The aim of the pilot scheme was to reduce the amount of food waste on the New Smithfield Market (where Emerge and FareShareNW are based). FareShare took any food that would be going to waste from the market traders, sorted it and then redistributed the usable produce to it’s Community Food Members.

The Community Food Members (CFMs) are the beneficiaries of the project and consist of many charitable and not-for-profit organisations in and around Manchester.

And the project has already shown some fantastic results! In the first month FareShareNW sorted and redistributed over two and a quarter tonnes of food to it’s CFMs saving a massive 9.6 tonnes of carbon by stopping it going to landfill.

We’re all amazed and thrilled by the first month of the project. Here’s to many more sucesful months!!

Check out the full article here

Ed

Our houses, the objects that we carry round every day, even our clothes are largely made with plastic. Most of us don’t even give it a thought. It’s part of a world of plenty, one of the benefits of technology and cheap oil. We can’t identify the plastics we use, and know even less about the fillers, plasticizers, stabilisers, and colourings added to plastics to enhance their properties.

There is increasing concern about the food we eat but much less about the health impacts of packaging, the leakage of phthalates and bisphenol A. Plastic debris litters our streets, our shores, the oceans, and accumulates in landfill. No-one really knows how much there is, or the extent of the environmental hazard it represents.

Are the deaths of wildlife due to ingestion, or fouling and the possible contamination of the food chain just the price we have to pay for the convenience of plastic? We try to use less but plastics production increases every year using. Some plastics get recycled, but with so many types and little thought given to designing in recyclability, it’s  expensive and often results in degraded materials. Plastic packaging is the poster boy of our throwaway society.

What are the solutions?

Find out at Emerge’s public meeting on “The Future of Plastic Packaging” on Nov 24^th at 5.45pm at Brazenose House, Brazenose St, M2 5BP

Richard Thompson, Professor of Marine Biology will be talking about the broad picture, the impact of plastic packaging, the environmental and health impacts, the overall trajectory of plastic packaging across the world and how the UK fits into that, and the priorities for change.

Stuart Foster, Director of RECOUP, will be talking about the different properties/characteristics of plastics, new developments in plastics and progress in the UK and Europe.

Nick Cliffe, Marketing Manager at Closed Loop Recycling, will be talking about the challenges of sorting packaging, and how smart packaging could make this easier.

Iain Ferguson, Environment Manager at The Co-operative Food, will be talking about the journey taken by the Co-op in reducing packaging, where it’s come from, where it’s going, the obstacles and what needs to change to make it possible for the Coop to move forward.

Nigel Rose

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Recycling a single aluminium can saves enough energy to run a T.V. for 3 hours!

Join us! Support our mission to reduce waste sent to landfill.

Reduce your waste by taking our Zero Waste Challenge, and encourage other people in your community to do the same, and you could win up to £150 worth of prizes!

EMERGE guarantees:

• Comprehensive training so you will know how to reduce your waste and have the confidence to pass on your experience to others
• Support as you plan events and gain pledges.

Not only will you receive a certificate for volunteering with EMERGE but you will also:

•  Gain new knowledge and skills
• Have valuable experience to enhance your CV
• Meet new people and have fun – all whilst doing your bit to save the environment!

Check Out Bike Friday's Website for more Info

Cycling in Manchester can be daunting to newcomers and inexperienced cyclists alike.

However, thanks to a group of experienced cyclists attempts are being made to change that. Part of the Love your Bike campaign, bike riders of all levels of experience take to the streets of Manchester for a monthly commute to work.

The scheme, coordinated by Manchester Friends of the Earth’s, aims to give people an opportunity to get on their bike but also offer support to those who need it. This Friday (and every last Friday of the month excluding December) sees the group starting off in 6 locations around Greater Manchester, travelling on arterial roads the groups aim to collectively  arrive in the city centre at 8.30am.

It’s obvious from the start, group leaders are aware of their responsibilites and the feelings of both cyclists and other road users alike. One point they make is, “It is entirely law-abiding – we do not try to slow down the traffic.” For those needing help for the homeward journey, the groups can also make arrangements to support you too. You can also have a look at the website’s handy Pocket Guide to Cycling leaflet, which is very helpful to cyclists old and new.

Personally, I think this is a brilliant scheme and I’m very happy to see other cyclists willing to encourage new people to use Manchester’s streets safely and confidently. From personal experience, avoiding using a bicycle to get around due to being scared of injury and high levels of traffic is something of a theme I’ve come across so often from friends in the city. Schemes such as Bike Friday is a great way of showing support to new cyclists wanting to take the first steps into a rewarding, enjoyable and eco-friendly mode of transport.

The event is held on the last Friday of every month and group leaders are easily contactable with questions. So there’s nothing stopping you-love your bike and love Manchester!

Ed

Useful Links
Bike Friday Web Page
Bike Friday Facebook Page
Cycling GM

One of the two large trees on the allotment

Every September/October I have the enviable task of processing and distributing kilos of apples from two substantial trees on our allotment.  We took the plot on in 2005 and the trees were the main reason for taking that plot.

