Lindy Sharpe: food and waste campaigner

Everyone has a story. What if everything was 15 minutes from where you lived? Well for Lindy Sharpe who lives in Highbury and works near Angel that’s the reality. Here she talks about her food policy work and how volunteering for Transition Highbury and Islington Environmental Emergency Alliance (IEEA) is helping all of us recycle and reuse our waste. Interview by Nicola Baird. Photos by Kimi Gill.

It’s Friday and Lindy Sharpe has begun the break from her four-day a week job near Angel with an Islington Faces interview. Encouraging people to eat and grow the right food is part of her DNA as Director of the Food Research Collaboration, based at the Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London, where she works on sustainable food systems, but she has also worked as a researcher at the New Economics Foundation, and as a food poverty project officer at the campaign group Sustain, which was for years located on White Lion Street in Islington.

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Talking via Zoom from her home in Highbury, the screen reveals neat shelves of books on the wall. Occasionally a friendly cat puts in an appearance, but mostly this is one of those interviews where everything runs smoothly – a rare five-star on-line experience! In a past life Lindy worked as a journalist in the UK and Canada and seems keen to ask this interviewer questions, which of course also makes her a terrific person to bump into in real life for a good chat.

“I really do live in a walkable neighbourhood, I never need to go outside my 15-minute radius. I can find everything I need here, I love that,” says Lindy with real enthusiasm as she talks about Highbury. It’s an impressive discovery from someone who only moved to Islington to follow her heart. “I was living in south London when I met the man to whom I’m now married. It was the early 1990s and there was a housing slump, it’s hard to believe now. Ian couldn’t sell his house in Highbury, so I moved in with him in 1993. It’s purely by accident that I’m in Islington. Now I’m hyper local to Highbury. I get lost if I go further afield!”

Although her children are both long grown-up she is delighted that they’ve also taken on green jobs and become “dedicated Londoners. My daughter lives with us and works for a nature organisation and my son works in Cambridge, supplying solar heating systems.”

Lindy admits to being a big fan of the Number 19 bus, taking her across the borough and on to the West End, but what she has come to love about her bit of Highbury is its neighbourhood qualities, in particular its friendliness and a range of shops and useful services. “I have so many friends and can walk to their houses. I love Whites the greengrocers on Blackstock Road. I like to spread my shopping out – Mother Earth at Newington Green is where I can fill my boxes and jars up with olive oil, rapeseed oil and dry goods. I tend to get my laundry refills from Five Boys in Highbury Barn which I’ve been doing for ages. Highbury has got a bookshop and a lovely dry cleaners down the hill,” she says dressed in a cosy polo neck. NB https://www.islingtonfacesblog.com/2016/03/09/costa-violaris-ca-drycleaners/

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5 places Lindy Sharpe loves in Islington

• I am very nature facing. I love the little bit of space around Highbury Pool where volunteers have turned it into a lovely woodland garden – have you seen the snowdrops are out? It’s done really beautifully.
• I love the number 19 bus, great public transport.
• I liked going to the farmers’ market on Sundays in Chapel Street, though it was closed in covid. People there were friendly.
• Au Lac is my favourite place and just round the corner at 82 Highbury Park,
• What I love about ink@84 book shop at 84 Highbury Park is that I can just send an email and they get it, often I can pick it up the next day: fantastic service.
• I like to walk through the Arsenal stadium to the Co-op on Benwell Road where I can recycle my soft plastics – that’s anything that isn’t 3D and is squishable (eg, cheese bags, cling film even bubble wrap and soft plastic carrier bags). The bin is inside the Co-op, though not particularly well signposted. See this link here for directions.
• I have started cycling to work, but I’m not really comfortable finding my way. I love being able to walk to work along the New River though.

