Will Copenhagen change your life?

My job, what I am paid to do, is to promote the idea of responsible waste management to businesses and people in Scotland on behalf of an independent environmental charity (Keep Scotland Beautiful).

You might therefore reasonably think that I am pretty one-sided when it comes to environmental issues and see Copenhagen (aka COP15 – the global conference on climate change currently underway involving 192 nations) as the last great hope for our survival. Not necessarily so, dear reader, for I was brought up to have an open, questioning mind and I too look at newspapers, read articles on the internet, watch television documentaries and I listen to the radio so know that the debate about whether we should be bothering to do anything about climate change, and whether climate change itself is even happening, remains unresolved as far as a lot of people are concerned.

Click to visit the official conference website

Indeed a recent poll (PDF) as reported in The Times under the headline “Global warming is not our fault” suggests that only 41% of people in the UK “accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made.”

This means that 59% of people are unconvinced. Some might have an inkling that something is amiss but they aren’t yet willing to state confidently that they believe man-made global warming needs to be sorted out.

And little wonder. For every message we hear about the importance of reducing energy, water and waste is a potentially conflicting message about the benefits of consumption (for the economy, for jobs, for the country) coupled with a body of scepticism including well-known figures who are quite happy to stand up in public and deny man-made global warming because they believe the science is flawed.

What is an individual person trying to go about their daily life supposed to think? Should we buy new products to help the economy or should we get things repaired or buy second-hand to help the environment? Should we spend time recycling our household or business waste or should we just send it to landfill and let nature take its course? Should we spend extra on train travel or continue to drive? These are real life decisions facing people up and down the country and the combined effect of all these decisions very broadly places each of us into one of several categories:

1. People who believe the climate is changing as a result of human activity and are actively trying to reduce their own impact.
2. People who believe the climate is changing as a result of human activity but don’t think individual actions can make that much difference and will wait to see what Government and policy makers decide before acting.
3. People who believe the climate is changing as a result of human activity but think that trying to resist it is futile in the face of big business determined to maintain economic growth.
4. People who aren’t sure about climate change and want to see more data to show the truth one way or the other but feel, on balance, that trying to reduce energy, waste and water is probably the best thing to do for the long-term survival of our species.
5. People who believe that climate change is a distraction from other more pressing issues such as population growth, peak oil, pollution, depletion of raw materials, war, famine etc.
6. People who do not believe the climate can change as a result of human activities (such as releasing CO2 into the atmosphere) and are ambivalent about the action on climate change.
7. People who do not believe the climate can change as a result of human activities and think that climate change is a conspiracy to raise taxes and seek global domination.

The truth is that some of us will fall neatly into these categories and others will fall between the gaps or find our viewpoint shifting depending on who we’re listening to at any given moment. What is certain is that it is difficult for people on the ground, “ordinary” members of the public, to know what is right.

My own perspective is that we need to concentrate on facts. Hard evidence should guide our behaviour, not rumour or supposition. Is global warming happening? Is it directly linked to CO2 emissions? One useful source of information I found on the subject is a website called Skeptical Science. I should say from the outset that it tends to support the view that climate change is real and that we are causing it, but it also considers evidence to the contrary. It isn’t afraid to deal with issues such as the recent hacked emails and the potential for this to undermine the science. Other articles on the website look at the “hockey stick” debate which, briefly, is a controversy over a graph produced showing recent dramatic rises in temperature which used different sources of data to plot points on the graph. Some have argued that the sources of the data showing before and after the dramatic rise are so different as to render the whole thing inaccurate. Anyway, I find the website useful and hope you do too. It’s certainly not my only source of such information but it’s consistently thorough.

Back to the point, will the Copenhagen conference change your life? The short answer is: “it already has”. Government policy makes a real difference to people’s lives. In Scotland we have already committed, in the Climate Change Act, to an 80% reduction in CO2 by 2050. That’s massive! And it goes further than any global agreement currently in place. In fact it will be amazing if Copenhagen results in anything like that kind of agreement. But Scotland is doing it anyway. That is bold leadership and businesses and households in Scotland will be actively involved in reaching those goals. So your life will change, if it hasn’t already. But is change always bad? Scotland has tremendous renewable energy potential in tide, wind and wave power. It also has limited space for landfill so, climate change or not, placing all our rubbish in holes in the ground isn’t really a long-term solution.

