When: 4th of November, 2010. 7pm
Where: American University, Richmond.
I was already anti-plastic before I went to hear this talk by Roz Savage and Zac Goldsmith. The event is by Greener Upon Thame’s, and Michael Glazebrook was on brilliant form. The videos I saw and the talks that I heard my anti plastic stance tenfold. It is not a small issue. As well as bringing news of the launch of an anti-plastic campaign by Greener Upon Thames, with the help of Zac Goldsmith and Roz Savage, Frost will be doing a series of articles of how you can be more environmentally conscious.
MP and Pacific rower launch campaign to make Olympics plastic bag-free
Zac Goldsmith, MP, and ocean rower/ environmental campaigner Roz Savage have launched a campaign to make the Olympics 2012 plastic bag-free.
The duo are backing Greener Upon Thames and will unveil banners and bags, soon to be seen across London, declaring “London – shouldn’t we be plastic bag free?” The group fear that the Olympics could prompt the production of hundreds of thousands of promotional bags, which would be carried around the world, creating a global problem, and shaming the British capital.
The campaign, backed by politicians, schools, more than 500 shops and thousands of London residents, will call on the Government to rid the Olympic Park and the capital of the polluting bags for the duration of the games to break the habits of millions of Londoners, and as a symbol to the world.
The move follows Roz’s latest – 8,000 mile – Pacific row, where she skirted the North Pacific Garbage Patch. This is an area of marine plastic pollution roughly twice the size of Texas, containing around 3.5 million tons of rubbish, including millions of plastic bags that kill animals and contaminate our food supply.
Roz Savage has now rowed solo across much of the planet: she is the first woman to have rowed across the Pacific, adding to her 2005 solo crossing of the Atlantic. In 2011 she will be setting off to row the Indian Ocean before rowing the North Atlantic to return to the UK.
Roz combines her epic adventures (she is one of the Top 20 Great British Adventurers) with raising awareness of the top environmental challenges facing the world today: marine plastic pollution, climate change, and habitat destruction. She is a United Nations Climate Hero, a trained presenter for the Climate Project, and an Athlete Ambassador for 350.org.
Her Pacific row was a project of the Blue Frontier Campaign and she is an Ambassador for the BLUE Project. Her inspirational book, Rowing the Atlantic: Lessons Learned on the Open Ocean, came out in 2009.
Richmond Park MP Zac Goldsmith is a former editor of The Ecologist magazine and author of The Constant Economy (2009), which looks at some key environmental problems and provides a programme for action.
In 2005 he was invited to oversee the Conservative Party’s Quality of Life Policy Group, which helped develop the party’s policies on issues ranging from transport, housing and energy to food, farming and the countryside.
Zac supports Greener Upon Thames, the Richmond and Kingston anti-plastic-bag campaign which is organising these two events, with help from the American International University and Kingston University’s Sustainability Hub.
Zac and Roz will also address an audience at Kingston University at 7.00pm on Thursday 11th November.