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Helping Highbury green-up
Lindy’s passion for Highbury was given renewed focus during the long months of lockdown. “With Caz Royds, who’d just retired and had been part of Transition’s community garden group and was interested in recycling, we turned the Transition Highbury website into tips for living greener,” says Lindy who is now the coordinator of the group. An upcoming campaign will get people to take photos of products you can’t recycle and then send the pictures to the brand and tweet them #unrecylablepackaging . Lindy plans to kick this off with some gifted loose-leaf tea that came in an unrecyclable foil pouch, and an olive oil container bought at Waitrose which also cannot be recycled.

• Back in 2018 we ran this interview with Mary Stevens who was then coordinating Transition Highbury until she moved away, see here

Their research revamp meant that when Islington Environmental Emergency Alliance (IEEA) was created in “to consult, help and hold Islington Council accountable for their Net Zero Carbon 2030 strategy” Caz and Lindy had all the skills – and the energy – to run the working group campaigning around household and commercial food and associated waste. This matches the Natural Environment & Waste Reduction & Recycling work stream of the council in its Net Zero 2030 vision.

“In a way Transition Highbury is how we work on the waste for IEEA. We had a pre-existing group with a mailing list of around 500 people; we do a newsletter and have a website,” she says. As a result, they’ve had several positive meetings with the council to find out what actually happens to our waste and what alternatives there might be.

“Islington recycling rates are not good compared to London’s outer boroughs or other parts of the country. And food waste compared to dry waste is low. Some people don’t have provision, for example if you live above businesses on streets – no food waste provision. We are trying to prod the council, say people are interested and concerned, so you can’t stay sleeping,” she says.

Follow this link to see what Islington can recycle https://www.nlwa.gov.uk/reducereuserecycle/recycle/whatcanwerecycle

“The planned Edmonton incinerator expansion was a huge upset for many people because there was real knowledge that it was a terrible idea, but the council just disregarded this. There’s been a huge amount of activism about the incinerator because it is sited in the poorest part of the borough (Enfield) and will pollute there. But for our IEEA waste group meetings the question is, ‘what are we going to do with all this waste if we don’t have it incinerated’? We’d like to unpick this more. If Islington sorted the rubbish better and not just put the onus on individuals, so if investment was put into better sorting, then a lot of material could be recovered that wouldn’t need incinerating,” she says, which is why the IEEA Waste group is now finding ways to help the council encourage more supermarkets to offer recycling for soft plastics so we don’t have to bin it.

IEEA may have brought her extra work, but Lindy is a huge fan, calling it, “a convening force bringing people together — other groups work on housing, transport, affordable energy and the green economy, waste, scrutiny and engaging communities. One of the ideas that the IEEA  has is that Islington is full of knowledgeable people – experts on building, communicators, conservation, teachers, all sorts, and people with practical skills – and if we can harness that it is very powerful.”

Political palate
Lindy describes herself as a climatarian on Twitter – “someone who eats guided by information about the carbon impact of their diet.”

Eating as a climatarian is still quite a new concept, first making it into the dictionary in 2016. Lindy explains what it means using her breakfast of organic oats, grown in the UK, and bought nearby at Mother Earth. “The organic milk was delivered to my door and then I added some local honey which someone gave me for Christmas… Organic oats means grown without pesticides; I sourced them locally which means that I walked to the shop and didn’t put in a last mile of carbon transport by driving. I bought them loose and took them home in my own container, so they came with zero packaging which didn’t have a carbon impact. Milk is in recyclable bottles so has a reduced carbon impact. The honey is local – that’s better than maple syrup or cane sugar which will be transported a long way,” she says.

For a climatarian every decision takes in distance of transport, packaging, method of production, source, method of distribution, packaging. “It’s a good idea to cut down on meat because the evidence is overwhelming that a plant-based diet has a lower impact on the environment, although there are arguments for keeping some sustainably farmed livestock,” she explains claiming to be a “geek about food”.

