Tescos' recycling initiative, why so quiet?

A few days ago after using Tescos' online shopping service for the first time I was thinking to myself that it would be a good idea if Tesco offered to recycle all of the packaging for the products you buy from.

Basically if you get your shopping delivered by Tesco they currently offer to take back your old carrier bags to be recycled. I thought why not take it one step further and when they deliver your shopping they offer to take back all of the stuff that could be recycled from your last lot of shopping.

So I decided to send my thoughts to Tesco. First I hit there website trying to find some kind of contact information, after some searching I ended up on there corporate site, and it turns out that they have a section all about the environment.

I read through all of the information and I found something very interesting. Tesco are currently trialing recycling machines at there stores. These recycling machines allow the public to come along with bags full of stuff to recycle and they just put it all into the machine and it's automatically sorted and stored for them, you don't even have to do any sorting or anything.

Tesco press release about the machines

Now this is brilliant. It's making recycling much easier for people to do. The one thing that troubles me about it though is the fact that if I hadn't tripped over it so to speak I would have never known. Fair enough it's not in all Tesco stores at the moment but it is in some and they are planning a country wide roll out. Why isn't it being being covered by the media? After searching though google I found pretty much nothing about the story, about the only thing I did find was in the specialist press for the food industry and that was 2 years old from when they originally announced they were thinking about doing it.

Surely something like this should be getting more coverage, they even won the National Recycling Awards 2006. Yet for some reason we hear nothing. All we hear about is how recycling is 'too complex', and yet when someone comes along with an idea like this that would make recycling much less 'complex' it gets no coverage and no one gets to find out about it.

I just think it's a shame that this isn't being promoted more. I suppose that if it's still in a trial period Tesco might be holding back until they have it installed in more stores, but at the same time if more people knew about it then maybe they would see more public demand for what they will be offering.

I think companies should be shouting a bit more about what they are doing to help the environment, it might inspire the public in some way and could also encourage other companies to join in and start implementing environmental plans themselves.

Power saving light bulbs: How much can you actually save

I know I like to bang on about power saving light bulbs, but it's for some very good reasons. For a start they can save you a fair amount of money, as this post will eventually point out. Secondly because you're using less electricity, you're therefore doing that little bit extra to help the environment.

While I have my concerns about the environment, most of my motivation for such things as energy saving and recycling are driven by the fact that in some way they are likely to be able to save me money or help make me self sufficient. It seems strange in some ways that nearly all the things you can do to make yourself self sufficient also seem to have some positive impact on the environment.

Self sufficiency will be another article later, so back to the light bulbs.

Lets see roughly how much money you could save a year if you changed to power saving light bulbs. After looking around the Internet it turns out that on average in the UK we use lighting in the home for around 1600 hours. This works out at about 4.5 hours a day. Now most homes will have a single room lit with either one or two bulbs for this amount of time along with several other lights on in other rooms as people more round the house.

For our example I'll do the calculations based on a living room with a single bulb lighting it for 4.5 hours a day 365 days a year. The first set of calculations will be based on a 60 watt non power saving light bulb, while the second example will be based on an 11 watt power saving bulb that gives out the equivalent amount of light as the 60 watt.

A 60 watt bulb uses 0.06kw/h of electricity for every hour it is on. So in this case in a year it will typically use 96kw/h. Now as we all know electricity prices have been rising lately so I'll take a rough average price for a kw/h of electricity at current prices, which is about 13 pence. So to run the light bulb for a year would cost £12.48

A 11 watt power saving bulb uses 0.011kw/h of electricity for every hour it is on. In a year it would use 17.6kw/h. Using the same electricity price of 13 pence per kw/h the power saving light bulb would cost £2.29 to run.

So initially we can say that in a year we would save roughly £10.19 or about 82%. However obviously we also have to take into account the bulb it self. A normal bulb would probably have to be replaced at least twice in a year period working on average bulb lifetimes, where as the power saving bulb would still only be around a third of the way into its life time. If we say that the power saving light bulb cost around £5 (I'm being conservative here, the last two bulbs I bought cost about £2 each) and the normal bulb costs around 60 pence a bulb then we still end up with a saving of roughly £6.40 a year.

Doesn't really sound much until you think that most house holds will have 2-3 bulbs running all at the same time. Also when you take into account that most people use 100 watt bulbs the savings really start to stack up.

If you replaced three 100 watt bulbs with three 11 watt power saving bulbs, that even though they provide the equivalent light of a 60 watt are still sufficient for the job. Over a typical year you could save approximately £40.50 which takes into account buying the power saving bulbs in the first place. It may not seem a lot until you think that in the average two bedroom house in the UK most people are paying £20 - £25 a month on electricity. Changing to power saving light bulbs could effectively get you two months worth of free electricity.

Obviously these are just worked examples and can't be exactly accurate, but even if you take a certain degree of inaccuracy into account it's still plain to see that simply changing to power saving light bulbs could save you a lot of money.

Environmentally Inspirational People: Tesla Motors

Tesla Motors are a company I've been following for a while now. They are based in the US and are the first company that I would say are making a 'real electric car'.

When I say 'real electric car' what I mean is a car that people will actually want to use, and a car that is actually practical to use. I think all these small companies out there that are producing electric cars are great, but they seem to be getting it wrong in a few ways. For a start most of the companies seem to be aiming the cars at people who think cars are evil. If you look at the vast majority of purely electric cars available at the moment they look awful. There's no way that a car enthusiast would be seen dead in them, and in these types of emerging markets it's usually the enthusiasts that set the trend. Second, most of the cars are highly impractical. Most offer no comfort what so ever, very little storage space and next to no range what so ever.

