2024 was all about the Final Straw Foundation’s newest project – the Education Station! An amazingly innovative education tool that showcases what we can do with single use plastics such as everyone’s favourite christmas chocolate tubs.
The support Final Straw Foundation has received from Fat Face Foundation has been instrumental to our work, and enabled us to lead the way on new and innovative projects to bring to our community together and help our planet, plus continue all of our usual great work. We’ve completed our 230th beach clean with our local community, removing waste that was impacting vital habitats along sites of special scientific interest. We extended our wild beach schools offerings, and doubled the amount of pupils that spent a day with us on the beaches from last year. The students learnt about our incredible wildlife and how to protect it whilst learning about various types of pollution, all whilst we inspired them to fall in love with our shores, so they are better connected to it and want to protect it. We instilled hope for the future with our education station, where we highlighted plastics pathway and it’s carbon intensity, what new inventions there are to help the planet and showed them how plastic is precious and that waste can be turned into something that still has value to someone. It’s been an incredible year and next year looks even better with the launch of our business accreditation programme and recycling sail cloth initiative.
In November 2021 we donated £10,000 to the Final Straw Foundation. This small but mighty charity work hard to keep our local waterways clean, mobilising the local community to take part in beach cleans as well as setting up a beach school for primary and secondary school aged students. Since their inception, FSF have cleared a whopping 38, 517kg of rubbish from local beaches! That’s about the same weight as a humpback whale! Incredible and proving action plus education are key factors to helping the fight climate crisis set to destroy our planet.
In 2022, we donated £3,000 to the Clean Harbour Partnerships. Final Straw have been working with other Clean Harbours Partnership members to monitor, test and hold accountable those responsible for the local sewage crisis in the Chichester and Langstone harbours. This research is vitally important to the health and wellbeing of people and wildlife in the local area.
Check out some of Final Straw Foundation projects and schemes below!
We have recently dedicated a large window in our Foundation shop for this incredible window mural designed by Deborah Hochreutener. The artwork was penned by local artist Susannah Greenwood with the hopes that it inspres and encourages the community to think about the effects of litter in our seas.
You may have seen her around ~ Nellie the Final Fat Fish has been around since 2019 and has travelled many miles collecting plastic bottles and stopping them from ending up in our waterways! Nellie has some new family members too!
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Borrow Bags ~ local sewing volunteers (including our very own Store Manager, Lydia) make reuseable shopping bags for local businesses signed up to the scheme for shoppers to borrow and bring back when they can. These bags are made up from reclaimed materials stopping it from ending up in landfill. Lydia uses fabric from faulty garments from the FatFace Foundation store as well as scrap pieces we recieve!
Most recenlty FSF have introduced Borrow Brew which aims to cut down on the amount of disposable coffe cups in the area. Borrow Brew is a deposit return scheme for reuseable coffee cups in Emsworth, Hampshire. How it works:
- Coffee shops and cafés can sign up to take part in the scheme. FSF provide them with a starter set of reusable coffee cups and instructions on how it all works.
- If a customer forgets to bring their own reusable coffee cup, they can choose to pay an extra £3 as a refundable deposit to get their hot drink in a reusable coffee cup.
- When they have finished their drink, they can return the cup to the shop where they purchased it, or any other shop taking part in the scheme, to get their £3 deposit back.
With an estimated 2.5 billions being used in the UK every year, schemes like this one really have the potential to do a lot of good for the planet!
