Police Scotland is this week “teeing off” with an app on over 15,000 police work mobile devices to help the force save “tens of thousands” of single-use plastic items from being used and thrown away. Working with the environmental charity, City to Sea – the organisation behind the award-winning Refill App – Police Scotland will be making sure their officers stay hydrated when on duty as a heatwave sweeps the country.
The Refill app will direct officers to hundreds of thousands of water refill points internationally and will be first used by officers on duty as they police the 150th anniversary of The Open in St Andrews. In St Andrews alone there are 16 refill mapped stations – places to refill your water bottle for free, while well over 1,000 sites to be found across the rest of Scotland. Refill stations can be public water fountains or cafes, bars and pubs that have signed up to be part of the campaign. The app will be rolled out to around 15,000 Police Scotland mobile devices.
Police Scotland is the second-largest police service in the United Kingdom and officers are regularly assigned to operations outside of their usual geographic posting. It will also be helpful in their day-to-day duties when they’re out in their local communities. The Refill app will support officers in this scenario in being able to find nearby free drinking water when on the go. Through using the app the service hope to be able to monitor the environmental impact as well.
City to Sea estimates that if every staff member and officer with the Refill app downloaded used it just once a week to refill a water bottle, the force would save over 1 million plastic bottles in a year.
The announcement comes off the back of the ‘truly alarming’ amounts of microplastics found off the Scottish coast found in a recent study with the Scottish Government estimating that more than 90% of plastic in Scottish seas comes from Scottish littering on land. Greenpeace’s ‘Big Plastic Count’ has also illustrated that recycling alone isn’t the fix to plastic pollution.
Commenting, City to Sea’s Refill App Lead, Ludo McCormick said,
“By working with organisations like Police Scotland we can have a huge impact in reducing single-use plastic bottles – one of the main forms of plastic pollution found in our rivers and on our beaches. I’ve been really impressed with how they’ve responded to this environmental emergency and taken steps to tackle it head-on. Crucially though we know that all workplaces can have a huge impact on changing entrenched behaviours. We hope that this project will not only encourage officers to refill when at work but also inspire them to champion refill and reuse when they are out and about with friends and family.”
Assistant Chief Constable Gary Ritchie, of Police Scotland, said: “I’m hoping officers will find this app useful while they’re on duty, especially in the warmer months or during large-scale public events.
“This is a good initiative which helps us to look after our teams in an environmentally conscious way.”
Polling by City to Sea and Friends of the Earth Scotland found that 88% of Scots were concerned about plastic pollution and 68% of people in Scotland would like to see more refill options.
