Craig Bennett

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:Back to my old favourite is I tried to- I was appalled at the lack of recycling infrastructure on the campus at the University of Reading. So we try very hard to- We explore trying to get recycling facilities on campus. And this time, unlike at school where I failed on this, this time succeeded and it’s something I was really proud about, is and yet again it took lots of negotiations with the bursar, it tends to be in every institution it’s the bursar that seems to decide whether something like that can happen or not. And my friend Nick and I in particular we had lots of these negotiations with the University of Reading bursar and finally got agreement for, to put cans, drinks recycling bins in every hall of residence. And we agreed that as volunteers we’d collect those, we’d have a named rep in every hall. A recycling rep in every hall. And these bins would fill up and that they’d put the sacks out on a Saturday morning and we’d go round with the student union minibus and collect these sacks and take them off for recycling. And actually we had this deal with a recycling company and they’d give us money for the sacks in return. So it actually ended up paying for itself. And in fact it started making quite a lot of money which was amazing which enabled us to do things like buy a big, a huge sort of recycling bin that looked like a drinks can to put outside the student union, which seemed an obvious next thing to do, which we did and we got that concreted in and so on. And it really was the first time we got recycling facilities going at the University of Reading campus. And I’ve been back since and, you know, even just ten years ago I went back and that old drinks can recycling thing was still there believe it or not. I don’t think it was last time I went but it doesn’t matter because they’ve got much better facilities in place so it got it going. So really quite proud to have done that. But we struggled on some of the other things like getting paper recycling going and there’s always all those kind of things. But we are proud that we did that. And we ran loads of other campaigns when we were there particularly associated with the Reading group around air pollution, around, as I said, protecting wildlife sites and stopping road building and things like that. So there is a lot more kind of activism going on there.British Library catalogue number: C2037/09 Project clip number: 21