Striving for Sustainable Change - Sustain Britain

Over the past six months, the team at Sustain Operations CIC in Wiltshire have made huge strides in their mission to transform landfill sites into low carbon, affordable fruit and vegetable production hubs.

Despite the issues with the structural integrity of the initial growing dome, the Sustain Operations CIC team have shown great resilience, trialling crops in the vehicle entrance of the failed dome, in readiness for the dome’s replacement, which arrives this week.

Resilience like this is vital when dealing with pioneering solutions. Fortunately, the Sustain Operations team have this in abundance. 

That’s a good thing given the potential train-wrecking decision by Wiltshire Council’s planning team to advance an application for an Anaerobic Digestion (AD) plant at the Crapper and Sons landfill site, ahead of the application for the Super-Midden, which was submitted  a full eight months earlier.

The issue here is that the Super-Midden application – which would permit the erection of over 100 affordable fruit and vegetable growing domes – is in danger of being rejected on a technicality: it did not take account of the AD plant!

It is unfathomable decisions such as this that are holding the country back. I call it UNCONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE, and it’s slowly destroying Britain. From bureaucratic delays and overspend on HS2, to high-energy costs and a failure to address the climate emergency, the creep of ‘unconscious incompetence’ needs to be addressed – urgently!

It's precisely this kind of challenge that drives our wider advocacy work, and it will be one of the topics that we’ll tackle head on at the PEA (People Environment Achievement) Awards Day Summit on Monday 22 June: part of London Climate Week.

Here we'll be leading a ‘Masterclass’ on Sustain Circles and community-based solutions. This is just part of our mission to inspire people and communities to progress their own sustainable solutions, building greater self-sufficiency in an increasingly turbulent and unpredictable world.

If you’d like to join us, tickets can be purchased via the PEA Awards Day Summit Eventbrite page.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Until next time...

Nick Ash