Which brings me on to the other point I wanted to make, it’s not just global warming (whether or not that has been proven) that should impact on our decisions about how we act. There are a multitude of potential effects on our wider environment as a result of things we do. On a basic level it is anti-social to throw litter away because it is unsightly and someone has to clear it up. So it’s not always the environment that dictates our actions. That is why Keep Scotland Beautiful has such an important job to do. Even if we discover tomorrow that CO2 is completely irrelevant to the temperature of the Earth (roughly zero% chance of that happening) it doesn’t mean that power stations don’t pollute the air and make it less safe for nearby residents. It doesn’t mean that the raw materials used to make the products we use everyday aren’t going to eventually run out if we continue to send them to landfill. It doesn’t mean that rubbish from Scotland doesn’t end up in the massive floating plastic island in the pacific which leaches chemicals into the eco-system.

Being green isn’t necessarily about being fixated on one issue. It’s about wanting to preserve the good things that we have so future generations can continue to enjoy them. Pure and simple.

Just looking at the profile of the event in Copenhagen and how many column inches have been written shows how the environmental agenda has been brought to the forefront of people’s minds. And whatever we conclude about the effect of our activities on the wider environment we cannot dispute the importance of at least having the debate. On a practical level it matters hugely that 192 nations are sitting down and having discussions. It will be fascinating to see what they decide.

Christmas Time

What is Christmas? For children it’s a time of magic and mystery with special stories, songs and food which imbue a warm, safe feeling on long winter nights. For some it’s a time to put aside the everyday routine of life and come together with friends and family to reflect and share. For others it’s bound up in religious celebration. Whoever you are and whatever your reason for celebrating Christmas there are many things you will probably find yourself doing more than usual over the next four weeks as we approach the end of another decade.

Some potential Christmas activities

Eating, drinking, meeting people, watching films, seeing your family, relaxing, taking time off work, travelling, going on wintery walks, feeling bloated, cursing the oven, celebrating, reflecting, nursing a sore head, reading to children, putting a tree up, sending cards, receiving cards, wrapping gifts, shopping, feeling all warm and fuzzy as you hear the sounds of carol singers in the distance, lighting fires, listening to music, using the internet, cooking, making mulled wine, writing lists, buying magazines, getting to know your butcher, trying to work out how to sit twelve people round a table built for eight, calling people on the phone, texting, emailing, instant messaging, social networking, feeling overwhelmed by the number of ways people can get in touch with you, feeling poor, using credit cards, worrying about money, hoping for a bright new year, wondering why no one has invented a way to wrap presents without getting sellotape all over the furniture, thinking about those less fortunate in countries where Christmas means being hot and hungry, giving to charity, buying a santa hat, working out what to wear at the work Christmas party, going to the pub, buying gloves, bringing decorations down from the attic/wardrobe, stringing up cards and watching them fall down again, tying tinsel round the cat’s collar, getting small gifts for stockings, hoping that crazy uncle Fred doesn’t drink too much again, wearing slippers, having long baths, cracking nuts, watching snow fall, building snowmen with humorous appendages, jumping for joy when you hear school is closed for the day, considering emmigration as a real possibility, being unable to remember the name of people you bump into at parties, trying to restrain yourself when it comes to food and drink consumption, feeling fat and guilty, getting annoyed in queues but not doing anything when someone clearly queue jumps, ice-skating (aka bum-skating), feeling magical as you look at Christmas lights in the city, enjoying the warmth of another as you settle down for a cosy night in, eating leftovers, getting all tangled with wires as you try to have a family game round the games console, remembering why other family members don’t play games consoles, playing Monopoly, watching as your little Sister storms upstairs because she couldn’t afford Park Lane, pulling crackers, wearing silly hats, thinking about making bread/cranberry sauce and then buying it from M&S as usual, ordering a massive bird and wondering how to cook it so it doesn’t go all dry, polishing the champagne flutes and realising you only have three left after the last New Year’s eve party, putting a santa hat on the dog, wearing wellies unnecessarily to collect logs from the garden, filling the room with smoke as you realise wet logs don’t burn well, trying spiced flavours of tea and remembering why you normally drink regular, thinking about how Grandma will cope, worrying about getting older, taking multivitamins to fend off seasonal flu, getting ill on Christmas Eve just in time to miss all the fun, highlighting the best programmes in the Radio Times, finding your highlights crossed out by other members of the family who prefer stupid films, renting Christmassy DVDs, eating mixed nuts and raisins, trying to counteract all the nuts with satsumas, eating seafood at breakfast, arguing about when to open presents, leaving the cooking to Mum, stretching your foot out on Christmas morning and feeling the excitement as your foots hits something, tearing off the wrapping as you discover what Santa brought, playing with new things, snoozing on the sofa, going to church, singing and finally wanting to do it all again in a year’s time.

