Clyde Loakes: Please don’t give up on people!

Nappy Ever After has joined the campaign to @StopTheRebuild of the Edmonton incinerator.  We believe it is an investment in the old linear economy.  Clyde Loakes, you claim to be backing the circular economy but this is a clear sign that you are saying one thing and doing another.

Zero waste authorities that really believe in the circular economy ONLY take steps that take us in that direction.   It is the only way to make change happen.

How have we got to this hopeless place and what steps should we take to change course?

As someone who has been very hopeful about recycling and waste prevention for many years and worked in that area I feel passionately that before 2007 the community waste sector was moving in the right direction.  The financial crisis and austerity measures meant there was no longer money for people-based community waste projects.  We can now take stock and review the effects of the cuts.

Even before 2007 ‘Big Waste’ was telling local authorities that re-use and recycling was moving too slowly.  The context of 2007 allowed them to gain the upperhand and they promised to increase recycling quickly.  The barrier to increasing household recycling rates, they said was segregated recycling.  Mixed recycling was introduced.  It has been a disaster.  Rates have continued to stagnate.  More and more recycling and food waste is contaminated (especially when operatives leave the bins unlocked so people can throw whole bags in, including nappy waste) and so all the recycling and food waste has to go to incineration.  Residents see it going into the refuse side of the waste truck and the public lose confidence.

Compare that to Islington’s old recycling scheme when operatives pushed electric trucks along the street and could be seen separating recycling.  This made it visible: it gave a clear sign that Islington cared about recycling.  The public could see the human investment and they knew their money was being spent on it.  This is the way to win the public’s participation.  We need to accept that mixed recycling has been a disaster and go back to segregating recyclable materials.

We also need to invest in local community gardens which parents can visit with their children. Families can bring their food waste and see it turned into compost that grows beautiful flowers and food.  There are many more steps that can be taken to prevent waste and the investment should be in people and communities, not a huge incinerator that will contaminate the air around it.  The principle should be that waste is processed as close to its source as possible to reduce road miles too.

Another step towards zero waste cities, that has been taken with spectacular success in Italy is to actually get children in schools to analyse what ends up in residual waste and then write to those companies producing the unrecyclable products or/and packaging and ask them to take responsibility for redesigning in a way that can be recycled.

There are alternatives to incineration. Local authorities should not just take rubbish away and burn it.  They are doing us no favours.  We end up with restricted lung capacity, low quality of life (or at least those near the incinerator do,) and a cost to the NHS.  Rubbish should be visible so that the public are motivated to take responsibility for it and work together to turn their rubbish back into resources.

The thing that is so bad about the plan for the Edmonton super incinerator is that it shows people in power have no faith in people and communities.  And we should be very suspicious of people who claim to be working for us and in our interests but have no faith in us, who do not think we can be empowered to sort out our own mess.

As someone who has been at the frontline of preventing waste, running a nappy laundry service and real nappy shop since 2003 I should add that I have immense faith in people to do the right thing.  And sadly, when it comes to dealing with municipal waste I have virtually lost faith in those in positions of power to work in the interests of people and planet.

Popping the Weasel

It’s 1999,  I’m on a radio journalism course and for an assignment I put together an item about nappy waste for Real Nappy Week and pitch it to ‘You and Yours,’ the popular mid-day BBC Radio 4 consumer magazine programme.  At the time I had no plans to set up a real nappy company … I was hoping for a career in radio journalism!

To liven up the item and punctuate the piece I made up a song and recorded some boys singing it at our local park..  Or to be more precise I put new words to the tune of the nursery rhyme ‘Pop! goes the Weasel’ which contains a verse “Up and down the City Road, In and out the Eagle, That’s the way the money goes, Pop! goes the weasel.”  I can’t remember all the words of the nappy waste version now, but there were lines like “That’s the way a disposable’s filled, pop it in the landfill.

By coincidence, the company I founded almost 13 years ago, Nappy Ever After, moved last year from Camden to Hackney to premises just off the City Road, indeed very very close to the Eagle pub.  So, to find us, get a bus to the City Road and get off at the Eagle.  Or take the tube to Old Steet station, walk up the City Road and turn right at the Eagle pub on Shepherdess Walk.  (Your phone will show a quicker route.)  We’re more like a warehouse than a shop and don’t have normal shop hours.  We’re open every Tuesday 2-6pm and by appointment.

A real nappy item was aired for Real Nappy Week 1999 on Radio 4’s ‘You and Yours’ programme.  They used my idea and research but remade the item themselves.  The show’s producer said I’d included too much about nappy waste and this was not relevant as it was a consumer choice programme!  We think differently now, right?

To replace the nappy waste content they gave 2 mothers some real nappies to  test for a few days.  Would the consumers like them?  They were disappointed that both mums found they worked really well and intended to switch from disposables!  However as it was all so late in the day they had to run the item like that.

I was on the radio again recently.  BBC Radio London called me to ask me to talk about nappy recycling on Eddie Nestor’s drive time show.  The mic was closed on me when I wouldn’t shut up about 35% of children arriving for school in nappies.  Eddie Nestor didn’t ask me what relevance this had to the topic of recycling disposable nappies, he just told me it wasn’t relevant and closed the mic.

This is the sort of silo mentality that fed the financial crisis.  We need to connect issues.  Just as 17 years ago what happened to disposable nappies after you’d thrown them in the bin wasn’t supposed to concern consumers, now 35% of children arriving at school in nappies in one of the most deprived schools in the UK has nothing do with whether or not £20million should be invested in a new Knowaste nappy recycling plant.  How about spending a little bit of a public health budget on giving parents good information on how to potty train their children?  It could halve the amount of disposable nappy waste Londoners generate and then, work out whether you need the nappy waste recycling plant or not.

PS Pop was cockney for pawn, and weasel, coat.  There’s a metaphor in that nursery rhyme about nappy waste and the planet that I didn’t see at the time; if we waste all our finite resources on single-use nappies (which aren’t of course disposable at all, such a clever name, like clean diesel) our descendants may find themselves wihout a coat/protection from climate chaos.