Why collecting garden waste is ludicrous.

The residents of Kirklees are not happy. Their council is now going to charge for the collection of garden waste as part of a major cost cutting initiative. Householders will pay £1 for a bag and will have to buy at least 5 bags at once.

Household waste sites will still take the waste but in my view this is still not the correct solution.

Noreen Logan of the Huddersfield and District Pensioners' Organisation calls this "ludicrous". She states that this will hit the disabled and the elderly.

Aside from any obvious arguments along the lines of people not being so disabled that they can still do the gardening but when it comes to taking the waste to the household waste site they are incapacitated, having garden waste collected is ludicrous full stop.

Let's look at what is needed for people to have their garden waste collected.
1) A separate wheeled bin
2) Bin lorries to collect the garden waste
3) An industrial composting facility
4) Somewhere for the used compost to go.

The alternative is to compost at home.
1) Compost bins cost less than £20 via the council
2) The material does not need to be collected saving CO2 emissions, lorries and extra bins
3) There is no need to an industrial composting facility with the associated energy consumption and CO2 emissions, space needed and odour problems to those nearby
4) The compost is made at home and dug in at home. This completes the carbon cycle and can actually reduce CO2 rather than the collection method which only increases it.

Anyone serious about gardening should be composting at home - end of story. Kirklees have got it right. There is a clear financial incentive for home composting and their plans will save £250,000. Other councils are following suit and good for them.

So, Ms Logan, it is you who are ludicrous. Stop this crusade against what is best for the environment and get composting!

The United Bank of Carbon

The article below was posted on the United Bank of Carbon blog about the work Straight plc has done on carbon offsetting. This was to offset all 2010 emissions associated with our Steelybin product. The article was written by Jonathan Wild, former Chairman of Bettys and Taylors of Harrogate. Straight plc is delighted to be associated with this project and we thank Jonathan for promoting the work we are doing.

Congratulations to one of our project sponsors, Straight plc, which has recently enjoyed a couple of notable business successes. The Yorkshire-based recycling company has won a contract for the largest single order to date of its Steelybin containers. Straight will supply the London Waste and Recycling Board with over 1,000 Steelybin four wheel recycling containers as part of the Board’s recycling programme.

Straight also celebrated being awarded the right to display the Carbon Trust’s Carbon Reduction Label on all its polypropylene recycling containers, showing that it is committed to actively reducing the carbon footprint of its products over time. Products must have undergone an assessment of their total greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of their life cycle in order to display the label.

This business vision is complemented by Straight’s investment in a UBoC project in Uganda, Trees for Global Benefits, which links small holder farmers to the international carbon market, sequestering carbon through reforestation and agroforestry. The company has purchased 1,000 Plan Vivo Certificates (voluntary carbon credits) from Ecotrust.

 Straight’s partnership with the Ugandan rainforest project gives its environmental work a ‘completeness’ and demonstrates its leadership intent. As one of the UK’s leading suppliers of waste and recycling products, the company is committed to continuing to be at the forefront of innovation and setting the benchmark for others to follow. Straight’s success is another a great demonstration of how a commitment to the environment delivers real business benefits.

On seaweed

I was visited a few days ago by the inspirational Dr Craig Rose from the Seaweed Health Foundation. Seaweed is interesting stuff. I eat Japanese seaweed from time to time, there is one call arame which is really good.  Also, anyone who likes sushi will be eating nori which is the green wrapping.

Seaweed is not really the right word for these type of foods. It would be better to call them sea vegetables or even marine vegetables.

What is really interesting is that some species are very high in protein. WRAP advised that if we are to hit our carbon emissions targets, meat consumption needs to fall by 50-75% over the coming years. Innovative sources of protein will be important and I think that some seaweeds might just fit the bill. And with over 70% of the earth's surface covered by sea there should be no shortage of space to farm it.

But it doesn't stop there. A team at Sheffield Hallam University has been experimenting with a seaweed derived salt substitute. We all know that too much salt is bad for the blood pressure. This product is only 3.5% sodium but has all the taste. Seaweed it truly a wonder food.

And just when you thought it couldn't get any better, Dr Rose believes that seaweeds could be used to generate electricity through anaerobic digestion. Again, we are not short of space to farm the stuff.

I'm off now to think about seaweed-based vegeburgers. I think seaweed will play a big part in the future.

Visit www.seaweedhealthfoundation.org.uk - they even have recipes!

Marcus Brigstocke

Thank you to the lovely Louise Simmonds from 

MRW for sending me this great photo of the 

wonderful Marcus Brigstocke admiring my moustache.

My specs are KH by Eyewitness.

On moustaches

I attended the National Recycling Awards in London last week as a judge of the competition and a guest of the organisers, Materials Recycling Week. All of the judges had their pictures posted up on the video screens running through much of the evening and a good time was had by all.

We were entertained by the extremely amusing Marcus Brigstocke who was very funny, unless of course you were Scottish or French or came from Norfolk in which case you probably would not be quite so amused.

