A trip to an industrial composting site.

First we looked at the garden waste composting. The finished product looked really well graded, and they had various courser grades, The Carymore man said that people come and buy it by the trailer load, or sometimes truck load. It is marketed as a soil conditioner. The area looked small for its intended purpose, the windrows were sandwiched right up against each other, and they must have been difficult to work effectively like this. There were pools to catch the runoff from the area, the worry being that the runoff will be nutrient rich and may cause eutrophication in nearby water courses (30/12/09: plus it will be acidic (organic acid) and mobilize nasty’s that may be best left where they are, especially as the site was previously a munitions dump (Heavy Metals etc)!!

It was good to see the in vessel composting system. Application of learning is a good thing. This as the high temperature 70 – 75 C composting to get rid of the foot and mouth pathogens, temps must be maintained at 60 for 48 hours, all overseen by EA. I ironically this was the compost that was most popular with the farmers, even though it carries the highest risk. Why? It’s the cheapest compost there. (Perhaps the high temps also kill off seeds and spores, so the farmer doesn’t get geraniums growing all over his farm?)

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Recycling Plastcis

It is apparent that the low density of plastic is a problem, tins and cans can be squashed down and a) The stay squashed, and b) They are made of a dense material. BUT plastic is springy and low density, and always wants to return to its original shape, this is a problem, would it not be possible to shrink the plastic using heat? When you throw a crisp packet on the fire it shrivels right up to practically nothing before it starts to burn, would this concept work with the of a HDPE milk container? Why not reuse plastic bottles for something, you could fill them full of recycled aggregate and use them in Gambian style boxes? Or why not switch to glass and run a deposit scheme?


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Reuse is THE BEST form of recycling

LATS no longer required?: Is the LATS scheme counterproductive? Just like giving householders a big bin, this gives district councils the option to fill a given space. Landfill tax on its own should be enough to halt the flow of waste to landfill, and is already having a big effect.

In Germany they have a system whereby it is banned to place bio degradable material in a landfill site, this is a great idea, why not force people to just “do it”. You could ponce around with taxes like the UK but no Germany wallop. Done. The level of domestic sorting that occurs in Germany also impressed me, they have four bins, and their compost bins and vented to prevent anaerobic decomposition. Aerobic means in the presence of air, so by allowing air in (as I understand it) it stops the anaerobic process before I t begins.

In California, re-use is more acceptable. Re use in the States is not frowned upon like it is in the UK. So why is this? Well the Brits are a stuck up bunch of @55es We seem to have been suckered by commercialism, lost our way in the fog of cheap consumer goods and cheap credit. Perhaps now we can have a better crack at showing a little backbone. (Now we can’t get drastic with the plastic (credit cards))

Reuse is THE BEST form of recycling as it occurs so high up the “chain”. If people, bought stuff from recycling centers this would help, resale points at CAs should be compulsory! How would the reuse of building materials fit in with building regulations, the LPA are so specific with what they will allow. I should imagine the use of structural recycled material would be frowned upon whilst cosmetic stuff would be more acceptable.

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Civil Amenity Sites reselling

Civil Amenity Sites are very good; I find them a real resource the one nearest to where I live is a small-scale compost only service. The full scale one in Taunton (20 miles away!) has all of the facilities except a re-selling point, which really is the best bit! Where I used to work in Devon they had a reselling point, where you could buy a cycle for £10 or a fridge for £10 in fact the fridge in our kitchen is one that came from there and it is still sweet as a nut two years on. (Top tip on buying a second hand fridge is look at the temperature dial inside, if it’s turned right up then the fridge has probably had it). Does reselling cause extra footfall? It’s like a bit of an attraction surely?

One of the condensing options was compaction, in to smaller units each weighing 12 tons . . . . . if you can put twenty tons in a lorry (articulated) without compacting it. What's the point? Loads of money spent on compaction equipment for no reason! Very annoying.

Sometimes when I go up to London I have stopped to watch the barges travelling to and fro with their load of waste, I learnt today that they are loaded at Wandsworth and make their journey from there . . . but where do they go? FIND OUT And . . .

“Cory Environmental, the largest barge operator on the Thames, transports over 600,000 tonnes of London's household waste each year, removing around 400 lorry movements and their associated pollution, from London's streets every day." (20/12/09 http://www.thamesweb.com/page.php?page_id=70&topic_id=14) Goes on to say that the rubbish is taken to Mucking in Essex.

Sweeden, and Japan Waste Originality

Once again I feel the frustration rising within me when we looked over what is going on in England. We don’t have to look far for a truly inspiring waste system, Denmark / Sweden both use incineration / gasification and pyrolysis to produce combined heat and power. I learnt last year that in Japan they go one step further and create paving slabs from the ash. And in England we are doing well, in term of recovery but with Germany recovering 93%, we have a lot of catching up to do.

Mutagenic and Carcinogenic?

