or make-up. The only things they were allowed to buy were essentials such as medication, food and stuff like toothpaste." By July 2008, Compact had grown to 9,000  members with spin-off groups all over the United States.

• Matthieu Ricard a French biochemist turned Buddhist monk talks about the pursuit of happiness, the fleeting nature of happiness from materialism and the more lasting happiness as a state of mind. As Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche put it: "Those who seek happiness in pleasure, wealth, glory, power, and heroics are as naïve as a child who tries to catch a rainbow and wear it as a coat."

   

• Locally in Charlbury, Hopethruhorses provides equine involvement therapy for emotional health and happiness.

• Christmas is not just a time of excessive food consumption but also a time when people receive unwanted presents - so consider giving "unwrapped" charity gifts on behalf of your friends from Oxfam, these will make a real difference to the lives of the people that receive them. Take unwanted presents to the local Charlbury "Bring & Take" in March or to local Charity  shops. Here are the top 10 tips for a green, sustainable and  eco-friendly Christmas. Use material bags to wrap presents in, either bags that the recipient can reuse or make permanent present bags in a range of sizes which you can reuse each year in your own family. These bags were mostly made from offcuts of gorgeous materials bought from Anna Belinda in Oxford, but also scarves following the Japanese tradition of tsutsumi.

  

• Those special things bought just before Christmas soon become "rubbish" - the extra refuse collected after Christmas amounts to an average five extra sackfuls per household compared to the rest of the year. During January, take your Christmas cards (and other greetings cards) to WH Smith, M&S, and TK Maxx stores where there are collection points for the Woodland Trust who generate money from recycling the cards and use the money to plant new woodlands in the UK. Alternatively, hang onto the cards to remake your own next year. Send e-cards which are even free! Our behaviour over the 3 days of Christmas apparently contributes "5.5 per cent of the UK's average carbon footprint of 11.87 tons per person a year" – equivalent to 20 days of normal consumption.

    
  
  December 2006 - Graffiti spotted on a post box in St Giles' - "This Xmas Santa Claus wants YOU to curb your consumption".

• Buy in bulk and use refills wherever possible. The Beanbag in Witney now do self-service Ecover refills for laundry liquid, fabric conditioner and washing-up liquid (in April 2009, the Beanbag won the Independent Retailer Award at the Natural and Organic trade show at Olympia.)

• Buy the correct amount of material to do a job so there is no surplus over at the end. 

• Mend broken or worn items rather than throw them out and buy new again.

• Buy fewer disposable items.

• Buy longer life products and rechargable batteries.

• Use real nappies - by the time a baby has been potty trained they will have got through 4,000-6,000 nappies (without them even having a say in the matter and no matter how green they become later in life) - that's a lot of money spent on "disposable" nappies and a lot of landfill!  A year's worth of disposable nappy waste from Oxfordshire alone would fill Oxford's Cornmarket Street to a height of 10 metres! At current tax levels, landfilling this much waste costs the county's residents £300,000 each year. That is to say that each child born costs the taxpayer £30 in costs for disposable nappies. 

• Always buy products made from recycled materials, this will reduce the impact of your purchase on the environment, this will reduce the raw materials used and reduce the energy taken in production, if the items are manufactured from recycled materials in the UK then the transport costs will also be reduced.

Cut Out Packaging

• Consider the packaging when making your choice about what to buy and let the shop know that you are doing this. Since 2005, the Women's Institute have been campaigning against excessive packaging - in June 2006, they staged a day of action returning excessive packaging to supermarkets all over the UK. The WI also have an ongoing letter writing campaign encouraging people to write to supermarkets. There was another local day of action on 30 June 2007 where Oxfordshire WIs and Oxfordshire Community Action Groups talked to customers outside local supermarkets about the excessive packaging found in the stores. Complete the WI's online survey about supermarket packaging. Easter eggs often have excessive packaging, there were good and bad examples on display at the Swap Shop in March 2007:
  

• If you are involved in packaging in your job, consider minimising it to reduce your costs and to reduce the problem of disposal to your customers. Envirowise gives practical environmental advice to businesses about packaging.