Marcus took to the stage looking wonderfully hirsute as you can see in the image below. He said that he had grown this moustache and beard for a part in The Railway Children and seeing as this was not his usual appearance, he had been very nervous about doing his standup act with this new look. Until he saw the picture of me, that is.



Marcus leapt from the stage and ran to my table to shake my hand telling me that my moustache was wonderful. There was a lot of laughter - I hope with me, and it was all a lot of fun.

I then met the inimitable Ranjit Singh Baxi who like me uses moustache wax. His is home made. He told me how he makes it but I am not sure if I am allowed to share the recipe as I think it is a family secret.



For the record, my own moustache now needs two coats of wax each day. For more years than I can remember I used the American Pinaud wax which was perfect. Then they changed the formula and it was not quite firm enough.














The only product I could find as a replacement that worked was called Hungarian Moustache Wax, bought from Bremen. And because the Germans don't take credit cards it is a real pain to get hold of. The only problem with the Hungarian product is that it is white.





So, I put a coat of the new Pinaud wax over the top to get the colour right.  The Pinaud wax comes with a free plastic comb which is pretty useless. They are also not recyclable.













So now you all know how the Straight moustache is manicured.
Those who were expecting a post about seaweed will have to wait a day or two longer.


For the truly devoted, there is a picture of Marcus and me on Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nra2011/5939148635/

Rupert Murdoch

Readers of my posts will note some positive comments made in recent weeks about Rupert Murdoch. These were written before the whole 'phone hacking scandal blew up. If it is demonstrated that he was involved in everything that has been alleged than clearly no one in their right mind would want to defend such a character.

Someone asked me today why Murdoch looks so smug in his recent photographs. I suppose if you are more powerful than any government minister and if you can control the police it must be one hell of a secret to keep to yourself. Maybe this now being common knowledge gives some sense of satisfaction?

I think I should now start to write about something else. My next post will be about seaweed.

Why supermarkets will continue to sell less and less

With ASDA and Tesco recently reporting falling sales, I thought about the afternoon in London in March 2007 when WRAP revealed its latest research. We were told that 1/3 of food purchased is thrown away - most of it good enough to eat.

This staggering figure, 8.3 million tonnes per year, is simply wasted.

At the time, I thought how this might pan out. There were two possible outcomes.
1) We all eat 1/3 more - consequences, we all get very fat and very ill
2) We all buy 1/3 less - consequences, massive reduction in revenues for retailers and everyone along the supply chain.

Since then WRAP has worked hard on educating the public into wasting less food. One study in Oxfordshire showed that people do respond to this  with an extra 4% of people committing to wasting much less food than they previously were.

I would like to think that supermarket sales are falling because people are wasting less. The collective belt-tightening we are all going through must surely help in this respect.

But how can anyone run a business knowing that 1/3 of what they sell goes straight in the bin? That really is criminal. Common sense needs to prevail and I am afraid when it does, supermarket sales might fall further still.

The Campaign for Real Recycling

Straight plc is a proud founder member of the Campaign for Real Recycling which wants government and local authorities to act urgently to improve the quality of materials collected for recycling in the UK. Real recycling is about maximising the economic, environmental and social benefits of recycling for everyone, from the local council tax payer to the global reprocessing industry.

The press release below was sent out today. We hope the Campaign is successful.

The Campaign for Real Recycling believes everyone involved in recycling will benefit from knowing where they stand with regard to the requirement of the revised Waste Framework Directive for ensuring separate collection of paper, plastic, glass and metal by 2015. CRR believes that it is better that all stakeholders establish together this year, rather than some time in the future, whether the UK's transposition of the rWFD is consistent and lawful, such that everyone can plan for the medium-to-long term.

Accordingly, an application by a representative group of CRR stakeholders for a judicial review of the Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011 was filed last week in the High Court. In the view of the claimants, these Regulations, which allow full comingling in collections, fail to transpose properly rWFD Article 11 and are therefore not a proper and legal transposition of the rWFD as a whole.

Mal Williams, Chair of CRR, said: “We have not requested this judicial review lightly. We understand the concerns of councils and their service providers. If we are to build an industry that is in step with our European counterparts, capable of maximising value from the UK's waste resources, this is an issue which needs resolving this year.

“Kerbside-sorted recycling collections produce the quality of material favoured by materials reprocessors in the UK and this approach is also consistent with obtaining best value for money. For reasons which will no doubt become apparent to everyone in due course, Defra has not taken the opportunity to enact regulation consistent with these facts or in our view with the wording of the WFD. Given that, obtaining clarity in this matter unfortunately requires us to resort to legal action, but that clarity is surely something to be welcomed by all parties in our industry.

“Regardless of the outcome, we hope that local authorities recognise the priority of obtaining high-quality recyclate and the potential for closing the loop with UK reprocessors. We urge all councils to work with this branch of the domestic recycling industry to drive standards.”