Climate Action
Action to limit climate change is one of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. We all now understand the need to act to ensure a safer future for our children and grandchildren. Woking, like many other other towns, has declared a climate emergency.
For all these reasons, Woking Soroptimists have set up a Climate Action group to lead our community service in this area.
Period products
There is now much greater awareness – quite rightly – of the need to prevent period poverty. Clearly, every woman and girl must be able to make an individual choice about what suits her, but there is a ‘climate change’ aspect to period products too. They are naturally used in great numbers, so is it possible to cut the carbon emissions and waste they represent? Listen to the BBC’s Big Green Money Show episode that discusses this issue.
Medical blister packets
This year, the Soroptimist Day of Action was held on Saturday, 16 July. The Action theme was ‘reduce single-use plastic waste’. So Woking Soroptimists were at Woking Environment Action’s WeAct Hub in Mercia Walk that day to collect medical blister packs for recycling. The hundreds of blister packets we collected just on that one day will be recycled through the Superdrug scheme.
Why does SI Woking collect empty blister packets?
SI Woking collects empty medicine blister packets for recycling because they are difficult to recycle. At the moment, the local Woking waste service does not take them. Superdrug has a programme to collect the packets at its pharmacies for recycling by Veolia. Unfortunately, the collection service is not available in every town. It’s an excellent initiative but more needs to be done to collect and recycle the very many medicine blister packets that are thrown away every day.
We know that single-use plastic waste is bad for us and for our planet. As consumers, we try to reduce the plastic we throw away. But when it comes to medicines, the patient cannot choose which medicine to take. It is up to the manufacturers to find ways of delivering and packaging medicines that create less plastic waste and packaging that is easy to recycle.
Soroptimists say: “It would be really good to have a ‘one-stop’ blue bin collection in our community for medical blister packs!”
A manufacturer cutting plastic waste
Did you know a local Woking company is helping to reduce plastic waste by making paper straws? We visited The Paper Straw Company and discovered that it is possible to make a paper straw that’s as good as a plastic one…but doesn’t have to end up in landfill. Our picture shows member Kath Heatley with a pack of Jubilee straws.
Calculate your carbon footprint
Do I really need to change what I do because of climate change? Find out with this easy calculator.