Don't believe what you read in the press!!!

Last week the Camden New Journal erroneously reported that the Camden Green Fair was my “baby”. They even attributed a quote to me. I would be over the moon if the Green Fair had been my idea, but it wasn’t. And I've never talked to the CNJ abou it!

The Camden Green Fair is now in its sixteenth year and has therefore been around for a lot longer than I have been evangelising about environmental issues. It is, and has always been, a community-led event and considerable praise deserves to go to the community activists and Council officers that have built it up year on year to what it is now – the largest free environmental awareness event in the UK. I’ve been proud to be associated with the Green Fair as a member of the 2007 steering group. But I am just in cog in a fabulous, well-oiled (and now renewably powered!) machine.

We believe that more than 20,000 people visited the 2007 Fair – a new record. I’m particularly pleased that the emphasis this year was on giving people lots of information about how they can make their lifestyles more environmentally friendly. So many residents say to me “I would do more in the battle against Climate Change if only I knew what to do”. That’s why, over the coming months and years, we’ll be building on the success of the Green Fair to help residents, institutions and businesses understand clearly what they can do to reduce their carbon emissions.

What a Waste!

It's hard to see how an inner city borough like Camden can charge residents by weight for the waste they produce because most of us live in multiple occupancy buildings and it’s virtually impossible to separate our bins. Penalising people for producing more waste, or for not recycling, is likely to lead to more fly tipping and a lot of ill feeling.

Most of our waste starts as packaging and comes from supermarkets like Tesco. They need to be persuaded to reduce their packaging and to use materials that can be composted. We also need to be tougher as consumer. We should refuse plastic bags wherever possible, complain when checkout assistants push plastic bags at us, and leave excess packaging at the checkout as they do in Germany.

Finally we need to reuse things a lot more than we do currently. I visited Cambridgeshire County Council last week to see how they pushed their recycling rate up to 50%. (Camden is at 27%.) Part of it is about collecting kitchen waste which we definitely need to do. But the Council also has a great free website which allows residents to advertise things they would like to swap or pass on. If you have any good ideas like that, then please let me know. The Camden Sustainability Task Force, a cross-party body of councillors concerned about Climate Change, will incorporate the best ideas into our next report – on Waste and Recycling – which is due out in July.