With all this activity there is bound to be some waste. Whether it be from the food we cook or the presents we give. Our website offers some hints and tips on how to combat some of this waste on a special Christmas hints and tips page.

We also have a Waste Aware Advent Calendar with daily tips including:

1. Avoid Christmas food and gifts with excess packaging. Buy food, such as fruit and vegetables, loose. Try to buy packaging that you can recycle locally.
2. Refuse any clothes hangers that you don’t need when you buy new clothes. Some stores may be able to reuse or recycle their old hangers.
3. Choose reusable glasses, crockery and cutlery for parties, instead of disposable alternatives that generate more waste.
4. Use a compost bin or food waste digester to compost your green waste, such as fruit and vegetable peelings, at home.
5. Choose mechanical toys as Christmas presents to reduce waste from batteries. Find charity and toy shops in your telephone directory or online.
6. Choose ‘low’ or ‘no’ waste presents such as gift vouchers and gift experiences as alternatives to large, packaged presents.
7. Hire party accessories, such as drinking glasses, instead of buying brand new. Find hire companies in your telephone directory or online.

Can we make it? Yes we can!

The latest set of recycling/composting figures from the veritable genii at SEPA are in and it’s good news. Rates have increased again and the rolling year-on-year stats (PDF) show the percentage of waste diverted from landfill is more than 35.2% with the latest quarterly figure by itself at 38.7%.

All of Scotland can be this beautiful

Considering we still have a year to go until the final deadline for reaching our ambitious targets of 40% across Scotland by the end of 2010 we must all begin to feel more confident that we can do it. That’s provided we continue to improve at slightly more than the current rate, which is certainly not a given.

Aside from making sure you recycle everything you possibly can (including from the bins in your bath and bedrooms!) another way to really help Scotland reach its target is by choosing products with less packaging and making sure any packaging you do end up with is recyclable. Many products in the UK now have labels which show what can and can’t be recycled by local authorities so have a quick check before you buy.

Choosing recyclable packaging helps by reducing that which has to end up in landfill. Reducing packaging in the first place helps because if we can reduce the overall level of waste produced in Scotland (known as waste arisings) then we will almost certainly end up with a higher proportion of waste recycled. Think of it this way:

You don’t like brussels sprouts. Fair enough. But it’s Christmas and your parents have produced a great spread with succulent turkey, crispy roast potatoes, bread sauce, stuffing and all the other trimmings including a bowl filled with the dreaded sprout. Your Dad tells you that this year he’s made a special effort to make the sprouts delicious and that he will be offended if you don’t at least try them. You eventually relent and offer to eat 40% of the sprouts on your plate to make him happy. He seems satisfied with this and starts merrily pouring the wine. When the sprout bowl comes round you have a decision to make: how many sprouts do you put on your plate? The more you put on, the more you have to eat, even though the percentage of sprouts you will have to eat stays the same. In the end you work out that the best thing for you and your Dad is to put 5 sprouts on the plate and eat 2 of them. Job done. The key thing is that you were in control and worked out that reducing the overall quantity of sprouts on your plate also reduced how much you had to eat to keep Dad happy. And that’s exactly what we can do with our waste in Scotland. Nothing is determined and every single one of us holds the key to unlocking our potential.

