Viva Brighton Issue #64 June 2018

ENVIRONMENT
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Ovingdean Green Festival
Cat Fletcher, ‘re-use officer’
Freegle founder, recycling
champion and Council
‘re-use officer’ Cat Fletcher
is one of the speakers at
Ovingdean Green Festival
on June 23rd.
We’re at crisis point
when it comes to plastic
usage. While I’m glad the
government is taking action
with the proposed consultation
on banning straws
and coffee stirrers, they’re
giving themselves 25 years
to implement it! We need action now. Twenty-five
years is way too long.
It’s not just up to the government; there’s also
a lot that manufacturers and retailers could do.
We could all do more. Locally, we could do a lot
better with events. Brighton hosts so many and they
have a significant environmental cost. The guidelines
the Council issues to organisers could be much
more ferocious. I’d like them to ban polystyrene,
for example. If all food outlets were banned from
using that you’ve instantly eliminated one major
environmental problem.
I’m not an advocate for that Brighton thing of
leaving things you don’t want out on the street.
My entire house is filled with things I’ve found so
I get why people like it. But it’s fly-tipping. People
assume if they put things out and they’re not there
later that someone has taken them. In fact it’s
probably been collected by the Council, which has a
statutory obligation to remove – but not recycle or
reuse – anything left on the street. It goes straight
to the incinerator and it costs a fortune to deal with
– we spend £150m a year
nationally on fly-tipping.
I’d rather people use a
recycling service. I’m one
of the co-founders of the
Freegle website, which was
one of the earliest services
to connect people giving
away things they didn’t need
to people who wanted them.
Now there are a million and
one ways to give things away
for free, so there’s absolutely
no excuse for leaving it
outside for the Council to deal with.
I try to do my bit; I have a slightly quirky, unsalaried
role as the Council’s ‘Re-use Officer’. They call
on me whenever they need to declutter. I did Kings
House in Hove recently. It was the biggest office
block in the city and clearing it was an 18-month
job. We sorted 280 rooms; 170 tonnes of stuff.
There were a lot of wheelie chairs. Before me, they
would have called in a removal company that would
have taken everything straight to landfill.
It’s brilliant that so many cafés and restaurants
in Brighton & Hove are banning plastic straws
and one-use coffee cups: there are around 110
cafés locally who’ve joined the #BYOCC – Bring
Your Own Coffee Cup – movement and lots of
places offering discounts for customers who bring
in reusable cups. That’s great. It’s also really encouraging
to see villages like Ovingdean pledging to go
plastic free. I hope we can build on this momentum
to work towards a plastic-free future.
As told to Nione Meakin
ovingdean.co.uk/get-involved
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