The latest news, stats and facts on key environmental issues. The latest news from Sussex Green Living.
Los Cedros Reserve – Andean cloud forest of Ecuador – UNDER THREAT
Our friend Nicola Peel has sent us an update and some incredible photos from her visit to the Los Cedros Reserve in the cloud forest of Ecuador which is now threatened by gold, copper and molybdenum mining.
Next Horsham Climate Cafe 4th April will be online
Press release
Horsham Climate Cafe gives inspiration: people take stock and change habits
The speed at which Governments, organisations and institutes around the World are reacting to the Covid19 pandemic gives the organisers of the Horsham Climate Cafe hope. It shows that when faced with an emergency the world can mobilise resources and political will in the midst of the crises.
An unexpected but positive spin-off is that the world has seen a huge dip in global greenhouse gas emissions since the devastating Covid19 virus and fast mobilisation of community collaboration and support.
Carrie Cort, the founder of Sussex Green Living and co-founder of the Horsham Climate Cafe said “The UK often blame China for its huge carbon footprint but a lot of our clothes and goods are made cheaply and imported to the UK. We spent £44.7 billion on imported Chinese goods in 2018 alone”. She continues, ‘All this manufacturing of cheap goods and shipping around is a hidden carbon footprint which the UK should take responsibility for. It also means we’ve become dependent on China for manufactured goods, which leaves us vulnerable in times like this.”
Horsham Climate Cafe is normally at the Quaker Meeting House on the first Saturday of each month, on Saturday 4th April at 2pm it will use Zoom or Skype free video conferencing, enabling people to attend from their homes. Read more
We hope you will all be delighted to hear – The Horsham Climate Cafe will continue throughout the current social distancing and quarantine measures! We’re now switching to online meetings using Zoom (see joining instructions below!), a FREE and easy to use video chat and video conferencing service. Please feel free to join any of our sessions to continue to be involved, or use this as a great chance to see what we’re about for the first time (all from the comfort of your own home!). Until we can resume our physical meetings, please do pop in on us – we are running EVERY Saturday at 2pm for an hour – we’d love to see you there! In our sessions, we like to talk about pocket and planet-saving ideas for the community (all quarantine friendly ideas, of course!). See below for the exciting schedule for our planned sessions so far…
© www.tobyphillipsphotography.co.uk
Behaviour change can be a daunting prospect, unless it happens in easy steps, with tangible and immediate benefits. Getting together to fix stuff is an instantly appealing answer to reducing waste, but Horsham District resident Carrie Cort has discovered that setting up a regular repair café has brought dividends and benefits to the community that neither she nor any of those involved could have imagined.
Carrie set up Sussex Green Living in 2012 and the same year attended a West Sussex County Council waste prevention advisor (WPA) training where she met and became good friends with another voluntary WPA Jill Shuker. In 2016 they organised their first textile up-cycling workshop as part of a Horsham festival, hoping it would encourage teenagers to learn how to sew and adapt clothes as a sustainable antidote to fast fashion. ‘It attracted children of all ages’, says Carrie. This workshop and later textile upcycling workshops resulted in a group of creative textile volunteers. Read more
POSTPONED DUE TO THE CORONAVIRUS. WE WILL ADD A NEW BLOG WHEN THE DATE HAS BEEN CONFIRMED
Date and time: Friday 13th March 2020 7.00 pm
Venue: Pulborough Village Hall, Swan View, Pulborough, RH20 2BF
This is the second in a series of climate change forum events in Pulborough, the first event in October was an outstanding success and packed out the village hall, learn more here. Come and learn about the problems and solutions of the food industry………
7.00 – 7.10 pm CHAIRMAN Geoff Barnard, Founder Greening Steyning
7.10 – 7.25 pm INTRODUCTION: THE FOOD CHAIN Tony Whitbread, President Sussex Wildlife Trust
7.25 – 7.40 pm SOIL HEALTH Dan Osborn, Chairman CPRE Sussex, the countryside charity
7.40 – 7.55 pm FARMING Philip Lymbery, Chief Executive Compassion in World Farming Read more
An award-winning film called 2040 is coming to Horsham and Lindfield in March and April, book your tickets now! It is a compelling vision…. come and let yourself be inspired.
