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Despite efforts to encourage recycling at supermarkets - see above - often items get thrown away and end up in landfill simply because there isn’t enough local
"Where to Take" information. Here is a list compiled by members of the Forum.
Please submit your "Where to Take" ideas to Gruff Edwards (gruff.edwards@tiscali.co.uk) so that he can incorporate them into this section.
are now being collected for recycling at Wyevale garden centres, e.g. Great Gaddesden and Chipperfield. At Great Gaddesden, ask at the checkout.
for torches, radios etc. can now be taken to the
Household Waste Recycling Centre, Eastman Way, where they have a wheelie bin designated
for this purpose. Please ask one of the helpful staff if you can’t find it.
can be taken to the Household Waste Recycling Centre, Eastman Way,
where they have a skip designated for this purpose.
They ask for cardboard to be flattened, so it is a good idea to flatten boxes by prising
open and re-folding if appropriate, before setting out for the recycling centre.
If re-usable can be taken to a Charity Shop such as the British Heart Foundation in Marlowes. Otherwise take to the Household Waste Recycling Centre, Eastman Way,
where the helpful staff can point you to the area designated for this purpose.
Take to the Household Waste Recycling Centre, Eastman Way,
where the helpful staff can point you to the area designated for this purpose.
Wouldn't it be nice if every corner of Dacorum looked as lovely as this part of
Northridge Park, Warners End did on Sunday morning, October 12th 2003?
The Forum is keen to encourage people who can volunteer their time in any way in
the ongoing battle to achieve a tidy, litter-free environment for Dacorum.
Its purpose is to put them in contact with each other and with Dacorum Borough Council.
To find out more, click on the link:
DEF Litter Volunteers
This section lists some ideas on how to avoid creating waste in the first
place:
Rather than endlessly accepting free plastic bags from shops, buy re-usable
shopping bags, such as these that are available for 75p each at Sainsbury,
Apsley. They are strong, attractive, and pack up small with a popper
fastener when not in use.
Tring, a beautiful market town within Dacorum has listened to its customers and created
a re-use Tring environmentally friendly, fair-trade bag.
17 billion plastic bags are used a year in the UK, that’s 300 for every man, woman and child!
It estimated that they take 1000 years to decompose, they are a danger to wildlife and a mess
to the country side.
Many countries around the world have already tackled this issue, the closest being Southern Ireland
where a plastic tax was introduced making it too expensive to supply them, any funds from
the tax go towards further environmental projects.
In Tring we have started the process, Private and Chamber of Commerce funds have paid for
the initial production of the bags, they are sold for a non profit at £2.50. The idea is
that they can be folded into a handbag and used when required. They are available throughout
the high street and the farmers market. Grass Roots have purchased one for each member of
their staff and many residents are now proudly carrying them.
Reducing Junk Mail is an important contribution to waste reduction at source. The first step is to register yourself with the Mailing preference Service at
The Mailing Preference Service
However, this does not eliminate some blanket mailshots, and mailings from organisations that you once subscribed to, or ones that your address has been passed on to, which arrive with annoying regularity to be glanced at then put into the Council's recycling box. From the environment's point of view, it would be far better if the junk mail item had not been manufactured and transported to your door. To combat and reduce this, the Forum have designed a template of "Return to Sender" sticky labels. These should be stuck on the item (usually in a transparent plastic wrap) as shown, hiding your address but not any mailing reference number, and with the arrow pointing at the "if undelivered" address if possible. The item can then be posted, free of charge. To obtain your supply of the sticky labels, please click on this link to the template, and print to A4 sticky label stationery, seven rows of three 63x38mm labels, i.e. 21 labels per sheet.
Making your own drinks at home saves on packaging and on the energy used to manufacture and distribute drinks via a retail outlet. This picture illustrates the preparation of lemon tea. The instructions are:
After making normal tea there is often around half left in the teapot. Dilute this with cold water fill the pot, then pour into a jug.
Squeeze half a lemon. Add the juice to the diluted tea. Peel some of the outer parts of the skin and drop them in (they will sink later).
Put the jug into the fridge when cool enough.
The Waste Group seeks to lobby and comment publicly on Government policies relevant to Waste Management.
The Waste Group have questioned the environmental sense of the Government’s £2000 scrappage scheme whereby owners of cars over ten years old qualify for a £2,000 grant towards the purchase of a new car. The way this scheme was justified to the public as a Green initiative sounds plausible enough. Newer cars on average are less polluting and use less fuel per mile, so people should be encouraged to swap. But the main point of using less fuel per mile is to save on energy and reduce the emission of Greenhouse gases that are the cause of Global Warming. If you really want to achieve this, you need to consider the energy that was used in order to manufacture the car that the Government is encouraging you to scrap. From quoted research figures, and assuming that the old car is efficiently recycled and that your new car is 25% more fuel efficient than the old one, you would need to drive the around 100,000 miles in the new car just to break even in environmental terms.
The figures above were found in “Sustainable Energy – without the hot air” by David MacKay http://www.withouthotair.com/ as follows:
(Implied) Ball-park figure for average petrol car energy consumption: = 0.8 Kwh per Km (Page 29. See also the discussion on Page 27 justifying his treatment of all forms of energy as equivalent for comparison purposes, so he uses a conversion ratio of one between electrical and chemical energy).
New car’s embodied energy (Note on Page 94) 76,000 kwh (Treloar et al 2004) or 30,500 (Burnham et al 2007, assumes recycling)
So if the new car you buy under the scrappage scheme is a 25% improvement (i.e. 0.6 Kwh per km), the number of km you need to drive before payback is reached is at least 30,500 divided by 0.2 = 152,500 km.
Correspondence Summary:
8/10/09: E-mailed modified text to Mike Penning, MP.
Replies from Mike Penning 20/10/09 and Ian Lucas Dept. for Business Innovation & Skills 27/10/09 admitting that "Scheme 'primarily designed' to boost automotive industry"
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