Bee Hotels, Eco Poles and Plastic
I recently attended a very worthwhile meeting of the Hall Rotary Club, a very active and vibrant group of Rotarians. The guest speaker was Emma Holliday, CEO Lids4Kids, (yes I have mentioned her to To
ny Miller). Emma spoke about their project, the fact that many millions of plastic lids have been saved from landfill and the brightly coloured Buddy Benches which are made from the recycled plastic. They also make many other products such as clip boards, bench tops, keyrings, pencil cases and such like – sold through Office Works. Great initiative even though I have a few concerns about the grinding up of plastic lids and producing microplastics, which I am sure they will take into account given time and more research.
How does this fit in with Bee Hotels – Hall Rotary Club is the buzzing centre of all things Bees! Hall is a bee friendly village near Canberra. One of the Rotarians made me the newest design in Bee Hotels, see beside, very classy, his wife likes to add the decorative touches. The next step is to design the actual pole this hotel will sit on, the enviro-team, Ross, Doug, Lucy and yours truly are onto that at the moment. The Northern Beaches Council is very keen to help us with this project so we should have our first Eco Pole erected within the next few months. Once the first one is in place we can then expand to other locations!!!
More on Plastic – see my story on cleaning up plastic from the beach in Oecusse – the local kids loved the day out and I gave them pens, pencils and exercise books for their efforts!
World Clean up Day Oecusse Style – Getting Rid of Plastic!
Oecusse is a very isolated sub-district of Timor Leste, situated on the north coast of the Indonesian territory of West Timor. The region is home to approximately 70 thousand people, (total population of Timor Leste ~1.4 million). Oecusse is actually an exclave of Timor Leste as it is surrounded by a foreign country, Indonesia, on three sides and has its northern border open to the sea, the Savu Sea.
Since 2001
I have been running an Environmental and Youth Program in Oecusse with a team of locals with whom I set up an NGO, GREEN TL. One of the events we try to hold regularly is Clean Up Oecusse Day. Last year I organised my neighbours to clean up the rubbish from the beach. As you can see in the photos we filled many bags with litter, as there is a general conception in Timor leste, and indeed here in Australia, that litter “goes away” somewhere when thrown on the ground. I guess they are culturally used to most of their rubbish being biodegradable and eaten by local dogs, pigs etc and have not really come to grips as yet with all the foreign introduced plastic, polystyrene and glass!!
Dumping all the rubbish in an old skip bin at the local tip.
A well earned swim in a muddy puddle on the way home.
How long will it take before the rubbish builds up again? But at least the locals are beginning to see the problem and are doing something about it.