The WasteBook

In a fast moving industry a definitive resource is The Wastebook. Started in 1995 in Bedfordshire there is a wealth of information here for anyone interested in recycling.

Christmas really is coming

According to the parish website the 4th of December the lights will be switched on in the High St. The question for you is how you prepare for Christmas. With all the difficult news of mortgages keeping an eye on your family budget is more important than ever. Also if no-one likes a cluttered home. So why not join freecycling group and help sort out both problems. By joining you could get rid of some items that are just gathering dust and also perhaps obtain that trinket that may just be right for one or two family members, and almost all done without leaving your home.

St Mary's Church in the snow

Snow and Oxfordshire are not very synonymous. Looking back over my photos here is one from last year of that icon of Kidlington, St. Mary's Church spire. This one is rather unique in that the spire has something else around it other than just snow!

Eating locally doesn't just mean eating at home or in your local resaurant!

Eating locally doesn't just mean eating at home or in your local resaurant, it also means eating locally produced food. A very useful web resource called the 100-mile diet is available to help you think about this. Here in Kidlington we have at least the Co-op that supplies local produce regularly in what they call Local Harvest. Also we have the Wolvercote Farmer's market on Sunday's.

M&S flower power & plastic bags & training

While I am on the subject of plastic bags, I would like to name and shame Marks and Spencer. My mother is ill so when I visited last weekend I went to buy some flowers. The flowers were pre-wrapped in the usual plastic wrapping. Taking my flowers to the counter the assistant who served me called to a colleague, "get some more large flower bags, I need one here." What! This is M&S doing its worst for the environment, just in the name of a bit of branding. The flowers were completely adequately wrapped already. This is not just a sign of bad company policy it is also a sign of poor staff training. The plastic bag they wanted to supply is totally redundant. It is a sop. It makes the customer and M&S feel good. Once the flowers are delivered the M&S branded bag has absolutely no other function than going into landfill. M&S, as with other supermarkets should train their staff to discourage the use of new shopping bags. However how often at the checkout do you find your goods stuffed into new bags without a second thought. So often staff take it on themselves to make it seductively easy for you to use new bags. Often they even put your food into bags themselves, "just to be kind." Well it is not kind, it is destructive to our environment, especially when it is a single use bag.

Plaggy Bags

Will our kids or our kids' kids look back in time and think, "Yuck, they used those plaggy bags and actually put food in them!" Here (at least in the UK) we are wedded to the plastic shopping bag. We use it for carrying our shopping home, we use it for our rubbish and we use it for carrying things when we go away from home visiting friends and family. The plastic bag certainly is flexible. However though plastic bags are generally free they do have a cost to the environment. In societies increasing encouragement to be greener (including providing us with green plastic bags!!) we should all do our bit to work out how we reduce the demand for more bags. Wouldn't it be good if supermarkets found that these bags at the end of their checkouts simply were not being used? Would it be right for to have an eco-tax on plastic bags? Well, London (UK) looks like one place that might end up with less plastic bags. The Telegraph reports that in some supermarkets their will be a ban on the supply of new and free plastic bags for shoppers. Thirty-three London councils have a bill before Parliament set to be debated on November 27th this year. Read more here. For me, I think this is the wrong way to go about it. Legislation is never as good as education. Here's an idea. Why not ban advertising on shopping bags? The government enforces the tobacco industry to put deathly caveats on cigarette packets. Since many companies use shopping bags as a reinforcement of their brands if we remove that then we remove their incentive for distributing these. Essentially if plastic shopping bags are bad for the environment then robust steps must be made to counter the lethargy of that shopper who goes to the supermarket to get, say just one bottle of wine and a box of chocolates - and then pops them in a new shopping bag.