Jane Stephenson

This audio clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. A quotation from this recording features in the book Voices for Change, published by UCL Press in November 2026 (available in print as well as a free PDF download). The full interview, along with the summaries, transcripts and recordings for this and the rest of the interview collection, is available at the British Library (Sound and Moving Image Collection, under the shelf-mark C2037). For more information, including educational materials and other resources, visit the Oral History of the Environmental Movement project website at www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:Toby Butler: And at that point did you have a sense of what you wanted to do or get into?Jane Stephenson: No. [laughing]Toby Butler: Right.Jane Stephenson: I mean I had always been interested in waste or lack of. So one of the things in Latin America that was lovely, and I have mentioned it in the Romanian context as well, that you know resources are precious and you don’t waste them. And in Latin America, you know, if you, when you first, the first thing you had to do was get hold of your, find an empty beer bottle because you couldn’t buy a bottle of beer unless you had an empty one. There wasn’t any plastic. You went to the market, nobody would give you a bag. There was nothing like, you know, not even a paper bag. You had to take bags. There was one supermarket in Lima that started to have plastic bags. But it was very rare. And nothing was wasted. So there were every- You know in every place there were people trading waste paper, you know, any, any aspect was all dealt with in a marketed way, you know, a proper way. So and when, and even before Latin America, when we moved from, oh have I told, I don’t know I can’t remember whether I mentioned this to you. When we moved from, I think I did when I was talking about Hackney taking some newspapers with us.Toby Butler: No.Jane Stephenson: Okay. So when we moved from East London over to Acton, when we’d been to look at the house in Acton I had noticed that there was a little waste paper merchant tucked underneath the arch of a railway bridge. I mean it was tiny. So I insisted that we took our news, you know, we had all these newspapers we’d collected that we carted them all the way over to the other side of London because I knew I could get, I could give them to somebody who was going to recycle them. So you know it had been a bit of, it was a bit of a thing. And in, as I say, in Latin America it was- And so we were shocked, we were shocked coming back at the amount of waste. So it was an interest but it was fortuitous that we fell into this work.British Library catalogue number: C2037/33 Project clip number: 18