In addition to the single use plastics we recycle mainly through TerraCycle, the following plastics can be dropped off for recycling at the major supermarkets:
– All plastic carrier bags, except biodegradable or compostable bags
– Breakfast cereal liners
– Shrink wrap & ring joiners from multipacks of water, cans etc
– Frozen food bags, e.g. bags for frozen vegetable, chips, etc
– Dry cleaning bags/bags covering new clothing
– Magazine and newspaper wrappers
– Bags for fruit and vegetables
– Bubble wrap
For online shopping deliveries, many supermarkets also allow you to hand your unwanted bags back to the driver for recycling. Read more
Our Launch!
We were thrilled to launch our Horsham Climate Cafe on Saturday 7th December 2019. As well as locals and school/college pupils, among those attending the cafe’s launch were county and district councillors, Horsham District Council chariman Kate Rowbottom, and parliamentary candidates for the Green Party, Liberal Democrats, Peace Party and the Conservative Party. The Green Party, Liberal Democrat and Peace Party candidates all signed a pledge to take action on climate emergency, as well as inviting the public to Vote for the Planet and Climate Action in the forthcoming election.
Mock up newspaper from 29th Decemeber 2029!
Carrie also presented her ‘mock up’ newspaper dated December 29 2029, the headline reading – ‘Horsham District achieve zero emissions by 2030’ (what a dream that would be!). She said: “It is important to sow seeds of change, show people what the district could look like and inspire them to move in that direction and fast” – check out the full press coverage here. Together, we can help move the community towards a zero carbon Horsham District, and make this headline a reality!
Feeling inspired to get involved?
We are always looking for volunteers, so get in touch or come and meet us and see how you can get involved! Join us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, or sign up to receive our latest news (it only takes two seconds to add your email address – simply click on black ‘Follow‘ tab on bottom right of this screen!). Feel free to also send us an email using our contact form, or come and say hello at our events like the Horsham Climate Cafe or the Horsham Repair Cefe!
On Friday 18th October the Wiggenholt Association held a Climate Change Forum in Pulborough. The village hall was bulging at the seams with over 150 people. It was considered a great success and now there are plans for the event to be repeated in other villages.
Presentations were given by the following guest speakers chaired by Jane Mote, media expert and ex BBC broadcaster.
If you are interesting in organising this event in your town or village please contact us. In the meantime below you can see some of the shocking stats provided by the speakers and below that their top tips on climate action.
Letter to the editor of the Evening Standard…..
After reading yesterdays paper I was shocked by the contradictions. On one page I read how “Quarter of London’s parks and playgrounds break the limits on filthy air with dangerous concentrations of nitrogen dioxide. The EU safe limit in accordance with the World Health Organisation is an average of 40 µg/m3 per year yet Victoria Embankment Gardens are 59.8 µg/m3′ ”
Then a couple of pages later Andrew Leadson states “XR are protesting in the wrong city and how the UK must be a beacon of hope for other nations”. She then goes on to say “We are sorting out our own back yards and the UK is already taking urgent action on climate change” Read more
We are really excited to share our latest stats and facts showing the impacts of our single-use plastic recycling scheme, which was launched in 2012 in partnership with TerraCycle. In the early days Carrie the founder of Sussex Green Living and her young son Adam sorted and dispatched the recycling, now we have about 20 volunteers aged 8 – 90. Our main public drop off locations are at the William Penn School in Coolham and the Horsham Quaker Meeting House. We also have community micro-drop off locations in: Leechpool School in Horsham, Rudgwick Youth Club, Thakham Village Hall, Storrington Community Market (once a week), Slinfold and Henfield. There are thousands of people collecting for us from all over the county. Over the eight years we have run this special recycling scheme we have diverted millions of pieces of single-use plastic from landfill and incinerator. Most of our single use plastic recycling raises money for the William Penn School.
Prior to the stats shown below we collected TerraCycle waste resources for the benefit of WAKOOS a nursery for children in Billingshurst and Horsham Matters, these statistic are not shown below. Read more
Climate Change – A discussion and debate about this burning subject.
Speakers are drawn from CPRE Sussex, the Arun to Adur Farm Clusters, The Sussex Wildlife Trust and Sussex Green Living.
Date: Friday 18th October
Time: 7pm
Venue: Pulborough Village Hall, Swan View, Pulborough RH20 2BF
Free with tea and sandwiches in the interval
The talks will be by the following guest speakers chaired by Jane Mote, media expert and ex BBC broadcaster. Read more
Now how is it that clothes are causing climate change? …..Where in the world are your clothes made? Take a look through your drawers and cupboard to find out! In the 1980s lots of clothes manufacturers decided they wanted to copy some of the big expensive brands, however to ensure they sold more and more cheaply and faster they moved their manufacturing bases to Asia. Most of the world’s clothes now are made in China, India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam and Sri Lanka where the price of labour is much cheaper.
