3rd February 2023: Meeting Notes
1. Five of us met, two sent apologies.
2. We briefly introduced ourselves to each other and highlighted the aspects of the environment that we were interested in.
3. We had an overview of the Forage Community Cafe project and ethos from Dianne
This is her initiative. We were all VERY impressed by what she has managed to achieve. What follows is my (imperfect) summary of what she told us.
It began in 2018 an environmental focus and her desire to save good food being wasted by supermarkets etc. After a number of interesting diversions and setbacks she managed to become part of the FareShare scheme.
Initially she operated this from home (giving over quite a bit of her own home for storage) and distributed food to a number of locations in Fulwell and Hendon.
She later managed to take over what had been "Miss Tina's" in Barmston and open it as the "Forage Community Cafe" using Fare Share goods in the cafe and having bags of goods (which are collected daily) available to anyone for a donation: the premise being to keep food out of landfill.
Her interest was in the environmental issue rather than operating a food bank. However, as time has gone on things have changed: she is now also operates a food bank from the premises (liaiasing with the council).
Latterly the community cafe is also now a "warm space" through council funding. To make this more than just warm space she is sourcing people who can run a number of courses at the cafe for the local community and further afield to develop skills both of a practical job-related and cultural/artistic nature. Where she cans she finds providers from within the local community for these.
Her future plans include providing a polytunnel and raised beds for the local community to grow vegetables and using the "wild space out the back" for children to learn about nature, have wilder times (campfires etc). Already "The Little Onions" gardening group meets.
It seems that our environment group fits well their interests.
[Link to piece in Sunderland Echo: Forage Community Cafe]
4. Topics and areas to explore.
Together we considered what we want to explore, as a result we have the following.
A. Recycling
In particular plastics - how we can individually reduce use, investigate the extent to which government (national, local), supermarketsare leading the way (or not) in terms of reducing packaging at the outset. The impact on landfill and recycling centres. Investigating exactly what happens to the materials that we do send for recycling.
B. Reducing food waste.
Composting, effective cooking, use of leftovers and so on: we didn't explore this much further.
C. Home warmth and energy use
House insulation: all the different options, how effective they are (including cork - which I want to find out about!).
Energy use and storage: alternatives to gas boilers, solar panels, home storage batteries (rather than exporting to the grid). Jeffrey and Lyn both have solar panels and battery storage so they may be able start our discussions on this topic with practical experience.
D. Transport
In particular the place of electric vehicles.
E. Nature.
In particular the ideas of rewilding both our own gardens and areas around about us.
Litter picking to take care of our environment.
This links back to growing food too and reducing food waste.
This topic could lead to activities rather than just conversations and discussions.
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These five topics are the main themes will be looking at over the coming months. We will just take each one as we want and explore it until we decide we've had enough and then we'll move on.
5. First topic: recycling.
Specifically the impact we have based on what we bring from shops and what we put into our bins. On that basis we came up with some tasks.
- Joan is going to speak to supermarkets particularly Sainsbury's and find out how they go about their recycling and what they think about in terms of reducing packaging in the first place. If we are lucky she may be able to arrange for someone to talk to us, or we can go and visit them.
- Helen is going contact the council to find more information out about how they collect and process recycling materials: to try to separate the truth from the myths.
- Lyn is going to contact the company that operates the recycling plant on Pattinson Road (who deal with the council's waste collection) and see they are prepared to talk to us or let us visit.
- Everyone to look for information and think of questions to ask to "dig in" to the topic.
6. Keeping in Touch
We might want to keep in touch between meetings so we considered what might work.
Not everyone uses smartphones/social media.
So to start with we will use email.
Therefore I would like to check whether everybody who signed up to the group would be prepared to share their email address?
If "yes" then we can each contact the group members directly with any interesting information that we've found out, or things we want to explore, or comments we want to make.
If "no" then emails would need to be sent to me as group leader and I would cascade them to group memebers via Beacon.
7. Resources
Overtime, as we explore issues, we will find resources and may develop some of our own. If we want to publish these we will do this in the first instance on the group's web page on our u3a website.
As things progress we can also look at additional channels (such as a Facebook group) but we'll keep things simple for the moment.
The meeting ran from 10-12noon.
Next meeting same time, same place, 3rd March 2023.
Back to Our Environment group page.