What a waste

In previous Blogs I have talked about the problem of rubbish. In the UK we send more of our waste to landfill than any other country in Europe.

Personally, I work hard to avoid collecting packaging in the first place. No plastic bags, nor packaging or anything that can’t be reused or recycled. Thus in any normal month I will normally only need to put my own bin out, a normal sized wheelie Bin, once a month. I say normally as I do also add to my own rubbish the detritus that I collect from my local wood. It’s frustrating that so many people do leave their rubbish in the wood. I always bring my rubbish back with me. I also take the equivalent of a bin bag full of beer and drinks cans to the recycling point. These I should point out are collected from the wood not that I am drinking gallons of beer myself. While I would love to be drinking that much, I could never afford to become a real dipsomaniac, so I just practice.

However, the real point is that it is not difficult to ensure that I reduce the impact I have on the level of waste that goes into landfill. There is a real green benefit in reducing our waste as if our rubbish was only collected once a fortnight instead of once a week would halve the carbon-dioxide pollution emitted in one fail swoop.

Also we need to reuse and recycle much more. When I was a child everyone had their milk delivered in glass bottles that were reused time and time again. While the added weight would have added to the amount of carbon it took to deliver and collect them, it was and still is greener than buying from the supermarket, the way that milk is bought today.

The problem is that milk is now predominantly sold in plastic cartons. This means that the cartons are single use and as very little plastic is recycled, the saving in reduced carbon outputs from the lighter weight packaging, is more than lost by the carbon footprint from the manufacture and disposal of all this plastic. Further, as the supermarkets use centralised distribution, your milk will have travelled hundreds if not thousands of miles.

The problem of waste is a serious problem, while many people do recycle; locally there is a real problem, as our local council doesn’t recycle any cardboard or plastic. So I am pleased to see that three of the local authorities in the region are looking at ways of dealing with our waste.

Personally, I have always disagreed with many environmentalists, as I have always been an advocate for waste to energy solutions. While burning rubbish will produce pollution not just CO2 but all sorts of other harmful chemicals, but some waste has to be incinerated, therefore it must be better to use the energy this creates. Not only will waste to energy projects replace fossil fuels, but also as the waste is not shipped the great distances that fossil fuels are transported. Thus further reducing the carbon footprint.

In the past when trying to get people to take waste to energy seriously, opponents have always said that if we reduced the rubbish we produce then any facility producing energy would run out of fuel. Well if that ever happened then we would really have all turned green.

The BBC News Report

Stopping fly tipping

As my regular reader will know, back in the spring the Friends of Chopwell Wood had its annual spring clean. Its unfortunately true of any area of the countryside, that small minority just doesn’t care about the litter, rubbish or trash they leave behind when they visit an area of beauty. Thus the FoCW along with the Forestry Commission carry out an annual spring clean to try to remove some of the rubbish that has just been dumped in the wood. Rubbish removal is not just confined to then, the first time I met the Ranger she was collecting rubbish, and others do it on a regular basis, but on this day a concerted effort is made to clear out what is mostly discarded drinks can, bottles and sweet wrappers etc. However, the other problem is that of fly tipping. To explain for my overseas reader, that is where rubbish is illegally dumped, sometimes by individuals but often by companies that are trying to avoid paying landfill tax.

It is probably the greatest single gift that the Friends of Chopwell Wood provided for the Community was to pay for a series of barriers that are in place on the Fire Roads (Dirt or stone tracks that enable Fire fighters to access the woods), thus preventing the fly tipping that used to occur on a grand scale. It still happens, but nowhere near as much as it did in the past. But following the last Spring Clean, a suggestion was made by our Earth Skills supremeo, that we asked the local authority if a skip could be placed near a particular entrance to the wood, so that instead of people dumping rubbish in the wood, it could at least be skipped and help reduce the costs of clearing such items illegally dumped.

Because I was already in contact with some of the local councillors, I was asked to place the idea before them. Latter I discovered that this had been asked for several times in the past but to no avail. Therefore, I was not totally confident that it would happen. But with the persistence of naivety, eventually a compromise solution was reached, and a Skip has been placed in the park very close to the entrance to the wood were most of the rubbish dumping occurs.

It has been there for some time now, and while I wanted to report the good news sooner, there was some concern that we would have further incidents of the skip being set alight. It was the concerns about a pyromaniac setting the skip on fire that prevented it from being sited right at the entrance to the forest as any fire in the skip would have set the wood ablaze too.

The real test of if this has worked will be if there is less rubbish to collect next year. I doubt that it will reduce the volume but it will allow the volunteers to go further a field and expand the area of the forest we are able to make free of rubbish.

While I hope that I will not have to talk rubbish again, well I know that some think that’s all this mouse does, until every one takes responsibility for their waste, I guess that it will come up as a theme again.