• Avoid taking plastic bags when buying things from shops & supermarkets, WRAP estimate that we use 10 billion plastic carrier bags a year. Some shops ask if you want a bag, others just assume you want one - if that is the case you can always say don't bother with a bag. Waitrose check-out staff are not supposed to automatically put out plastic bags, they are supposed to ask first. Buy some reusable bags such as CAWAG's jute bag available from News & Things and the Good Food Shop. Also use Bags for Life from supermarkets which last a long, long while and are replaced free of charge whenever they break. Waitrose introduced a re-usable jute bag during March 2008, they were the first supermarket to introduce the plastic Bag for Life in 1997. On Friday 27 April 2007 Sainsbury's banned the regular pastic bag for one day and gave away 7m Bags for Life free of charge - that equates to the number of "Bags for Life" that Sainsbury's would normally sell in just under two years. The more durable bag, made of 100% recycled material, is designed to be re-used again and again (Sainsbury's say at least 20 times, but in reality it's much higher) and when it finally gives up the ghost, Sainsbury's will replace the bag free of charge.  There is a giant plastic-slick in the Pacific Ocean - the vast expanse of debris – in effect the world's largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

• Drink tap water rather than bottled water - filter it first if you prefer the taste, either use a filter jug for the fridge or have a filter tap added to your kitchen sink. Watch Pur's TV interview with water to see water in a different light. Ask for tap water at restaurants rather than bottled water - often the tap water will be filtered and served with ice and lemon. Consumption of bottled water is doubling every five years in Britain and represents over 15% of all soft drinks sold in the UK. On average each person in the UK drinks almost 40 litres of bottled water per year. Worldwide it is estimated that over 150 billion litres of bottled water are now consumed every year - an increase of almost 60% in five years. Most plastic bottles will end up buried in landfill sites, where they take hundreds of years to decompose. None of the millions of tonnes of plastic produced in the UK have yet decomposed. The energy cost of producing billions of plastic bottles from oil, transporting the bottles over thousands of miles and then disposing of the bottles in landfill sites or incinerators makes bottled water one of UK's most wasteful luxuries.

• Use reusable containers when making packed lunches or storing things in the fridge - avoid using plastic bags, aluminium foil or cling-film that are only used once.

• Get milk delivered to your door in glass bottles by Charlbury Dairy. Rinse out the empty bottles and leave them on your doorstep for collection. Since December 2006, they have been delivering organic milk in glass bottles rather than Tetra Paks.

Cut Your Paper Footprint and Save the Forests

• Each of us in the UK throws away, on average, a quarter of a ton (250kg) of paper every year. About one fifth of a household's waste is paper or cardboard. Deforestation caused by paper production is thought to be a bigger cause of global warming than transport. In the world, the worst offenders are the Finns at who get through 333kg. The average Somalian uses 20g. Much of the UK's paper is barely used and a large proportion ends up in landfill. Just 42 per cent is recycled – but as there are so few recycling mills in the country, most of this ends up being sent abroad. It is a myth that most paper comes from sustainable sources. Seventy per cent of it comes from natural forests, the destruction of these forests not only destroys vegetation and wildlife but also destroys the livelihoods and culture of the local native people. The UK produces virtually none of its own pulp and imports 80 per cent of its pulp. Around 75 per cent of the paper for magazines is production wastage and is never read. Advertisers know that 99.7 per cent of recipients of junk mail throw it away unread but they think it's worth it for the 0.3 per cent who just might read it! See satellite imagery of clearcut logging of the boreal forests on the Russian-Finnish border, First Nation Indian Reserves in British Columbia, Canada, and eucalyptus plantations that have replaced rainforests in Espirito Santo in Brazil.