This was all true until Tesla Motors came onto the scene. What they have done is to produce a modern sports car, with everything that a modern sports car should have. It has blisteringly fast acceleration, it has comfort, it has looks, and it has range. They have taken all the things that are great about driving at the moment and pushed it up another level by making the car run completely on electricity.

Basically they have created an electric car that car enthusiasts would buy. Part of this is thanks to our guys over here in England at Lotus, who have worked with Tesla for some time on several elements of the car. Some people even refer to it as an electric Elise although it is a lot more than that.

Possible the most exciting part of all of this is the fact that they are currently designing an everyday salon car, and it should be coming over to this country too. So in a few years time you'll be able to buy a practical, exciting, fully electric car, that will be able to compete with the big car manufactures that still seem to be dragging there heals somewhat.

I wish Tesla all the luck in the world, and I hope that when they land over here the pricing will be right and I'll be able to get myself a nice shiny 100% electric car.

All the in-depth details of the car are available from their web site http://www.teslamotors.com/ . They also have a blog which has lots of interesting information about how they put the car together and the research they are doing into battery packs and electric motors.

Still too much waste

If you have been reading my other posts then you will know that not so long ago I started a major push to make myself recycle more. So far this has been going really well. I've even got my girlfriend into it as well and it's now becoming second nature to put recyclable stuff into the card board boxes I've put by, rather than just put them in the bin.

I still think that we're creating too much waste. While our bin has significantly less in it at the end of each fortnight it still has quite a lot.

After having a quick look at what we don't recycle it seems that we mostly throw away food skins etc. So basically the waste from meal preparation, vegetable skins, bits of fruit.

Therefore I've decided that it's time to get a composting bin. I've been looking into it and our local council offer them at a highly reduced price with a free book on how to compost.

We even have a good use for it. Last year my girlfriend decided to have a go at growing some of her own veg in pots in our back garden (we rent and can't dig up the garden). As a first try it was pretty successful and we got a good few meals worth of veg from it. So next year we're probably going to give it another try using what we learnt last time round to hopefully make things a little more successful, and if we get the composting bin then this time round we'll have some nice home made compost to fertilise everything with. Both my girlfriend and I really like the idea of organic produce and are currently trying to move as much of the food we buy over to organic as we can.

So once the Christmas holidays roll on and I've got some time off work to go and collect a bin we'll be able to start our composting. Hopfully this will have a significant impact on the amount of waste that goes in the bin.

Things that annoy me about renting a house

My girlfriend and I have been renting our house now for just about 2 years. While the place we live and the area we live in are nice there are still a few things that annoy me about renting a property.

1. Making Changes
2. Maintenance (or lack of it)

Making Changes

Over the passed few months I've changed all the light bulbs in the house that I can to power saving light bulbs. That is apart from two rooms, the living room and the room I'm currently sat in now writing this. The reason behind this is because in those rooms we have dimmer switches.

Many of you may already know that power saving light bulbs will not work properly with dimmers. I've searched the Internet and managed to find manufactures that produce bulbs that they claim will work with dimmers, however I don't seem to be able to find any suppliers that stock them.

Basically if I was allowed to in my contract I would have all the dimmers changed to normal switches. As I'm re-newing my contract soon, I might see if I can get it done but I've got a funny feeling that the landlord won't class it as money well spent.

The heating system we have in our house isn't the greatest either. The boiler is pretty old and judging from our gas bill not very efficient either. There seems to be a slight issue with the hot water in our house as well. Basically if the heating isn't on then the water doesn't get hot, which means in the summer we have to have the heating on to get hot water instead of just having the hot water part on.

So once again if I actually owned the property I would fork out the cash to get the entire heating system replaced with an energy efficient condensing boiler and call it money well spent. With the potential savings I could make it would pay for itself in about 4-5 years.

Maintenance (or lack of it)

The only problem with renting is your always working on someone elses time scale. If something goes wrong in your house and you own it then you either fix it yourself or you get someone in to do it.

When your renting however, what usually happens is something goes wrong then you inform the letting agent, who several weeks later (from my experience) get in touch with the landlord to find out if it's OK if they find someone to fix the problem. After this several trades people are contacted to assess the problem and give quotes on what is wrong and how much it will cost to fix. These quotes are then sent to the landlord, who takes all of the information in assess what needs doing and what will give the best overall result and then chooses the cheapest option that probably won't fix the problem properly. Eventually the work gets done, then six months down the line it breaks again and the whole processes starts over.

It gets to the point where if anything goes wrong and you can live without it, or get round it some other way you don't even bother going through the process except to report it to the letting agent so they know it wasn't you that broke it.

Anyway enough of my rant. If you have any comments on your experiences with renting then I would be happy to hear from you.

Indoor Skydiving

I went indoor skydiving today at Airkix in Milton Keynes. I got it as a Christmas present off by girlfriend last year and had only just got round to booking it.

I've got to say it was amazing. I've never been skydiving before so I wasn't completely sure what to expect, but it was great. After a briefing and kitting out you go into a huge vertical wind tunnel and basically get taught how to control yourself in free fall. The package I did included two, one minute sessions in the tunnel, which when you hear it doesn't sound that long, but it seems like your in there for ages.

I would highly recommend trying this to anyone out there who likes doing sports and wants to try something a little different. It's well worth the money and great fun. The staff are highly trained skydivers and as well as making sure everyone is safe they also make it there number one priority to make sure that everyone is having a great time.