Accusations of “double standards” fly
September 24, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Just when we thought we were doing well as a nation with our recycling, it turns out that there is no room for complacency. Accusations of double standards have been flying recently, with those in the south east of England apparently being the worst offenders.
It seems that far too many of us are heavily reliant on our local council’s schemes rather than taking the initiative ourselves. According to research for Zurich Insurance, thousands of tonnes of rubbish are sent to landfill each week which, if we were just that bit more motivated, could be recycled.
Almost a quarter of us feels that it is too much trouble to go to the local facility and would rather throw rubbish out than have to recycle it ourselves. Whilst a respectable number of us are happy to do our green duty so long as the council picks up our recycling, a small minority (one in eleven) are too lazy even to sort our rubbish and one in eight of us simply cannot be bothered washing out tins and containers for recycling.
If the British public cannot be educated into taking more personal responsibility for recycling then, according to a spokesperson for Zurich Municipal, it is essential that councils “continue to develop flexible plans to meet the demands of this changing landscape."
Zurich’s research also showed that fly tipping has become more of a problem over the last three years and that people in the UK want harsh measures taken against offenders. Almost half of us feels that the vehicle used to commit the offence should be destroyed and almost a fifth would like to see the offenders serve a prison sentence.
Supermarkets finally to recycle food waste
September 17, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Ever wondered what happens to all those old bruised and black bananas and all those potatoes with shoots sprouting out of them when they are done with in the major supermarkets? Well sadly and strangely the answer wasn’t a very good one for the environment… until now. This might soon be about to change.
Waitrose announced this month that they would be piloting a new ingenious scheme that will mean all that old food will be turned into a renewable fuel. There will be five Waitrose stores across the UK that will be gathering all their old degradable food and then seeing it heated and turned into a methane-rich bio-gas that will be capable of acting as a replacement for electricity. It then leaves an odourless and entirely organic fertiliser.
Anaerobic digestion might sound like a physical way of helping us avoid stomach aches but it’s actually the name of the process. It is much easier than we might think to hold back all the waste foods from the supermarkets and then add to a container for this process. It’s not actually Waitrose who conduct the anaerobic digestion but a company called Biogen.
It’s Waitrose’s aim to power over 500 homes using this process and to get the bio-gas plugged into the National Grid as soon as the tests have been passed and approved. Something that helps prevent things going to landfill and also provides us with a new source of energy seems likely to be a sure fire hit.
UK recycles the most mobiles
September 10, 2008 at 1:17 pm
A consumer survey released by Nokia has revealed that the UK is top of the global league when it comes to recycling mobile phones. 10% of people interviewed in the UK had recycled a mobile phone in the past, which doesn’t sound like an awful lot. However, when you consider that only 3% of people across the world have recycled a phone, the UK is well ahead of the pack.
The survey consisted of interviewing 6,500 people in 13 different countries, including Germany, Finland, USA, Nigeria and Brazil amongst others, to create a truly global picture of the state of mobile phone recycling. The aim of the survey was to find out about the attitudes and behaviours of people across the world, and also to provide information about Nokia’s own recycling schemes.
As well as the low rates of recycling in evidence across the world, the survey also revealed a large amount of ignorance on the matter. One fifth of people in the UK are unaware that mobile phones can even be recycled and the figure across the world is even worse, with an average of 50% saying they did not know it was possible.
Markus Terho, director of environmental affairs, said that if everyone who owns a mobile device brought back just one unused device we “could save 240,000 tonnes of raw materials”, which would be equivalent to “taking four million cars off the road” in terms of the amount of greenhouse gasses released.
Nokia has recently opened a new service outside their main Regent Street store, promoting greater recycling of handsets. Each new handset box sold will provide recycling information to increase awareness and will hopefully lead to a greater number of phones being recycled in the future.
Council taxpayers face £3 billion landfill fines
September 3, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Despite a recently reported rise in recycling rates, local councils will face fines of up to £3 billion for waste sent to landfill – a bill ultimately paid by council taxpayers.
Surprisingly, Environment Minister Joan Ruddock seemed pleased with the latest municipal waste statistics, covering the period from October to December 2007, saying,
“Local authorities and their residents are making good progress. We still have some way to go before we are performing at the level of some of our nearest neighbours in Europe. But we are catching them up, and positive feedback like this should encourage all of us to keep up the effort to reduce and recycle our rubbish.”
A closer look at the figures shows that the “good progress” includes a reduction in household waste from 25.8m to 25.6m tonnes – a drop of just 0.8 per cent. And although household recycling went up by 3 points to 33.9 per cent, this means that around two-thirds of our rubbish still ends up in landfill.
Responding to the statistics in rather less glowing terms, Councillor Paul Bettison from the Local Government Association said,
“Britain is the dustbin of Europe and dumps more waste into the ground than any other country in the EU. This is costing the council taxpayer dearly in landfill taxes. Councils are still facing fines of up to £3 billion if we do not dramatically reduce the amount of waste thrown into landfill.”
So does recycling in Britain really lag behind the rest of Europe?