Get help recycling in your local area from our main Waste Aware Scotland website.

This finite world

Whichever way we look at it the world is steadfastly finite: there are clear limits in terms of the space and resources available. Unfortunately us humans have, until now, ignored this fundamental physical constraint and instead treated the Earth as if it was infinite. This may have been understandable at a time when people didn’t know if the world was flat or round and their nearest neighbours were a week away by horse and cart. Now we are part of a global village yet our activities, from continuing to inhabit every viable corner of the planet to plundering whatever materials it contains, would suggest we don’t even understand what that means. We continue to use both space and resource with abandon, like a hungry dog working out how to open the fridge when no one is home. Except the dog is pregnant, and no one is ever coming home.

What did they know about global warming?

In reality we have it a bit easier than the pregnant abandoned dog. We have brains that allow us to build shelter and sow seeds for food. But even our intellect and dexterity don’t change the fact that almost everything we see around us will eventually run out, unless we take away less than we leave in or find a renewable alternative. We simply cannot sustain an ever-increasing number of people with a fixed supply of land and non-renewable materials. It’s mathematically impossible.

Presuming we accept that the future survival of our species is a good thing we therefore have a responsibility to manage what we have available to us in order that future generations can make use of it so that they can, in turn, ensure that future future generations can use it and so on until the Earth is absorbed by the expanding Sun in about 500 billion years by which time we may have worked out how Dr Who does his thing and colonised other worlds. That’s pretty much the best case scenario. In the meantime we have to figure out how to avoid imploding like a water balloon meeting a bullet.

How long do we have to react?

We are at crunch time in 2009 because we now know not only that our activities are generally unsustainable (i.e. we collectively use far more energy and materials than we recover) but also that, for the very first time in human history, our actions are likely to cause irreversible damage to our environment within our lifetime. We can proudly proclaim that we are the first generation of humans to face the very real prospect of reaching old age faced with the certain knowledge that our behaviour and activities sped up the demise of our species. Of course our children won’t blame us individually, they won’t say “Daddy why did you stand by and let that happen” (unless we happen to be a world leader) but they will blame us collectively. We will die in the shame of having failed in the biggest task we faced.

It needn’t end that way. We may just manage to turn it around and collectively agree that we do need to change at least some of our ways if our children and grandchildren are to prosper and thrive on the Earth. We may enter an “age of sustainability” where a maximum impact quota system limits what people and businesses can get up to. Our leaders may step up to the task and provide solutions to our need for work, food and shelter and our desire for travel, entertainment and luxury without creating the ever-increasing problems associated with environmental damage. In Scotland the environment is at the top of the Scottish Government’s agenda, and long may it stay that way but that doesn’t mean we don’t face enormous challenges.

The difficulty with finding a workable solution to the problems of climate change and sustainability is that the successful choice is unlikely to be a single-faceted, big-ticket item. No single measure will create sustainability and solve the environmental problems we face. This presents a problem in itself because humans love simple solutions to difficult problems. Just look at the history of invention:

Problem	Solution
It takes ages to get anywhere.	The Wheel
Evenings are boring.	The TV
I want to communicate with people hundreds of miles away.	The Phone
I don’t want to get swine flu/avian flu.	A Vaccine
I want to know what Simon Cowell had for breakfast.	The Internet
I want to know how the world began.	Hadron Collider
The world is warming exponentially.	Gulp

Some big-ticket solutions have been suggested, particularly with regards to the warming effects of climate change. For example Geoengineering which would involve inventing something to cool the planet to roughly the same degree as it is being warmed by our greenhouse gas emissions (predicted to be roughly 5 degrees over this century).

Volcano dust cools the earth. Fact.

