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Duke of Edinburgh Award Volunteers With Turn The Tide Portishead

Duke of Edinburgh Award Volunteers With Turn The Tide Portishead

Since September 2020 we have had 86 students from Gordano School volunteering with us to achieve their Gold, Silver or Bronze awards. We liaise with the lead teacher for this scheme which has proved beneficial both to us and the school.

They volunteer with us for 3, 6 or 12 months depending which award they have entered for,
this then completes a section of that award.
We require them to fill in a form in which parents/guardians give their details and permission for any photos sent to us to be used for our publicity.
We supply them with litter pickers and yellow hi vis at which point they can start to go out for one hour a week litter picking in locations of their choosing in and around Portishead.
They are required to report back to us, time spent, amount collected and the locations they have covered.

Once they have completed the time required for their award they have to answer the following questions:

  • What progress do you feel you have made in your volunteering experience with us?
    Is there anything you have learned from your volunteering experience with us?
  • What skills do you think you have learnt during your volunteering time with us?
  • How might you apply these skills in your life going forwards

We can then sign them off by filling in a D of E assessment form online in which we have to outline what they have gained from their time volunteering with us.

Since this project started we have, to date, had 86 students in this scheme, they have completed 964 hours of litter picking and filled 1496 black bin bags with rubbish, they recycle where possible and report unusual items they have found.

We have to date signed off on 5 Gold, 2 Silver and 51 Bronze Awards with a further 1 Gold, 10 Silver and 17 Bronze students volunteering with us and yet to be assessed.

As part of their volunteering with us we have also invited them to join us at our Community Litter Picks and I am pleased to say that quite a few have come along over the recent months.

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News Projects

Costa Cup Recycling Project

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Coffee Cup waste is a big problem for the 21st Century. There is an estimated 3 billion paper cups used each year in the UK alone.

Of great concern is that ONLY 0.25% of that 3 billion is recycled.

Costa has however launched a huge cup recycling project, recycling ANY brand , yes ANY, paper coffee cup (most of the types of cups that can be recycled). Costa’s mission is to recycle 30 million take away coffee cups each year.

You can take your single-use coffee cups into over 2,000 Cost’s across the UK to recycle them. BOTH the Costa Coffee shops in Portishead are part of this cup recycling project.

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News Projects

Buying Far more plastic than Easter Egg

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Plastic and cardboard packaging makes up more than a quarter of product weight in some of the UK’s best-selling chocolate eggs. Packaging alone accounts for up to a quarter, on average, of the total weight of the most popular Easter eggs on sale on the High Street, new research has revealed.

The worst offender in the top 10 best-selling branded eggs analysed by Which? was Thorntons’ Classic Large Egg, where the cardboard box and plastic make up more than a third (36.4%) of the product’s weight.

The second-worst was Lindt Lindor Milk Chocolate Egg that has a packaging weight percentage of 28.1%, while Mars’s Milk Chocolate Easter Egg and Chocolate Bar and Cadbury’s Creme Giant Egg both weighed in at just above the 25% average at 25.5% and 25.1% respectively.

For many years chocolate eggs made headlines for the volume of packaging which ended up in landfill at Easter, with manufacturers and retailers criticised for not doing more to reduce it and make it more recyclable.

Choose your Easter eggs wisely. Look for only those that use foil and cardboard.

Here is a link to the Petition to stop Easter Egg Manufacturers using plastic.

https://act.friendsoftheearth.uk/act/tell-easter-egg-manufacturers-go-plastic-free?refsid=625452

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Collaborative Community

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We are able to support the very successful Portishead in Bloom team by litter picking the planned judging route during the days before the event and we have also been invited by them to be one of the community groups who meet the judges to talk about our activities and initiatives. We have been part of this for four years.

We also like to support the Portbury 100 group who litter pick the main road into Portishead by recording their collections on our Litter Log, which we keep for local groups and individuals and which is included in our publicity.

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Terracycle in Portishead

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Our involvement in the Crisp Packet recycling scheme has now come to an end following the closure of the scheme by Terracycle so many thanks to our team who ran seven day a week collections from bins situated in Waitrose, The Youth Centre and Parish Wharf Leisure Centre. Many hundreds of black bin liners of both crisp packets and other related potato products were collected and delivered to the collection point run by Conductive Education Bristol who were able to receive the reward points from Terracycle enabling them to run sessions for their special needs children with Donkeys for the Disabled.

We are still running the Writing Materials scheme which we started in 2018. This involves collection boxes situated in all of the Primary Schools in Portishead, The Ship Inn and Simply Green Zero Waste (Portishead’s plastic free shop) these boxes are collected by Kate, one of our volunteers, she then takes them to St Mary Redcliffe and Temple School in Bristol, our nearest official collection site. They are then able to pass on the rewards from Terracycle to a school in Uganda.

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7 Inventions that are Literally saving our Oceans

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There are so many people out there that are working hard to think up solutions to our Oceans problems.  From edible water packaging, to the Sea Bin Project, which Turn the Tide have been involved in, in Portishead, to Eco six pack rings. Check them out! in this article (click the link below). 

There may be some of those 7 inventions that you could use to make a change, that helps our environment just a little bit.

A one person change, becomes a group change, becomes a town or city change, becomes a country change and hopefully a global change. 

Let us know what you might do differently in 2020. 

Click on this link –

 https://interestingengineering.com/7-inventions-that-are-literally-saving-our-oceans