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Greyton’s Nicky Vernon speaks to Jennifer Sanasie about the progress of the transition within Greyton and the future.

 

From the 26th of March until the 27th March the famous Absa Cape Epic mountain bike race will be in Greyton, to celebrate this event and obtain international exposure a team of dedicated people ably supported by GTT have created a visual masterpiece.

The painting measures a whopping 3 750 sq m – almost 4 times the area of the Cistine Chapel! It is certainly the largest landscape piece of art in South Africa.

25 000 hours TV coverage in 175 countries.

The Absa Cape Epic is widely regarded as the world’s premier international mountain bike stage race and is the most televised mountain bike race of all time – a total of 25 000 hours in 175 countries.
Greyton’s objective is to win the prize for the best Epic town and to this end a flyover was dreamed up for the helicopter TV crew to capture.
Accolades must go to the team who decided on a landscape painting by Adele Fouche that would be “painted” onto the whole Uitkyk rugby field (thank you Uitkyk!)
Adele created the landscape in such a way that the cyclists would ride through it. Probably a first! – again with kind permission from Uitkyk School.

GREYTON written in 8m high letters

At the top of the picture are letters spelling GREYTON that are 8m high, outlined in white and black and filled in with woodchips.
In an effort to use recycled/recyclable materials the team was assisted by Greyton Transition Town and the Eco Kids who supplied materials such as wood chippings, cans, eco bricks.
Straw and paint is also being used to colour in the field. The paint is special sportsline paint, mostly donated by a kind donor. Seventy-five bales of straw will be carted from Blaawbank farm by volunteers.

Many hours in the hot sun

The painting was mapped out to scale using approx 1000m of black twine for a grid and another 1000 m of string to outline the picture. It was then painted in outline in black and then filled in with colour.
GTA member John McGlashan and Adele Fouche were driving force behind this project, working many hours in the hot sun.
They were assisted by Andrew White, Janine Winfield, Chrizenda Gunter, Nicky Vernon, Candice Mostert, Marshall Rinquest, Alistair Barnes, Sylvia Barnes, The Greyton Lodge, The Oak & Vigne, Searle’s, Jeremy Prins, Jenny Duncan, Chris Leatt (The Post House), Piet du Toit, Chris Coetzer (Greyton Liquor and Wine Boutique), Wayne from GTT, Dominique St Clair, Gemma Downing, Belinda Mutti and many others.

Thank you for all the support in the drive to get Greyton on the world map. Visitors are our mainstay in this village!

By Candice Mostert

I just can’t say how moved I am when I see people getting excited about the value of their waste. As I continue with the Swop Shop, Trash to Treasure projects in Greyton and the Overberg I begin to see a mind-set changing among people. I am seeing kids cleaning up the streets, parents teaching their kids how to clean and dry recyclables- it’s one of the best feelings in the world, to see honesty and responsibility taking first place and this will stay in the minds of these people and children for life.

Swop Shop is a space where people can bring clean, dry, recyclable waste and receive vouchers, which they can exchange at an on-site shop, to purchase essentials such as clothes, toiletries, blankets and school clothing. This is a simple idea that is going a long way to distill value in the people who are working for their goods – value to the land they are cleaning up or preventing further littering and of course a value to the waste that was once seen as useless.

Caledon’s first Swop Shop opened Friday 24th January 2014 at Swartberg High School.

The Swop Shops wouldn’t be possible without a constant stream of ‘high-end’ waste. Chic Mamas, charity second hand clothing retailer based in Greyton, gives generous quantities of unsold, high quality clothing. Shoprite Checkers has given GTT access to four stores for their slightly shop-soiled or damaged products.

The GTT team have been working in all schools where swop shops are opening to help teachers and children make the transition to a less wasteful way of living.

Pictured below, Marshall Rinquest explains the swop shop at Swartberg High School assembly with examples of upcycling waste – a mirror made from used plastic fabric softener bottles by Greyton’s queen of upcycling, Monique Fagan, and eco-bricks – plastic bricks stuffed with non-recyclable plastics which are going to be used for building community centres.

The shop will now be open every week for the students of Swartberg High and they can bring their waste for collection any day of the week.
Any donations are welcome to keep our shops awesome and look out for the next shop opening in Genadendal – coming soon.

For further information call Candice Mostert on 082 850 4254
greytontransition.co.za

Greenpop is a social business that believes greening and sustainable living can be fun, POPular and accessible for all. We believe in inspiring a greener, more conscious, inclusive movement and do this through tree planting projects, green events, education, social media, voluntarism and activating people to start DOING!

 

Why Trees?

• Trees give us much-needed oxygen and sequester carbon dioxide

• Trees increase biodiversity

• Trees fix nitrates into soil making it more fertile to grow other plants, like vegetables

• Urban tree planting improves pride of place

• Trees provide healthy and beautiful places for children to play and learn

• Fruit trees provide nutritious fruit to eat

• Trees improve an area’s water quality

 

Importance Of Trees

Trees are the world’s single largest source of breathable oxygen. They are under threat, which means we are under threat.

