Prestwich Local Area Partnership will launch its Love Prestwich Anti-Litter Campaign for the summer which aims to target Prestwich Village Town Centre to promote respect of the environment to residents and businesses to Love Prestwich and keep it clean.

The campaign is aimed at local businesses, schools and residents to work alongside Council officers to make Prestwich a cleaner, safer, greener place to live.

Aims of the Campaign

Raise awareness
- raise awareness of fixed penalties for fly tipping
- encourage residents and businesses to be greener and cleaner
- promote street care team

Take Action
- schools, residents and businesses sign up to the BURY STREET CARE PLEDGE
- educate local businesses on their DUTY OF CARE to legally dispose of business waste
- educational school visits and poster campaign
- community clean up day

Catch’em
- identify hotspots
- encourage reporting
- undertake enforcement where necessary

Do you want to become a Community Champion for Prestwich?
You can sign up to the LOVE Prestwich Anti-Litter Campaign by filling out the form below and handing it in to Prestwich Library, or alternatively contact :
Carran O’Grady (LAP Manager)
Tel: 0161 253 7245 EMail: c.o’grady@bury.gov.uk

You can download an application form http://www.bury.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/1F1891E5-F291-4F06-953F-7497A9B816F8/0/LOVEPrestwichLitterCampaignFlyerweb.pdf

It’s great to see that the “Climate Change Calendar Competition” which was run by Bury Council together with Bury Friends of the Earth has at last made it onto the web! My council colleague Cllr Ann Garner was heavily involved in the project and I know how important it was in raising the profile of this important issue.

Earlier in the year Bury and FoE ran a poster competition for the young people of Bury with the theme ‘our global future’. Some of the posters from the competition will be used by Bury Council to promote a cleaner, safer, greener Bury. The aim of the competition was to encourage young people to carry out research into climate change and consider solutions to climate change issues.

The winning entries can be downloaded here.

There were two themes to the competition:
(1) ‘our global future and my home’; and
(2) ‘our global future and my town Bury’.

Today’s announcement by Gordon Brown’s Labour Party to build a new generation of Nuclear Power stations is fundamentally wrong and dangerous.

Greenpeace sums up the case against Nuclear power simply:

• Even if Britain built ten new reactors, nuclear power can only deliver a 4 per cent cut in carbon emissions some time after 2025. Even the Government admits this (Sustainable Development Commission figure). It’s too little too late at too high a price.

• Most of the gas we use is for heating and hot water and for industrial purposes. Nuclear power cannot replace that energy. And it’s a similar case for oil as it’s virtually all used for transport - nuclear power can’t take its place.

• The real solutions to the energy gap and climate change are available now. Energy efficiency, cleaner use of fossil fuels, renewables and state of the art decentralised power stations like they have in Scandinavia. Together they have the potential to deliver reliable low carbon energy quicker and cheaper. They are also safe and globally applicable, unlike nuclear. But these technologies will be strangled if cash and political energy get thrust at nuclear power.

Lib Dem Environment Spokesperson, Professor Steve Webb MP set out the Party’s opposition:

“This is a flawed decision based on a sham consultation. There is a real risk that focusing on new nuclear plants will undermine attempts to find a cleaner, greener, more sustainable and secure solution. We should be concentrating our efforts on renewables and greater energy conservation.

“Ministers should also be promoting and supporting carbon capture and storage as a safe, secure and flexible way of plugging the energy gap.”

Residents, shopkeepers and visitors will be glad to know that work on the “Retreat” water feature in Prestwich Village centre nears completion.

The replacement granite wall is currently being constructed (See Picture) and final completion is expected early in December.

In March 2007 the Liberal Democrat team on Bury Council successfully proposed a budgetary amendment which extended the “Blue Bin” recycling scheme to every house in the Borough.

The success of the scheme was confirmed in a response to a question I raised at the Full Council meeting last night. 1,020 Tonnes of recyclables were collected in July 2007 - the first month after the Blue-Bin roll-out up from 767 Tonnes in July 2006 - a massive 33% increase!

Its excellent to see such a great response from the public to the recycling initiative. The Lib Dem’s are already asking when the scheme can be made fortnightly for everyone. My colleague Cllr Richard Baum also asked for a report on the small number of households who’ve not yet received their bins (mostly farms, but a few areas with restricted lorry access). I’ll let you know this information when its received.