Happy New Year! If you trying to get rid of your Christmas Cards – don’t put them out with the rubbish (unless you have a recycling bin) take give them to the Woodland Trust to recycle and convert into trees. They want to recycle 100 million cards and plant 24,000 trees.

So finally a good reason to go to Tescos.

Something that I think we all should be doing. It’s easy once you have the composting bin. With all this talk about wasting food and reducing the waste going to landfill and the length of time between waste collections this is something that is really easy and really will help save the world.

Composting reduces the amount of waste going to landfill. Any food you do waste can be recycled in your garden – by looking at how much food you put on your heap you might start questioning what you are buying. It also gets over the the hygiene problem a bit by reducing the amount of tasty morsels that attract vermin to your bin. This assumes you are composting properly and not attracting the vermin your compost heap instead.

It’s very fulfilling putting home-made compost on the garden!

We have been having a bit of an ongoing discussion about recycling where I work after our local council changed the way the they do their recycling. The main point of contention is the bugged bin controversy. Our council is one of the ones that has bugged their new wheelie bins which is fine by me. The only problem I have with this is that they didn’t tell anybody that this is what they were going to do. If they had said that they were going to put a chip in our new bins so that they could weigh rubbish so that they could look into ways to improve the collection or even a pay to throw system I have no problem with that. But they didn’t and now upset residents have removed them or broken incurring more costs on the council and no doubt at some point our council tax will go up.

In the Real Story programme this week there were a few facts that I didn’t know:

1. Councils need to pay £18/tonne of rubbish to in landfill tax
2. This is going to go up £3/tonne every year
3. Councils have limits on how much waste they can put in landfills if they go over this figure they can fined £150/tonne

We received the Bournemouth Council mag this week as well. They mention the chipped bins, giving a brief explanation. They say that they do actually anticipate using them for a while as the bin trucks are not equipped to use them. I am not even sure it is legal for them to use them yet!

Once we get sorted it out will make our lives a lot easier as will not having overflowing recycling bins and the silly blue plastic bag lying around anymore. It will save us money on petrol too as we won’t need to go up to the dump quite so often.

I found an article about recycling the other day. It refers to a TV programme in which they say recycling doesn’t work. Here’s a link to a clip of the programme – it’s not particularly family friendly! This maybe true in terms of efficiency etc but I think that it’s the principle that is important. We can’t go on using stuff then putting it in holes in the ground (unless it’s been composted already!) – this might not seem so bad in the US but here in the UK land is not quite as available for landfill and nobody wants a landfill in their backyard.

You have to think about countries like China and India where they have huge populations. At some point they people are going to want all the stuff we have. If we don’t set the example of being serious about recycling and I guess in some ways reducing our consumption the waste produced by these countries will have a massive impact on the rest of the world.

The whole recycling system might not be efficient but really it is still in it’s infancy and hopefully retailers will get on the bandwagon and make their packaging more recycle friendly and people will demand more environmentally friendly packaging.

I think people sometimes miss the point with recycling it’s not just about separating the out the glass and paper etc. It’s about reducing your waste buying a particular product or shopping in particular shop.

It’s about reusing things, fixing things, taking them down to charity shop or freecycling them rather than dumping them in the bin.

It’s about setting up a compost heap in your garden and putting suitable waste on that so you can fertilize your garden easily and cheaply. Apparently 38% of all UK waste is organic waste that could be composted and contributes to creating greenhouses gases when put in landfill.

Once you have done those things then you can get down to sorting out the glass and paper!

The thing about all this stuff is it’s not rocket science, everyone can do and really there’s no excuse not to now – at least not Bournemouth anyway!

Anyway I was initially disappointed as I when I tried to set it up it didn’t work. But yesterday I looked at the instructions, took it apart adjusted the plunger and that sorted it.

So now we can have showers in the morning leave the plug in and when we are done pump the grey water into my water butt. So hopefully my water should never be empty again!

After putting this up yesterday I did a bit of research on grey water. There are a number of things which I found out:

• Ideally you should only store you grey water for about 24 hrs – it gets smelly and other things after that
• Some references say you shouldn’t use grey water on vegetables at all. Others say use it but use it carefully. Most things I have read say if you water the soil rather than getting water all over the plant you should be OK – although apparently this can be OK of you thoroughly wash your produce before eating.

Anway here are some of the references I found:

• Grey Water Central
• Safe Use of Household Greywater
• Conserving Water: Rainbarrels, Cisterns and Gray Water

After finding this stuff I am not going to keep my grey water in my water butt but leave it in the bath until I need to use it and then let the remainder go do the plug!

It does bug me that you can buy organic produce from a supermarket but the produce is packed plastic that doesn’t bio-degrade.

Numbers of plastic bags that supermarkets generate bug me too – I think I might have mentioned this before. I stand grinding my teeth when I am waiting to be served in one particular place I go as the cashiers pull out bag after bag ready for their next customer and then almost force one on me – of course I politely refuse and try and stuff everything in by backpack or pull out a pre-used bag that I just happen to have with me! (perhaps not all the time to be honest but I try!)

As well as detailing their five main aims the site also provides addresses and a templated letter so you can write to the supermarkets to air your views.

I think this will do wonders for the image of the WI. When you usually hear about them it’s about jam or cakes but I think this idea is pretty cool and will be added to the list of campaigns on this site.

BTW I have updated the this site with a new theme which I built – there might have a few teething problems but I am trying to fix any problems as I find them!