The world has lost 80% of our original forests in the last decade

~United Nations Environment Programme

We need to start a culture of planting and replacing trees now. Greyton Transition Town and Green pop are working together to develop ways to encourage new tree planting and provide an opportunity for travellers to and from Greyton to offset some of those air and road miles!

The ultimate plan is for the whole of Greyton to become a fruit forest with trees in public spaces everywhere. Greenpop is helping Greyton Transition Town to achieve this by helping plant the first 100 trees. 50 are to be located at the Zebra Moon hostel in Park Street and the other 50 at the new Green Park, situated at the dump site.

The Greyton Green Park

The Green Park has now been fenced in, thanks to funding from TWK Municipality and the Industrial Development Corporation as well as volunteer support and further sponsorship from GTT. Soon it will become a space for many events, activities and projects including:

• Fruit Forest
• Garden waste management area for chipping and composting the town’s garden waste
• Charcoal making facility
• Organic vegetable garden
• Mushroom Farm
• Workshop and Information Centre
• Link to the region’s four BuyBack Centres and SwopShops
• Festival Park for music events and other performances including the annual Trash to Treasure Festival

By Matt Shim

When I stepped on to the aeroplane taking me overseas for only the third time in my life in April this year, I had no idea that I would find myself in a town like Greyton in August. In fact it was a complex web of circumstance that led me to this gorgeous little town, and little more than an odd question that determined my being here for the last two months.
I had been an intern at the Green School in Bali and in conversation with a teacher, had mentioned that I would like to visit Africa. By some unknown connection, Sunnye Collins, from the GTT Board, had been emailing him regarding environmental education. And thus, my thread was tied to Greyton’s rope, and slowly over the course of two months would become woven well into the fibres.

From my experience, it seems that the best things come as a surprise to you and in this manner, my coming to Greyton was no different. I have learnt so much, met so many amazing people, and experienced things that I would never have imagined doing.

Granted, my journey into South Africa and to Greyton was not necessarily smooth, after 8 months of tropical weather, I was greeted in Johannesburg to freezing temperatures and a luggage problem, leaving me without clothes for the night. My flight into Cape Town was also severely delayed by more luggage problems and as I walked out the gate I wondered what I was getting myself into. Greeted at the terminal by Candice, who I had only seen through skype, and two unknown Rastas, and remembering Sunnye’s emails – “there aren’t elephants, giraffes and Masai warriors here (at least not in Greyton!)” – I could only wonder what was and wasn’t in Greyton and what the next two months would be like.

In some ways, I was dropped straight into the deep end, visiting Heuwelkroon and mingling with too many names to remember. But over time, these people became my family and friends – especially those of the Country Conquerors Band. I saw the work that needed to be done in the community and realised that, given my time was short, I could only help in a small way, yet perhaps, my influence could affect people’s perceptions long after I had left. Coming from working in a school in Bali, it was only logical to work with schools here in Greyton. The GTT Team were able to make connections with five schools in the area and work on addressing issues such as energy, food and water conservation, drug awareness and entrepreneurship at a grass roots level.

As an ever-shifting community changing for the better, I wanted to highlight three changes both physical and psychological that I could see happening in front of my very eyes.

The community garden in Heuwelkroon was the first real project that I helped out with in Greyton. It was a lot of manual labour – much more than I expected, but soon the garden started blossoming, both with plants and people eager to make a change in their community. Although still very much a work in progress, we have seen the plants grow and the people responsible for the garden grow too.
Secondly, being of Asian origin although living my whole life in Australia, I feel like my presence as someone different has helped a lot of people, children and adults alike, to be able to look beyond the colour of a person’s skin, or any kind of outer appearance, and appreciate people for who they are inside. The transition from people calling out “Jappie” or “Jackie Chan” without thought to kids telling me they wished that I could have come to a camp with them is heartening to say the least.

Working with the schools was a really enlightening experience for me. We introduced games and built trust between students. It is truly an incredible moment when you see someone’s attitude change right in front of your eyes – something really serendipitous. Our games were played with so much vigour and excitement, and as we came out of our skins to ourselves and each other, we planted the seed of responsibility for each other. This culminated in the clean-up of the Green Park (previously known as the dump site) in recent weeks. Contrary to the attitude that was shown at the beginning, the kids were so full of energy and eager to participate in something that doesn’t necessarily sound so thrilling. The change from the Green Park being full of illegally dumped rubbish to being a green, living place was amazing to see.

From the runs over the zig zag pass, playing games with children, hanging out at Riaan’s house in Heuwelkroon, going bareback horse-riding, drinking coffees at Via’s, and having music nights at Pure Greyton, I feel like I’ve had a full on, but simultaneously laid back Greyton experience. My time here has been short, but I leave a piece of my heart in this country and this town. I am thankful to Nicky Vernon, Candice Mostert and Sunnye Collins for the opportunity that I had to intern here, and thankful to all of the people who became my friends and family. It is always hard to leave a place after getting to know it and its inhabitants, and I look forward to all the change to come in this town and world.

