Students create inspiring art in Repair Cafe Challenge

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SimonWhen thinking about living an environmentally sustainable life, the first thing most people think about is the 3Rs: ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’. As part of Sussex Green Living’s education outreach programme, we initiated a School Challenge looking at how you can reduce waste by repairing.

 

Our school challenge for Horsham District Schools was supported by a Horsham District Community Lottery Grant, a donation from a Horsham councillor and kindly judged by Horsham artist, Morag Warrack.

 

The challenge invited students to learn about repair cafés, what they do and how they help reduce waste on our planet. There are items that could be repaired but often people don’t have the skillset to make repairs. Repair Cafés are run by volunteers who have both a passion and the expertise to repair electrical, mechanical and textile items. The premise is that you can take along your items and for a small donation, they will try to fix them while you stay, watch and hopefully learn a new skill at the same time.

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Never too Small to Make a Difference

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SchoolEducation has always formed a big part of the Sussex Green Living mission. In fact, it is where Carrie Cort started out, as a network of families learning about nature, the environment and ways that everyone can live a more sustainable life.

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Community Collaboration at its Best

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During the first lockdown in 2020 many people felt isolated. Sussex Green Living (SGL) thought it was important to connect people and to continue its work improving the environment. SGL’s Carrie Cort organised weekly online Horsham Climate Café events. Some of these attracted over 150 people, both local and from further afield. One of the aims of the café was to introduce people ‘virtually’ from the same villages and this is when the seed of Billingshurst environmental group BilliGreen was planted.

 

The group was started by Mela Davidson and Melanie Holliker who both wanted to create a network that boosted the local community and had a positive impact on the local environment.

 

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Sussex teenagers unite to take action on climate by Max Moorcroft (first published in West Sussex County Times)

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Sussex Green Living’s Youth Eco Forum is a young persons’ environmental group where we speak about current news and creatively demonstrate climate activism in many forms. The YEF was founded in June 2020 in the hope of connecting like-minded teenagers to make a difference for our planet during a period of disconnection… so we started […]

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Bright future enjoyed by St Mary’s School

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Thanks to our Tesco Community Grant we were able to take our Bright New Futures Roadshow to St Mary’s CofE Primary School in Pulborough on the 22nd July . This is a large school with a new teacher leading their Eco activities.  We started the planning process with the school many months in advance, then […]

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Tesco grant helps us share Bright New Future

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Thanks to a Tesco Community grant on 8th July we took our Bright New Future Roadshow to Kingslea School in Horsham where we worked with 60 children from Year Two who had been studying Our Blue Planet. Our original plan was to attend their school summer fete, but owing to covid this was postponed, and […]

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Student App set to deliver lower carbon future

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Press Release – Solar for Schools App wins Innovate UK grant

Students calling for action against climate change will have access to an App that will help them in the fight to deliver a lower carbon future in the UK.

The App is being developed by Solar Options for Schools, which won funding this week (4 November 2020) from UK Innovate in the latest round of the £10 million Sustainable Innovation Fund. The fund is intended to help the UK rebuild after the effects of COVID-19.

The Solar for Schools App will deliver an innovative interactive App, which will enable secondary students to learn about energy, electricity, and climate. It will offer learning to all students, irrespective of their social-economic status, being accessible on both android and apple phones. Read more

Biscuit wrapper recycling

Parishes and Schools recycle more single-use plastics

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School recyclingHere’s What You Can Do.

In partnership with TerraCycle, a global leader in recycling hard-to-recycle materials, Sussex Green Living is now working with over fourteen parishes and schools to divert billions of waste resources from landfills.

Why is Recycling Single-Use Plastic Important?

Plastics are extremely durable and cheap to manufacture, making them almost impossible to overlook for manufacturers when it comes to product design and packaging. But their durability comes at the cost of slow degradation rates in the wild; upwards of 300 to 1000 years.

With about 380 tonnes of it being produced every year, by the time the plastic we have disposed of today begins to degrade the quantity in landfills, oceans and everywhere else will have become totally unmanageable. That is, unless, we can turn the tides.

Bisphenol A has been observed to disrupt physiological levels of sex hormones, negatively affect thyroid hormone gene expression in humans, and cause other detrimental effects. In marine life, issues with plastic entanglement and ingestion have been observed at a broad scale. Read more