Steve Roberts, Thanet Green Party’s Parliamentary Candidate for East Thanet and a town councillor for Broadstairs, shares a Broadstairs & St Peter’s Town Council initiative to reduce the number of overflowing bins seen around our beaches by reducing the need for single-use plastic water bottles:
Overflowing bins are a common sight around our beaches. We have all seen too many of them – full of food containers, drinks cans, single-use plastic water bottles. We all know the main culprits. And we all know what a few seagulls can do with an overflowing bin. It is not a pretty sight.
Single-use plastic water bottles may be the biggest culprit. To combat this, Broadstairs & St Peter’s Town Council is funding an alternative – a water refill station.
The Town Council’s plans for this year include installing at least one in Viking Bay, Broadstairs, this spring, following the example of Margate, where a water fountain was installed on the main sands last summer, with Ramsgate Town Council also hoping to follow suit this year. All three areas are being supported by Thanet District Council, which will undertake the installation. Initial estimates are that each refill station reduces the number of single-use bottles purchased by between 25,000 and35,000. That is a lot less pressure on our public bins.
The stations also give everyone access to free drinking water, a basic human right.
Southern Water is guilty of many things including regularly dumping sewage in our seas, they discharged sewage 63 times in 2022 for 792 hours. At least we can still drink the tap water.
It may reassure you to know that Southern Water has been prevented from paying a dividend to its shareholders until at least 2025 after a cut to its credit rating, amid a scramble to shore up the finances of the heavily-indebted water industry.
Communities in Broadstairs, Ramsgate and Margate are also promoting the use of Refill, an app which shows cafes, shops and other places offering a free water refill. You can find the app here https://www.refill.org.uk/
I spoke to Jessica Rose, Thanet’s Plastic Free Thanet lead, who said: ”Supporting a culture of reuse and refill over use once and throw away is what Plastic Free Thanet is all about. We’re excited to see this spreading across Thanet with free drinking water fountains. We’re hoping this will make a big difference to the number of single-use plastic bottles finding their way on to our streets and beaches this summer.”