My blog can be found online:
www.lettersfromserendip.blogspot.com
facebook.com/lfserendip

Greyton is a small community with BIG ideas – BIG Transition and Environmental ideas.

Greyton Transition Town (GTT) has found its voice for sustainability in the concepts and ideas of Transition Movement pioneered by UK activist Rob Hopkins and brought back to South Africa by local resident and experienced organiser Nicola Vernon. In just a few short months the energising impact generated by this grassroots charity has inspired community and volunteer-led events to escalate at a rapid rate, resulting in recognition from the region’s political leaders.  At the recent Trash to Treasure Festival of Transition in Greyton, Special Advisor to the Premier of the Western Cape, Jennifer Cargill, announced  GTT as a flagship project  of the Western Cape 110% Green Initiative. Filming the festival, and many other initiatives being conducted simultaneously around the town over 4 days, were the professional German Film company Deutsche Welle (DW). As well as being the main provider of news for German television, DW broadcasts globally in English on current affairs with a strong emphasis on the environment, specifically climate change.  Their website features an on line stream and programme viewing facility and they publish a monthly glossy magazine. www.dw.de

DW found out about GTT through the GTT website and contacted us to cover the Trash to Treasure Festival as well as other aspects of GTT’s work.  The film crew went to Emil Weder school to watch the vegetable garden being planted out by pupils, they saw the Country Conquerors, the world’s only Afrikaans reggae band, in rehearsal in their modest shed in Heuwelkroon and interviewed their base guitarist and general all round eco-star, Marshall Rinquest.  The team also filmed the opening of the new GTT shop and info centre.

They were very impressed with the Festival, capturing the colour, clamour and commotion with hours of footage which will be distilled into a mere 8 minutes of film.  Long enough for us though!  The film will be broadcast and on line from May 6^th, please encourage as many people as possible to view the film to help establish GTT as the leading transition town in Sub Saharan Africa, not just South Africa.

GTT wants to spread the excitement and effectiveness of galvanising, educating and involving local communities to protect their future and meet critical needs around food and energy now.

Converting sunlight into electricity holds a tremendous amount of promise for helping nations and communities meet their energy needs and yet some big obstacles still stand in the way of adoption: cost, inefficiency of solar cells, storage issues,  and the shortage in supply of silicon materials for the making of photovoltaic cells, being the big ones. Yet on one single day, the sun sends 15,000 times as much energy to the Earth as we consume worldwide on a daily basis? A free supply that in contrast to fossil energy sources, such as oil and natural gas is available in limitless quantities!

One bright development is the expansion of graphene, a highly conductible material made from carbon, pioneered by UK scientists, but rapidly drifting into commercial use, it is likely that with just a few years that graphene panels will be many times more efficient and cheap. Graphene is a sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb-like lattice just one atom thick. Since its discovery in 2004, this “wonder material” has continued to amaze scientists with its growing list of unique electronic and mechanical properties. Some believe that graphene could find uses in a number of technological applications – even replacing silicon as the electronic industry’s material of choice.

The first graphene was produced in 2004 when Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov used sticky tape and graphite (better known as pencil lead) to separate the layers of carbon and isolate the one-atom-thick material graphene. Six years later, the scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work with the substance.

As Geim and Novoselov noted in their seminal 2007 paper (pdf): “The graphene ‘gold rush’ has begun.” And though there are no commercial applications for it yet, it’s important to remember that graphene is only eight years old.

Graphene is nearly transparent, electrically conductive and capable of absorbing many different wavelengths of light, giving it great potential to be used in thin, flexible solar panels that could be plastered on everything from the sides of buildings to the clothes we wear.

A number of research groups are working to realize this potential. At the beginning of the summer, physicists from the University of Florida were able to increase the efficiency of graphene solar cells from 2.9 percent to 8.6 percent. The researchers believe if they can reach efficiencies of 10 percent, the cells could be competitive commercially.

Solar power is the energy of the future – safe, clean and 100 % environmentally compatible. Greyton Transition is looking to explore the potential role of solar power in the reduction of fossil fuel use in the town and local areas. Using the sun to heat water and supply fuel in South Africa where sun is abundant is a sensible way forward and GTT will include this as part of their overall strategic plan.

Inevitably there will be hurdles and technology will no doubt evolve less quickly than we would like, but look around us, even in winter we have sunlight available to us, everyone should consider the merits not only from the perspective of cost reduction to your household bills, but potential ecological and environmental costs as well. Their safe disposal and removal of hazardous materials is already under discussion and many companies already have such a system in place. Do ask your supplier what will happen in 20 years or so when the panels are no longer effective.