Village Sustainability Newsleter, March 2025
Sustainable living in our villages
Let's start with a grateful recognition of the expansion of West Berkshire’s fortnightly kerbside plastic recycling collection. We can now include plastic pots and trays in our cans and plastic bottles bag. This is great news for those who have been faithfully dropping off these items of single-use-plastic waste at the recycling facilities around the district. Our household tries incredibly hard to avoid single-use-plastic but we always seem to end up with masses of it. Have a look at the West Berkshire Council website for more information about the specifics of what can and can’t be recycled kerbside. It’s worth getting it right, as the wrong items can contaminate a load of correctly recycled items which wastes a whole batch. If you’d like to keep up to date with West Berkshire Council’s environmental activities you can sign up to their monthly email at https://www.westberks.gov.uk/newsletters .
We have been very much enjoying Sandi’s Great British Woodland Restoration on Channel 4 which is well worth a catch-up. If you haven't seen it, the very lovable Sandi Toksvig has purchased an area of woodland not far from here in Hampshire. This very warm-hearted three-parter charts the progress of the first year as she and her wife learn, try, laugh, cry, meet disappointment and ultimately do what we all need to do - which is our very best for however large or small a patch of the environment we can exert an influence on.
Lent is fast approaching - Ash Wednesday is on March 5th - and with it the opportunity to give up or take up something, ideally to the benefit of our spiritual well-being and the world around us at the same time. How about identifying an item a day to go to the charity shop? Clear our homes and minds, and raise some funds for a good cause at the same time. Alternatively, how about during Lent we commit to not getting our cars out for those little trips around the village? Living where we do and with very little useful public transport, we are all heavily reliant on our cars and even those who drive EVs inevitably form part of the congestion problem that Newbury has never managed to shake off. But how often do we have a delivery to make, a child to collect, another short errand where to save ourselves 10 or 15 minutes we jump into the car rather than using our own steam? I appreciate that it's not possible for everyone but for those of us who can, wouldn't it be great if we committed to walking to the post box, cycling to the tennis club, joining a friend to go on foot to an event at the village hall? The upside is that giving up that short journey in the car we gain a small amount of brain space, some fresh air and often the chance to bump into one of our lovely local mates, which is surely one of the best bits of living in a friendly village like ours.
Julia Hoaen