Go Green!
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By David Jenkins
Posted: Wed Mar 8 2006
Militant tendency
Women’s Environmental Network
What do they want? They campaign on environment and health issues ‘from a female perspective’, including the Real Nappies for London project. The Tower Hamlets-based group also runs local food projects, encouraging women to compost and grow their own food on estates, as well as a sanitary products education initiative. ‘In the UK, we buy more than 3 billion disposable sanpro items each year,’ says spokeswoman Liz Sutton, ‘which end up incinerated, in landfill or in our seas and rivers.’ They also scarily point out that 80 per cent of the UK’s population live within 2km of a landfill site.
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How will they get it? In 2000, they launched WEN’s Tampon Action Day to call upon the Government to give women the ‘right to know’ what they put inside their bodies (such as potentially harmful GM cotton). In an attempt to transform the great ‘unspoken-about’ into front-page news, they designed ‘tampon crowns’, which WEN supporters wore to events like Alternative Fashion Week. Plans for London Nappy Week (April 24-30) include real nappy fashion shows, ‘nappuccino’ coffee mornings and ‘nappy mountains’ – piles of filled bin-bags in public places, to represent one year’s use of disposable nappies.
www.wen.org.uk
The Alliance Against Urban 4x4s
What do they want? Explains founder Sian Berry: ‘Our goals are to make driving a big 4x4 in town as socially unacceptable as drink-driving, and to increase taxes on the most polluting vehicles, including increases in road tax and a higher congestion charge in London. We are also seeking an end to 4x4 advertisements in the media.’
How will they get it? A protest that involves spoof parking tickets (downloadable at the website) signed by the ‘manufacturer’, stating that their ‘false advertising led you to believe you needed a three-ton off-roader to: get to the gym/ take your kids to school/commute to a business park/trek to Homebase on a bank holiday.’ The ticket also informs the car owner that ‘Driving a 4x4… around town will waste more energy in one year than leaving the fridge door open for seven years.’ They also do a nice range of T-shirts saying the urban tanks are ‘not safe, not clean, not cool’.
www.stopurban4x4s.org.uk
London Rising Tide
What do they want? LRT believes that the Kyoto Protocol won’t avert the climate-change crisis. Instead, the protocol promotes ‘the self-interest of corporations and industrialised nations, marginalising issues of global equity and the environment,’ according to the group’s Robbie Madden. Their enemies? The oil companies: ‘There is no such thing as an ethical or sustainable oil company.’
How will they get it? There’s the BP-bashing ‘Art Not Oil’ exhibition, which they cheekily mounted on the Edith Cavell statue opposite the National Portrait Gallery. They also shut down a Shell petrol station in Islington last month by hosting an eco-carnival on its forecourt, blockading the entrance and exit, disabling the pumps with ‘Caution Global Warming’ hazard tape, all to the jolly sounds of a samba band.
www.londonrisingtide.org.uk
Green cab firm
Solar powered home
Community garden
London's recycling
Eco housing estate
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