Green Futures Articles

Sainsbury’s ‘Inside Out’ bag, currently the subject of a trial at two supermarkets in west London, is being touted as a simple way to promote the re-use of free bags picked up at the checkout. The company’s stouter ‘Bags for Life’, which cost 10p and are reusable (and ultimately replaced free) for repeated shopping trips, have been selling at a rate of 120,000 a week since mid-1999. But that still leaves 25 million free Sainsbury’s bags going out each week. The new model now on trial, when turned inside out, can be used to hold recyclables for kerbside collection, the collectors having agreed that it needs no special identification for this purpose. OK, it’s a drop in the ocean rather than a revolution...

J Sainsbury, 020 7695 6000; www.sainsburys.co.uk

In London, you can do it on the roof, up the wall and in the park. Grow food, that is – enough to supply every resident with a fifth of their fruit and vegetable needs. David Nicholson-Lord charts the rise of the urban food revolution – and the barriers that stand in its way My back-garden veggie patch has been underperforming of late. The broad beans did pretty well but the runners were savaged early on by slugs and then, while we were on holiday, strangled by bindweed. The broccoli failed to emerge from the seedtray and the spinach failed to emerge from the soil. Something odd is happening to the rhubarb, too. I wish I knew what it was.

I mention this because I suspect my attempts at urban sustainability are symptomatic of city food-growing as a whole. It’s a great idea – in theory. It’s the practice that’s the problem. Whether you’re an individual or in a group, it requires commitment, knowledge, patience, planning, time (lots of it) and year-round vigilance. Is this compatible with modern lifestyles?

Going for gold in the tree-planting stakes, the organising committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City (www.slc2002.com) is already half way to its goal of getting 100,000 new trees planted in Utah. Internationally, its efforts focus on Sarajevo, host city of the 1984 winter Olympics, which was denuded of its trees by citizens desperate for fuel during the Bosnian conflict of 1992-95. In a new joint initiative with the White House Millennium Council and American Forests, the committee aims to plant 100 trees in Sarajevo itself and 15,000 tree seedlings on the surrounding slopes - notwithstanding the need to clear land mines as part of the preparation of the land. Salt Lake City is also offering a certificate to anyone in the world who registers having planted an ‘Olympic tree’.

Stop thinking ‘waste’, start thinking available resources, close to urban centres, which may not need digging out of the ground. This is the message of the new government-funded Waste Resources Action Plan (WRAP, see GF 25, p9). Set up as an independent company and launched in November with £30 million in government funding over the next three years, WRAP will support strategic initiatives that find and develop new markets for waste.

The recycling industry too often falls into the unhealthy framework of a ‘monopsony’ - a market with many suppliers but just one buyer, where supply exceeds demand, the value shrinks, and trading ceases to make business sense. To reverse the equation, WRAP will look at all the potential end-uses for recycled materials, building on the ‘value already present’ in the material. Its chief executive Jenny Price, speaking to an audience from industry, central and local government and NGOs at the WRAP launch, described her strategy in simple terms as “start with users and potential users, and the markets will follow”.