How do you achieve this? One apparently workable solution among the suggestions offered is to simply reflect sunlight away from the Earth either by suspending mirrors in space or, more cheaply, by distributing sunlight repelling particles in the upper atmosphere (by plane). Great huh? Well it is an innovative, relatively simple solution and it is comparatively cheap but this article shows that there is a fairly major downside: reflecting sunlight would impact on the water-cycle of the earth and may make fresh water more scarce. This is because the water cycle is more readily affected by lack of sunlight than by rising temperatures. So you could effectively cool the Earth but make it drier. Then you would need another solution to combat the dryness. Then another to combat the side effects of that. And another and another. Before long the Earth would resemble a giant madcap laboratory where all our human constructions were maintained by one central computer to keep everything in check. A bit like an enormous life support machine. Don’t mention power cuts. Just imagine tabloid coverage of the “trillenium bug”!

Surely it is better for us to at least try and pursue a low-tech, low-energy, low waste solution whereby we minimise our impact at a personal, community, national and international level through agreements, regulations and general common sense? If each of us makes small reductions in our resource use each year we can become sustainable consumers which will result in a reduction in our waste output to landfill and the associated impacts on our environment which that entails. We could enter a virtuous rather than vicious circle, whereby we keep improving until we reach a balanced equilibrium. Is that possible?

Who’s to blame for rubbish on beaches?

Most beaches in Scotland are clean and tidy places which we can enjoy to the full, safe in the knowledge that they’re being looked after properly. You have to be of a certain disposition to swim in the sea of course, but that’s to do with the temperature rather than the quality of the water.

What are you thinking?!

Despite the general absence of rubbish, pollution and dead wildlife on our beaches there will always be the odd occasion when standards slip and most of us will have stumbled across an ice lolly wrapper or a tipped-up bin as we trek across the expanses of sand that nature has so kindly provided. The problem with these isolated incidents is the “accumulation effect”: it all adds up. If left unchecked it can become a serious problem, not least because, once rubbish enters the sea, it becomes extremely difficult to clean up and joins the international mass of rubbish which is causing serious problems.

I had always tended to assume that beach litter was caused by three things:

1. Idiocy/ignorance such as when someone casually throws rubbish to the ground, glad that it is no longer on their person and unwilling to think about for a second longer.
2. Carelessness such as when someone places a light-weight piece of rubbish on top of a bin in a windy area, forgetting that the merest gust will launch their rubbish into the air and blow it around.
3. Random acts of nature such as mini tornadoes which whip bins into the air and distribute the rubbish across a wide area. Also, seagulls.

It might be an idea to start running...

Points 1 and 2 above are connected to human behaviour and reflect how we, as citizens, act towards our environment and those around us. Fortunately these negative examples are relatively few and far between and there are plenty of positive examples of beach clean ups etc. to combat them. What had not occured to me (at least until it was highlighted recently) was that there was another “creator” of rubbish in a strong position to do something about it: the packaging industry and in particular the plastics industry.

Funnily enough it was the plastics industry itself that brought the issue to my attention, through their “Plastics 2020 challenge” website and a recent ComRes survey, which was picked up in an article for Packaging News.

As it turns out, the largest group of people surveyed (38%) blamed individuals and only 13% blamed the industry which tends to show that the end user is held responsible by the public, rather than the original producer. In terms of beach litter, the shipping industry took a sizable hit with 10% of respondents blaming them most with sewage and waste companies receiving 13%.

It’s a fairly wide spread of results and shows that people, as a whole, are aware that beach litter comes from different sources. But we still blame ourselves, and that’s probably about right. Until we get 100% degradable packaging (which breaks down into 100% safe micro-particles) we are going to have to accept responsibility for taking our litter home and recycling it.

Not much litter on Harris judging by this...

Perhaps, if everyone who does contribute to the problem of litter can become a little more active in trying to find a solution, we might have rubbish free beaches by 2020.

Update:

To discover the location of award beaches (those which have been proven to be well managed and have good recycling or refuse facilities) please visit www.keepscotlandtidy.org/coastal. Keep Scotland Tidy is part of Keep Scotland Beautiful (as are we) and provides a range of useful information including about the bathing water litter grant scheme for community groups organising clean ups and facts about marine and coastal litter – sources, types etc.

