Village Sustainability Newsleter June 2025
SUSTAINABILITY – TARGET 2030
What a waste!
A loyal reader commented to my husband last month that he’d enjoyed my gardening article so I thought I’d point out that I produce these articles as part of my PCC role of sustainability rep – a job I accidentally created/volunteered for a couple of years ago aiming to help Chieveley Church try to meet the Church of England’s joyously ambitious, hopeful target of achieving carbon net zero by 2030. I’ve put a title at the top just so you know why I write this stuff! And nothing about gardening this month.
I read an article in the Guardian recently (29 April 2025) about what we do with waste textiles. It started by talking about activists politely returning worn-out textiles to the CEOs of the items’ retailers, asking what the company proposed to do with them. No helpful response seems to have been received and the article explored the issues now facing textile disposal. We aren’t talking about usable clothing or household items which can of course be resold, given as hand-me-downs, passed to charity shops or donation bins, or otherwise offered to those who can use them. Favourite donation points of mine are TUX Exchange in Newbury which rehomes school uniforms, the local HUGS group which delivers specific requirements to the front line in Ukraine, the Cowshed in Wokingham which does amazing things with prom dresses and more, as well as the large number of charity shops local to us here.
So what to do with worn-out clothes and textiles that can’t be passed on? Well, my grandmother patched sheets, mended everything (the local monthly repair café at https://www.repaircafe.org/en/cafe/newbury-and-thatcham-repair-cafe/ can help with tricky fixes) and downgraded unusable towels to floor cloths. Our holey t-shirts get chopped into squares and bagged up for use in the garage.
Beyond that, charity shops have traditionally collected rags, which they were then able to sell on for a small sum, but there are fewer of those companies now and the quantity of product available well exceeds the amount usable for stuffing, wipes etc. Clothing like fleeces and fluffy dressing gowns made from recycled material are typically made from recycled bottles, not textiles. So fabric waste ends up being incinerated locally in the general waste or sent overseas where huge mountains of discarded textiles in countries like Ghana cause immense problems. Similarly, waste fabric mountains in Kolkata are home to the very poor “ragpicker” community that Chieveley church supports; ragpicking is a dangerous and fragile way of living. Incineration is advertised as a way of disposing of waste while generating power, but has been described by the BBC as “Now the UK’s dirtiest form of power” (BBC news online, 15 Oct 2024) so is not a sustainable solution either.
All this got me thinking more about what happens to our “recycling”. For instance, I do not know what happens to the textile we are encouraged to leave out in clear, marked bags on bin day. Incineration or export? I do know that – at least last time I checked - Aldi was the only supermarket in Newbury with UK-processing of soft plastic waste delivered to the store by customers. Much of the UK’s soft plastic waste is exported to Turkey or the Netherlands for processing, or is incinerated.
Some years ago I saw an incredibly powerful photography exhibition of work by Pieter Hugo, nominated for the Deutsche Börse photographic prize. The powerful, shocking images depict Agbogbloshie Market in Accra, Ghana, where heaps of “Western waste” - tech - are deposited and burned in absolute mountains. The photographs show people trying to eke a living by picking out whatever they can salvage from the smoking heaps of electrical and electronic waste - cables, keyboards, monitors, screens – and are heartbreaking, in terms of the indignity and conditions of the work, not to mention health implications, and the harm being done to the environment by the incineration and chemicals leaching into the soil.
Of course, the most sustainable thing to do given the choice of refuse, reuse, repurpose, recycle is to refuse in the first place. Let’s try and buy less! Try to buy items packaging free or wrapped in paper or carboard (and yes, it is usually more expensive. Don’t get me started on that!!!) – and seek out textiles fully made from natural fibres. Let’s recognise shopping as the tedious, necessary hassle it is. Of course we need some stuff, but enough is enough. Check the charity shops for imaginative clothes and homewares, and avoid buying new. When did it become more fun to trail around a shopping centre at the weekend than exploring the countryside in the fresh air or hanging out with friends and family? Let alone sitting scrolling through a screen trying for a dopamine hit which would be readily available by walking through a spring-green wood, paddling in the sea, or gazing out on the beautiful view from a high point of the Ridgeway.
Julia Hoaen