Compost Workshop: 6 May

(From the Council's Media Team)

Do you want to know more about how to make your own compost for your garden or allotment?

As part of Compost Awareness Week, which runs from 5 to 10 May, Lewisham Council is holding a compost workshop for residents.

When: Monday 6 May, Time: 5.00pm to 7.00pm, Location: Civic Suite, Catford.

Compost Awareness Week aims to encourage more people to recognise the benefits of home composting and the great results that can be achieved by using peat-free compost containing recycled material.

Did you know that as a nation we produce around 300 million tonnes of rubbish a year and over half of this waste can be easily recycled. Over one third of the contents of an average UK household bin can be home composted, not to mention all the garden waste that can be added to a compost bin.

As well as learning how to successfully get your own compost started, we also have a limited number of free compost bins available. If you would like to attend this or other compost workshops held during Compost Awareness Week, or get a free compost bin contact Beth Sowden on 020 8314 2053.

For further info about home composting see here or here.

A new friend for the cow bins?!

The cow bins at 'Moo Cross' have apparently been a huge success and have now also been rolled out to schools across Lewisham. Yesterday I went on the Lewisham Green Party outing to Yalding Organic Gardens in Kent, and came across a possible friend for the cows.

Introducing, Alys the Rolypig compost bin:

What do you think?!

Rolypig's website says the composter "turns a chore into a pleasure with its simple operation and attractive appearance. Never again will you dump green waste in the dustbin to be expensively transported to the landfill site [incinerator, in Lewisham's case] . . . Just think how much fossil fuel energy is wasted in this way to bury a potentially useful garden fertilizer. . . Every time you roll your Rolypig onto its next flat side, you aerate all the contents automatically, simple, no complicated mechanism."

The price quoted on the Rolypig website is rather steep, but perhaps if the council went the 'whole hog' (sorry) and bulk ordered one for every school, we could get a special deal. Sounds like an excellent way to get children (and adults) converted to the joys of composting! So how about it, Nigel, can we have our very own Lewisham waste-eating urban farms please?!

Clean and Green Schools Awards

A number of people have asked me recently whether I am enjoying being a councillor and my answer is generally something along the lines of 'most of the time, yes, but sometimes it's incredibly frustrating'. Yesterday afternoon was definitely one of the fun bits of being a councillor, when together with Deputy Mayor Heidi Alexander I was handing out the awards for the Clean and Green Schools awards.

Before the winners were announced, there was a brilliant and exceedingly loud workshop by Big Beat, a group who make music using percussion instruments made from junk. The councillors and officers present loved it and thought it would be a good to have a session before/after full council meetings, and the children seemed to enjoy it to.

Anyway, congratulations to all the schools who took part and won awards, though special mentions should go to St Stephen's CE and Stillness Infants, who scooped the top two prizes. In addition to recycling, the schools were involved with all sorts of projects including wildlife ponds, composting, reducing waste, freecycling, litter picks and litter surveys, collecting unwanted items to donate to charity, to designing 'rubbish monsters'. Very inspiring. I hope they go home and nag their families to do the same.

This is not a plastic bag

Following hot on the heels of Anya Hindmarch's highly-sought after designer bag and the announcement that Modbury in Devon has just become the first plastic bag free town in Europe, Lewisham town centre management team are about to launch a range of cotton bags, with the double aim of both promoting local shops and reducing waste.

The idea started out as a Green budget proposal. When we first discussed the idea with town centre managers, they liked it so much that they decided to spend a small amount of leftover cash from last year's budget on it straightaway. The first batch have just arrived back from the manufacturers and will be hitting shops soon. I believe the first bags are earmarked for the bigger shopping centres in Lewisham (ie Lewisham, Catford, Brockley), but as our budget proposal also went through, more bags (this time in fairtrade (and I think organic) cotton, as stipulated in our budget agreement) have been ordered, which I believe are going to be aimed at smaller shopping centres (I'm hoping this will include Ladywell, but I have no say over this).

The town centre managers will be offering the bags to shopkeepers at just above cost-price , who can then sell the bags onto customers at £2 each. This means that the scheme should be self-financing (ie sustainable in more ways than one!), as well as making the shops a small profit, and any profit made by the town centre managers will be ploughed back into buying more cloth bags or on other improvements to shopping areas.

So buy them quickly before they are snapped up and put on E-bay for extortionate prices. Could soon be the must have accessory for all shoppers in Lewisham!

Waste Strategy

On Wednesday evening I went to the Mayor and Cabinet meeting. The Mayor withdrew the items on the Monson consultation and the lighting PFI contract, but the main reason I was there was to here about the borough’s new waste strategy. The document looks at various options to meet our 20% recycling target for next year, including expanding the collection of kitchen/garden waste and making recycling compulsory.

While the strategy as a whole was approved, the Mayor was somewhat reticent about committing to any particular proposal out of those outlined in the document. He was concerned at the cost of implementing them, in particular the green waste collection. He's right to make sure money is spent effectively, but we will need to spend more money if we are to boost our recycling rates. I'm hopeful that this strategy is something we can get a degree of cross-party consensus on, and the Greens will certainly support any sensible plans to increase recycling in the borough, including compulsory recycling as long as it's implemented fairly and alongside a publicity campaign and making sure that everyone has access to recycling facilities.