   
  Photos of British Columbia by Bill Ritchie

• Not long ago much of the virgin tree fibre Kimberly-Clark (makers of Kleenex & Andrex) used for its tissue products came from unsustainably logged forests. These forests were predominantly logged in clearcuts - a devastating form of logging where most if not all trees are removed from an area of forest. After a clearcut, what's left behind is a barren landscape that can no longer support wildlife species. Kleenex tissue boxes are now seen in February 2009 labelled with the FSC logo and Kimberly-Clark have made great progress in shifting the timber supply for their products. In August 2009, victory was achieved for the boreal forests when Kimberly-Clark published their new environmental fibre policy that governs how it will help conserve forests and support sustainable forestry and use more recycled fibre.

  

• Cancel your paper telephone directories and use the on-line versions, if everyone did this the resources saved would be mind boggling enormous. Cancel your BT Directory (or order one) by phoning Freephone 0800 833 400 Monday to Friday 8.30am to 5pm. Cancel Yellow Pages (or order one) by phoning Freefone 0800 671 444. Cancel Thomson Local (or order one) by phoning 01252 555 555 Monday – Friday, 8.30am – 5.30pm.



 

• More than 21 billion pieces of junk mail are delivered each year. Register with the Mailing Preference Service to avoid getting junk mail through your letterbox or phone 0845-7034599. You can also opt out from receiving unaddressed mail delivered by the Royal Mail or by phoning 08457-740740.

• Use toilet rolls, paper tissues and paper napkins made from alternatives to wood fibre. The UK Cloudy Bay Cotton company makes toilet rolls, paper tissues and napkins from organic cotton fibres. They also make Papura tissues and toilet rolls from 90% sugar cane waste material that would otherwise be dumped. These are available at selected Waitrose stores and from SoOrganic mail order.

• Do not pick up paper napkins in cafés or give spare back if you get given more than one.

• Ask yourself: do I need to print this? If so, use both sides of the paper. Making one sheet of A4 causes as much green house gas as burning a lightbulb for an hour, it also uses a mugful of water.

• Make sure any paper you buy (toilet rolls through to writing paper) comes from recycled sources.

• Select balance on-screen rather than a paper receipt at cash machines.

• Re-use paper bags; compost receipts and torn-up bank statements.

• Sign up for paperless billing and on-line bank statements.

• Read news articles on-line.

• Use scraps of waste paper or old envelopes instead of Post-its.

• Cut down on and share magazines, return unwanted catalogues to the sender.

• Carry a fabric, washable hankerchief to avoid using tissues. Research suggests that wood fibres and chemicals in paper tissues can provide allergens that exacerbate hay fever.

• Use washable kitchen cloths for mopping up.

• Use fewer sheets of toilet paper.

• Re-use envelopes and make your own cards.

• Read small print carefully and never tick the "more information" box.

• Ask your boss to buy recycled paper for your workplace and to encourage people to reduce their paper consumption.

• Buy and read Paper Trails: From Trees to Trash - The True Cost of Paper by Mandy Haggith (produced on recycled paper) or if you live in Charlbury borrow it from our Bookshare Library.

• Visit the Shrink web site to pledge to consume less paper.

  

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Cut Your Water Footprint

• The WWF reveals that in 2008, UK has become the sixth largest net importer of water in the world. Only 38% comes from within the UK the rest depends on water systems within other countries, some of which are facing serious water shortages.

• In the UK, the average household water use for washing and drinking is about 150 litres a person daily, but we consume about 30 times as much in "virtual water" which is used in the production of imported food and textiles. 140 litres of water will have been used to bring you a single 125ml cup of coffee. 15,500 litres to bring you 1kg beef. The large quantities of water used to grow salad crops grown in southern Spain has led to salination of the water table by the infiltration of sea water as the fresh water pressure drops.

• "What's particularly worrying is that huge amounts of the food and cotton we consume are grown in drier areas of the world where water resources are either already stressed or very likely to become so in the near future," said Stuart Orr, WWF's water footprint expert. Listen to Stuart Orr of WWF explain the report. 