“I don’t put anything into my mouth which I haven’t thought about – eating is political for me. I think about food and where it comes from. That’s been my day job for 20-odd years, so my food choices are based on my background knowledge. One of my colleagues is an expert carbon counter and also lives in Islington. He opened my eyes to the fact that how you cook foods has a big environmental impact. Putting a big potato in the microwave for 10 mins then crisping it up in the oven generates a lot less carbon emissions than if you cook it in the oven for an hour. Boiling a kettle and filling a thermos flask uses less energy than reboiling the kettle. Microwaves are very energy efficient and low carbon, relative to a gas oven. My oven is already electric, and powered by renewable energy, and although I have a gas hob I will never buy another one.”

Although Lindy loves to cook, she is not a fan of TV cooking shows. “The British have very high consumption of ‘ultra processed food’, ready meals and so on, and are big watchers of TV programmes in which people cook from scratch. There’s a big mismatch between how we actually cook, and cooking as entertainment…”

Eco worrier
Despite Lindy’s determination to find solutions to very contemporary problems, she does admit to being an eco worrier. “It’s a big preoccupation, increasingly difficult not to be pessimistic and in particular for our children and the next generation. One has to be prepared to be depressed and grief stricken when first confronting the reality of what is likely to happen. The natural conditions that have maintained and enabled our lives have changed and that’s frightening. Once you start engaging with the climate crisis, it is alarming. I think my way of coping with it is I feel I have to do something.”

This sort of thinking makes it clear why Lindy and Caz used lockdown to improve the Transition Highbury website, and she is still using her spare time to scrutinise council documents and meet up with officials to help Islingtonians live less wasteful lives.

“If we persuade more people to recycle more of their food waste it’s not going to save the planet, but as Greta Thunberg said, ‘We need everybody to do everything’. We need big changes by governments and small changes in people’s lives. These are very challenging times, people have a lot of things to cope with, they are getting poorer, and seeing government cynicism makes it difficult,” says Lindy thoughtfully. “Obviously we have to try to hang on to hope and as long as we have some great rain, like today, followed by sun, and can see the greenness, well, that always makes me feel good.”

However damaged our planet, its changing seasons and the sudden bliss of that wet earth smell after a downpour are still the most effective antidote to bring this Highbury eco-worrier joy – even if she’s out and about on foot in her 15-minute neighbourhood.

• Follow Lindy on Twitter @greenfoodpolicy
• Follow Transition Highbury Twitter @TTHighbury
• To find out more about greener living locally, see Transition Highbury’s eight steps to take to cut down on waste; recycle; buy local seasonal food; eat less meat, fish and dairy; say no to plastic; drive less and avoid flying; save energy in the home and get involved at https://www.transitionhighbury.org.uk/ all tailored for local residents, especially those in N4 and N5.
• Islington Environmental Emergency Alliance works to support and scrutinise Islington council’s Net Zero Strategy. If you are interested in joining, see which of the work streams you would be interested in supporting. Lindy is very happy for more people to join their work on cutting waste. https://www.islingtonalliance.com/

ACTION TO TAKE

1. Households can monitor their plastic use for a national survey run by Greenpeace for a week in May (16-22). See https://thebigplasticcount.com
2. The new Islington Climate Centre is open on Saturdays at Angel Central (between Wagamama and the Vue cinema on the first floor) with vegan bake sales, toy swaps, talks, info and opportunities for Q&A.
3. Form to fill in if you are interested in stopping the Edmonton incinerator expansion, see https://stop-edmonton-incinerator.org/contact

Over to you
If you’d like to nominate someone to be interviewed who grew up, lives or works in Islington, or suggest yourself, please let me know, via nicolabaird dot green at gmail dot com. Thank you to Dorothy B for suggesting this interviewee If you enjoyed this post you might like to look at the A-Z  index, or search by interviewee’s roles or Meet Islingtonians to find friends, neighbours and inspiration. Thanks for stopping by. Nicola

 

Feedback:

Ursula: Fantastic wonderful interview; many thanks.