We don’t need to save the Earth

In the latter part of this soon-to-be-over decade we have been bombarded with messages about saving the Earth, looking after the environment, protecting the planet etc. Every day it seems someone wants to tell us that something we have been merrily doing for years is in fact the wrong thing to do and that, if we continue our harmful behaviour, we will slowly but surely destroy the world we live on. The unfortunate thing about all these messages is that the core element – regarding the future of the planet – isn’t actually true. In fact the Earth, as in the place we all live, isn’t in any danger whatsoever, at least not for the next few billion years.

It'll be fine.

Whatever is done by humans, from nuclear bombs to global warming, will be shrugged off by our world like we would shrug off a bad cold. After the damage is done it will recover. We simply cannot inflict a knock-out blow by using only that which comes from the Earth in the first place, whether it be uranium or masses of CO2.

Perhaps I am stating the obvious here but if anyone was in any doubt the Earth will outlive humans. Our harmful actions are only going to hasten our demise, not that of our host. So anyone who says “save the planet” really means “save ourselves”. Friends of the Earth: friends of survival. We are really protecting our own future (or that of our fellow creatures) and that’s important enough! After all, it would be nice if us humans could be around long enough to see in the next millenium.

The other side of the coin: do you think the Earth would campaign to save us?

The trouble with plastic bags

Most people, if they are anything like me, arrive at the shops bagless and curse their failing memory as they guiltily snaffle their shopping into their pockets, up their jumper and anywhere else it will fit to avoid having to accept one of the plastic bags on offer. Just to be clear, this happens after the checkout, not before, which would be an altogether different kind of activity.

On the odd occasion when you have no other bags to hand and the plastic bag on offer from the person behind the checkout is necessary  (try sticking a whole chicken in your trouser pockets) then please try and re-use it next time you’re out and about. If that fails then most major retailers offer a recycling service for old plastic bags. Above all “don’t throw it out!”. Plastic bags in landfill are no good to anyone and some may well find their way out of the landfill site and into the natural environment, where they wreak havok on unsuspecting wildlife who, quite understandably, don’t recognise the bags as part of their daily life and fail to read the safety message on the side.

He's not keeping the rain off.

Some commentators, such as environmentalist George Monbiot, have questioned the priority given to the issue of plastic bags at a time when we face global climate change and where other issues might be more pressing. However, you can’t dispute the fact that “disposable” plastic bags have had their day and if we can properly address the issue of bags in Scotland, we can then move on to other things.

What can we do with old food?

I’m talking here about what “we” as a society can do with our old food rather than what “we” can do as individuals as the latter is very well covered by our Love Food Hate Waste campaign website.  In Scotland we generate a lot of food and other organic waste from a variety of sources including households, large and small businesses, public sector organisations, social enterprises, churches, schools, on the street, on the transport network and basically anywhere people eat. The food waste generated by all this eating has to go somewhere and currently a vast amount of it still ends up in landfill, which is pretty much the worst option for it. If you can think of somewhere less useful than landfill to put a valuable resource like organic waste then I’d like to hear it.

Will food waste trip us up on the way to a Zero Waste Scotland?

Current efforts are primarily focussed on the task of reducing the amount of organic waste we send to landfill which we can continue to achieve if everyone takes full responsibility for the waste they produce and, for example, composts or implements waste reduction measures. The next phase would be to move towards the ultimate goal: eliminating organic waste entirely, but is this realistic? It’s certainly a massive, huge, enormous task. Even taking a single example such as the food waste produced in staff canteens throughout Scotland we can see the kind of difficulties we face. Can a canteen in a workplace with several hundred or more people realistically compost their food waste, especially when it includes cooked food and meat? Well yes, actually, provided they have outside space to fit an anaerobic digester and the willingness to embrace the technology. More likely though is that the business or organisation could employ a recycling service to collect their organic waste to be composted or “digested” off-site.