Mutagenic: “In biology, a mutagen (Latin, literally origin of change) is a physical or chemical agent that changes the genetic material, usually DNA, of an organism and thus increases the frequency of mutations above the natural background level. As many mutations cause cancer, mutagens are typically also carcinogens. Not all mutations are caused by mutagens: so-called "spontaneous mutations" occur due to errors in DNA replication, repair and recombination.” (Wikepedia14/12/09)

Carcinogenic: “Benzene, kepone, EDB, asbestos, and the waste rock of oil shale mining have all been classified as carcinogenic.[1] As far back as the 1930s, industrial smoke and tobacco smoke were identified as sources of dozens of carcinogens, including benzo[a]pyrene, tobacco-specific nitrosamines such as nitrosonornicotine, and reactive aldehydes such as formaldehyde—which is also a hazard in embalming and making plastics. Vinyl chloride, from which PVC is manufactured, is a carcinogen and thus a hazard in PVC production.” (Wikepedia14/12/09)

It would apparent that the two category’s overlap considerably.

Waste Regulations

Land Fill Directive (July 1999) strategies to reduce bio degradable waste: Land Fill Tax was introduced under this act. We looked at lots of graphs showing downward trends of bio degradable waste going to land fill. BUT I presume most of the bio waste will have gone for composting, which involves rotting it down, there for still producing methane. We really need to get incineration up and running in this country, gasification or pyrolysis, are better names without the stigma attached. It seems a waste to rot down all of that potential energy. In Spain were soil is a bit scare compost is valuable, composting makes good sense there, but in the UK? I’m not sure.

Infectious H9 cat: I presume that this category is used for clinical waste. Is clinical waste classed as hazardous waste? Maybe not. INVESTIGATE. NO its is not Hazardous Waste it is . . . . Clinical Waste it has its own Category!

PCBs now banned, PCBs are part of the UK industrial heritage, and they can be disposed of via high temperature incineration.

WEEE as a directive is already having a noticeable effect in the way shops deal with people. Many shops such as comet and curries will take back you old appliance for recycling; this is due to their obligation under the WEEE act. Cynical head on: For big firms they may have their own concentration centers which are used to collect of fridge’s, TVs etc, maybe they are sold for their raw materials, to places like China and India. So are they doing it because they are obliged to or because they make money from it?

Pre treatment of landfill waste, separation. It was interesting to see that even separation of waste counts as treatment, there was a list of three criteria that had to be fulfilled, one of them was “change the properties of the waste” or similar, I thought this was a wooly term, and needed clarification.

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Waste Regulations are Working

I personally have noticed that Waste policies in the UK are making a change to the
way I work, a few weeks back I rung up for a price on a skip to take some concrete away price was £125, and then I thought I’d find a price on a mobile crusher for the day, again £125. So being I I was to gain five or more tones of useful aggregate, I went for the crusher. Crusher was towed 30 miles from the site, it weighs five tones. Good? No. Took me pretty much ½ a day to load it. So minus £60.

But I gained £100 of good quality (for the intended purpose) aggregate. So in economic terms I finished up £40 on top. Not bad for a small amount, a larger amount would have worked out even more cost effective.

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The First Environmental Legislation

Environmental Legislation: 1237 was when the first environmental legislation was first put in the effect, and since then countless act, amendments to acts and EU directivities have overlain these to produce a right old mish mash of rules and regulations. To further complicate this common law can be applied to any case / breach deemed necessary.

This legislation however, convoluted does not does not fill me with the same amount of despair as other areas of people-kinds battle with ourselves, it really is making a difference. Landfill volumes are decreasing, and recycling is increasing, a careful set of taxes are pushing people away from landfill. General waste is now costing around £100 a ton to dispose of.

It is interesting to hear that the world economic downturn has helped has helped reduce waste, BUT!! that is because the turnover is lower, not because people are better at using less waste!

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Reflections on an Iron Age Fort

The trials and tribulations undertaken by iron age man, were most impressive on
viewing the bund that surrounded the site of the iron age fort, such was its size it
would have a taken a JCB perhaps a week to construct it, I estimate that it would
have been in the region of 3600 m3 of soil and rock, that probably about 8000
tones of soil all moved with a hollowed out antler. Whilst I was a laborer my best
effort was 8 tones in one day, but that was using a shovel and wheel barrow, and
the substance was sand which is easy to shovel, based on that it must have
taken them at the very least 1000 man days to accomplish, probably double that,
so it really was a prolonged effort, perhaps over ten years or so.

One thing that struck me is how we (humans) have complicated life so much, we
were once happy with a willow grove to make most of our containers and
baskets, clay for pots and cups, now we make them from refined oils at great
cost to the environment before shipping them around the world, and not even
reusing them, straight in the bin! We’ve gone mad. There was this film I was
watching I while back “the gods were mad” in this a primitive tribes people, find a
coka cola bottle dropped out of a plain it becomes the thing to have in their
society, a wondrous thing. Yet we throw away jam jars and plastic bottles all the
time and in the next step we are buying a tuper ware container to keep things in. Madness.

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