Politics

The Recycling Fiasco

I’m a big fan of recycling, I try and do my part, at least when it doesn’t involve too much effort.  A recent Dispatches programme made me realise I should probably be recycling more.  Typically I hadn’t been recycling plastic food trays, for example, or the plastic trays I buy some of my sliced meat in.  So I started giving them a rinse and putting them in.  It’s had a marked difference on my general waste, reducing it drastically.

Recently I was met with a question though, I had a piece of packaging with a recycle logo and the letters PPE.  I wasn’t sure if my council took this so decided to look it up.  It turns out PPE stands for Polyphenylene Ether, which didn’t mean much to me either.  Not that it really made any difference, as my council, Test Valley, don’t really go into much detail as to what can be recycled.  Under plastics in their A to Z Recycling Guide, for example, there is no information about the different types of plastic.  The breakdown on the What You Can and Cannot Recycle with Test Valley page is equally high level.  It does state that mixed plastics (stating some examples, like yoghurt pots and meat trays) are not recyclable and on the recycling guide it also says the same thing, apparently because the recycling technologies and markets do not exist in the UK.

Reading a BBC article from 2003 I found this quote though:

“All this food packaging of yours is recoverable but there’s no effective subsidised collection system in the UK to make it worth the effort.

“If there was, we could turn it into car parts, video cassettes, shampoo bottles – we have 1,100 product applications. Anything that can be made from virgin plastic can be made from recycled plastic. The quality is the same.”

Even the RecycleNow website it states that yoghurt pots can be recycled and that you should check with your local authority as there are limited facilities, which should improve “over the next year or so.”  But this article by The Daily Green on plastics symbols, suggests PET/PETE (a triangle with a 1 in it) is also used for ‘ovenable food trays’ which means they’re just as recyclable as plastic bottles.  So are some recyclable?  How do you tell?  The tray my ham comes in states on the back that neither the film plastic (the clear sheet on the front I assume) or the label paper are currently recycled, but says nothing about the tray itself. Continue reading →

The Government Needs to Spend More Wisely

I caught Your Money and How They Spend It on Wednesday last week.  The series is simple, it’s looking at how the UK government collects and spends public money.  We all know the government collects revenue from taxes and uses that money to provide public services.  Everything from welfare and pensions, to the NHS to defence comes from the revenue it raises.

I think we’re all well aware the nation is in a hole because we’ve been spending more than we’ve been earning for some time.  As such we’re all equally aware of the austerity measures and cuts we’re having to impose and I’m behind them.  We do need to reign in spending and get our house in order.  Cuts are obviously one way to do this and something that must be done, but one question the programme raised was about how the government spends our money, and do they do it well?

I’ve long held the belief that there is massive scope for efficiency improvements in government spending and that we don’t get anywhere near good value as taxpayers.  We’ve all seen the headlines about projects that were late or overran, or were not fit for purpose.  There was one on the programme I had never heard of. Continue reading →

Abolishing VAT on Ebooks

This is a bit of a selfish post. For those who didn’t know, in the UK books are VAT (tax) exempt. Ebooks, however, are classed as digital downloads, so get charged a full rate of 20% VAT. There have been some changes to the E.U. rules to allow governments to remove tax on books, but so far no one seems to have done so.

This is one of the reasons (given, anyway) ebooks are more expensive than print.

If you’re a UK resident, you can add your name to a petition to change this.

The petition introductory page probably makes a better argument:

Paper books are free from VAT despite their impact on the environment yet e-books carry 20% VAT. Paper books need oil based inks and glues, high energy use for paper production and printing, oil fuel for distribution and large land use for warehousing. At the end of their lives many find their way to landfill. E-books are far more environmentally friendly using a tiny fraction of the energy of a paper book for production, distribution and storage and at the end its life it is simply deleted. A book should be defined by what it provides not the material that is used to produce it and the more environmentally friendly version should be encouraged and not discouraged by VAT.

You can sign the petition here.

The Woeful Nimrod

Anyone shocked by the MOD spending £200 million to dispose of the cancelled Nimrod MRA4s needs to go read the Wikipedia page on them.

I already knew this was a project that was long past a joke but it doesn’t make easy reading: the project was £789 million over budget and nine years late already.  The aircraft were coming in at £400 million each (a third of the cost of a Space Shuttle) and this bid won because they re-used the fuselage from earlier aircraft and basically bolted on new wings and engines to supposedly save money.

It has long been a question of how BAE won it when we could have gone out and bought a better platform for less money.  The Nimrod has long had a patchy service record with calls for it to be retired, they date back to the 1960s and were last upgraded in the 1970s.  It’s an aircraft that should have been scrapped a long time ago and most flyers won’t miss it.  Only BAE will miss milking the money from it.