What might bring the issue to a head is that there is talk (as mentioned in the soon to close consultation on a Zero Waste Scotland) of a landfill ban on organic waste in Scotland. If this happens then we will quite simply no longer have the option of putting food waste in black bin bags. We will have to embrace alternative methods and this is where we could start to see real innovation in the uses that old food can be put to.

There are two main ways in which we, as a society, can use old food and other organic “waste”:

1. Compost it – Simply place the organic material in an appropriate receptacle and allow nature to take its course. Can be done at home or on a larger scale. Composting can also be sped up (and made more consistent) by using “in-vessel” processes whereby the materials are given a little helping hand (see this great example of how in-vessel composting can work).
2. Digest it - Using either small or large scall anaerobic digesters (AD) we can produce methane plus a liquid and solid digestate all of which have a range of applications. Anaerobic digestion is a bit like what happens inside our own bodies when we eat. Bacteria work without oxygen to break food down into nutrients and byproducts. See more about how AD works here.

It starts to gets interesting when we see how the end product can be used. For example with commercial composting we now have an approved certification process for the compost (called PAS 100) which allows it to be sold for agricultural purposes and therefore it ends up back on the land to grow crops. This reduces the need for petro-chemical fertilisers and other soil conditioners. The compost can also be sold to individuals for use in home gardens and tends to be cheaper and is certainly more environmentally friendly than the peat based compost from your local garden centre (although peat free alternatives are available).

The applications available from the AD process are more varied:

1. Biomethane fuel - East Midlands airport has recently announced plans to trial biomethane fuel in the airport buses to reduce their CO2 impact. Of course it would be nicer to see planes using biomethane fuel rather than just the buses ferrying people back and forth but it’s a good start. Biogas can also power cars and trucks.
2. Power – Using the methane produced during the AD process it is possible to create energy, or even to pump the gas for direct use within industry in a similar way to natural gas (which many people may not realise contains mostly methane).
3. Heat – Methane can theoretically be pumped into homes for heating, just like natural gas. In answer to the very natural question: no it doesn’t actually smell. It can also be used to heat factories and in some cases the food waste from a business can be used to heat the same business, saving costs and helping the environment.
4. Compost - With a little gentle treatment (and time) the solid digestates can be turned into regular compost to improve the condition of soil.
5. Fertilizer – the liquid digestate can be used as a nutrient and nitrogen feed for the soil in place of chemical fertilizers.

A note of caution with all this: methane is effectively a hydrocarbon based fuel, just like fossil fuels. Combustion of methane in transport and power plants therefore releases CO2. The difference between methane produced from food/organic waste and oil is firstly that methane has a better fuel to energy ratio and secondly that, if it is sourced from waste, it is arguably better to burn it, use the energy and accept a proportion of CO2 release into the atmosphere than have the methane itself released into the atmosphere (it is 20 times more effective as a greenhouse gas). It is also renewable in the sense that it doesn’t take millenia to produce (unlike oil). It is important however to make sure that we aren’t replacing one form of CO2 producing activity (burning fossil fuels) with another (burning methane).

From a purely sustainable perspective compost, where available, has to be the better option. By breaking down organic waste using the oxygen in the air to produce a carbon filled compost substance we effectively trap the carbon in the waste and use it in the soil. Some CO2 is released during composting but this has been described as “part of the natural carbon cycle” so isn’t adding to the CO2 we, as humans, put into the atmosphere because, left to their own devices, plants grow in open soil, then die, then decay and so on. It is effectively non-athropogenic CO2, unlike that generated by burning fossil fuels.

However, we live in the real world. People need to get around and heat their homes. So AD offers a workable solution, based on existing infrastructure and known technologies. AD plants are costly at first but have low long term maintenance costs and provide skilled jobs for workers in the plants.

Hopefully the above offers a basic introduction into the various techniques for dealing with our old food. It is likely that we will hear more and more about AD and commercial composting over the coming months and years so when you do, you’ll know a bit about it now. Overall it is vital to get the right balance between what is sustainable and what is necessary for us to maintain our economy but more important than everything is that we don’t just throw our old food into landfill.

