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the 5p charge on plastic carrier bags has reduced their use by 85%. a step forward. BK are stopping making plastic toys with kids meals. McD. will soon follow. it's now down to pressurise the big concerns into cutting down on all the unnecessary packaging. and educating the masses into recycling, and applying heavy fines for dumping ( e.g.1 crisp packet out of car window = £50 spot fine if caught), and I'll promise not to chuck my smoke ends out at the traffic lights.
Local Councils could make a start by actually recycling all that 'recycling' that they collect !! Also... what about have 10p deposit on plastic bottles ??
 
Local Councils could make a start by actually recycling all that 'recycling' that they collect !! Also... what about have 10p deposit on plastic bottles ??
our local waste site boasts that it recycles 80% of all rubbish received. metals get sorted and sent for scrap, wood, cardboard ,plastic etc. , all sorted and recycled wherever possible.
 
our local waste site boasts that it recycles 80% of all rubbish received. metals get sorted and sent for scrap, wood, cardboard ,plastic etc. , all sorted and recycled wherever possible.
You're lucky... many councils try not to collect it... as it costs them too much money to recycle it... Swindon is one. Also, there's a scam with 'recycling certificates' whereby a council pays someone (normally foreign) to recycle waste... they are given a 'certificate' to prove it will be recycled... but it never is... is either landfilled/burnt/dumped somewhere. Of course, this is all foreign so totally outside of UK jurisdiction.
 
Our council stopped recycling 'fly away' plastic last year, cling film, crisp packets etc. My landfill bin, which I'd previously only used to put out 50% of the time, goes out every collection full of the stuff.

We do make an effort to avoid this plastic, but it comes with so much packaging.

Place where I work; we have recycle bins and landfill bins. The whole lot gets taken away and incinerated.
 
We have a recycle bin and a main waste bin, The neighbouring council has about 7 different bins for different materials and their recycle rate is low because people can't be bothered to sort it. I do admit 7 containers is a bit much..
 
It does vary greatly, and suppose some properties don’t have the space for some many bins.

We used to have several different bins, which I strictly adhered to. Until our council sourced a different contractor, and I noticed my carefully sorted recycling, being chucked into the same truck!

Now have a bin for recycling, green waste bin, glass, food waste and landfill.
 
Wind power is fine - provided you can work with it's characteristics. I'm also fine with people having "green" lecky supplies - but only if their supplies turn off when there's not enough green lecky. As it is, there is absolutely no such thing as a green tariff - all the supposedly green tariffs do is charge more for exactly the same thing the rest of us get. Load of greenwash.
As for nuclear, it's essential if we aren't to end up back in caves. As above, renewables aren't much help when they aren't producing. Solar doesn't work at night, wind suffers from sometimes widespread and prolonged calm periods. As an example, consider the calm spell in Dec 2010 - a couple of weeks (so forget about storage to carry you over) of very cold weather (so high demand for heating) with short days (minimal solar production) and virtually no wind over a large area. Pretty well reliant on nuclear, coal, and gas to keep the lights on.
Years ago in one of my professional journals there was an article on how there'd been (back in the 90, 80 or even earlier) a prolonged calm over much of northern Europe which lasted for something like 10 days. More recently I read a study where someone correlated wind output data from multiple EU countries and found (IIRC) several days where wind output was "very little" across those countries. So forget about the "we can buy it in via more interconnectors" arguments as well.

It must also be taken into account that the waste problem could be a lot less of an issue than it is. A bit part of the problem is that a relatively small group of misinformed people have created an environment requiring things be done in a sub optimal way. Handling of highly active waste could be reduced by simply waiting for it to be less active, and quantities could be significantly reduced by using it as fuel in fast breeder reactors.
There is a lot of work going into small modular reactor systems. Can be made inherently or intrinsically safe, and being small and modular reduces the capital cost and risk - all the things that makes our current "very big" reactor plants so expensive.
 
Don't know if anybody noticed this, but Lou (bless her) had added a poll to the thread, and got excited about it after working out how to do it. And she set the question to 'Are you for or against...' and the options were 'Yes' or 'No' lol

And people had voted for one or the other too.

I changed the poll options and question to read properly :D
 
Wind power is fine - provided you can work with it's characteristics. I'm also fine with people having "green" lecky supplies - but only if their supplies turn off when there's not enough green lecky. As it is, there is absolutely no such thing as a green tariff - all the supposedly green tariffs do is charge more for exactly the same thing the rest of us get. Load of greenwash.
As for nuclear, it's essential if we aren't to end up back in caves. As above, renewables aren't much help when they aren't producing. Solar doesn't work at night, wind suffers from sometimes widespread and prolonged calm periods. As an example, consider the calm spell in Dec 2010 - a couple of weeks (so forget about storage to carry you over) of very cold weather (so high demand for heating) with short days (minimal solar production) and virtually no wind over a large area. Pretty well reliant on nuclear, coal, and gas to keep the lights on.

Some countries e.g. Norway produce their electricity from renewable sources. Given they have lots of rivers & streams filling fjords, it shows it can be done. IMO we use fossil fuels & nuclear 'cos its the easier option.

At some point fossil fuels will be exhausted, unless we've killed off the planet by then.
 
Don't know if anybody noticed this, but Lou (bless her) had added a poll to the thread, and got excited about it after working out how to do it. And she set the question to 'Are you for or against...' and the options were 'Yes' or 'No' lol

And people had voted for one or the other too.

I changed the poll options and question to read properly :D
You didn't have to tell everyone lol
 
Some countries e.g. Norway produce their electricity from renewable sources. Given they have lots of rivers & streams filling fjords, it shows it can be done.
Key thing there is is the "they have lots of rivers & streams filling fjords" bit. They also have much higher terrain than we have, making the energy on those streams and rivers much higher. And I think you'll find that they are much more sparsely populated than we are.
We actually have few good sites for hydro - and most of them already have schemes running on them. The non-pumped ones suffer from running out of water in dry spells, the pumped ones act like big batteries and rely on something else low-carbon (eg nuclear) to "charge" them.
So we have a much higher demand, and far fewer (and lower grade) sites available - hence we don't have much usable hydro capacity.
IMO we use fossil fuels & nuclear 'cos its the easier option.
Only in part - we use them because they work and are reliable. Nuclear can not be described as "easier" when you see the hurdles that have to be jumped to get a new plant off the drawing board.
At some point fossil fuels will be exhausted, unless we've killed off the planet by then.
People keep saying that, but of course, as stuff get "rarer" and the price rises, it then becomes cost effective to pull more stuff out of the ground. And there's a heck of a lot left down there yet.
 
People keep saying that, but of course, as stuff get "rarer" and the price rises, it then becomes cost effective to pull more stuff out of the ground. And there's a heck of a lot left down there yet.
It's not what's down there. It's what we're doing with it. Burning it and releasing the CO2.

We don't even know what's beyond even a onion peels worth of the planet in the grand scheme of things.

But nothing disappears fully. We convert one energy to another. So it's in the atmosphere.

Eventually, too much for us to live with as humans unless we have natural selection to evolve.

And we're developing new tech and burning more fossil fuels at a rate faster than we are evolving naturally.

That's the issue.

It's not how much it is to mine. And how much is there.
 

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