Europe produces more than a billion tonnes of waste every year, but the EU is committed to reducing this. By early 2008, five EU countries had already achieved the 50 per cent recycling rate for municipal solid waste – the level currently being proposed by the European Parliament as a binding target for all EU governments by 2020. Denmark and the Netherlands, for example, send almost no waste to landfill, whilst the Netherlands and Austria recycle or compost the most waste, at more than 60 per cent each.
However, Britain certainly does not deserve the title of ‘dustbin of Europe’; previous statistics show that Greece landfills more than 90 per cent of its rubbish, with Portugal not far behind.
There’s no room for complacency, though. With the landfill tax rising each year, we must all reduce the amount of waste we generate – especially the type that can’t be recycled – if we want to keep council tax bills down. Nearly two thirds of all household rubbish can be recycled, which saves energy and raw materials. Even better is avoiding waste in the first place, or repairing and re-using items.
Remember the waste hierarchy: Prevention; Re-use; Recycling; Other forms of recovery; Disposal.
If your council is poor at recycling, write to them or contact your local councillor to demand better recycling facilities now. Find details for your council here.
Cambridgeshire Council to offer cooking oil recycling
August 27, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Both residents and the environment will benefit from a scheme being introduced in Cambridgeshire, to recycle cooking oil. Living Fuels, a company operating from Norfolk, has joined forces with Cambridgeshire County Council to provide banks at ten civic amenity sites across the county.
Householders will be able to take their used cooking oil in sealed containers to their nearest bank. The banks will be emptied and the contents taken to a plant in Thetford where it will be converted into LF100 fuel, which can be used to produce clean electricity. Currently Living Fuel collects around 80,000 litres of oil which converts into electricity for 5,700 homes. The estimate for the total amount of cooking oil used each year in the UK is 225,000 tonnes, which has the potential for producing energy for 2,200 homes. For further details of just what the process involves see the company website.
The scheme is good news too for Anglian Water, who estimate that they spend £5 million each year dealing with blockages in drains and sewers, caused by people pouring old cooking oil down their sinks and toilets.
Living Fuel already provides banks free of charge in Suffolk and Norfolk and plans are afoot to extend the scheme to London, where they will be providing two banks in each of three as yet unnamed boroughs.
In the past, most of its supplies of used cooking oil have come from the hospitality industry, schools and prisons, local authorities and government agencies and the food manufacturing industry, with private households being a previously untapped source of raw material.
Ireland has what it takes in the rubbish stakes
August 20, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Whilst the British government is good at talking about recycling initiatives and convincing us that change is on the horizon, the actual implementation is… well, a bit rubbish.
When it comes to the issue of recycling, it would appear that we Brits just do not get it. Already fresh recycling policies are flagging: supermarkets are failing to use recyclable packaging, shoppers are still able to use large quantities of low-cost (or free) plastic bags and our British beaches are transforming into plastic-littered landfill sites before our very eyes.
Times columnist, Melanie McDonagh, has highlighted "Britain’s poor recycling performance" in her latest article, "How Ireland cleaned up on recycling". The article explains how the Government of Ireland (Rialtas na hÉireann) has cunningly decided to wrestle the recycling dilemma by making people pay for the quantity of rubbish they dispose of. Rather than threatening to fine people if they accidentally put their paper in with their plastics, it is now Ireland’s policy to charge around £4 per rubbish bag. Not only does this mean that less plastic is produced and less money is spent on landfill sites, it also sends out a clear incentive to reduce the amount of rubbish people throw away on a day-to-day basis. McDonagh sums up her article well, concluding that if we are to change the way we see recycling, the government should "make us pay … it’s the only language we understand".
Whether or not we need to introduce a scheme similar to the aptly dubbed Recycle Bank is another question entirely. A number of people feel that the British government should follow the example of Ireland’s plastic bag ban. Rather than pussyfooting around and charging a measly 5p per shopping bag, British supermarkets should charge an amount that will force its customers to rethink the type of bags they use. Please click on the Bag it don’t bin it website to find out more.
Carrier bags – paper or plastic?
August 14, 2008 at 2:56 pm
If asked to say which was worse for the environment, plastic carrier bags or paper carrier bags, most people would hardly hesitate to say plastic, plastic, plastic! Paper is a natural material and completely biodegradable after all. So why don’t supermarkets just switch (or switch back) to paper bags? Isn’t that the simple answer to the environmental damage plastic bags are causing? Well the truth is, it is certainly not that simple.
Plastic bags are undeniably a problem in many areas. Discarded carrier bags are directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of animals every year, from turtles to gulls, due to ingestion. They have been blamed for causing massive floods in India after they blocked up drains. Parts of the North Pacific Ocean are becoming a soup of photo-degraded plastic particles, which are then entering the food chain. You simply do not hear about paper bags causing these problems!
But let’s look at it from a different angle. The production of plastic bags is far better in terms of energy use than paper bags. It can take up to five times the energy to make a paper bag. The production of plastic uses valuable oil resources, but so does the production of paper bags. Paper bag production is also responsible for the destruction of millions of trees every year already (over 20 million just for paper carrier bags in the USA alone). The production of paper can create 50 times (yes, that’s 50 times!) the amount of water pollutants than the production of plastic, and up to 70% more air pollutants.
