The great bin debate

As many of you may already know, the government has recently announced that they will be considering introducing a tax on how much rubbish we throw away. We have already seen a war between local councils and their residents about introducing fortnightly bin collections. Now it seems there is going to be another fight regarding taxing based on what we throw away.

The question is, is another tax the right way to go about things and will it really increase recycling?

I think one of the major problems with this announcement is that enough facts about what is actually going to happen aren't being made available. When the idea of the tax was originally announced some time ago, the government pointed out that you would be given an allowance connected to how much you threw away. If you stay within this you won't be charged any extra however if you are significantly below it then you would get a refund on part of your council tax as a kind of way of saying thank you for recycling as much as possible. Whether this will be how it works in reality we will have to wait and see.

I think if this is brought in without some proper thought then it could cause more problems than it solves. For a start you'll probably see an increase in fly tipping of general household waste, there may also be issues as regards to people putting their rubbish in other peoples bins to avoid being charged. None of these problems as of yet seem to have been addressed in anyway.

Time and money would be better spent finding out why people are creating so much waste in the first place and coming up with a solution to this problem rather than charging people for something they might not have that much control over. If it turns out that the only reason is because people are lazy and can not be bothered to recycle then fair enough charge them. Once they start feeling it hurt them in their pocket they will soon start to recycle more. However if there are genuine reasons why a family produces a lot of waste then maybe that reason should be addressed instead of a tax being pushed upon them.

It would be quite interesting to do a survey of life style against the amount of rubbish being thrown away to see if other things like health could be directly linked to it. For example a family that survives entirely on microwave meals is likely to throw away more packaging than a family that makes their meals from fresh ingredients. Fair enough most of the boxes for the meals could be recycled however a lot of the microwavable trays can not, or if they can I am yet to find somewhere they can be taken to be recycled. As everyone is being constantly told all these ready meals are full of too much this and that, that generally degrade our health, so does a family or individual that produces a lot of rubbish also have a life style that is likely be make them more unhealthy?

This could be classed as a controversial question but I hope you read it for what it is and not as an attack on people who eat microwave meals.

Basically what I'm saying is that if you go to your local supermarket and buy fresh fuit and veg along with the odd tin of this and that you're probably going to be able to recycle most of the packaging and waste produced by that meal. However if you buy ready cooked meals that are packaged in wax coated carboard boxes with plastic trays you're less likely to be able to recycle the packaging.

And so we come to the real cause of the problem, the super markets. These huge companies govern pretty much everything we buy as far as food is concerned, so surely it should be their responsibility to make sure that we never have to take home excessive amounts of packaging that we later have to dispose of. Maybe the government should be putting more pressure on these waste producers rather than the people who are essentially disposing of it for them.

If you're thinking of reducing your waste then why not take a look at some of my other articles on the subject.

When I started recycling
Composting
Organic Fruit and Veg Delivery

Tetra Pak Recycling

A month or so ago we changed our kitchen bin to one with two compartments. It has a small section that can be used to collect stuff for the composter and a larger section for all the other stuff we usually throw away. One thing about this bin is that it's not particularly large, this has got me thinking even more about what I do and don't recycle.

One of the major bulky things I regularly use is Tetra Pak based drinks containers for things like fresh apple juice etc. A while ago I looked on Tetra Paks website and they offered an address where you could send all of your Tetra Pak packaging to be recycled. I thought it might be worth while doing so I started collecting all the containers ready to send them off.

Recently I decided to check the Tetra Pak recycling web site again for more details about where to send the containers. Well it turns out that Tesco is joining forces with Tetra Pak to roll out recycling facilities to their stores around the UK. They will be adding two new recycling points every week until September, which means you'll soon be able to take your Tetra Pak based containers to your local Tesco to get them recycled.

As Tesco say "Every little helps".

Source [Tetra Pak Recycling]

Tetra Pak Recycling Update

The joy of efficiency

Currently I rent the house I live in. If you've read the article I posted some time back on renting you'll realise that I'm not particularly happy with it either.

Well this weekend I found another reason to be annoyed at renting. This reason is the incredibly inefficient heating system we have and the fact that it doesn't even work properly. I found out exactly how bad it was when I got up on Saturday morning. First thing I thought I'd do would be jump in the shower and get dressed before sorting out the long list of things I had to do that day. I managed to get about 2 minutes of hot water before everything went a very annoying luke warm, which quickly turned to freezing cold.

This was the first sign that something was up. The second sign was when I went to put a load of clothes on radiators around the house that had just come out the washing machine. They were all stone cold, not even a bit of heat coming off them. I knew the heating was on because I had put it on about 15 minutes before for the sole purpose of drying the clothes.

At this point I decided to investigate properly. First thing I did was turn the heating system off and bleed all the radiators, downstairs was fine however upstairs had a stupid amount of air in all the radiators. At this point I thought that must have been the problem, so I put the heating back on and waited a while for the heat.

Guess what, it never came. So at this point I have a boiler that is going at full pelt because it's trying to catch up with the thermostat however it's not actually getting any hot water into the radiators.

When we first moved in the house over a year and a half ago we had a problem with the heating that was very similar. When it happened then, we had several contractors come out who said that the best course of action would be to install a new boiler and heating system. However there was one bloke who said he could get it working again by replacing a £20 part. I bet you can guess who got the job can't you. Anyway it turns out that the same thing had gone wrong again, it's basically some electrics that move some valves near the hot water tank to route the water coming from the boiler to either the hot water system or the radiators. Well it had broken again. Luckily you can actually override this control with a manual push switch, the only problem with this is we now have to manually govern our heating system to make sure that the radiators work and that we get hot water.

Obviously I'm going to report this to the letting agent once again and you never know it might actually get fixed properly this time, but the thing that really annoys me is we have been burning all this fuel to essentially heat up a pipe that is about a foot long between the boiler and this valve.

I think while the government is making all these plans for improving building regulations to make things greener they should also look into forcing landlords to make their properties as energy efficient as possible. After all if it was my own house I'd never stand for having such a bad heating system. I probably would have got it changed when the original problem happened. Just because I rent a house why should I have to put up with inefficient heating that I have no control over.

It's not like these people don't have any money, after all many people can't afford one house let alone be able to buy one to rent out to people too. So surely they can afford to kit it out with a decent heating system.

Live Earth: Forget lighters get environmental

For as long as I can remember it has always been traditional for festival goers to use cigarette lighters to bring a much needed glow to a night time performance.

Well no longer do we have to burn fuels to create that wonderful glow, not now that Nigel's Eco Store has kindly provided us with the Blow Light. This little device is being touted as the worlds smallest wind turbine and to give us the required festival glow it contains a couple of coloured LEDs.

So if you're planning on attending Live Earth, why not get yourself a Blow Light and bring some much needed environmentally friendly colour to those night time performances.


Live Earth after the concert update (10/07/07)