Rochdale is doing Cartwheels over re-use

Cartwheel arts

Cartwheel Arts has been able to create a kinetic sculpture from reused materials and produced a 'how to' book in the style of a recipe book which will go to every household in Deeplish this week.

The aim of the project was to help communities in Deeplish recycle more and recycle right. Currently Rochdale’s recycling rate is 35%, so there are still a lot of things being thrown away that can be recycled or re-used. The Rochdale based Arts Company has worked on the two projects, junk sculpture and a leftover recipe book to raise awareness of reducing, re-using and recycling waste.

Residents have been taken to Greater Manchester’s Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) to see why it is important to put the right thing in the right bin. They also visited a landfill site to see what happens to some of the waste that goes into the general waste bin.

One volunteer from the project said: “It was fascinating and we learnt loads, such as why only certain plastics can be recycled, how much we throw away each week and how gases from landfill like methane can be turned into a valuable resource to generate electricity”.

Residents creating the book also took part in a cooking demonstration using leftover food with environmental charity Emerge and have worked with writers to develop poems, short stories and recipes all with environmental messages embedded. These have been combined with bin collection information to form a dual language recipe and information booklet that will be distributed to 4,000 households in and around the Deeplish area of Rochdale.

Phillippa Superville-Blackford from Recycle for Greater Manchester who funded the project said: “This is exactly the kind of thing we want to support, communities helping communities and getting our recycling message across to residents in a different way”.