Suspension sinks on Sundays! C5 X7 that works hard + 206 GTi HDi (and 406 Coupe and 306 HDi). - MattBLancs

[myglaren]

The town I lived in in the late sixties and seventies had an electricity generating plant*, used oil, but also burned all the flammable rubbish that was collected. Burning the rubbish drove the generators and avoided using oil.
The excess heat was used to heat water that was piped through the town to provide hot water and heating in most properties and heated pathways in the town centre to keep them free of snow and ice.
There wasn't much electricity to generate, just some peak times, most was supplied from hydroelectric stations and a couple of nuclear power stations.
Our electric and heating bills were barely worth generating, the paperwork probably cost as much as the bills were.
They use the food waste to generate methane that they run the local bus fleet on.
*Our flat looked out on it at the rear, 100 yds from it.

[MattBLancs]

Interesting, thank you.

District heating schemes can be a good use of "waste heat", very expensive to retrofit, another "needs to be on the cards from the outset" really.

[myglaren]

Interesting, thank you.

District heating schemes can be a good use of "waste heat", very expensive to retrofit, another "needs to be on the cards from the outset" really.

There is, or was, such a thing here. Expensive for the users and very unreliable. I think it is binned now. As Washington is/was a MK style 'new town' it was ideal for the scheme but not fully implemented, fortunately.

One of the better ideas was to run TV and phone cables to every house that was built, making it very simple to get a phone installed and plug the telly in. There was even 'Washington TV', a sort of cable service done in a very amateurish way. Didn't last long. One of the motivations for the TV cables (radio too) was that there were to be no unsightly TV aerials. That went bye-bye when satellite dishes were born. No chimneys either, everywhere had to have gas or electric central heating and gas open fires. One exception was an ex-miner neighbour who had a free coal allotment so was issued a dispensation and had coal fired central heating, a one-off though.

[MattBLancs]

Sorry, my mind jumped to "allotment" in the garden sense - I had visions of your ex-miner with his own private open-cast colliery to potter in a dig up himself some clinker or anthracite

[mickthemaverick]

While at OU summer school in Bath in the 1970s we visited a company called Sevalco on the Severn Estuary who started life as rubber manufacturers. One day they employed a new manager who was into recycling and his first aim was to make use of the vast amount of wasted heat that went up the chimneys. Cutting a long story short he looked for a manufacturable product that demanded a high rate of heat consumption and after 3 months research settled on brick making. He then embarked on a search around the country for a source of suitable clay and after much hunting realised that their own rubber manufacturing plant was built on clay rich soil!! Subsequently they produced and sold bricks as a sideline using their own clay and then ran piping around the brick kiln chimneys to produce superheated steam which drove turbines to generate the electricity to power the adjacent housing estate which they built with their bricks to house their employees!! I was impressed!!!

[MattBLancs]

That's great initiative, I like that

[bobins]

There's a lovely 10 minute Nationwide piece from 1970 detailing Worthing Council's efforts to reduce and recycle back in the day. Not a lot has changed over the last 55 years !
For a while I worked in the yard next to where this was filmed so recognise some of the buildings I may have even explored some of them as they were empty when I was around then

[CitroJim]

Milton Keynes appears to have a what it considers a very good recycling percentage of 60%..

https://www.milton-keynes.gov.uk/news/2 ... -recycling

Our Recycling Centre has occasional open days and is indeed a very interesting and instructive place to visit.

[MattBLancs]

Milton Keynes appears to have a what it considers a very good recycling percentage of 60%..

https://www.milton-keynes.gov.uk/news/2 ... -recycling

Our Recycling Centre has occasional open days and is indeed a very interesting and instructive place to visit.

Pretty fantastic in comparison to national or Lancashire figures:

The 2023/24 statistics on household waste sent for recycling, reuse and composting reveal that the rate for the Lancashire-12 area of 41.5% was below both the North West rate of 45.3%, and the England rate of 42.3%. The Lancashire-12 percentage fell by 1.3 percentage points (pp) over the previous year.

At the district/unitary level, recycling, reuse and composting rates varied between lows of just 27.1% in Blackburn with Darwen to 45.0% in West Lancashire.

https://www.lancashire.gov.uk/lancashir ... y-tipping/

[bobins]

I think household waste recycling used to be measured by weight (not sure if it still is though), so as we are allowed to put glass in our recycling bins down here, we automatically did much better than other authorities that didn't as the glass weighs much more than empty cereal packets

[MattBLancs]

Yes still by weight, or at least some of the data is in weight (there's kilogrammes per household listed on one of the pages I've read in last day or two)

I didn't realise some folks weren't separating glass, as well as very heavy it's very energy intensive (to make "virgin" glass from raw materials) so a good candidate for recycling.

[Gibbo2286]

That's great initiative, I like that

It would be blocked a buggered about with nowadays by green councillors.

[Gibbo2286]

I like the BBC 'posh' voices on that video, not much of that now. They'd probably be saying "It's effing good innit."

[CitroJim]

Yes still by weight, or at least some of the data is in weight (there's kilogrammes per household listed on one of the pages I've read in last day or two)

I didn't realise some folks weren't separating glass, as well as very heavy it's very energy intensive (to make "virgin" glass from raw materials) so a good candidate for recycling.

Here in MK, glass goes in with metal and plastic. We have a separate bin for paper and cardboard.

[MattBLancs]

Here in MK, glass goes in with metal and plastic. We have a separate bin for paper and cardboard.

Ah, yes see what you mean - sorted later. Yes we have a "blue bin" into which goes glass, plastic and tins + cans - separated later presumably a the sort of place I am thinking of a visit to

I took the weight of the glass improving the recycling data as being the alternative being it still put intm the Non-recyclable bin instead.