Launching the company’s support for ‘Liter of Light’ at London’s University of the Arts near King’s Cross station yesterday, 14 January, the company’s senior vice president for the UK, Estelle Brachlianoff, said supporting the scheme “ticks all the boxes for us”.
Mrs Brachlianoff said: “This helps makes the world a safer place as well as a lighter place… We are as a company committed to resourcing the world is you can imagine that recycling plastic and using a small amount of water to save energy and bring light is in a nutshell everything we do as Veolia.”
Liter of Light aims to bring light to poorer communities in two ways. One is to insert a plastic bottle containing some bleach and filled with water upside down in the roof of houses typically with galvanised roofs and lacking electric lighting. About half the bottle is above the roof line and sunlight is refracted into the room at the strength of about a 55 watt bulb for about 10 hours a day.
A separate project sees the plastic bottles used to hold a thin bulb and connected to a large battery which can last up to eight years and is powered by small solar panels.
Exhibition
Following the launch, a ‘Litre of Light’ exhibition, is open at Central Saint Martins in London’s King’s Cross, which, says Veolia, aims “to encourage people to think more about plastic recycling”. It runs from 14-17 January and forms part of the Lumiere London light festival.
Veolia has also said that its involvement aims to highlight the importance of plastic recycling with a particular focus this time on families. It has commissioned research from YouGov in the UK and this has found that children aged 8-15 know more about recycling than their parents!
| YouGov survey results (1,365 parents; 745 children; Dec 2015) | Parents % | Children % |
| Believe that recycling is important | 69 | 76 |
| Know they can recycle plastic water bottles | 87 | 95 |
| Understand they can recycle empty yoghurt pots | 72 | 81 |
Landfill
Richard Kirkman, technical director, Veolia UK and Ireland said: “When it comes to recycling plastics practice makes perfect, because despite knowing all this we still lose 50% of all bottles to landfill! We want to encourage the nation, regardless of their age, to think twice about whether they can reuse their bottles for another drink, or turn them into something completely different altogether. And if that’s not possible remind them they can be recycled too.”
Related links:
www.literoflight.org
www.veolia.co.uk
www.visitlondon.com/lumiere
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