It doesn’t stop there. Paper bags are heavier, up to 6 times heavier, and more difficult to compress than plastic bags. That means more impact from transport pollution. It also means that paper bags would take up much more room in landfill sites than plastic bags currently do (less than 2%). And whilst it is true that plastic bags can take hundreds of years to break down, paper bags also have this problem due to the fact that biodegradation requires light, water and oxygen, elements which are often missing from modern landfill sites.
A much larger percentage of paper bags are recycled when compared to plastic bags; paper recycling in general is much more advanced than plastics recycling. However, recycling paper bags uses many times more energy than recycling plastic bags. Then there is the issue of reuse. It is thought that 80% of plastic carrier bags are reused at least once. This is probably because they are strong, waterproof and don’t fall apart after a couple of uses. Can the same be said for paper bags?
So is paper better than plastic? The answer, quite clearly, is no! Both paper and plastic carrier bags create their own problems for the environment. If plastic bag recycling was brought up to the levels of paper recycling, this already small environmental problem would all but disappear.
Summer blockbuster encourages children to recycle
August 8, 2008 at 1:55 pm
School’s out and when the inevitable rainy afternoon brings young children and their accompanying adults to the cinema, Disney may well encourage them all to go home and recycle (after seeing WALL-E, that is).
Along with Pixar, the animators who have previously brought us Toy Story, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille, Disney’s summer blockbuster WALL-E transports viewers to a “galaxy not so very far away” in a film where not much is said, and yet a powerful message is put across.
In the film, humans live in spaceships whilst a sweet, courageous robot (whose name stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) works to clean up the planet that they have filled to the brim with rubbish. At once an endearing adventure story and a bleak promise of apocalypse, WALL-E is a film that may just bring home an idea or two about the virtues of recycling.
Having the recycling message mixed into their entertainment is likely to be a familiar experience for the very young. The two-to-six-year-old viewers of CBeebies can now tune into EcoBeebies, a range of programmes focused on our impact on the environment. Little ones can sing along at the end of programmes such as Green Balloon Club, “…All the little things we do/make a difference”, and parents can also find sticker charts on the accompanying website to put some of these ideas into action.
Online mobile phone recycling scheme launched
July 30, 2008 at 2:25 pm
According to some estimates, there are 90 million unused mobile handsets sitting around in homes across the UK, collecting dust at this very moment. People are constantly reminded not to throw away their old phones due to the toxic properties of some of the ingredients and as a result they are unsure of what to do with them.
If you have an old handset (or even a few) lying around at home, then you will be interested to hear about the new service offered by MPRC (The Mobile Phone Repair Company), which has just launched a new mobile phone recycling scheme that claims to be simpler and more efficient than any of the other schemes currently available.
The aim behind the scheme is to recycle old phones for the precious plastics and metals that are found within them, and for this reason the handsets do not have to be functioning.
The service, which complies with current EU legislation and is done in an environmentally friendly manner, aims to form “financially productive partnerships with charities, businesses and members of the public”, according to the website.
The process is simple: just go to the website, choose your model of phone and fill in the form. You will then be sent a freepost envelope in which to post your phone, and when the phone is received you will be paid.
The prices are pretty good too. For a Nokia N95, you can get £120 for a working phone and £60 for a non-working model. However, for older models the prices are a bit lower, with phones such as the Nokia 2100 being bought for £2 for a working model and £1 if it is not functioning.
The company claims that payment is guaranteed within 14 days, and it also states that a free courier collection is on offer for 10 or more phones at a time, which could be useful for charities looking to capitalise on the scheme.
Chip-and-bin fails in Norfolk
July 23, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Much has been made in the press of the chip-and-bin plans, whereby householders pay according to how much waste they produce. However, the failure of a trial in Norfolk, which started in 2002, could be bad news for the Government.
Computer problems, the irritation of local residents over the Big Brother type surveillance and a two-and-a-half fold increase in fly-tipping have brought the trial to a halt.
52,000 homes in the South Norfolk District Council area took part at a cost of over £1 million pounds, £25,000 of which was spent on fitting the necessary equipment to 12 dust carts. The microchips fitted to the bins (and used successfully in Europe for over a decade) were supposed to send data on the weight of refuse and the address of the household to a computer on the dust cart. In order to ensure accuracy, each bin was weighed six times on the way up and a further six times on the way down. However, problems with the electrics, hydraulics, mechanics and computer rendered the scheme unworkable.
District Council leader, John Fuller, has said that in order for the scheme to succeed, the technology has to work “in every bin, in every street on every day of the year”. Three other areas piloting the scheme have also had “significant difficulties”.
Despite the problems experienced already, the government is still seeking other councils to take part in trials next year. South Norfolk’s trial was not an official pilot but was paid for by government grants for recycling, which could be spent in whatever way the council wished. The legislation for official pilot schemes has not yet been passed.
