Environmental grumbling

There has been a flurry of Linkedin emails in my Yahoo! inbox recently and so this morning I checked to see which of my former colleagues I am now linked to. It’s rather exciting, finding connections that I thought had been broken as people have moved on. And it’s fascinating wondering how Linkedin knows I know some people.

This morning there was nothing other than people updating their profiles, which I skimmed quickly, and then wandered back to the front page and looked at the Yahoo! news headlines displayed for my delectation and generally ignored unless I’m particularly bored.

This morning’s crop were as uninspiring as ever but two of them stood out as very worrisome. It was announced that the government is proposing to fund a return to once a week bin collections and that they are intending to raise the speed limit on motorways to 80mph.

The reason given for the speed limit rise is the economic benefits from shorter journey times. I don’t drive very much these days but when I do it is generally during rush hour and I frequently find, on the M1 and M62, that 70mph is just a dream.

I have a number of concerns about this proposal. One is that with the speed limit set at 70mph people generally drive at 90mph. Raise it to 80mph coupled with a weird aversion to the use of speed cameras and people will tend to drive at 100mph. This increases the fuel used, the carbon dioxide emissions and the chance of an accident, which stops traffic dead for an appreciable amount of time.

I have, over the years, spent many unproductive hours sitting in a car waiting for the accident in front of me to be cleared. The most recent of these was on the Snake Pass on 17^th September. Whilst we sat there two fire engines, two ambulances and a police car drove past. As it happens the Snake is an A road so we were able to turn round and find an alternate route. This is obviously not possible on a motorway so an accident results in stationary traffic, sometimes for hours, whilst the wreckage is cleared away and the bodies helicoptered out.

The Transport Secretary noted also ‘the benefit of bringing millions of ordinary motorists, who are otherwise law abiding, back on the right side of the law.’

This seems to me to be, frankly, ludicrous. In no other area would we change the law for the benefit of the law breaker.

Wonderfully the head of the RAC Foundation Professor Stephen Glaister seems to have similar thoughts to mine. He commented, ‘Drivers travelling that 10mph quicker might reach their destination sooner, but will use about 20% more fuel and emit 20% more CO2. There is also likely to be a slight increase in road casualties.’ He continued, ‘Before you change a speed limit, you have to know whether you are doing it for safety, economic or environmental reasons. Unfortunately not all of these are compatible.’

So, that’s the first unsettling news from ‘The Greenest Government Ever’. The next is the idea that the government should pay councils to restore weekly bin collections. This is a fascinating one given that we are supposed to be reducing the amount of waste we produce.

Why should we want to reduce waste? Three main reasons. One is that biodegradable waste buried in landfill site releases methane. This is both dangerously explosive if it builds up and a potent greenhouse gas, around 23% worse than carbon dioxide. One is that resource is becoming more expensive – plastic is made from oil and as the price of that rises the cost of plastic increases. And the final one is that we have limited landfill space left in the UK and no-one is terribly keen on having new ones excavated and filled near them. And then, of course, there is the hidden cost of managing waste. We are not aware of the cost of all that packaging but we pay for it in our grocery bills. And then we pay for it again in our council tax bills as the local authority’s bin men magic it away for us.


There are some fascinating waste facts here.

In Sheffield we still have weekly collections of general waste and fortnightly collections of recyclables. The fact that we are ‘lucky’ makes no difference to me. I usually put my general waste bin out monthly (I don’t eat meat and I compost my vegetable waste) and my recycling bin quarterly. I’d like to be able to rent out bin space to my neighbours. I might sound holier than thou. It’s not because my soul is pure but that I’m watching the pennies with two kids at university. Having my milk delivered, making food from scratch and taking packed lunches to work greatly reduces the amount of packaging waste and I don’t drink pop so no bulky PET bottles in the bin.

I could do a lot more to reduce my waste and I’d be more than happy to take a council tax reduction to do so. Or, more to the point, save some of the jobs and services that are being cut under the government austerity measures. One of the comments (by Stephen) on the news story went like this:

‘We’re going to make you unemployed.

We’re going to make you lose your home

We’re going to charge you £9000 for university

We’re going to sack servicemen

We’re going to get rid of Aircraft and ships.

We’re going tor raise VAT

We’re going to let the banks off the hook

We’re are going to stay in Europe

We’re going to keep raising fuel prices

We’re going to alter political boundaries

We’re going to cut NHS Spending

We’re going to cut education spending

We’re going to increase foreign aid

We’re going to involve us all in conflicts that don’t concern us

But we’re going to collect your dustbins weekly, aren't we clever?’

(Apostrophes added)

I don’t agree with all of his criticisms but I do agree that the government should perhaps think more carefully about what best to spend its (our) money on. We could all do a bit more, waste less (and that means wasting less money) and retain more essential services. Mr Pickles believes that every household in England has a basic right to have their rubbish collected every week. I think there are some basic rights that are more important.