/green

It was certainly windy last night and this morning in my neck of the woods. Monday also happens to be our recycling collection day, so most people dutifully put their boxes out on the street the night before. Our local council supplies open boxes (i.e. no lids), which obviously don't stop the contents (especially lightweight items like empty plastic bottles) from blowing all over the streets, which is just what had happened this morning.

I'm expect in the short term that retro fitting lids onto the boxes would be cost prohibitive, so in the meantime it relies on householders to sort their own solution, which given the time it took for people to take recycling more seriously won't be fast in coming.

To me this indicative of poor planning at a council level, exacerbated due to the need to get a solution in place very quickly, no doubt to meet the demands of central government policy at the time, which in turn was probably driven by European targets.

It was on the same journey to work this morning listening to Radio 4 (I find listening to politicians getting some verbal abuse for avoiding the question etc. raises my spirits on the journey into work). Lord Turner (pic below) was discussing the climate report he's pulling together (for Dec? I think) and the fact that building coal fired power stations maybe ok, as we can retro fit carbon capture technology when it's a) proven at scale and b) proven we want to afford it. No doubt retro fitting to existing power plants will by that time probably cost more than to build a new plant.

Just goes to show that doing some proper planning from the 'get go' is probably is cheaper in the long run and gets you where you want to be first time around (maybe 2nd time, but certainly not 5th or 6th).

So today I'll try and practice what I preach and ensure we get our planning into order.

Lord Turner