Opinion… “Any Old Iron!”
So I was just sitting at home, probably not doing much, and I hear somebody shouting outside. There it was again… I can’t really understand what they are saying, but it sounds eerily familiar.
I run outside and there’s a white pick up truck full of scrap metal and an old guy standing in the back yelling, “Any Old Iron?”! I couldn’t believe it. They were collecting scrap metal. This took me back to when I was a young’un and I would wonder what these people were going to do with all of the rubbish that people throw out. I started to think about it… RECYCLING!!! Even back before we were given little magnets at school so that we could put the coke cans that didn’t stick to the magnets into a recycling bin and we were told to stop using CFCs, the Gippos had the right idea.
With such a push on a need for recycling, reducing our carbon footprints and generally being green - how much difference are we really making? On Friday 9th February 2007 The Virgin Earth Challenge was launched by Richard Branson, alongside green activist and former US vice president Al Gore.
“The Virgin Earth Challenge is a prize of $25m for whoever can demonstrate to the judges’ satisfaction a commercially viable design which results in the removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases so as to contribute materially to the stability of Earth’s climate.” www.virginearth.com
I had heard about this sometime before Christmas 2006 and was very excited about it. There was lots of talk and hype about this challenge and a prospect of offering numerous smaller prizes at all levels for businesses, government and even for schools and individual students who made a difference in the ‘battle against climate change’. The idea of offering a cash incentive to scientists to develop new technologies is nothing new but definitely something that I thought was needed to entice the scientific community to start acting more on possible solutions to our current ‘environmental dilemma’. Almost a year and a half on and there has been very little in the way of progress. The Earth Challenge website doesn’t seem to have changed in the slightest since it was launched and there have been no announcements on progress or even if there is anybody involved in what seemed to be a very promising idea.
So what are we all supposed to be doing? With some local council authorities in the UK announcing that they will be going through residents rubbish bins and fining households that are not recycling enough. Obviously residents are outraged, well the ones that don’t recycle anyway as they are all expecting fines. I’m eager to see if this actually encourages people to do their bit or if folk are just as happy paying the fines.
The Midlands are planning to build a new ‘Super-Incinerator’ to serve two counties, which, as per usual, everybody is up in arms about because of the destruction of the countryside. Yet they seem to ignore the fact that the current landfills do a great job of that already, a solution is definitely needed. These incinerators will provide power to the local area and may even feed back to the National Grid. If successful, they are also looking at incinerating non-recyclable waste from other counties. At the rate that our local population is growing, and therefore our waste, something needs to be done about what we should do with it all.
