Go Green Week in Worcester April 2019

Helping residents and visitors to learn simple ways to live more sustainably the University of Worcester and Worcester City Council held a city-wide Go Green Week. Focussing on promoting the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) created by the United Nations through a variety of events and activities. Heralded a success and promoting the 10 simple Golden Rules about living sustainably.

The week jump-started with a sustainability dance performed and choreographed by nineteen Heart of Worcestershire College students under the supervision of University student, Monica as part of her assessment. Dancers wore customised re-purposed T-shirts. Staged on the beautiful waterfront of South Quay and focused on the seventeen SDGs. Woo Bikes held Have-a-Go session to let people try electric bikes between shows. The dancers created a chalk circle with the SDGs that lasted several days after the event.

On Wednesday catering college students transformed wonky veg destined for the waste bin into delicious curry and soup. This Feed the 1,000 event raises awareness of food waste. Each year, the average UK family wastes enough food to create 1,000 meals.

Litter can harm wildlife and looks unsightly and a community litter pick is a great way to show people students care, attracting many positive comments from passers-by.  For the rest of the week, we moved inside to the wonderful Crowngate POD! We had activities to engage both adults and children: beeswax wraps (to replace single-use cling film), wildflower seed bombs to entice more pollinators,  learning about your carbon footprints, snacking on dehydrated fruit saved from the bin, ‘name the embarrassed polar bear made from WRE junk store items and embarrassed about climate change,’ and painting potted plants.  The free plants were potted in both reused plastic cups and egg shells.  It was Easter after all and the little eggshell plant pots can go straight into the ground or a larger pot. The calcium adds to improve soil nutrients. The beeswax wrap demonstration was particularly successful since many people were happy to learn how to create reusable food wraps by recycling their old clothing. 

We also created a flower mirror that we donated to the POD! from the spoons reused from ‘feed the 1,000’. Let’s Waste Less generously participated all three days and we were excited to have Greenpeace, Act on Energy and Worcester Veggies & Vegans run stands on different days with free giveaways and informational flyers. Pets As Therapy brought therapy dogs on Friday which was a huge hit and encouraged people in Crowngate to stop by.

Watch a short video about the week.

Keen to measure how sustainable the citizens of Worcester were in their daily lives we carried out short surveys. Encouragingly, we found that 41% of the people spoke with travel most often on foot, an increase from last year. We also saw a decrease in travel done alone in cars. Our data cannot be used to make conclusions about the behaviour of Worcester as a whole but does show that there are sustainably-minded people making an impact in the city.

Another question in our survey asked whether people used certain sustainable items in their homes. We found that over 90% of people have energy saving light bulbs and recycling bins. We also saw that around 60% of people also had water saving items, programmable thermostats, and compost bins.

This year, we collected amazing raffle prizes from local businesses, with a Gtech vacuum as our grand prize. People could earn raffle prizes from taking our survey, and we then drew the winning tickets on Saturday at the end of the event.

Go Green Week was a great event this year and really give us a chance to have engaging conversations about sustainability with the public of Worcester. This week would not have been possible without the support of all of our contributors to the week! We would like to thank everyone who volunteered and donated items, and helped run this week!