Thursday 16 June 2011

In A Turn Around That Will Affect Every Family In The UK,

Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman, will bring slop buckets to you,
it is of course a 180 degree turn around from what she said almost a year ago, quote, 'the Government has no plans to force households to put food into slopbuckets,’ Mrs Spelman’s call for all food waste to be recycled raises the prospect of families having to save all of what she referred to as ‘smelly waste’ for separate collection, while the rest of their rubbish is picked up once a fortnight, Labour ministers backed away from the slopbucket idea before last year’s general election after a cool public reaction when the first councils tried the scheme, ministers also promised weekly bin collections, but have said that bringing back weekly collections would cost £132.5million a year,

tip for Mrs. Spelman, want to save some money to offset that bill? well take your plan that involves the supervision of rubbish policy by two quangos, the Waste and Resources Action Programme and Keep Britain Tidy, abolishing those two bodies would alone save taxpayers around £50million a year, but I guess it will be a case of 'jobs for the boys', as usual, the good news is that the slops collected 'smelly waste' as she says, will be collected separately and then used in a recycling process called ‘anaerobic digestion’, but there a a catch, the process has been known about for more than 150 years, but has never been used on a large scale, it produces a ‘digestate’ material which, under current technology, is too polluted to be used on a large scale for its main potential purpose, as fertiliser for farmers, so it will have to be sent to a land fill I guess,

in case you think the picture above was made up, well the bad news is that it was not, residents in Newcastle-under-Lyme are already being forced to follow the strict new recycling regime – with households juggling nine separate bins, the bins are, from the left, food (grey bin kept in kitchen), food (green outdoor bin), tin cans, cardboard, plastics, clothing, paper, general waste and garden waste,

there are so many reasons that we enjoy living in Thailand this is one of them, recycling here does actually work, unlike in the UK where it costs councils fortunes to recycle, the other piece of good news is that it only costs 40 baht a month for 3 unsorted collections a week, if you do not have kids over here you do not pay school fees, health service? best in the world with BUPA, I can see a doctor within 15 minuets of entering a hospital, a specialist later in the afternoon, stay over night for any procedures the next day, all for less than my National Health contributions I pay in the UK, before you ask yes I pay all of my taxes and NH contributions, I am not a tax exile, but all of this separating rubbish and being fined if you make one little slip up does seem a little unfair for UK residents.

2 comments:

Grecian Ern. said...

Dear Stan,
I live in Newcastle under Lyme and regret that your info is out of date as we now have an additional dark green bag for the collection of glass. Do try to keep up!
G E.

PattayaStan said...

Dear Grecian Ern, many thanks for the up to date information, I have publish your comments in an effort to keep up in the latest post! but in all seriousness, I have yet to see published accounts by any council that shows that recycling pays, the only plant that I know of that makes a profit out of recycled products is one that recovers materials from of all things, fluorescent lights that have failed, as I have always said recycling works where labor and transport costs are minimal, but put UK wages, transport, purchase of land, insurance and maintenance cost into the equation and the operation will cost far more than can ever be of any financial benefit, also the shear amount of movement of the waste pollutes far more than can be imagine, which conveniently of course is not taken into account by the tree huggers and greenies, enough already! best regards, Stan and Diana.