Summer at last. A bit late but a nice vitamin D boost before the long haul through until next summer, which is due I believe in March. Not the best of weekends to make my hockey debut for this season with two games in two days. I’m still standing after yesterdays jog about on the wing but I suspect I will be suffering after today’s fixture. Luckily it’s the over 50’s cup so not too many younger than me this time.

A lot of rubbish in the news this week. There was one day when I think the boys and girls in charge thought we needed a bit of uplifting after months of doom and gloom with economic woes and cut backs so they threw us a couple of token bonuses. All I felt were shockingly negative and wide of the mark but pandering to a perceived public demand. Just as we are getting into the swing of living more sustainably and doing lots more recycling we get told that weekly mixed rubbish collections are going to be encouraged, relying on investment in clever sorting equipment to get the recycling done. First of all the equipment is not there at the moment to achieve this with completely mixed waste and how good is that equipment anyway, surely there will be huge cross contamination between all the different wastes that can go into the domestic bins. Then there is the negative message which comes across that we can go back to not thinking about where stuff comes from and where it goes. Sorting the recycling can have a very positive influence on attitudes over a long period, as annoying chores become inbuilt ‘feel good’ habits, at which point we can move on to the next stage whatever that might be.

Another rumour of change was the discussion on raising the speed limit which seems to go against most boring but sensible thinking. Although car development and safety has come a long way they are still heavy fast moving objects controlled by rather unpredictable organic life-forms on increasingly crowded roads. On those roads there are even bigger objects that are restricted to 56mph so the contrast in speeds will be even greater which looks to be asking for trouble. On top of that the loss in fuel efficiency is already big between 60 and 70, let alone at the higher speeds, so carbon output will increase instantly.

Then the BBC were warning one morning about the dangers of handling and eating veg that had been grown in the soil, potatoes and leeks getting particularly bad press, all due to a tenuous link to a very widespread, but not huge, e-coli food poisoning outbreak for which they could find no other explanation. They couldn’t pin anything down to a single farm, district or even county but ran out of other possible links. Now I don’t know much about medicine but if the soil around the whole country was widely infected and soil on veg was the real source of this outbreak why haven’t we seen it in all those other years when soil appeared on fresh veg? I hope no-one took this too seriously as veg growing is tough enough without silly rumours hitting the markets.

Now for the rubbish good news. Recycling for small businesses is getting more efficient and the result is falling costs to us. This week we reviewed our waste disposal choices and managed to simplify our sorting/storage choices by picking more comprehensive disposal packages now being offered to businesses in our area. Because we produce relatively small volumes of waste we have had to work quite hard to get our various different recyclable wastes taken away. This has involved several different contracts, lots of individual costs and plenty of inconvenience, but it would appear that there is now enough organisation in the waste industry for more inclusive flexible solutions to be offered at lower cost. This means that most of our recyclable waste can go to one contractor in one bin, in one collection, once a fortnight at far less than we were paying before. Not only that but we are now recycling so much of our waste that we are reducing our non-recyclable waste collections to once a fortnight rather than weekly which means another saving. We also found out that our mixed waste goes to energy generation (incinerator) rather than landfill which is not perfect but better.

Eco News

The dominant high pressure system has slowed up the turbines somewhat this week but we are hopeful that the autumn storms will return soon (every cloud has a silver lining). We heard from the SSE Feed in Tariff people this week letting us know that we would need to obtain an export meter number, a half hourly export meter and an export contract to be eligible for FIT’s. I informed them calmly that all this was already in place (all installed and contracted to SSE!) and we had been generating and metered since July 21st. Am I the only one that has any idea what is going on? They said they would check it out and get back to me. They must have sorted it out as the contract turned up the next day and we are now signed up and have sent in our first quarterly reading (end Sept), hurrah. Despite the generation slow down over the last week and a bit we still managed to generate more than we used, not just September but over the whole period since the switch on. So some of that carbon surplus can go towards balancing the next big carbon user our delivery system.

Have a good week.