Recycling for Gloucestershire Meeting

The meeting went very well. I met two people, Kate and Simon. They were both very friendly and helpful. They talked me through what it was they do. They mainly do promotion material and events.

The list of things that included are-

1. Two websites-main,and schools
2. Real nappies -promoting parents to use reusable nappies to create less waste,and to save money.
3. Home composting- 14 master composters and 4 community composting sites.
4. Recycling Centre- five recycling centres, but closest one is Hempsted, Gloucester.
5. Two Landfill sites
6. Reuse Organisations- Butterfly Project and Emmaus
7. Schools
8. Road shows

I said I wanted to photograph things where it was more hands on, E.g recycling can going round picking up the waste etc. They said it was the district council that run this, but they would be able to talk to them for me a they are associated with them. Things I could do with the district council-

1. Recycling Collection
2. Bring banks/kerbside schemes
3. Low performance areas - Matson, Barton, Tredworth.

With the low performance areas, they said this was where communities just didn't recycle. They were having issues with too much waste in the streets. Kate suggested I could document a family in one of the areas as to the reasons why they don't recycles-what their ethics are and what they consume. 

I'm interested in looking into the low performance areas, the recycling centres and recycling collection, and also the landfills. Kate said it would be quite difficult getting permission to photograph in the landfill sites, however I could try. They run educational school events to the landfills so I could possible join them on one of these trips.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how it went and I'm quite excited about getting started. They also want me to do some promotional material for their website, so it would mean getting work published. This would be for free, but in return they will help me with me project. They have someone who works in getting all the statistic for waste/consumption etc so this would be helpful to put this information with my photographs.

I am still going to go to the meeting with SWEA to see what they can offer, as I still want to keep my options open at this early stage.