REUSE member, Jersey Employment Trust, draws attention to the environmental benefit of reuse

Acorn Enterprises are launching a campaign to raise awareness about the environmental benefits of reusing items and minimising waste.

To coincide with World Earth Day which falls in April, messages which will be seen around the Reuse store in Trinity include:

• A new living room suite uses the same amount of CO2 to produce as driving from Jersey to Paris.
• Buying a second-hand sofa saves the same amount of CO2 it takes to drive around Jersey five times.
• The carbon footprint of one new 100% cotton shirt is greater than driving a car from Grosnez to La Rocque and back.

Acorn general manager Steve Pearce said: ‘Acorn’s primary objective will always be to support people with a disability or long-term health condition with work and training opportunities. However, it also has an environmental objective, which is to assist in the protection and preservation of the environment and promote the concept of reduce, reuse and recycle waste.
‘Buying second-hand household goods and clothes is a great way to reduce your personal environmental impact. Everyday items all have a carbon footprint but we set out to interpret what that means and open the conversation as the Island heads towards being carbon neutral by 2030.

‘You can look at the Impact Calculator on the Reuse Network website (reuse-network.org.uk) and see that an average settee might have a 52kg CO2 saving but it’s difficult to know what that actually means. When you put it alongside the carbon footprint equivalent of a flight or a car journey, it starts to make sense.’

The environmental messages, which have been created by AI Studio, will be appearing in the Acorn Reuse store as banners and boards this month. Acorn have also interpreted how many items they save from the waste stream, such as:

• Acorn sorts 10,000 bin bags of clothing every year = the height of Mount Kilimanjaro.

The campaign has been supported by Geomarine, whose managing director Phil Horsley said: ‘Geomarine are exploring ways to increase the amount of reused and recycled materials in local civil engineering projects.

Using recycled aggregate has become standard practice. We have also completed several piling contracts using pipe recycled from the offshore oil industry.

‘Partnering with Acorn allows us the opportunity to look at different ways of thinking about our eco-credentials and how we can bring about positive effects for the environment. We have always been impressed with Acorn’s philosophy of nurturing people and improving the environment, and we are looking forward to developing the relationship.’

Earth Day, an international awareness day that started in 1970, is on 22 April and this year the theme is Restore Our Earth.