Monday 23 August 2010

Compost Mentis in Shrewsbury

Compost Mentis (a play on the Latin phrase meaning not of sound mind) is actually a theatre production by the wonderful Whalley Rangers All Stars theatre company.  http://www.wras.org.uk

It features a gardener and a giant compost heap who slowly fall out over the course of the hilarious play.  Their relationship slowly begins to break down when it’s discovered that the compost heap has a life of its own and harbours thoughts that are fermenting within.

Puppet, mechanical and musical interventions ensure that the audience like the gardener are led up the garden path...

The play was recently performed in Shrewsbury town square with sponsorship from the local council as part of the Shrewsbury Summer Season of free live productions around the town centre to attract tourists and shoppers.

A crowd of around 100 gathered at each of the three performances throughout the day and with the summer holidays there was lots of young people there to educate too.  Volunteers from the Shropshire Master Composters group used this as an opportunity to link to the plays gardening theme and try to get more people interested in home composting.

Five of our volunteers laid on a display with wormeries and compost bins and display boards.  It was a great day with a huge amount of interest expressed and leaflets given out to hundreds of people who will hopefully go home and compost more off the back of this.


Wednesday 16 June 2010

Cooking in the Community


Volunteers from Shropshire Master Composters with the support of waste management staff at Shropshire Council have been educating the public about food waste prevention. 

Its all part of a district wide project funded by the Central Area Partnership to reduce the environmental impact of food.  This involves promoting local food to reduce food miles, encourage composting and food waste prevention to stop food waste going to landfill and encouraging people to cook from scratch to get people to eat more fresh food which can reduce packaging.

To encourage this, we have helped organise a series of public cookery demonstrations which alongside stalls selling local produce and environmental education activities such as composting clinics as helped to get more people around the Shrewsbury area to think about food and how to be greener when we are buying, using and disposing of food.

Wednesday 10 March 2010

New Shropshire Composting Business


Shropshire Seaweed


Organic Gardening Products


The Shropshire Seaweed range was launched in 2010, drawing together five revolutionary garden products under one label. Each of these products had been developed to help ordinary homeowners transform their outdoors environment by eradicating nasty chemicals and embracing a more organic way of life.  Find out more at www.sea-chem.co.uk

Monday 22 February 2010

Tesco Display

A couple of us volunteers from Shropshire Master Composters recently joined staff from Shropshire Council and Tesco to promote waste reduction at the new Tesco Extra store on the site of the old cattle market in north Shrewsbury. We focused our display on home composting but also did a separate stand on Love Food Hate Waste.  The Council also did a stand all about recycling and Tesco were focusing on highlighting energy efficiency including giving away free wind up radios all day!  Very generous!  (Rather made our free love food recipe cards seem less generous though)


It was a successful day though with several hundred people passing by over the course of the day.  A big thanks to all the volunteers who helped with the composting display and to Tesco (and in particular their new regional Community Manager Chris) for organising the event and not only supplying us with lots of cuppas throughout the day but also giveaways and prizes to help encourage more interest in our stalls.  

Lets hope more people get the message and start to recycle and compost more and waste less.

Wednesday 10 February 2010

Fairtrade Fayre 2010


As part of "fairtrade fortnight" 2010, volunteers from Shropshire Master Composters attended a huge food fair in central Shrewsbury to promote home composting.  There were more than 12 stalls mainly selling ethically sourced food, drink and clothing from developing countries.  There was also fantastic Caribbean music provided from the Telford West Indian Associations Youth Steel Band.  The town crier opened up the event and rounded up hundreds of people to attend.  They all learned about the difference you can make in peoples lives by choosing to pay a fair price for produce from developing countries and of course whilst they were at it we showed them why they should compost too!

Tuesday 5 January 2010

Tesco's Recycling Centre in Shrewsbury


Unlike other sites, they use a TOMRA automated recycling machine. You can put all your recycling in one hole and the machine sorts it for you. It has cutting edge technology like photo-recognition and infra-red scanning to sort items into separate underground storage containers. It can even differentiate between different colours of glass bottle!



tomra machine
As part of their new sustainable development in north Shrewsbury, the supermarket giant Tesco has installed a brand new automated recycling maching which can accept:
  • paper and magazines
  • cans, tins, aerosols and foil
  • glass bottles and jars
  • plastic bottles
  • plastic bags
  • textiles
  • shoes

Automated technology

Increasing recycling

When installed in 2007 it was one of the first of its kind in the UK. It has proved extremely popular and within 6 months of operation the site had doubled the amount of recycling collected. The machine uses 'reverse vending' technology giving reward card points for recycling which motivates people to recycle more. As such they are helping reduce the amount of household waste sent to landfill each year in Shropshire.