Transition Island Blog

Camden residents’ conscientiously sorted doorstep recycling boxes are simply rebundled and sent abroad.

Every item of paper placed in Camden’s recycling bins is sent to Malaysia, Indonesia, India or China. All of the borough’s waste plastic goes to China.

This is according to figures released to the New Journal this week under Freedom of Information rules. The council is locked into a seven-year, £16 million a year contract with waste company Veolia.

But it is the council’s cost-cutting policy of lumping all types of waste together, that requires the ‘contaminated’ recycling can only be processed abroad.

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California Plans to Use Citizens as Guinea Pigs: Why Every U.S. Resident Should Care

Taken from an American Blog

Beginning this summer, airplanes will fly 500-800 feet over California, spraying hundreds of thousands of California residents with untested pesticide called CheckMate.

The State’s Department of Food and Agriculture is initiating the largest aerial pesticide spray in the history of the United States because it’s afraid the light brown apple moth will take over our plants.

• Never mind that the evidence suggests that this moth has been with us for decades causing no harm whatsoever (and has, in fact, been controlled by natural predators).
• Never mind that scientists across the globe have dealt with this moth before, and advised California that widespread spraying will do no good.
• Never mind that the State’s previous spraying last year resulted in well over 600 reported ill health effects.
• Never mind that a man named Stewart Resnick, an agribusiness man whose farming company happens to own the manufacturer of CheckMate (the pesticide to be sprayed on us) has made generous political contributions to our State’s officials.
• And never, ever mind that 19,000 citizens and counting have said out loud that they do not want to be sprayed.

And why should anyone who lives outside of California care? One simple reason: we are the nation’s guinea pigs. The USDA recently announced plans to survey all 50 U.S. states to see if the light brown apple moth can be found anywhere else. If they do…

Read more…

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opinion:
I don’t know the facts of this case.
I do know this sort of protest is an expression of outrage from ordinary people about politics and big business behaving in scandalous ways. And I’m sure Californians are not the only Guinea Pigs in the world!

The UK’s thirst for bottled water appears to be drying up.

New figures show that sales are falling for the first time in years.

Shop sales of bottled water fell by 9 per cent to £284m in the year to March, according to independent retail analysts. Also, water cooler sales have also fallen, although not as dramatically.

environmental costs

Green groups said they hoped the figures suggested the public was turning away from bottled water because of the environmental costs of packaging and transportation. Some of it travels to the UK from the Fijian islands in the Pacific!

Production of a litre bottle of Evian or Volvic generates up to 600 times more CO2 than a litre of tap water.

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Pesticides continue to be linked to serious illness.

The Pesticide Action Network points out:

‘They are the only manufactured chemicals specifically designed to be toxic.’

‘They are also the only group of toxic chemicals routinely intentionally dispersed in the environment.’

So why are we encouraging our children to eat more?

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The Soil Association’s definitive annual Organic Market Report in 2007 showed continued strong growth and increasing public support for organic food, drink, textiles and health and beauty products.

beyond food

Organic textiles and the booming organic health and beauty sector are experiencing particularly strong growth. In 2006, they had already increased by 30 per cent in the number licensed with the Soil Association.

beyond supermarkets

Retail sales of organic products through organic box and mail order schemes and other direct routes increased from £95 million in 2005 to £146 million in 2006 - a staggering 53 per cent growth, more than double that experienced by the major supermarkets.

One reason may be that organic farmers are three times as likely to market their products locally or directly as non-organic farmers in the UK. People like local. People buy from people they like. Local growers are easier to like than supermarkets, even though many of us are gripped by the habit of the once-weekly supermarket-dash.

organic fakes?

But we’ve heard a rumour that not all supermarket food labelled ‘organic’ actually comes from organic sources. It has been said that while the room that does the packaging may be certified organic, the food can come from anywhere. And because the ‘assembly room’ is organic, the packaged food can legally be labelled ‘organic’.

Can this be true?

A major airline, American Airlines, is criticised for flying an aircraft across the Atlantic with only five passengers on board.

Recently, a Boeing 777 used 22,000 gallons of fuel flying from Chicago to London and produced 43 tons of CO2 in doing so.

This nearly empty flight is estimated as having cost American Airline about £30,000. That fuel could have taken a Ford Mondeo around the world five times.

no alternative…

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The reputation of Japan’s paper industry lay crumpled last month.

Market leader, Oji Paper, admitted it had lied for over ten years about the quality of its recycled products.

This follows the country’s second-biggest paper company, Nippon Paper Group, also admitted false claims. They claimed recycled fibre volumes as high as 50%, but it was actually between 5% and 10%.

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