Bottled out campaign diary
Wednesday,14 July 2010 by Maddy Hays
Maddy at The Wave
2009
September: Back from a wonderful summer spent frolicking al fresco amongst plants and such, the group meets just before term. With all the third years gone, there’s only a handful of us left. Problemo. To start some action, an army is required. So we hit the Freshers’ Fair with full enthusiastic energy and big grins to get as many new students on board as possible. We have no plans for the year yet, no idea where our campaigning adventures will take us, because these decisions are up to all of the members, including new ones.
October: At our first meeting we have tea and cake and talk about why everyone wants to get involved, a lot of people had never campaigned before, and don’t know about issues in depth, but that’s really not important. It’s the enthusiasm, the passion to make things better that keeps a campaign alive. We talk about things going on in and around Sheffield: the fact that RBS, with notoriously dirty investments, are on campus recruiting students, the lack of ethical food at uni, with so little being vegan or locally sourced, about the need for more ethical clothing ranges in the uni shop…..and plant some seeds of plans.
Some genius also has the idea of making recruitment leaflets to give out at every demo, so that everyone knows who we are and how to get involved.
November: We spend the next two months as busy little bees demo-ing nasty companies who dare to show their face on our campus, selling vegan cakes, holding talks about sweatshops, meeting with the catering staff and so on.
While our activities are all fun and good, we soon become exhausted, and we don’t have much to show for our efforts. Sure, every demo raises awareness, and is reported back to the heads of companies, and we have raised some very-much-needed funds for People & Planet, all the while having a whole lot of fun, but we wanted some visible results!!
2010
January: We organise a meeting to talk about ideas for a new campaign. We want to make a difference to the environmental impact of students. We want results that we can see. And so, inspired by Leeds students, we decide to launch a campaign to ban bottled water on campus, and to install free water fountains for everyone. It makes so much sense: bottled water is a crazy waste of everything. For 1 litre of water, 7 litres are wasted in production, 250ml of oil is consumed and 100g of carbon is released into the atmosphere. Add to that the fact that only blah in 100 bottles are recycled and you have a green disaster right there. And that’s not even mentioning all the money wasted!
March: We set to work on our ‘Bottle Out’ campaign.
Step one of our campaign is research: finding out all the niggly details about passing a motion, our university’s water policy and so on. As well as talking to people at the Union and Uni, the P&P office is a gold mine for advice and information on running a campaign…it’s what they do full time! We need to get 1000 signatures to bypass council and for our proposal to go to popular vote at the next election.
Step two is making it happen: we write the motion, design and print posters
Step three is spreading the word. Our recruitment leaflets combined with our high campus presence has been working a dream in getting new people on board and our team is strong. We start a poster campaign to raise awareness of the hidden evil behind bottled water and stick them up all around including in halls, using the same poster on all of our stalls. And, of course, we create a Facebook group to spread the word even further. 1000 signatures are gathered easy peasy.
And step four, getting the bottles out, well, we’re still working on that. Because of the way our union works it won’t be going to vote until September, but we have a great base of support so we reckon it’ll get through, and the plastic will disappear, replaced with fountains popping up everywhere. Added to that is the awesome strong group that we have built, with the skills and stuff to run a campaign.
Tags: People & Planet Annual