Heavy wine bottles get hammered

As reported on the Waste Aware Business news page earlier today a high profile wine critic has decided to ignore the heaviest glass bottles when it comes to recommending to readers what wine to drink.

How Heavy is too Heavy?

Even the most delectable amrita will be cast aside if it arrives in what Tim Atkin deems to be excessive packaging. It’s a bold move and one which highlights the efforts being made by those with influence towards more environmentally friendly options. Tim lays a lot of the blame with Spain, Italy and Argentina who seem to have some kind of machismo desire to produce weighty bottles to match their beefier wines.

Without seeing a clear carbon footprint analysis of the wine bottles concerned it is impossible to accurately gauge how much importance we should place on choosing lighter bottles. But we don’t need to get the calculators out to know, via the wonderful medium of common sense, that reducing glass packaging weight will lead to a number of benefits:

1. less fuel to transport the wine to its final destination.
2. fewer raw materials required to produce the bottles therefore less resources required to obtain those materials.
3. less fuel to transport the raw materials that make up glass to the wine bottle manufacturers
4. less fuel to transport the wines to our homes
5. less glass waste overall in UK
6. lower weights of waste in recycling trucks – less fuel and increased capacity

So, although the finer intricacies of the overall benefit to the environment (such as the origin of the glass and whether we will recycle lightweight glass as much) are still to be ironed out, it still seems sensible to support Tim’s stance on this.

Research by WRAP (pdf), as part of their Glassrite project, suggests that there are a number of factors to consider when making bottles lighter but concludes that

Modern manufacturing methods allow glass manufacturers to produce wine bottles that are significantly lighter than was previously possible, without compromising safety.

It’s now up to the manufacturers to prove that they have the bottle to address this issue properly.

Wheels on Fire

As those of you old enough to remember formica kitchen tables will know, Bob Dylan has written a lot of songs.

Fashion is temporary - style is forever

One of them (Wheels on Fire) tells the story of a burning wheel in imminent danger of exploding! As the first verse tells us:

If your mem’ry serves you well
We were goin’ to meet again and wait
So I’m goin’ to unpack all my things
And sit before it gets too late
No man alive will come to you
With another tale to tell
And you know that we shall meet again
If your mem’ry serves you well
This wheel’s on fire
Rolling down the road
Best notify my next of kin
This wheel shall explode !

Now, there’s a very small chance the song is complete nonsense a metaphor for unrequited love and teenage angst but I prefer to think that, on this occasion, Dylan was penning seasonal waste advice. It’s almost as if he had the foresight to realise the potential dangers associated with placing inappropriate materials on bonfires and chose to highlight tyres as a chief culprit. Clever guy.

It reminds us all that, as we start to plan our suitably impressive piles in the approach to Bonfire Night, we need to ensure they are secure and made mainly from natural, sustainable wood sources. Our environmental friends at SEPA have joined Dylan in the warning.

Marshmallows anyone?

Carol McGinnes, SEPA’s Environmental Partnership Manager:

“While bonfires are an important part of celebrations, and a good way to keep warm, piles of wood prepared in advance can become a dumping ground for people wishing to dispose of unsuitable rubbish illegally. We’re already seeing piles of wood for bonfires starting to appear, and there is a concern that rubbish which should not be burnt will end up in the piles as well.

“Bonfires should not be used as a way to dispose of unsuitable wastes, whether household, industrial or commercial. Many items of waste can release fumes into the air, which are not only damaging to the environment, but can also affect the crowd around the fire.”

Some items have been identified as especially dangerous:

• aerosol cans
• paints tins
• empty containers that may have contained flammable chemicals
• old tyres (told you)
• rubber
• furniture (older items may contain polyurethane foam)
• carpets and synthetic floor coverings

As highlighted in a recent news story on our main website, anyone looking for more advice on how to reuse or recycle waste in their local area can visit the Sort-It website. Alternatively, businesses can use the Waste Aware Business recycling directory.

The jury is still out on whether one of Dylan’s other well known songs, Blowing in the Wind, is a commentary on the dangers of airborne pollutants.