The power of pledging is helping people across the Highlands to reduce their household waste. 5 out of 6 people find that pledging to take specific action helps them to cut their waste.

More than 500 pledges to take action to cut household waste have been gathered - at schools, in the Eastgate, at events, in the street - as part of RoWAN's Slim Your Bin campaign. RoWAN staff have been busy calling those who joined to find out whether they have followed through on their pledges, and so far from almost 300 responses we're finding that 5 out of 6 say pledging helped "a little", "some" or "a lot".

Here are some typical comments:

      "Filling in the pledge form helped me focus"

      "The children are learning about waste at school and that's helped me at home"

      " The face-to-face chat gave me some great practical advice" Read more

If you have visited a Master Composter event recently, you may have noticed the lovely plastic bottle flowers that volunteers have made.  Particularly eyecatching and effective in a garden, if you would like to make your own, see the attachment below.

Master Composters are available to set up displays, hold workshops or do walkabouts at community events or galas.  Please do give Katy a bell on 01349 867063 or master.composter@rowan.org.uk if you would like us to come along!

At our Easter Eggstravaganza party, we had a colouring contest and a chalkboard-egg decorating competition.  There were a lot of entries for both.  Congratulations to Faith Elson and Niamh MacKenzie who won our colouring contest and to Michael Urquhart who won our egg decorating contest.

Click here to see their entries.  Prizes will be sent to the winners today!  Thank you to everyone for taking part.

The Dingwall Eggstravaganza was certainly a great success!  Nearly 100 people came along to the Leisure Centre on Saturday 27th March to take part in compostable crafts, egg decorating and fancy dress.  Check out the gallery to see some of the fantastic crafts that the children made - can you spot yours? RoWAN staff were busy asking folk to 'Slim Your Bin' and lots of positive pledges were received - if you haven't signed up yet, click here to be entered into a £40 prize draw.

Watch this space for details of our next theme party - maybe an Icecream and Smoothie day in the summer!

Thanks to one of our hardworking volunteers, Marianne, LUSH got in touch with Kate to find out ways they could cut down on the amount of waste they were sending to landfill. Read more

Carol and Kate have been busy in Inverness working with Merkinch PS, Central PS, Crown PS and Inverness High School.  Each school is showing a keen interest in trying to reduce the amount of waste they produce. Read more

Lunchtimes at Tain Royal Academy are full of drama – and the drama is full of rubbish. Pupils in the lunchtime drama group, run by teacher and writer Peter Whitely, are tackling the subjects of waste and consumption in a play titled “Pieces of String too Short to be Useful”.

The aim of the piece is to get secondary school audiences thinking about the connections between the things they consume, the waste they produce and the effect this has on landfill and on climate change.

In a series of short sketches, pupils look at typical consumer items – a mobile phone, a Tshirt, hair products – and examine why we always want more, better, newer replacements.

Peter Whitely explained “How many of our choices are truly individual, and how much are we all influenced by fashion and advertising? Under the guise of “decluttering” we can end up throwing out items which are perfectly all right, filling up landfill sites and adding to our carbon footprint in the process.” Read more

Park Pupils Challenge Waste

How much waste does our school produce? What’s in all those bins anyway? These are the questions that pupils of Invergordon’s Park Primary School set out to answer, with the aim of reducing the schools’ rubbish. Reducing, Reusing and Recycling, the 3Rs of waste, saves money and resources and helps tackle climate change, which affects us all.

With the help of Ross-shire Waste Action Network (RoWAN), school Eco Committee members gathered in 24 hours’ worth of school waste, sorted and weighed it. All pupils separated their lunch waste into cooked and uncooked food, packaging and drinks containers from school meals and packed lunches. All the bins were gathered in, as was the paper for recycling and the compostable waste which the school already collects. Read more