Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE)

While this article probably would have been more relevant had I got round to posting it when WEEE came in, I still think it's important to point out what's currently happening regarding the new directive and how it effects people.

WEEE, which stands for Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment, is a directive brought in by the government to regulate the disposal of household and industrial electrical equipment. Basically it moves the responsibility of recycling and disposing of products from the consumer to the manufactures and resellers. There are various things that both manufactures and resellers have to do to be compliant with the new regulations, one of which that will be interesting to most of you is the "in store take back" schemes.

The WEEE directive requires resellers of electronic equipment to provide a free service to its customers allowing them to recycle their old equipment when they purchase a new equivalent. So now if you go and buy a new washing machine or TV or anything else electronic the people you buy it from are supposed to provide you with the ability to recycle the unit you are replacing free of charge.

As I said at the start of the article this post is a little late, the WEEE directive actually came into force on the 1st of July 2007 and from what I can see very little has been said about it. I imagine this probably has something to do with the fact that it's going to cost companies a fortune to recycle all of the equipment to the required level. If you go to any of the major high street electronic retailers websites they do have information about the scheme, however on pretty much every site I went to, it was very well hidden indeed. The WEEE directive states that the retailers have to provide full information to their customers in store about how to recycle their waste goods, I haven't been to any major electrical retailers lately but I have an idea that the relevant information probably isn't as easy to come by as it should be. Maybe that could be a little experiment for a future post.

If you've had any experience taking advantage of the WEEE directive then let me know. It would be nice to know if it actually works as smoothly as it sounds like it should.

For more information on the scheme and how it works follow this link to the governments NetRegs website.

How cycling saves me over £1800 a year and nearly 2 tonnes of CO2

A few weeks ago I posted a little information about the first 7 months of cycling to work. A few days later mOnkeymafia posted a very interesting comment querying how much money and CO2 I'd actually saved since making the move to cycling to work. Well ladies and gentlemen here are the details.

I used to mostly use my car for work, on the odd occasion I'd use it for going to see someone or something like that, but the majority of the miles I racked up are now replaced by cycling. I'd say at a rough estimate it was around 6000 miles a year give or take.

Now lets deal with the green side of things first. The car I had output roughly 180g/km of CO2 you can check on the vca car fuel database to see what your car outputs if you don't already know. So lets do the calculations.

6000 miles = 9700 km if I round up.

9700 km * 180 g/km = 1746000 g/km

Do a bit of conversion of units and that comes to roughly 1.75 tonnes of CO2

So by replacing my car journey to work with cycling I'm reducing the amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere by 1.75 tonnes. It might not sound a lot, but if everyone could do the same it would soon make a difference.

Now onto the money side of things.

To do my 6000 miles a year to and from work it was costing me about £60 a month in petrol, so if we start with that I'm already saving myself £720 a year by not having to buy fuel.

Next onto insurance, I was paying roughly £59 a month for my insurance (11 monthly payments), now this might be a lot higher than some people and a lot lower than others but in my case it means I'm now saving £650 a year on that.

Just to keep a running total we're currently at £1370.

Next we have to keep that car running in tip top condition, that means servicing. While I had my car it was serviced twice at registered dealers which cost around £250 each time. As well as servicing there is MOT and tyres. I won't count tyres here as 6000 miles isn't really that far and a good set of tyres should be able to last that easily. MOTs however are about £45.

Now our running total is £1665

Then on top of all of that we have tax, which in my case was £165 a year.

So our grand total is £1830 a year or about £152 a month.

I realise that not everyone lives within cycling distance of where they work, but if you do why not think about giving up your car and cycling to work.

Just an extra note for those who were wondering, yes my girlfriend does have a car, however I only ever use it when we are going places together, so in general I've managed quite well with everyday life without having my own car.