How well do you ‘Work Your Butt’?
Competition opens next Monday, 21 March
Jennifer Lopez is famous (amongst other things) for her shapely and well-worked butt, but unfortunately our garden water butts don’t gain quite the same amount of attention. According to a recent WWT survey, nearly two thirds of those surveyed said they had a water butt, but only 1 in 10 make good use of the water it collected, while the rest allowed the overflow to go down the drain.
‘Work Your Butt’ is a fun, cheeky awareness campaign being launched this spring by the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT) with a serious message. WWT is calling on the nation’s garden owners to use their water butts to wash the car, water the plants or even top up their pond, and is highlighting the benefits that less reliance on mains water has on the environment and their pockets!
WWT Welney would like to see as many entries from the East of England as possible, both from people who get maximum benefit out of their water butts and to people who think that they could if they had the materials to do so.
Butts come in all shapes and sizes (water butts that is) so there’s something to suit everybody’s needs. WWT is launching the Work Your Butt awareness campaign on 21 March, during its month long Festival of Gardening and to coincide with the start of Climate Week.
Did you know?
• On hot summer days, over 70 per cent of the nation’s water supply may be used for watering gardens.
• Rainwater collected in a water butt is much better for both ponds and gardens than tap water, so this could be the time to get your butt to the garden centre and grab yourself one.
• Your roof collects enough rain water to fill 450 water butts every year so investing in a good butt now will save you money.
• Of the respondents to WWT’s Wetlands In My Back Yard survey, only about 1 in 10 people collect rain from all their roof surface.
• In a big storm the rapid movement of water off hard surfaces into the drainage system is a major factor in flooding – drains fail to cope with the volume of water and overflow, flooding property and threatening lives. Two 250l or four 125l water butts store enough water to cope with the first 1 cm of rainfall off a 50m2 roof, equivalent to a moderate summer rainstorm.
• If every household in the UK got a standard water butt (and worked it!) this would save about 30,000 million litres of water each summer – that’s enough to fill approximately 12,000 Olympic sized swimming pools.
• Did you know that in the UK the proportion of treated mains drinking water used for gardening can approach 50% during the driest months.
As part of the campaign, WWT are offering hundreds of pounds worth of gardening vouchers in a competition looking for a) the ‘Best worked butt’ in the UK, which will be judged on a photo (or video) and no more than 50 words and b) those in the ‘I want a great butt’ category pledges from those inspired to install one. There will be £250 gardening vouchers up for grabs for each of the two categories, courtesy of NFU Mutual, sponsors of WWT’s Festival of Gardening.
ENTRY DETAILS:
The competition will open on 21 March and close on 30 June.
Entrants should email workyourbutt@wwt.org.uk with their name, address and contact telephone number, then complete in 50 words or less, either the sentence “I work my butt well by....” or “If I had one, I would work my butt by...” Entrants should also send supporting photos (of no more than 1mb) showing them and their water butt (or the water collected in it) in action. Alternatively, entrants can enter by uploading a video of them and their water butt in action, and us sending us the link via workyourbutt@wwt.org.uk .
Visit www.wwt.org.uk/gardening for full details of WWT’s Festival of Gardening ‘Work Your Butt’ campaign and the competition. You can also find more useful advice about how to work your butt to the best of its ability.
