Business & Politics

One in the morning and two at night--those are the free newspapers that Londoner's get handed every day on the streets and en route to the Tube. And then there are the ones that people buy. You can just imagine what the trains look like by 7 p.m. It's a nightmare for environmentalists or anyone who has to sit amongst them for the rest of the evening. Project Freesheet is a web-based campaign about the waste and the need for recycling. It's a visual petition: they are encouraging the public to send in photos of the abandoned newspapers and hope to hit 1.5 M images. They want to see the producers pay for the clean-up because an extra four tons of waste is being generated every week day by the free papers. To publicise their cause, Project Freesheet enthusiasts collected 1,500 papers left by London Underground passengers on one day. They displayed their mountain of papers in Trafalgar Square before sending them off for recycling. They have some good ideas: "why not rent the vans and drivers used for newspaper delivery to Project Freesheet over night to do collections from strategically located disposal points e.g. tube stations and bus terminals, plus other recycling bins on key streets? If we establish an agreement with a recycling plant to take the papers we collect, we will be able to sell the paper back to the reclaimed paper purchasers." It is this kind of thinking out of the box that is going to solve problems by changing the way people act. :: project freesheet