This year has been a bumper harvest and the scale of the challenge is hard to describe.  One of the trees fruits every other year and 2011 is a fruiting year.  It is laden with juicy eating apples.  Too many for one house so we do our best to pick and distribute to anyone we can.  A wheelbarrow full of these apples made its way to FareShare a couple of weeks ago. Last Saturday at Apple Day on Seymour Grove Allotments kilos of our fallers were collected, the bruised bits cut off (composted of course) and the remainder processed into fresh apple juice.  Today I’ll be taking some to St Bride’s Church for distribution to people who are destitute.

A new method of preserving some of this fruit (for me) is dehydration.  I attended a workshop in early September organised by Old Trafford Amateur Gardeners’ Society which was about low carbon preserving, including using a dehydrator.  So, I have borrowed the machine and processed 7 kilos of apples into rings for drying.  Once they are done I can keep them in jars (or any air tight container) for months and enjoy locally grown fruit when our apple season is finished. Less energy is used this way than freezing the food.

A small amount of compostable waste for the worms

Aside from the pleasure of eating our own fruit in the winter and spring this is a good way to use fruit that is blemished. Its very easy to cut any marks off the skin and dry the fruit. Most of the 7 kilos of apples I processed today wouldn’t win a beauty contest, and supermarkets wouldn’t stock them, but they taste wonderful. I’m left with a very small amount of waste (mainly apple cores) to compost and 9 trays of apple rings in the dehydrator.

Debbie Ellen
Abundance Manchester
Abundance Trafford

Lucy and Nicola- cooking up a storm!!

Nicola, Lucy Andrea and used vegetables and curry paste supplied to FareShare to make 5 huge pans of korma and balti curry which will be delivered out by FareShare to our 50+ beneficiary organisations in and around Manchester.

A big thank you goes out to the Just Life team who provided the safe, clean catering facilities at their Community Centre for the FareShare cooking mission! Centre Manager Matt Lloyd said “We were delighted to lend our kitchen to FareShare knowing that people in need, including our own beneficiaries, would benefit from a delicious curry cooked by experts!”

If you would like to find out more about FareShare, get involved in future cookery sessions or other volunteering opportunities or simply give a donation please contact Seb or Vanessa on 0161 223 8200 or email.

Nicola and Andrea in the thick of it.

Writers would be expected to produce an interesting or thought provoking article (around 300-500 words long) around once every one or two weeks. A minimum commitment of 12 weeks is preferred. A good standard of written English is essential, as well as keeping to deadlines. Examples of published writing would be preferred but not essential- everyone is welcome to get in touch.

Interested?

Please comment below,contact us on Facebook or twitter,  email,  or phone the office on 0161 223 8200 and speak to Ed, Nicola or Lucy.

Ed

An Abundance Manchester volunteer hard at work

This is either because their owners aren’t able to pick them, don’t want to eat the fruit or there is simply too much fruit for them to consume themselves. This is where projects which pick and distribute unwanted fruit become important. Currently there are two such projects in Greater Manchester, Abundance Manchester and Abundance Trafford (the younger of the two).

Abundance Trafford started last year and we’re still only small. We pick unwanted fruit in Old Trafford, Stretford and Urmston areas of Trafford and distribute the fruit to organisations that work with people in food poverty. It’s enjoyable, satisfying work, but coping with both picking and distribution is time consuming, especially when you try to do it without using vehicles, to minimise the carbon impact of the work.

That’s why working with FareShare is such a boon. Recently we picked about 35 kg of apples from two trees in Stretford. The apples were cookers, which are harder to give away in volume than eating apples, as some organisations are not able to deal with lots of them. So, we had bags of apples sitting in our living room – where to take them?

I rang FareShare, as I knew that some of their community food members (CFM) are based in Old Trafford, to see whether they were going to be delivering in the area in the near future. They said they could collect the apples within a couple of hours, as they were dropping off a delivery locally. This was fantastic, FareShare can deliver smaller quantities of the lovely apples to some of its 35 different CFM as part of a weekly food delivery.

This sort of partnership, with Abundance Trafford picking the fruit and FareShare distributing it means that Abundance Trafford can pick more fruit, safe in the knowledge that it can be widely distributed and FareShare is dropping off and picking up food in the same trip: maximising use of the vehicle.

If you’d like to help us pick, or have a tree in need of picking please contact us

Debbie Ellen

If you haven't got a green bin, click on the pic to find out how to order one.

A fortnightly collection is easily do-able if you use all 4 bins effectively. Making sure that all food waste goes into the green bin really cuts down on residual waste that goes in the black bin. Whilst there have been criticisms of removing weekly collections it shouldn’t be a problem for most, as more than half of average household rubbish can be recycled according to MCC.

Bravo the courage and vision of those councils who see that encouraging homes to reduce, reuse, recycle (the real ‘3Rs’) their waste will inevitably lead to a reduced need for weekly general waste collections – or at least it should!

Through the practical “incentive” of reduced general waste services, householders will begin to see the benefit of separating resources properly for recycling and who knows – they might even start to think about all the different things they buy and whether they really need all that packaging and the other stuff that only ends up in the bin…

Lucy

Useful Links
Manchester City Council Press Release
Q&A on fortnightly collections from Manchester City Council