Waste

Green Queen

This entry was posted in Hydro Power Waste on by

Windsor Castle is to get its own hydro-power system.

A spokeswoman for the Queen said: “We’re constantly looking at ways of saving energy. We use energy efficient light bulbs at Buckingham Palace and recycle 99 per cent of green waste.”

Members of the Royal Family have long embraced an environmentally friendly lifestyle. The Duke of Edinburgh uses a taxi cab fuelled by liquid petroleum gas to travel around London, and water in a bore hole at Buckingham Palace is used to supply air conditioning to the Queen’s gallery before topping up the water levels in the Palace lake.

The electricity from the new plant will be fed straight into Windsor Castle and not into the local grid. It will be the biggest of its kind in the South of England. Four turbines, which will be built by npower renewables, will be submerged in two of Romney Weir’s bays.

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You are what you throw away

This entry was posted in Compost Waste on by

Around a third of all food in the UK is thrown away. The process starts with the need for perfect, symmetrical and clean groceries and continues all the way through the process to failure to reuse left overs and throwing out stuff that’s a second past its sell by date. I couldn’t calculate it, but I’d hazard a guess that Casa Spinneyhead’s cost per capita in food waste is less than the national average of £420 per year, especially now we’ve started composting. (A matter for another time is just what the hell am I going to do with the compost when it matures? It’s not like we have a garden or anything.)

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Turkey Guts

This entry was posted in Biodiesel Waste on by

I was very excited by Thermal Conversion (then referred to as Thermal Depolymerisation) when I first heard about it two years ago. After ten years of development the first Thermal Conversion Process plant has gone live. However, it may not be able to fulfill its promise because of technicalities in the renewable energy funding process.

According to the company, CWT is unable to expand its U.S. operations due to limitations on the tax credit definition created by the Jobs Bill of 2004. Wording in the bill promotes development of biodiesel fuel from specific feedstocks, Appel said, but to the exclusion of other renewable energy sources such as oil produced by TCP. The Jobs Bill grants a tax credit of 50 cents to the dollar per gallon of biodiesel specifically derived from virgin soybeans and used cooking oils. CWT’s TCP-derived fuel, which meets the universal definition of biodiesel as a liquid fuel produced from biomass and utilizes animal waste from nearby poultry processing facilities as its feedstock, is excluded from the tax credit.

Also see Cycling on the Pavement: USS Blowjob for a fictional take of TCP/TDP use.

via Sustainablog

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Compost

This entry was posted in Compost Solar Power Waste on by

Casa Spinneyhead still throws away a lot of perfectly good composting material, so I’m looking at ways to utilise it.

Hippyshopper recommends wormeries, but I’m working on a budget. Recyclemore.co.uk has cheaper options. The Community Composting Network has resources if I wanted to get my neighbours to muck in. Allegedly the council has a scheme where I can get cheap compost boxes, but the number on the website has been disconnected, so that’s not much use. They do run the Kerb it green waste recycling service, but we’re obviously not in any of the chosen pilot areas.

To conclude- it’s off to B&Q I go!

UpdateJeff pointed me to this easy DIY wormery, and I found the Green Cone, designed to speed up the composting through solar heating and insulation and feed the nutrients direct into your soil.

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Delay cycle

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The Government has chosen to delay implementation of an EU law requiring recycling of computers and other coonsumer electronics. Apparently the suppliers and retailers won’t be ready until next year, when the law is supposed to come into effect in August. How long have they had to prepare for this and are other countries having similar problems?

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24hour Mulching People

This entry was posted in Compost Waste on by

New from Japan, a kitchen waste disposal system that works extremely quickly to create compost. It doesn’t say whether this compost is viable for horticultural use or merely a bonus in reducing volume. The first would be excellent, but the latter’s a good step forward in itself from a landfill point of view.

via Treehugger

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Home Power

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Home Power magazine, the hands-on journal of home-made power, grew out of our passion for renewable energy (RE). We’re concerned about a world that is increasingly polluted. We’re concerned about the high energy use and waste of “developed” cultures. And we’re concerned that people are dependent and unable to care for themselves when it comes to energy. Renewable energy gives people control over their energy future by using energy that is provided daily by nature.

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