Container ships produce more greenhouse gas emissions than some small countries. According to The Essential Daily Briefing: “It has been estimated that just one of these container ships, the length of around six football pitches, can produce the same amount of pollution as 50 million cars (22/04/2018)
Like many commodities, clothes are transported by cargo ships which equals a rather serious carbon footprint and directly contributes to climate change. Read more
Did you know the second most polluting industry is the fast fashion industry? Learn more about the problems in this blog ‘Are your clothes really causing climate change? We are delighted to announce a local solution….in partnership with our friends at One World Living and our great volunteers, we are running a pre-loved clothes sale otherwise known as a kilo sale! It is on Saturday 9th November 12-4pm at Greenway Academy, Greenway, Horsham, RH12 2JS, at the end of Green GB Week. We will be selling quality pre-loved clothes for a bargin £10 per kilo (normally kilo sales charge £15 a kilo).
To give you an idea of what you will get for one kilo….. a pair of man’s denim jeans will be about 1.5 and 2 kg and woman’s clothing 1 kg will be about 1 pair of denim jeans or about 6 T-shirts. Thanks to the PTA at Greenway Academy there will be drinks and homemade cakes for sale, so come for the afternoon. There will be a separate areas for children, ladies and men’s clothes.
Proceeds from this sale will help us deliver FREE climate education in local schools, learn more here, also deprived children and families Romania and Uganda. Plus helping the planet and your pocket! Read more
On Saturday 7th December 2019 in partnership with the Horsham Quakers we are launching the Horsham Climate Café with a tea party, young and old welcome!
It will take place on the first Saturday of every month 2pm until 4pm in the Quaker Meeting House, Worthing Road, Horsham, HR12 1SL (oppersite Sainsburys car park) after the morning’s Horsham Repair Café (10-1pm).
At the Climate Cafe people can meet informally and talk about climate change, eat delicious homemade cake, have a hot drink and join in the conversations about problems and solutions. You can come once or every month. Lets share ideas and actions people can take to reduce their impact, maybe taking away a ‘Pledge to the planet’ action each month! Download an action plan here – adult version and family version. Clean energy switching service available, just bring your last energy bill or use our site Big Clean Switch. Read more
PRESS RELEASEWith climate change in the news daily, heatwaves, the hottest July date ever recorded, wettest August and now the Amazon ablaze, who would blame people to despair. Help is at hand to Horsham District residents, on the first Saturday of every month at the Horsham Repair Café. Not only do the volunteers offer repairs, refills and recycling advice but they give clean energy advice and switching and climate change solutions.
Governments have been talking about climate change since the early 90s, it is only now in 2019 that we are seeing fast escalating action, with more than half the UK’s principal local authorities having declared a climate emergency in the last eight months. The Horsham Repair Café run by Sussex Green Living with the help of the Horsham Quakers and lots of volunteers are stepping up to this climate crisis. Read more
Community groups whose work benefits residents of the Horsham District have been invited to sign up to benefit from the new Horsham District Community Lottery. So Sussex Green Living and one of our outreach initiatives the Horsham Repair Cafe have signed up!
Ticket sales are now open, 60p from every £1 ticket will go to charities, voluntary organisations and other good causes whose work benefits Horsham District communities. Players of the lottery can win a £25,000 jackpot, plus smaller prizes.
1 in 50 – Every ticket has a 1 in 50 chance of winning a prize every week!
£25,000 prize if you match all 6 numbers in the correct order!
Who are we and what do we do for the Horsham community?
Horsham Carfax Bandstand
Horsham District was bombarded with environmental art and activity on Saturday 6th July. Volunteers from the Horsham Repair Café and Sussex Green Living, an environmental awareness and educational network, provided a dazzling array of ‘environmentally friendly’ stalls at their second Share, Care and Repair Fair, this year within Horsham Market. It was part of the Horsham District Year of Culture 2019 and Horsham Festival.
