Annual review
Surrey Environment Partnership
April 2020 – March 2021
Activity and achievements 2020-21
The annual review contains the programme of countywide initiatives that were coordinated and funded by the Surrey Environment Partnership in 2020-21. Read it below or download a PDF of the report.
Foreward
Background
Our aims
Performance summary
Our approach for 2020-21
Activity and achievements 2020-21
- Managing Surrey’s waste
- Responding to coronavirus
- Influencing national strategy
- Building our data and intelligence
- Improving recycling at flats
- Contamination reduction
- Watch Your Waste campaign
- Collection crew safety campaign
- Data driven interventions
- Harnessing the power of pestering
- Encouraging composting at home
- Getting real about nappies
- Surrey Recycles search tool and app
- Recycling guides
- What happened to Surrey’s waste
- Digital channel development
- Reducing fly-tipping
- Reducing single-use plastics
Managing Surrey’s waste: Harnessing the power of pestering
Educating children about waste reduction and recycling can achieve two key benefits – preparing them for the future when they are responsible for the waste generated in their homes and taking messages back home to their families and encouraging them to act now. For SEP’s 2020-21 programme it was agreed to continue to fund the Wastebuster online schools engagement programme in Surrey, which crossed two academic years.
2019-20
For the 2019-20 academic year, primary-aged schoolchildren at Surrey’s state and independent schools benefited from their teachers’ continued access to Wastebuster’s online teaching resources. In addition, a new challenge was developed to help reduce contamination of recycling bins by promoting the Surrey Recycles search tool and app.
Performance against KPIs in 2019-20 was affected by the closure of schools in March 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic with schools largely unable to focus on anything other than the core subjects.
Results showed that:
- 196 state schools accessed the online portal (down from 197 during 2018-19), downloading 2,169 resources (up from 2,048 in 2018-19).
- 30 independent schools accessed the portal (down from 43 in 2018-19), downloading 339 resources (down from 360 in 2018-19).
2020-21
Following research into school activity relating to recycling and waste, we developed a new programme of work with Wastebuster for the 2020-21 academic year. The focus
was to:
- Work with Wastebuster to improve how they communicate with schools and simplify the web portal to make it quicker and easier for teachers to engage with the content.
- Make it easier for children to take recycling and waste activities home to be completed with their families.
- Make it as easy as possible for both teachers and parents to complete activities with children if schools were closed due to coronavirus.
To achieve this, we worked closely with Wastebuster on the communications sent to schools and on their webpages, making sure they were in line with what the research indicated.
We also worked with them to develop a Kids Club website that parents could access to carry out activities at home and a badge book feature that encouraged schools and families to take part by incentivising them with digital badges and rewards.
Results showed that:
- 265 state schools accessed the online portal, downloading 5,187 resources
- 27 independent schools accessed the portal, downloading 509 resources.
