Environmental Conservation Group Announces Green Initiatives

Press release from Sustainable Southbury:

August 26, 2020

Sustainable Southbury is transforming Southbury into a green community! We are an environmental conservation group working to make our town a sustainable community by driving local action. We work with the town to implement environmental practices, and we coordinate events and social media campaigns to educate and inspire our community. Sustainable Southbury continues to work hard during this pandemic to promote environmental causes and affect positive change.

Our May social media campaign encouraged our community members to start their own Victory Gardens! Victory Gardens are fruit, vegetable, and herb gardens that were grown at homes and public parks across the US and many other countries due to food shortages during World Wars I and II. As we are again in the midst of uncertain times, growing a Victory Garden is a fantastic way to support your family, community, and the planet! Our posts showed growers how to successfully start a garden, what plants to grow, how to compost, and much more!

No garden can be successful without the help of our pollinators -- especially bees! Did you know that 1/3 of all the food we eat requires pollination? However, there is a large decline in the honeybee population due to pesticides, habitat loss, and lack of diverse flowering plants. A major part of growing a successful garden is protecting our pollinators! Sustainable Southbury hosted a sold-out screening of the award-winning film The Pollinators, followed by a ZOOM Q&A featuring the film’s director Peter Nelson, Audubon director Leslie Kane, and advanced master gardener Michele MacKinnon.

Did you know the average person eats a credit card worth of microplastics every week, or that only 9% of plastics have been recycled since 1950? Sustainable Southbury supported the Break Free From Plastic’s global Plastic Free July campaign by sharing facts about single-use plastics and the results of plastic pollution and inspiring our community to use less plastic in their daily lives. We also created letters for residents to send to corporations that contribute to single-use plastic pollution to push them to switch to alternative packaging and take responsibility for the cleanup and recycling of plastics they generate.

Upcoming social media campaigns include: how to preserve and share the produce you grow in your Victory Garden, how to properly “put your garden to bed” at the end of the growing season, and how to get ready for winter and save energy in your home!

Like our “Sustainable Southbury” Facebook page and follow us on Instagram @sustainablesouthburyct for updates and events!

We’re looking for more volunteers to help with upcoming projects! If you’d like to get involved, please contact sustainablesouthbury@gmail.com

This press release was produced by Sustainable Southbury. The views expressed here are the author's own.