In the run up to this unique Fair nineteen locations – shops, salons, sports centre, Horsham library and the Carfax bandstand, had surprize eco ocean art installed with environmental messages, plus a display at the Fair. This Community Eco Ocean Art project, sponsored by Biffa, was the brainchild of the founder of Sussex Green Living Carrie Cort. Carrie said “People are so worried about plastic pollution and the plight of the planet, I thought this would be fun for anyone of any age to get creative around communicating the problems and solutions”. She continued “Their art had to be made of unwanted materials or acrylic wool. Acrylic wool is a problem because it is synthetic, plastics, which means it will take decades to completely break down”.
Pam Tedder one of the Horsham Repair Café volunteers co-ordinated the yarn or ocean bombing of the Carfax bandstand. Read more
West Sussex County Council Climate Pledge
The Countryside Charity, CPRE Sussex is calling for people to respond to an opportunity to help their local Councils work out how to deal with the Climate Emergency.
Sussex councils are leading the way on Climate pledges in the South East according to information compiled by the South East Climate Alliance (SECA).
More councils have declared a ‘Climate Emergency’ in Sussex than in any other county in the Region. Twelve of the sixteen Local Authorities in East and West Sussex have already acted to declared an emergency or have passed a motion to do so, learn more here. Read more
Take a few moments to learn how you can power your home using clean renewable energy, saving money and the planet!
What do we mean by ‘clean energy’?
Power stations, wind turbines and solar farms all feed their energy into the Grid, like rivers running into a big pond. When you switch to clean energy, your supplier guarantees that however much electricity you take out of the ‘pond’, the same amount of clean energy will be put in. The more people who switch to clean tariffs, the more renewable energy that goes into the pond. This means that the energy sector is producing less pollution and carbon which is crucial if we are to reduce global warming and climate change.
Approximately 30% of the UK’s electricity is generated from renewable sources.
Under new laws, Britain’s biggest energy companies will have to buy renewable energy from their own customers, for example, homeowners who install new rooftop solar panels from 1 January 2020 will be able to lower their bills by selling the energy they do not need to their supplier. Read more
Do you know which items are recycled with our “TerraCycle” schemes ?
We wish we could recycle all the plastic food packaging you have kindly donated however there are clear guidelines on which items will be accepted under the free TerraCyle recycling schemes that we are registered to. Our small team of volunteers are working hard to sort through donations to remove all items which cannot be recycled under the TerraCycle schemes.
To help streamline the work of our volunteers here is a reminder of which plastic food packaging we can accept for recycling. Plastic food packaging from other sources will be discarded…..even if made of same or similar material. Read more
Wow since December the general public have collected 25,136 crisp packets, thanks to our green team of volunteers who sort and dispatch this recycling! Our volunteers include the A Team from Leachpool School in Horsham, who collect from their school, K2 leisure centre in Crawley and The Pavillions leisure centre in Horsham.
We work with a number of charities and companies who recycle these single-use plastics one such company being TerraCycle, they are an innovative recycling company that has become a global leader in recycling hard-to-recycle materials. This scheme helps diverts billions of waste resouces from our landfills and incinerators, recycling them to make new products. Read more
‘The Future We Want’ Billingshurst Carnival procession
Want to join a climate action procession to express the urgent need for people to make changes to their lives to reduce the effects for climate change? Want your children to inherit a healthy planet? Join us as we march for the third year running for ‘The Future We Want – LESS C02’ and climate action.
When: Sunday 30th June
Where: The procession will depart from Jengers Mead, Billingshurst at 12 noon, arriving at Billingshurst Show just off of Lower Station Road *.
Led by Carrie Cort the founder of Sussex Green Living (SGL), volunteers from this West Sussex network and members of the public. Carrie trained with Al Gore the former US Vice President and leading climate change scientists as part of the Climate Reality Leadership Corp.
Save Resources – And Money – With Sustainable Living
Developed nations now consume an estimated 16 tons of minerals, ores, fossil fuels, and biomass per capita every year, meaning that we are consuming Earth’s resources at an entirely unsustainable rate. Though this may seem a daunting fact, you can make a difference in your Sussex home by joining the 94% of residents in the South East that have already committed to making positive changes to lead a greener lifestyle. Doing so could have a worthwhile impact on your household’s pocket as well as its sustainability! Here are some changes you can enact at home. Read more
Rainbow Brands: Buzzing Products Healthy Lifestyles
We are delighted to be featured on Sussex Green Living it is doing great work to inspire more smarter environmentally friendly living and it certainly shares our ethos to help bring about this positive change in our communities. Read more
Toby Phillips www.tobyphillipsphotography.co.uk