• Treating and pumping drinking water and waste water uses a lot of energy, with the UK water industry accounting for around 1% of UK CO₂ emissions. Amazingly, domestic water heating is responsible for 5% of UK CO₂ emissions, and 25% of your household energy bill. Waterwise show that large savings can be made by simple changes to the way water is used at home. If your home doesn't have a water meter you can get one fitted to monitor your consumption, you could also save money if you only have 2 people living in the house, see the Thames Water Waterwise website for ideas to save water. Get a rainwater butt to store water for your garden.
  

• Drink tap water rather than bottled water - filter it first if you prefer the taste, either use a filter jug for the fridge or have a filter tap added to your kitchen sink. Watch Pur's TV interview with water to see water in a different light. Ask for tap water at restaurants rather than bottled water - often the tap water will be filtered and served with ice and lemon.

• Consumption of bottled water is doubling every five years in Britain  - we drink 200 times as much bottled water today as we did in the 1970s; this represents over 15% of all soft drinks sold in the UK. Most plastic bottles will end up buried in landfill sites, where they take hundreds of years to decompose. None of the millions of tonnes of plastic produced in the UK have yet decomposed. The energy cost of producing billions of plastic bottles from oil, transporting the bottles over thousands of miles and then disposing of the bottles in landfill sites or incinerators makes bottled water one of UK's most wasteful luxuries. Even if the bottles are recycled, the resources and transport involved with bottled water are incredible - it takes up to 12 litres of water to make one litre of bottled water and hundreds of times more CO₂ than tap water. On average each person in the UK drinks almost 40 litres of bottled water per year. Worldwide it is estimated that over 150 billion litres of bottled water are now consumed every year - an increase of almost 60% in five years. This is particularly unecessary considering our tap water is safe to drink, however, a water filter does make it more palatable.

• BRITA, the major supplier of cartridge water filters, has launched an in-store recycling scheme. Recycling bins are now situated in a range of high street stores such as Robert Dyas, Argos, Cargo, Comet, Sainsbury's, Homebase, Asda, and Makro. The collection bin at Cargo in Witney is located next to the new filters. BRITA have now discontinued their long-running freepost service where you used to be able to return 6 at a time for recycling. Since March 2009, The Good Food Shop in Charlbury has started collecting Brita filters for recycling, so this is very convenient for Charlbury people.

Change to Low-Energy Lightbulbs

• Replace your lightbulbs with low-energy lightbulbs, these last about 8 times as long as conventional lightbulbs so you will have fewer broken lightbulbs to dispose of. You will also save 75% on your lighting costs and 75% of the associated carbon dioxide emissions. In conjunction with SusCha, the Charlbury Area Waste Action group has organised and funded a low-energy lightbulb library for people to borrow for a couple of evenings and try out bulbs in the comfort of their own home. This means that you can be sure that the lightbulbs will suit your fittings before making the investment. The library also includes a wattage and current meter so that you can measure the electricity consumed by an appliance (e.g. a TV) in standby mode or by a transformer when the appliance (e.g. a radio) is switched off. Phone Louise Spicer 01608-810745 to book borrowing the library. Reducing your electricity consumption will make a postive contribution to reducing your carbon footprint and will have an impact on global warming.

• The 10:10 Campaign brings you an excellent interactive guide to help you decide which light bulbs to buy to reduce your energy consumption. 

  
  

• Andrew Cooper, Director of the polling organisation 'Populus' on BBC Radio 4's Analysis programme on 19 July 2007 said "To an implausible degree, people say  that they are already taking every possible step. For example, 81% of  people say that they only boil as much water as they need, they don‘t  automatically fill the kettle; 4 out of 5 people say that they don‘t use the  standby button on their television set; 76% say that they recycle  everything in their house that can be recycled; two thirds of people say  that they only buy low energy light bulbs.  Now that‘s despite the fact  that, according to the National Consumer Council, only 11% of the light  bulb market is currently for low energy light bulbs and at the current  growth rate they‘re projecting that it’ll only be 13% by 2020.  So clearly  people are over-claiming here.  What it clearly tells us is that people  perceive that there is now a sort of cultural norm that the right answer is  to say that you are doing these things, that you are acting responsibly in  respect of the environment even though they’re not."