It's International Compost Awareness Week! Here's lots of ways to get involved for 52 weeks & more

Over seventy years ago the 

organic agriculture pioneer 

Sir Albert Howard stated :

 "The health of soil, plant, 

animal and man 
is one and indivisible"

Taking care of the soil where we grow our food, making compost, reducing waste, healthy eating, exploring the 'circular economy' of growing plants, beginning to understand the web of beneficial organisms that exists below and above ground:  

our gardens, kitchens, eating and shopping preferences are the forums for all of these.

We can all learn more and make our own contributions even more valuable, right here in Tooting.

Wandsworth Borough Council has published a post in its website about food waste and composting, and we're copying some of the links here because they are accessible and practical ways being offered this spring and summer to learn more and share experience.

• Firstly, there's the Wandsworth Composting Project - all the details are here in this flier. TTT and other partners are contributing too.
• Secondly there's a practical workshop on composting skills on June 4th at Bramford Community Garden - here's the flier.
• Thirdly, there's the Grow Your Own at Home! gardening classes sponsored by Be Enriched, taking place near Tooting Broadway and starting on June 10th. Here's the flier.

In June and early July there are further public compost advice sessions planned - when the dates are fixed we'll share them.

Home composting may look like a dark art: 

these events will share the skills to demistify it for local residents.

The Wildlife Gardening Forum has a website that's a treasure house of experience, including a good web page on soil and fertility: click here to read it.

Home composters provide a community service as well as benefiting our own gardens by returning organic material to the soil. We remove kilos of kitchen waste per household every week from the borough's waste transport and processing. That borough service has a carbon cost as well as a financial cost - we can reduce both costs by working with our waste to recognise it as a valuable resource.

Wandsworth Oasis UPFest: Tuesday 3rd November

'It's all about waste'  That's how Gill Perkins, CEO of the Wandsworth Oasis charity, describes the driving theme behind UPFest: the Oasis event on Tuesday November 3rd:

All welcome to a fun and original evening: a catwalk and showcase of the joy of upcycling clothes and textiles. 
TTT are proud to be involved via Jeni Walker and her initiative Sustainable Making and Arts Tooting - SMArT. 

Location: the Oasis shop at 234-250 Mitcham Road, Tooting SW17 9NT
Timings: 5:30pm to 10:00pm on Tuesday 3rd November.
More UPFest details online here- entry by donation.

Jeni has been making scrap silk skirt scrunchies in World AIDS Day red - available on the night next week. Here she is last week in the decorated window of the new Oasis shop at Amen Corner in Tooting:

Oasis supports local people who are affected by HIV and have successful charity shops around the borough. Gill and the team work (tirelessly) to sell as many of the items donated as they can, but inevitably there is still so much that may be fated to become landfill. 

From today: the new 5p tax will be charged for single-use plastic shopping bags

The long-debated tax of 5 pence per single-use plastic bag becomes law from the 5th October in England, and applies to 'free' bags from larger shops and chains (enterprises employing more than 250 people). Smaller shops can also charge if they wish. The sums charged go into pots for charity...so there are some complex processes, rules, exceptions (and fines for non-compliance) behind the scenes. 
Read the government's guidance for retailers here.

So what? 
In 2013 we used 8 billion of these 'free' bags per year, just from UK supermarkets....with year-on-year totals growing.
Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland have already implemented this tax - the latest figures show that in Wales, the use of these short-life bags nationally has been reduced by 79% over 4 years.

The majority of these bags are instant waste, with an enormous cumulative impact in terms of costs of dealing with household and business rubbish, and blight from windswept litter all around us. 
Read TTT's earlier 2010 post about global plastic pollution here. 
They are derived from oil, a non-renewable resource. (There are other options such as bidoegradeable cornstarch).

Of course there is a carbon saving if bag use is reduced - savings in terms of materials used to make them, and their distribution, and the carbon costs of disposing of them. 
'Reduce' has much more positive impact than 're-use' or 'recycle' and is much more within our own control.

What does this mean for me?
There's a new article - click here - which summarises exactly that.

There's an easy option that can suit all pockets: 
use a textile 'bag for life'. 
Made of jute or cotton, they are recyclable when they finally pack up - cut up and composted, or used as mulch.

For a good short article about re-usable bags, click here.

Cloth bags also have a carbon cost in their own production and distribution; some long-life shopping bags are made of plastic textiles.

'The future is dappled in the present': green sky thinking now

This post is a round-up of eight imaginative projects and developments that are happening now, in Tooting and beyond. 
It's a selection of what we've spotted in the past month.

My title comes from Paul Allen of Zero Carbon Britain at the Centre for Alternative Technology, one of the contributors to Playing for Time (see below). Paul's natural-world image means that the opportunities for making a sustainable future are all around us...if we look.

We hope there is something here to catch your interest and inspire on the Bank Holiday. 
(Plus, in three posts from last week: there's our plastic bottle greenhouse to build in the garden 1200-1600 this Thursday and Friday, and then Restart and the first Tooting Field Day later in April.)

1  Playing for Time
Lucy Neal, who founded TTT in 2008, has been spending the past two years writing Playing for Time, her book about making art as if the world mattered.
Playing for Time joins the dots between key drivers of change in energy, finance, climate change, food and community resilience – and offers ‘recipes for action’ for readers to try.

It's a wonderful collection of how artists round the globe are at the same time imagining the future and working in the real world on what matters to us all.  

The book is not only for artists, and one of the points of the book is to encourage us to look out and across our silos of specialism. 
Dip into the 400 pages...you'll be hooked!

It's Lucy's book, and it's also a collaboration with sixty other contributors...so it's a great representation of the spirit of joint action, connecting with others and local solutions that we can share as 'Transition' values. And yes, there is quite a lot about Tooting in the book!

Playing for Time was published last week, and TTT blog readers can order the book from the publishers now, and get £5.00 off the price.
To order, enter this discount code: ONPFT2015 at Oberon Books.
Offer valid until 31 Dec 2015...but no need to wait until then.

2  Energy from the kinetic force of footsteps (or footballers) 
“My idea was a floor tile that would convert the kinetic energy from a footstep into electricity" says engineer Robert Kemball-Cook about his invention that provides off-grid power anywhere. It's expensive now - but "We are establishing a whole industry that never existed before.”  
Read about Pavegen here