Official launch of Plastic Free Ferndown at the Barrington

In a bid to reduce the use of single-use plastic in Ferndown, everyone is invited to the official launch of Plastic Free Ferndown (PFF) on 18 August outside the Barrington Centre in Penny’s Walk.

The launch, organised by the campaign’s steering committee, will include a barbecue courtesy of the Flying Teapot.

Food will be offered free, but donations will be welcome, with all proceeds going to Surfers Against Sewage (SAS), the award-winning charity spearheading Plastic Free Communities of which Ferndown is a part.

PFF’s steering committee will start the day with a litter pick through Pennys Walk. Their findings will be on display. The committee will be on hand outside the Barrington from 10am until 2pm to talk about the campaign and suggest suitable alternatives to single use plastics. Residents will be encouraged to work towards making their town a ‘plastic free’ community by the end of the year. This does not mean everyone has to cut out using plastic completely, but that the town can demonstrate it is doing its best to reduce its consumption of single use plastic.

New ideas for achieving this will be welcomed.

The Plastic Free Ferndown campaign is well underway with several of its objectives already being met:

Ferndown Town Council passed a resolution on 23 July to support the Plastic Free Ferndown initiative and to appoint Cllr Peter Lucas as the town council representative on the Steering Group.

Barrington Centre: Penny’s Café is now plastic-free and the entire centre is aiming to become the first plastic-free community building in Ferndown. It is hoped to achieve this by the end of September. Thanks go to PramaLIFE for pushing forward the initiative following liaison with Plastic Free Ferndown.

Ferndown Upper School’s 15-strong School Council student committee voted to support the campaign following PFF’s visit and has passed three resolutions: to commit to changing how the school serves food in the café (ie review use of containers/plastic forks and knives); removing plastic liners from waste paper bins; collection of plastic lids for the Lush recycling scheme. These small changes will considerably reduce the usage of single-use plastic at the school.

Xerocad is now using paper bags rather than plastic where possible and now uses screwed up scrap paper for packing, rather than bubble-wrap.

Ferndown Fete on the Field has adopted the PFF cause and it is on the agenda for the next meeting. Harry Worth has confirmed that there will be a small 3p surcharge on the 5k and 10k runs next year to cover the cost of paper cups, rather than plastic ones.

Colten Care has introduced a group-wide reduction of single-use plastic. They have three care homes in Ferndown: Amberwood House, Brook View and Fernhill, so their ‘Caring, without plastic’ campaign, is a huge achievement for Ferndown itself, as well as for Colten Care in general.

Ferndown Pharmacy buyer, Sharon Pharaoh, has eliminated the use of plastic bags for prescriptions and substituted them with paper bags. “Where we need to use a plastic one for certain items, we use a biodegradable one,” said Sharon who made the conscious decision to do this for the environment.

The Flying Teapot: Luke Armstrong has cut out plastic straws and replaced them with paper ones. He also serves his takeaways in paper bags.

mags4dorset has ceased receiving regular deliveries of two parcels a month because they were wrapped extensively in plastic tape. The office waste paper bins no longer have plastic liners, which has cut out around 200 bags a year.

Ferndown First School eco champions recently collected hundreds of lids and took them to be recycled at Lush. They also carried out a class survey to find out how many pieces of single-use plastic are used inside lunchboxes and asked parents to help the school have a plastic-free July.

Pretty Soul Hair and Beauty has confirmed they are scaling down on single use plastic when using the foiling method for hairdressing.

JD Wetherspoons’ Nightjar, the use of plastic straws was stopped in January this year. Instead, Wetherspoons are using paper, biodegradable ones. They are doing this at all their 100 pubs throughout the UK and say this single act will eliminate the use of 70 million plastic straws.

Tesco has replaced two-layer plastic meat trays with single layer plastic, making 84 million trays easier to recycle and removing 96 tonnes of plastic. Significant changes to the packaging of their wet wipes has resulted in a 20% material reduction and removal of 57 tonnes of plastic. (Ironically, they say the material saving is enough to make over 10 million more packs). Tesco claims that over 78% of the packaging on all its ‘own brand’ products is recyclable, depending on if the local authority collect it.

It is hoped to achieve plastic-free status for the town by the end of the year.

To find out more about the aims of Plastic Free Ferndown and how you can improve your environment, come along to the launch on 18 August.

Also join the Facebook page or contact a PFF community leader on 01202 870270.