Abi Reid – Community Education Liaison Officer

Abi lives in Derbyshire together with her husband where they keep accidentally taking in other people’s cats. She has worked at Renewi as the Community Education Liaison Officer at BDR since 2014.
“Before I came to the BDR contract I worked as the Waste Education Minimisation Officer on the Derby contract. So, I have been with the company for twelve years in total. Since leaving university I have always worked in the waste industry delivering waste and recycling education and promotion.”

“My team consists of two people, myself and Rebecca, the Assistant Community Education Liaison Officer. We look after all of the social media feeds for the education work for out contract including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the website. We are responsible for everything to do with Waste Less South Yorkshire. We also deliver education sessions in schools with children of four and upwards. We have workshops around themes like the facility and how it works, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Climate change, Circular economy, Composting and Food waste. My favorite workshop is called It’s A Rubbish Adventure which shows how the facility works. We developed the workshop together with Magna, the local children’s science center and it initially ran at their museum for a year before we took it over. The workshop has changed a little bit since we made this video but it still gives a good feel of it.”

“Most of the time we split our work, Rebecca takes care of the delivery, going into the schools, and I do a lot of the planning, project management and policy side of it and report writing.”

“I also do tours of the facility for adults, I show about 200 members of the public around the site each year. I deliver talks about the facility, food waste, clothes waste and the local recycling services to community groups as well.”

“My team also run a lot of campaigns across the area. We run campaigns promoting home composting,  waste prevention around Christmas,  Recycle Week, which is a huge campaign around the whole UK to promote recycling. And every year we run a food waste reduction campaign as well, this year the food waste campaign will be the majority of my work. We are running a series of pilots to improve food storage so fresh produce lasts longer which should significantly reduce the amount thrown away.”

“What do I contribute to a more sustainable world? A lot of the work I do focuses on waste prevention, re-use and recycling. We are trying to focus more on carbon, climate and explaining the importance of the circular economy to this and the next generation.”