This article is written by Marie Hanin, Operational Researcher & Senior Policy Advisor, Defra.

It is Saturday and you’re out for a walk in the city. After grabbing a coffee, you see a shirt in a shop window which you can’t resist the temptation to buy. You head to the park, sit on a bench and let the delicate sunshine warm your skin. What a perfect day to start planning your next summer holiday.

But something is amiss, and you begin to wonder: “What will happen to the plastic cup I just threw away?”, “What were the working conditions of the people who made my shirt?”, “Can I really justify this flight to Morocco?”

I am sure that spending an afternoon like this will feel like a distant dream for many who are currently in lockdown due to the ongoing covid-19 pandemic. But while we look forward to a return to some modicum of normality, the truth is that covid-19 is not our only pressing challenge.

Our planet is warming, our environment is facing its sixth and fastest mass extinction, our oceans are drowning in plastic, the list goes on. We know our individual actions directly contribute to these worldwide issues, yet we feel disempowered to tackle these gigantic problems alone.

I work for the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). My colleagues have a genuine interest in working towards Defra’s letter “E” and delivering sustainable long-term policy to support a healthy, thriving natural environment. In this time of urgency, government actions are necessary, but are they sufficient alone? As civil servants believing in the difference we can make, could this letter “E” also stand for Empowerment?

With a bit of free time, supportive friends or colleagues and a drop of creativity you can achieve a lot

Reflecting on our daily habits and their environmental impact can be a daunting step to take, yet very rewarding if we find more ethical alternatives that work.

Along with four work friends, I decided in summer 2018 to find ways to inspire and help our colleagues take individual actions to lower their environmental footprint in their everyday lives. This initiative was born as a small action group called SPRAT. A sprat is a fish, also known as a Russian sardine. It is also our acronym for the “Sustainability and Plastic Reduction Action Team” – a group to provide support, ideas and advice to help colleagues pollute less, recycle better and make more eco-friendly choices.

Walk before you run

Running SPRAT in our free time with almost no money meant we had to be realistic and prioritise our targets. Echoing our passion for the marine environment we agreed to start with one question: “Which steps could we take in our office to decrease the amount of plastic going into the oceans?”

To make sure we were tackling the issue at all its different stages, we built our framework around four pillars:

  • Reducing our plastic consumption;

  • Recycling what plastic we use;

  • Managing the existing plastic pollution in our environment;

  • Informing others about the problem and solutions.

This allowed us to identify easy steps we could take in our office for other public servants to start feeling empowered by their daily choices.

Here are a few examples of the SPRAT initiatives we’ve started in Defra:

Going plastic-free

  • Displaying a map offering plastic-free shopping options for take-away food and groceries around the office and across London.
  • Setting up a plastic-free/palm oil-free tuck-shop, offering a range of ethically sourced snacks such as chewing gum, cereal bars, chocolate and crisps in cardboard or compostable packaging.
  • Encouraging people to attempt the “Plastic-Free July” challenge and discover plastic-free alternatives or to get creative and make your own.

Recycling better

  • Creating bin posters to highlight in which bins (general waste, recyclable or compostable) common items should go, and also flagging those trickier items.
  • Monitoring each bin daily and identifying the most common mistakes made to help us address those better going forward.
  • Signing up to free Terracycle schemes and setting up separate bins for crisp packets, confectionary wrappers and stationary items on all floors of the office.
  • Organising “clothes swap” events in the office.

Cleaning our streets, waterways and beaches

  • Organising regular litter-picking events in and outside London.
  • Beach clean photo competitions with plastic-free prizes to encourage beach cleaning whilst on holiday

Spreading the message

  • Releasing bi-monthly newsletters to share articles, events and ideas to inform and inspire people to take more eco-friendly actions.
  • Organising lunch-time talks with external speakers who took action in creative and inspiring ways.

Lessons learned

One of the things we’ve learned throughout this is that measuring success is a key component of any new initiative.

Some successes are easy to monitor and are highly encouraging: for example, over a year we diverted more than 50,000 crisp packets from landfill. Other actions are harder to assess: it is unclear for example whether our office has significantly decreased its consumption of plastic wrapped food.

Most of our impact will however be impossible to measure: we believe SPRAT’s biggest achievement is its resultant domino effect. Our individual actions are small but good news is that we are not alone. Over a year we have reached out to 23 governmental offices across England.

Within and outside Whitehall many people are setting up their own green initiatives. SPRAT belongs to this big network of active citizenship initiatives. By normalising and multiplying grass-roots actions, we can enable behaviour change and give people a bigger sense of responsibility. By offering achievable solutions, we can empower colleagues to take action and inspire other people to do the same.

With a bit of free time, supportive friends or colleagues and a drop of creativity you can achieve a lot. So, what will be the change that you decide to make? — Marie Hanin

With many thanks to my SPRAT co-founders and proof-readers Julia Churchill-Angus, Natasha Hill, Sam Burford, Ross Robertson and Sophie Rogers.

(Picture credit: Unsplash)

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