Sunday 21 January 2007
As someone who's worked in and around the NHS for about 25 years, I find the Conservative Party's proposal to give more management and financial responsibility to doctors horrifying. They have no training in management, they are traditionally territorial about their own speciality and, most of all, they are almost totally monetarily self-interested. Their trade union, the BMA, needs to be confronted and deposed from the public myth that they are the best arbiters of public health decision making.
About sixty percent of my waste is plastic. The council wont recycle it yet it is the one thing wont biodegrade and takes up most space in landfill.
There is however another problem. Not all plastic packaging is the same material. Generally there is a little number in a triangle stamped on the bottom to identify which kind it is, but is always too small to read.
What annoys me is the waste of packaging,ie, big boxes only half full in particular medicine and vitamins bottles. you could either get more in or have smaller containers, next disposable nappies yuk all that stuff put in our bins let alone the disposal of them, maybe some sort of liner inside the nappy to go down the loo before putting in the bin. Our councils should provide more containers to recycle things. then our big bins would not need emptying so often i myself can miss one or even two wks of bin collection, I also use a composter bin, which takes a lot of greens etc.
With regards to recycling. I live in a rural village and our council only provide bins for glass and paper. I would love to recycle the plastic that I throw away but can't. My answer to this is to buy food with a minimum or no plastic pacaging. I think that food shops should do more to lessen their usage of plastic and polystyrene. I also keep small animal so this too goes into the rubbish sites. If we are going to be charged for our rubbish I shall have to burn more so adding to the carbon emmisions..... you can't win.
Susan Way, Tillingham, Essex.
Recycling for flats in Padua, italy involved huge communal bins on every street corner and within walking distance for everyone a set of complete..plastics, cardboard, bottles etc bins
...i have a car in general but while it's off the road the recycling of what the council doesn't take away is too far to walk meaning my flat doorway is full of cardboard and plastic bottles...and there's nowhere in the area that recycles plastic bags!!!
Could incineration also releive the relience on imported fossil fuels?
Ben Bradshaw may believe that sone local autrhorities wish to use microchip devices in wheelie bins merely to measure the total household waste in their areas; but, surely, a cheaper way would be simply to weigh the loaded lorries when they arrive at the landfill site, incinerator or whatever. The minister is either very naif or very devious!
As for the idea of charging for waste by weight (or volume), it is fatuous in the extreme - only professional politicians and out-of-touch councillors could possibly contemplate it.
As an "expat" living in the Netherlands I was interested to see the piece on recycling.
Another way the Dutch have reduced such things as fly tipping is to have introduced a "removal tax" on all purchases, from electric toothbruhes to plasma tv's, that need specific waste removal. The tax is paid upfront at purchase, no choice, and at the end of the products life you can take small items to the local council area or call them to pick items up. It's already been paid for so people are not so included to just dump stuff.
Something for the Brits??
Voorschoten, The Netherlands
Charging for the way rubbish is collected?
1 - they already are charging
2 - the local councils themselves approve planning that builds big shopping centrs and supermarkets that produce rubbish and sell things in packaging that we are then taxed for to take away. By who - the very local councils that indirectly approved the creation of the mountain in the first place. When will counccils start getting punished by the electorate for tha bad edcisions they make like this, instead of behaving like the national govt and battering us like this? Don't forget, the national govt are supposed to be the betterr ones, so once you gte down to council level, can you really be sure of getting the quality of councillors able o make good and effective decisions. From what I have seen, self interest and politics are more likely to hold sway?
These were some of your comments on the Politics Show on Sunday 21 January 2007 at 12:00 GMT on BBC One.
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