Thoughts on geekyoto

Last weekend I treated myself to an outing, a day of mental stimulation. I took myself off to London for the geekyoto event organised by Mark Simpkins and Ben Hammersley. As the early birds took their seats in the morning, we were a little unsure what to expect. So were Mark and Ben, I think.

What followed was a day of mind-expanding ideas, few of them very predictable given the day’s theme (“Discuss the future and how we’ll live in it”). It wasn’t all about environmentalism, it wasn’t all about technology either. Some bits of it weren’t about either of them. But throughout, the basic ideas of living future lives sustainably, using our geek technology to understand and bring about sustainability, weren’t very far away.

The day was long, and did suffer from slide overload after a few hours (next time, I’d like more speakers to just speak; most of the slides on show at geekyoto didn’t really need to be shown at all). But I did learn a lot, such as:

• The story of the Government minister who didn’t want to post a question on his blog because he feared being seen to show weakness – this was the thing I found myself thinking about most after the event. How, I wondered, can we bring about some understanding of online culture by politicians? So that future generations of them can ask questions in public and not be frightened of the opposition – or the Daily Mail – coming down on them like a tonne of bricks as a result
• Carbon emissions trading is broken; a new campaign, Sandbag, hopes to fix it by removing emissions trading permits from circulation, thus reducing the total number, and making the trading market stronger. I’d like to write an article about this for someone, if I can get a commission
• Lots of people present had a very positive view of the future. It isn’t necessarily inherited, Richard Sandford of Futurelab told us. Imagine better futures, and they’re more likely to come about. Ben Saunders’ inspiring closing talk was clear: the only limits on human potential are the ones we impose upon ourselves
• Lots of the proposed changes will work best over decades; we are anticipating things that will require generational change. A move away from disposable products of all kinds; energy usage as performance metric; making play a more important part of everyone’s life

Geekyoto was something genuinely different; a hand-made conference about things that mattered both to speakers and audience. It was stimulating, thought-provoking, and ended with natter in the pub. There are going to be more geekyoto events; I hope to attend them, and I encourage you to go along too.

(More photos here)

Charging for waste, and making recycling easier

Rubbish charging given the go-ahead:

Councils in England are to be given the power to introduce pilot schemes to charge households according to the amount of rubbish they throw away.

I have mixed feelings about this. I’m pleased that people are thinking seriously about waste at last, but I’m not sure that charging for unrecycled waste is, on its own, a solution. Let me explain why.

For years now, local authorities have been caught between two hard places. The government has reduced central funding and told the councils to raise the money they need with Council Tax. If their taxes are high, that’s their own fault, and nothing to do with the government. The government saves money and blames the councillors in high-spending authorities for being wasteful.

Recycling schemes cost money, of course, but the councils are trapped there too: the councils themselves are charged for every tonne of waste they send to landfill. So they need to recycle as much as possible to save on this cost. But setting up and managing the recycling costs money too. Councils might want to offer (for example) kerbside plastic recycling, but then find that they can only do so at a loss. They’re doing the right thing, environmentally and morally and in the eyes of the government, but they’re making a loss on it and will have to pay for that from Council Taxes. So some other service, like a library or something generally seen as “less important” than recycling, will get cut instead.

And throughout it all, the government smugly declares that these problems are not of its making, because every high-spending council has only itself to blame.

Right, rant out of the way. Here’s what really bothers me about this idea.

The Tories criticise the scheme saying it will encourage fly-tipping. It might, but I don’t think that’s the biggest problem. More likely is widespread difficulty for people to actually obey the requirements laid upon them to recycle.

Why might it be difficult? Because effective recycling needs physical space.

I’ve said before that recycling is all about storage. You have waste stuff, and it has to be put somewhere. In the past, people just threw it in the dustbin. Now, they need to throw it into one of four or five dustbins. But kitchens in many thousands of houses and flats don’t have enough space for that many bins.

Larger households will find room. Keen green-minded recyclers will make room. But thousands of people, especially those in smaller properties, flats, or rented accommodation, will have trouble finding the space they need to store the waste that they can’t immediately get rid of. People in these circumstances will find it hard to follow waste regulations, because they don’t have the physical space to store their waste and will incur costs if they throw them in their standard wheelie bin.

I can think of two possible solutions, or at least methods of making life easier for these people.

One is widespread use of community bins. A bit like the local recycling centres you see in most towns, but on a much wider scale. There will need to be one on every street, and it will need to be bigger and accept more kinds of waste than the existing ones. There would no doubt be a lot of opposition to something like this, but I suspect most people would prefer it to paying more taxes.

Another option – and this is the one I’d prefer and hope to see come about – is a massive increase in the use of recyclable packaging by food manufacturers and retailers.

When people discover they are being charged by their council for disposal of the little plastic trays that their ham slices sit in, pressure will increase on the supermarkets to make sure those little trays can be recycled.

With any luck, we’ll see bio-degradable packaging taking over. Those with gardens could chuck packaging into their compost bins; those without would be able to throw it on communal compost piles in their nearest park or open space.

I’m not opposed to recycling; I’m very much in favour of it. I want to see it encouraged. But I think the basic, practical problem of storing waste before it is collected is just as important to recyclers as the issue of preventing it going to landfill.

Stonehenge bypass latest

There’s a bloody great road that roars past our most famous historical site, Stonehenge, and for some years now there have been plans afoot to try and do something about it.

It’s a thorny issue, because there’s not many options that don’t do just as much harm as they do good. Stonehenge is by no means a lonely monument; the landscape in that area is riddled with archaeology, some of it of as much interest to professionals as Stonehenge itself. Almost any plan for re-routing the A303 is going to involve destruction or damage to something historical.

There have been various ideas floating about. One was a dig a huge tunnel, hiding the road for miles in either direction. This would, of course, cost an absolute fortune and would be by no means easy; if you read the details at the Highways Agency site, you find that to dig any kind of tunnel they’d have to modify the water table itself, and build huge retaining walls to keep the sludgy Wiltshire clay from cascading down on to the road. There’s a reasonably informative PDF you can download, from which the map above was snipped.

The government has issued a press release about it, mentioning some options. But perhaps more useful are the dates and times for a public consultation, to be held in Salisbury and London during February. If you care about Stonehenge or its surrounding landscape, you might like to try and make it along to either the White Hart Hotel in Salisbury, between the 9th and 11th of February; or to The Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House, Piccadilly, on the 17th and 18th.