So I wonder if I can recycle clingfilm....?

One controversial subject we've all had to deal with in recent years is recycling. Obviously, the more you recycle, the less waste there is choking up your local landfill site, so all the better for the environment. All was well back in the good old days where you took your cans, bottles and newspapers down to the local bottle bank on a Sunday afternoon. People who wanted to recycle could recycle; they knew what they could recycle and they knew that if they didn't recycle they weren't going to get their bins attacked with bright yellow warning stickers by an over-zealous local council employee.

Nowadays, things are quite a bit more complicated. It seems as if most local authorities, in the UK, at least, are having a keeping-up-with-the-Jones' style competition to see which of them can get their constituents to recycle the most waste in the shortest amount of time. This is all very well, but it seems to have lead to what must be the most over-complicated recycling system in the entire western hemisphere. For example, at my parent's house in Essex, they are blessed with three huge wheelie bins, one green, one brown and one black. The brown bin is for kitchen waste, i.e. potato peelings, manky leftovers, things that have been trying to create an ecosystem at the back of the fridge and have been evicted. The green bin is for recyclables. The local council helpfully distributed a list of things which can and can't be recycled when the bins were first introduced, and since then it hasn't changed much as the list of things which could be recycled was already fairly extensive. All other waste, i.e. that which isn't harbouring anthrax spores or can't be turned into a Bag For Life, goes in the black bin. The one glaring fault of this system is that, for some unknown reason, glass can't be recycled. So, the institution of the Sunday afternoon bottle bank trip is safe, for now.

Where I live, the system is completely different. We have a brown bin, a black bin and a blue box (yes, a box.). The brown bin is for cardboard and garden waste only. The council says that this is because the contents of this bin are composted (I'm sorry, but can't kitchen waste be composted too?). The black bin is for "household waste", in other words, stuff that isn't cardboard or garden waste and can't be put into the blue box. The blue box is for recycling.

I have issues with this blue box. First off, it's a box. It might be emptied weekly, but, in our flat at least, it still ends up overflowing. Secondly, the list of items that can be placed in it is a constantly changing magical mystery that the council only occasionally deigns to inform us of. If you were to present me with a milk bottle made from a slightly obscure type of plastic right now, I wouldn't know which bin to put it in. When the blue box first arrived on our doorstep, we were presented with a list of things which could be put in it. I was even slightly annoyed at this, because to be honest the list was fairly basic, limited to items such as newspapers, magazines, coke bottles, glass bottles, etc. Next to this was a list of things we would be able to recycle at some point in the future, e.g. "Coming soon to most areas! Recycle empty milk and juice cartons from August onwards!". Why only most areas? And rumour has it that there are 31 whole days in August, so any chance of narrowing that down slightly? And aren't milk and juice cartons made of cardboard anyway, so why can't we just put them in the brown bin?! Anyway, you get my point. Present me with a scrunched ball of used clingfilm at my parent's house, and I can tell you right now that it belongs in the black bin. Present me with such an obscure item of rubbish here, and I'll tell you it's probably best to phone the council and ask.

Recently, the council managed to annoy me even more by dropping a letter through our door informing us that they were going to start charging fines for offences such as having a black bin which is too full for the lid to close properly, the assumption being, of course, that said person who is committing such an offence is not recycling enough of their waste (because it couldn't possibly be that a family of five produces more unrecyclable waste than an elderly couple). However, if you have a contentedly filled, fully closed black bin and an overflowing blue box, like we do most weeks, the bin men have been told to ignore any extra bits of recycling which might appear next to a blue box, and, in fact, this is another practise which could incur the council's wrath in the form of a fine. So what's the solution? It seems to me that the council are implying we dispose of our annoying extra rubbish through fly-tipping. Either that, or put it in the shed, wait for the rats to invade and then give the council's pest control men something to do.

The point of this acidic rant is that two different areas of the country have two completely different systems for getting rid of rubbish. It's pretty clear which one is the most efficient; but shouldn't such systems be uniformly the same across the country? This would put an end to the eternal confusion of most of the populace when it comes to being green about your bin. Or maybe that's just too easy.

xx

Noise? Trees??....huh??!

If this is what you're thinking right now, read on for an explanation.

So there I was sitting on a train the other day thinking how no-one told me before I decided to "go green" (i.e. do my bit to save the world from burning to a crisp via global warming etc.,) that this business of going green really isn't very easy at all. For example, the particular train I was on was running half an hour late. Not such a big deal? Well, in actual fact, that meant that I was going to miss a connection, which meant I'd have to sit around at Peterborough train station for forty minutes waiting for the next connecting train, which meant that my journey would end up being one hour and ten minutes longer than it should have been. Again, not that much of a big deal, you might think? Trust me, it's a pretty big deal when your journey is supposed to be eight hours long in the first place.

Now I'm a frequent commuter between Scotlandshire and Englandshire and I have to say unfortunately this wasn't the first time my journey had been thus disrupted. Time and again people have said to me, when I'm having a moan about the abysmality that is the East Coast train service, "Why don't you just fly?". The answer, plain and simple, is that getting on a plane to travel a relatively short distance, such as from regional capital to regional capital, is horrendously bad for the environment. I can't remember the precise technicalities, but I think that for a journey of this distance, a train emits around a third of the total carbon dioxide emissions that your average Mr Ryanair tin can (sorry, "aeroplane") would. This is why I will continue to endure savage delays and disrupted schedules on a near antique railway line, instead of getting on a plane and supersizing my carbon footprint. I wish, however, that before I got all environmentally concerned, someone had told me what a pain in the ass being green is.

So, to the title of this blog (sorry, I did promise an explanation, didn't I?). A lot of people might be familiar with the old riddle, "If a tree falls down in a forest, but no-one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?". The answer of most rational, scientifically-minded folk is yes, of course it makes a noise, because of sound waves travelling through the air and all that. A lot of climate change deniers, or even those who aren't so sure, when questioned why they think global warming isn't happening tend to come out with "Well, they say global warming's happening, but I don't notice the temperature going up" or, on a rainy summer's day, "So much for global warming, eh?". To these people, I ask a simple question. Just because you don't notice something happening, does it mean it isn't happening at all?

xx