Environ-MENTALISTS??

I get my shopping delivered - so rarely go to a supermarket, so that would definitely mean a special trip for me. Personally, I think a huge part of the problem is the lack of litter bins on the streets nowadays - there used to be a lot more, but the councils needed to save a few quid so they were taken away, in the same way public loos started to disappear.....

We do need to do things differently, but for me the tail is wagging the dog here. What we need is a co-ordinated, simple policy for recycling so that every council does it the same way, and to make it as easy as possible for people to do so. We also need there to be pressure applied to manufacturers to use less, and better materials.

 

It is truly terrible @Freddy, and I am all for getting our shores, rivers, roadside verges and countryside cleaned up. I just think that yet another tax/charge is the wrong way to go about it.

As I said before, I think the reduction in on-street litter bins goes a long way to explaining some of this - that, and the fact that we have a significant proportion of society that either do not give a monkeys about their surroundings, or have had any attempts to better those surroundings battered out of them by over-zealous council officials. When I was a kid, we had 'Keep Britain Tidy'


It was taught and supported in schools too. Railway stations were spotlessly clean, and quite often had loads of flower beds and hanging baskets all around them. Town centres had loads of flower beds and hanging baskets, parks were kept in good order as were burial grounds and streets, all done by the council. Juice came in cans or if it came in a bottle, the bottle was made from glass - water came from a tap. Greed and profit have brought us to where we are - there have been so many cuts to our services that we don't have many litter bins any more, and there are nowhere near the flower displays that we used to see in our towns - - some people will construe that as the authorities not giving two hoots about things, and the way people are now they will shrug their shoulders and ask why they should then care.

We need to go back to the start in this country - our priorities are all wrong to be blunt, and we are not going to make anything better if we do not massively change tack; and taxing yet another thing is just recycling an old idea that is proven to only have a limited impact.

Oh, and how many of those bottles that are washing up on our shores are ones that have been legitimately binned, shipped overseas for 'processing' only to return here on the crest of a wave?

 

I'm less convinced by the CO2 thing if I am honest. The world's climate has always been changing, and whilst there is evidence that human activity has an effect on that change, it is unclear how much of a change we are actually making. I have read a few times that human activity accounts for 6% of all atmospheric CO2 - so even if we made an improvement of 10% tomorrow, that would be a 0.6% change, so how can that be better?

Again, this is another thing that has been turned into a money-maker, and that is the big problem; the whole time that people associate things like this with their pockets being raped, they will resent it and not buy into it. Enough stick - let's try some carrot.

 

Even if it was a deposit scheme, it would be a tax in a way - you can bet there would be some bottles that you would be unable to return for whatever reason, and that is money gone (gone where, who knows?) - they were also talking about it being all cans, jars and other plastics as well. And you can also bet that the bottle deposit would be added to the price before VAT, so the government would cream off 20% tax on all deposits.

Also, do you really think that there would be a commensurate reduction in our council tax to represent all the waste that we would be taking to the recycling machines and not putting in our bins - - - a further stealth tax.

 

No, I am not prepared to risk it - but, there has to be a more measured (and sensible) approach. Realisation that electric cars may be better for the immediate air, but all they also have their own environmental impacts (the batteries for a starter contain rare-earth metals and some pretty nasty stuff), and even plugging them in to charge is only shifting the pollution somewhere else, as they don't run on fairy farts.

We were told that diesels were the way to go to reduce CO2, and we even subsidised a scrappage scheme with public money (many of those 'scrapped' cars are still sat on guarded sites doing nothing, and have not been recycled), then diesels were villified - conveniently missing the fact that it was only the older diesels that were the problem.

I could go chapter and verse on the effects of these EU 'targets' being brought in too early, and that resulted in cars suffering premature deaths and scrappage - - how environmentally friendly is that?

And then there is our 'elite' that had a climate conference recently in Davos - - - with somewhere in the region of 1500 private jet flights to take them there and home again; do as I say, not as I do??

Don't kid yourself - it is all about money, nothing more, nothing less.