OUR PRESENTATION

The year is 2012
I hate wearing this gas mask. It’s so clumsy.

So do I. Do you remember when we were in year 6 at the Good Shepherd school? We were able to walk about normally.

It’s so hot inside my mask, its all condensation.

I would rather have a little bit of condensation than breathe in all that black stuff over there coming from the incineration plant.

Remind me again why we have incineration plants.

Well the problem is that rubbish nowadays has to be incinerated which is just a fancy name for being burned.

Can’t you remember our visit to the Western Riverside Transfer Station? We met Ken that day he was the refuse manager there.

He told us that it was his job to transfer all the rubbish from the London Boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea, Hammersmith and Fulham, Wandsworth and Lambeth to Mucking in Essex via the River Thames.

Ken also informed us that if people didn’t recycle more than the landfill sites would be totally full up.

So Ken was right the landfill sites did run out and the rubbish has had to be got rid of another way–being burned.

Surely back then people didn’t produce so much rubbish.

Of course they did, Ken told us that the western riverside transfer station handled 1000 tonnes of rubbish per day. Ken also stated that the quantity of rubbish was increasing year by year.

At the Good Shepherd School we carried out a questionnaire to investigate just how bad the situation was.

Can you recall what any of the questions were. I never forgot anything!
Question 1 Does you family recycle?
Question 2 How many plastic bags does you family throw away each week?
Question 3 Do you know where your local recycling point is ?
Question 4 Do you throw away your shopping bags?
Question 5 Would it encourage you to recycle if you seen a celebrity recycling?

Did we find out anything interesting?

35% of the families in the Good Shepherd School didn’t recycle.
328 bags were thrown away each day.
64% of families questioned threw away their plastic bags.
52% of the families questioned would be encouraged to recycle if they saw a celebrity recycling.

Yeah but what is the point of recycling rubbish any way. I wouldn’t want anything that is made out of waste products. Its rubbish people throw it away because its been used and it can’t be used for anything else!
Can it?

First of all we needed to classify the rubbish to see what items were being thrown away.
At a school level
480 items of paper
552 organic items
280 metal items
1,280 plastic items

At a borough level
17 280 items of paper
19 872 organic items
10 080 metal items
46 080 plastic items

In London people throw away per hour enough waste to fill the Royal Albert Hall. Can you believe it.

But what to do? This is where Sue and Ieuan really helped us. They arranged for us to go to the Urban Studies Centre and interview people who could help us.

Louanne Tranchell who was from Hammersmith and Fulham Local Agenda 21. Louanne told us about the depletion of the rain forests. All the heads of the countries were so concerned about the amount if waste they produced along with the depletion of their natural resources.

So they all met in Brazil in 1991 to do something about the problems of tree shortage.

It was at this meeting that they came up the term recycle and the need for recycling to take place.

This meeting was called Agenda 21 because they were going to take action in the 21st century.

Louanne told us that London is recycling at 9% but needs to be improved to 25 %.

Surely this is now the 21st century and we have found out that quite a lot of families are still not recycling.

Louanne was pleased about our idea of producing a leaflet to encourage more people to recycle and cut down on the waste produced.

The next person we interviewed was Eva Heffernan from London Remade.

Eva told us that it was her job to go out to manufacturers to encourage them to buy back waste products to make new products. She helps companies get the best price for recycled products.

The most amazing facts that Eva made us aware of were:
Computers mats made out of old car tyres
Pencil cases made out of used computer chips
Hand bags made out of bottle tops
Plastic vending cups can be made into pencils
Rulers can be made out of old printers

This could be in the form of a guessing game what do you think?

So we found out then that our rubbish can be used for other things - people need to be told what their rubbish can be made into. Remember the leaflet that we made.

We interviewed Emma Banthorpe who worked for Hammersmith and Fulham council. Her job title was Senior Environmental Policy and Project Officer. She told us about the 2 smart sacks. The clear one and the orange ones. The clear one for garden waste and the orange one for bottles card metal and paper.

Didn’t we find from our questionnaire that not everybody knew how to use the recycling system in their borough in which they lived. So this needed to be put into our posters.

Emma thought it was a worthwhile thing to do to get a celebrity recycling so as to encourage more people to recycle.

Who was the last person that we interviewed?

Let me think. Its on the tip of my tongue. Oh yes it was Mike Lachowicz from Hammersmith and Fulham Friends of the Earth. We asked Mike what he thought about recycling.

He told us that if we didn’t recycle the only other option in getting rid of our rubbish is by burning it.

Yeah that’s the reason for us to now wearing these horrible gas masks for we can’t breathe our air anymore because of so many pollutants in it.
Mike told us that we needed to cut down the amount of waste produced because each year it has increased by 3%.

Mike was very interested about the recycling bin that Irina had made and was pleased that we had put it into all the classes to make all the children to recycle more.

So we learned lots of things.

Didn’t we do anything with all the things we learned?

Did we not tell anyone?

What about our assembly?

What about out leaflet for Local Agenda 21?

Did no celebrity answer out letters to help us with out recycling Campaign?

What about our posters we put up in out local community?

Well nobody listened. Nobody could be bothered.

People thought that it wasn’t their problem.

Its not 2012 its 2003. Our rubbish isn’t incinerated yet – we can still feel comfortable about breathing our air. We have time to make a difference.

Don’t be someone who doesn’t listen.