Waste Prevention
The Greening Campaign has partnered on this Pillar with Garden Organic
Our modern society is centred around mass consumption and not designed to prevent waste. We buy, we use (often for a short period), and we put in a bin.
The aim of this Pillar is to change this behaviour by raising awareness of Waste prevention approaches that your community can access and adopt, preventing waste from occurring in the first place.
“Our proudest pillar achievement has been setting up a small charity, getting funding and launching a toy library, all within a couple of months” Community Waste Pillar Champion
The waste hierarchy helps us understand what Waste Prevention means – actions that stop waste from being created in the first place, like reducing what we use or finding ways to reuse as much as possible.
Waste Prevention can be a complex subject but essentially means – reducing everything that goes into our bins – all bins- by changing our purchasing choices and consciously reducing the amount of waste we produce.
We are somewhat conditioned to believe recycling is the solution to waste. However, sorting our waste for collection simply passes the problem to someone else to deal with, is very energy intensive, and is often ineffective – it does not prevent waste! Waste production and disposal is a huge contributor to accelerated climate change, so there’s every reason to concentrate community efforts on preventing it wherever we can.
Garden Organic, supported by Hampshire County Council’s Waste Prevention Team, are working with the Greening Campaign to deliver this programme to communities.
The activities you will undertake will support your community to make changes in a fun and interactive way, and will include training for two of your residents to become Waste Prevention Champions. The training is provided by Hampshire County Council Waste Prevention Team with support from Garden Organic. Once trained, your champions can share their knowledge with other members of the community.
- Garden Organic will support your champions to identify and share ways to effectively prevent waste in your local community. This might be by reducing food waste, demonstrating how to turn food waste into compost, or setting up a local tool library, nappy library or repair café and then measuring what has been saved.
- We will also support you to create a list of local waste prevention services to share with others.
- We can provide you with a fun and informative waste prevention trail to display in your community & raise awareness. Each board contains a statement about waste, a solution to the problem, and a quiz question to reinforce the learning. The trail hopes to encourage conversation around waste and change people’s behaviour.
The incredible thing about joining in to tackle waste prevention is the additional benefits it can bring:
- Learning new mending skills
- Learning about composting
- Learning how to use social media
- Learning how to set up events
- Making friends
- Reducing loneliness
- Joining one of the biggest movements spreading across the UK!
Joint Pillar Events
Throughout the year all 5 Greening Campaign Pillars come together to run joint events. This shows how we can tackle climate change challenges through shared solutions. For example, by reducing waste we save energy, save money, reduce extraction of resources (which often impacts biodiversity), reduce manufacturing which also reduces air pollution.
We can all commit to wasting less by simply reducing what we put in the bin every day. When communities work together we have the collective power to make change happen. It’s up to us!
Interested in running a campaign or finding out more?
Please contact the Greening Campaign and we will talk you through all the options. We want to support you to enjoy running The Greening Campaign - our future is your future - we all live on the same planet!
