Rubbish and Recycling
Posted: Wed 8 March, 2006 Filed under: Domestic, Green, Thoughts 3 Comments »Over the last year or two I’ve got more and more into being Green, recycling as much as possible, and all that eco-friendly gubbins.
A lot of our recycling is collected by the local council, who have a bizarre timescale involving collecting the recycling once a fortnight, garden waste once a fortnight, and domestic household rubbish once a week. In light of this, it’s sometimes interesting for me to look at what’s being collected from other houses, and how much recycling waste they accumulate as opposed to just chucking it all in the bin to be collected weekly.
And the simple result is that most people do just chuck it all in the standard bin, despite the provision of recycling collection bins/tubs etc. Since we started doing the recycling properly, we normally chuck away one bag of “normal” domestic rubbish a week. That’s it. All the rest is recyclable.
I think that probably the best basic way to get people recycling in our area is to swap things around again. Collect the recycling every week, and the household rubbish fortnightly. That way you’re making it harder for people to just chuck it away, and instead making it “easier” to recycle instead.
Now I “just” need to figure out a way to persuade the local council that this is a better way to do things. What’re the chances?
Floating Wind Farms
Posted: Mon 7 November, 2005 Filed under: Green Leave a comment »I saw an interesting idea the other day, and kind of kept it over for while we were away. Sad, but true.
Anyway, this piece details the invention of a floating wind-turbine farm, which seems to be a pretty good idea. It means it doesn’t have to create/build the expensive moorings for the wind-turbines, and that they could be sited further away from the coast.
In addition, they could be moved should they need to (for example, in the US during hurricane season) and generally just seem to be a pretty good idea. The only thing I wonder about is how well they’d need to be anchored in order to not topple over at some point…
Windage
Posted: Wed 26 October, 2005 Filed under: Green 2 Comments »The BBC has a couple of interesting features at the moment about wind-power and green energy.
The first concerns whether having a wind-turbine at home can make financial sense as well as ecological sense. It’s something that we’ve been looking at, particularly for once we’ve moved – there’s no point spending *cough*thousand pounds on a wind-turbine etc. only to sod off twelve months later. I also think we’ll be making use of grants and so on from organisations such as Clear Skies, and taking advice from the British Wind Energy Association. There’s a lot of other stuff that’ll go into the process, and in that context the article makes for interesting reading.
The second piece details the story of one installation of a domestic wind-turbine, and the trials and tribulations of the process – again, something interesting for future reference.
Energy Transfer
Posted: Wed 12 October, 2005 Filed under: Green, Thoughts Leave a comment »Over the weekend, we looked at USwitch for some comparisons on changing our electricity supplier to one who uses renewable energy. It’s a bit of a complex thing really, but basically what happens is that the energy provider promises to provide the National Grid with “clean” energy (i.e. from a renewable source, such as hydroelectric, or wind-farm) for the amount that’s been used by us. Not perfect, but better than nowt.
In the end we’ve changed over to Npower‘s Juice programme, which uses power generated at the North Hoyle wind farm.
It’s going to be interesting seeing how the transfer goes etc., but it stands to save us about £50 over the year, as well as being part of our “Green” objectives…
Recycling
Posted: Fri 7 October, 2005 Filed under: Domestic, General, Green 1 Comment »Over the course of this year, I’ve got more and more into recycling and general Green stuff. I’ve always been into it to a degree, but I found that while living in Manchester it was something that was seriously difficult to do, as there were no decent local recycling banks, and the paper-recycling collection was – well, sporadic, to say the least. In fact, there was little to no chance to recycle stuff while I lived there – something I hope has changed a bit now, but while I was there it was definitely difficult to do.
Since moving to Bracknell though, it’s become a lot easier. First of all, the council actually do a regular collection of recyclable stuff, and just that simple fact makes it all a lot easier. We can get rid of all our cardboard, paper, and plastics in this way, and they collect once a fortnight. On the alternate weeks, they do a “garden waste” collection, which goes off to be composted – although they charge for the bags in which to put the waste, which always strikes me as a bit of a scam, considering the amount we’re already paying for council tax, which includes rubbish collection. Still, we don’t use that one that much, as most of our garden waste goes back on the compost heap anyway.
Herself is also a fairly avid recycler and so on, so the garden already had a serious compost heap (well, one of the plastic compost bins, which then ended up being two bins as one was always full, and has now become a proper heap in its own container) where most of the garden waste and raw food waste went (veg peelings and the like) and the basic stuff was already in place, containers for the plastics, papers, etc., so in that way as well it’s now a lot easier to do the recycling stuff than before.
Of late, we’ve also been watching the BBC series “No Waste Like Home“, which has made for interesting viewing, and helped to show just how much people in general chuck away that can be recycled.
As a result, we’ve also just bought a wormery from a company called Wiggly Wigglers (I swear I’m not making this up) which will also help on breaking down food waste (both cooked and raw) into decent compost. We set it up last night, and so far it’s all looking pretty good.
I’m sure there’ll be more posts about this kind of thing as time goes on, so I’m also going to add in a new category, just titled “Green”.