One tonne plastic bottle display shows environmental impact

Toni McNamara Service Support Officer for Newcastle Borough Council, Cllr Simon Tagg and Charlotte Hutchings Climate Change Team for Staffordshire County Council.

Families in Newcastle got the chance to see a one tonne installation of plastic bottles in a new campaign to highlight the impact of plastic on the environment.

The installation by the Guildhall Clock Tower contained 25,000 plastic bottles and was used to help people visualise how much plastic is thrown away in Staffordshire and encourage people to correctly reduce, reuse and recycle.

The event was organised by Staffordshire County Council's Climate Change team as part of the national Plastic Free July campaign. The team gave people advice on how to cut back on their plastic usage while staff from Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council also gave demonstrations on how to recycle correctly. Local organisation Refill Rewind were also on hand offering plastic free refill products.

Staffordshire County Council pledged to be net zero by 2050 and has already cut its carbon emissions by twenty five per cent. The authority has achieved this by switching to run their buildings on green energy, replacing streetlights with LED bulbs and recycling over 200,000 tonnes of waste a year.

Simon Tagg, Cabinet Member for Climate Change at Staffordshire County Council said:

"We all need to do our bit to make Staffordshire sustainable and a big part of that challenge is helping people understand the impact plastic is having on our environment and not recycling it correctly.

"In Staffordshire we throw out 4 in every 10 plastic bottles instead of recycling. That is enough to fill 16 Olympic-sized swimming pools every year. But if we can all make small changes such as cutting back on plastic use and waste, reusing the plastic we already have and recycling more, we can make a difference."

Information on how people can get involved in Plastic Free July is available at: https://www.staffordshire.gov.uk/PlasticFreeJuly