Newsletter issue 1

6th September 2020

How exciting! It's taken much time and effort to get to the point of sending out a newsletter. Thank you for signing up to follow our campaign.

A colourful drawing of a flower, rainbow, tree, and flower with a bee flying and a smiley face. Has plastic items covered by the banned symbol.

We launched our new website for Plastic Free July 2020. It's a great basis for our work, we hope it will serve the campaign well. The library was collected over the last couple of years. It was created to serve Swindonians in a time of fake news when many of us are unsure what to trust.

The 8th August 2020 saw the launch of the Summer of Refills campaign led by Refill / City to Sea. It's an important campaign to correct misinformation about the safety of reuse with regards to covid. In short, reuse is safe using basic hygiene measures. We are supporting the campaign in a number of ways to get this vital info out and ask that you do so too. There is a petition to sign and share, asking Big Business to start using reusables again.

For the start of September, we have launched the Keep Swindon Tidy poster making activity. Taking responsibility for our actions can provide us agency and help begin to make change. Providing signs is one part of changing the culture of littering and getting people to think about waste. Get involved, draw the change that you want to see in the world!

Art: a plastic bag jellyfish using its tentacles to kill a fish
Image credit

We watched the excellent Story of Plastic documentary for Plastic Free July 2020. The film depicts our current system of plastic recycling as unsustainable, causing disease and suffering. We are hosting free on and offline community screenings of it with discussion afterwards. Contact us to arrange a screening.

We contacted both of Swindon's MPs on July 9th 2020 to arrange a meeting to discuss what the government are doing about plastic pollution and what they're not. Justin Tomlinson reneged on his agreement to meet with us. Robert Buckland is aware of the offer to meet but has yet to respond. He agreed before the 2019 general election to support the aims of the Plastic Pollution Bill. We'll keep you updated on whether they will honour their words and meet with us.

We have changed some of the campaign aims:

  • We are prioritising support for local, independent and organic / natural. These aspects can significantly reduce plastic packaging as well as having many other environmental and social benefits.
  • We will advocate for equality. Wealth and income inequalities are clearly linked to pollution, environmental destruction and mass extinction in many interconnected ways. Other inequalities (eg sex, race) feed into this unhealthy system, of which pollution is one aspect.

If you want to keep up with what we're doing in between newsletters, updates to the campaign and website are chronicled on the timeline.

Thanks for reading. Be the change...