Mullum Cares has been involved in a myriad of Plastic Reduction Actions and founder, Sasha Mainsbridge, was awarded Local Woman of the Year 2017 for the Ballina Electorate as recognition for the powerful outcomes from Mullum Cares work in Mullumbimby centred around the trader focused Plastic Free July challenge. The Mullumbimby IGA removed their plastic carry bags for good after PFJ 2016 and we crowdfunded a filtered water fountain for our town:)
At the Mullumbimby Repair Cafe every Saturday morning you can not only avoid broken plastic things going to landfill by getting them repaired by you can also seek to restore the functionality of any lonely plastic containers who have lost their lids or visa versa. Every lost property in every school in this country probably throws out a stack of perfectly good containers and lids that could have had a second chance for love if they were just taken to a Plastic Perfect Match tub:)
Mullum Cares and Green Music Australia started supporting the Mullumbimby Music Festival to reduce it’s use of single use plastic cups and bottles by preparing a map showing all the water bottle refill sites at the festival and inviting We Refill to provide free filtered water for everyone:)
By the following year the We Refill machine had grown up into a full size unit!
Mullum Cares was blown away to receive $1000 worth of bamboo plates, bowls, cups and cutlery sets to seed the Mullumbimby Library of Stuff’s Waste Free Event’s category by the Byron Spirit Festival. The ‘Grub & Scrub’ initiative driven by Deb Buck of the Spirit Festival team saw a major reduction in the volume of waste from the busy food vendors.
Plastic Free July 2017 saw the concept of Boomerang Cups get a run in many local cafes and Santos Organics continued the idea as they elected to ditch disposable coffee cups for good! Responsible Cafes got a nudge too as there are still a few cafe’s not offering a discount if you BYO.
In April 2018, Mullumbimby Woolworths removed plastic bags from their registers for good! Offering customers boxes as a back up for when they forget to BYO bags and Mullum Cares organised a #choose2reuse celebration on Sat April 7 to launch the Community Bag Share repository.
With special guests dirtgirl and Plastic Free Boy the event was lots of fun!
