Derek Smith

Did you know that 1/3 of your household waste can be composted? Composting is a natural process that transforms your kitchen and garden waste into valuable and nutrient rich food for your garden, for free.  Anyone with outside space can compost at home, and it’s easy to make and use.

All you need to do is provide the right ingredients and let nature do the rest.  The Surrey Waste Partnership (which is made up of Surrey County Council and the 11 district and borough councils in the county) is offering home composting bins at fantastic prices, starting from £14.00 (RRP £39.00), to encourage more residents to compost at home.

Even if you do compost already, there may be a few extra things you could put in. For example: empty cereal packets and egg boxes; fruit scraps and vegetable peelings; tea bags and coffee grounds; vacuum bag contents and even vegetarian pet bedding, are in fact great ingredients to make compost. Mix this in with garden waste such as old flowers and nettles; wood chippings and straw; twigs and dried leaves, and you have the perfect recipe. When it is finished the compost will be like a fine soil, ready to use.

Use it on your flower beds and vegetable plots, patio planters, hanging baskets and even window boxes.  Compost keeps your plants growing healthily, by improving soil structure and fertility, maintaining moisture levels and keeping your soil’s PH balance in place.

Composting is good for the environment.  By putting less household waste out for collection, less energy is required as there are fewer vehicle movements, waste handling and industrial processes involved, and less waste going to landfill.  And composting means you are putting carbon back into the soil, making it more fertile and helping tackle climate change too.

Spring into composting at home and make the most of the waste you throw away.

To buy a bin or get more advice on how to turn your table scraps and garden waste into compost, visit www.surreycc.gov.uk/getcomposting or call 0844 571 4444.

Green Mole Forum is encouraging people in Mole Valley to go to this event and suggests we all go on the same train – see the poster below.  The train stops at Leatherhead at 10:33 and Ashtead at 10:37 and we hope that plenty of people from Ashtead will be going.

AD is a well established process for handing sewage, farm wastes, food wastes or combinations of these feedstocks to produce biogas and a solid residue that is a valuable soil fertiliser.  AD keeps organic waste out of landfill, and cuts greenhouse gas emissions.  AD plants vary from the very large (one AD plant handles all Stockholm’s sewage and food wastes for example) to plants the size of a large table.  There are still not many AD plants in the UK, despite government support for them.  The introduction of feed-in tariffs will give a big boost to all renewable energy technologies in the UK including AD.

A small AD plant is already being seriously considered in Headley to run on a mixture of horse manure and sewage.  Local famers recognise the benefits of having an AD plant on farm land.  Our new group intends to build on this existing local support, gather information, seek advice from experts, and come up with the most promising AD projects.  If you would like to be part of this group or find out more, please send us an email via the ‘Contact’ button on the GMF website http://www.greenmoleforum.org/ , or give me a ring on 01372-378914.

Derek Smith

Green Mole Forum is encouraging people in Mole Valley to go to this event and suggests we all go on the same train – see the poster below.  The train stops at Leatherhead at 10:33 and Ashtead at 10:37 and we hope that plenty of people from Ashtead will be going.

Derek Smith

Is this something that Transition Ashtead should promote?  The campaign wants people who sign up to commit themselves to reducing their CO2 emissions 10% by the end of 2010.  I’ve had a look on the campaign website www.1010uk.org for more information on the campaign and was disappointed by what I found.

For individuals there is a 10 point check list of things to do (nine really, the last one is a joke). I assume you’re meant to do the lot but it’s not clear.  It suggests you measure your gas and electricity to check you have saved 10% in 2010, but that’s no use if you didn’t measure in 2009.  You can tick one of the boxes if you either (a) have no flights in 2010 or (b) only one return flight.  But in case (a) your emissions saving is zero if you didn’t fly in 2009 either but could be enormous if you did.  In case (b) you can score points for ‘only’ going to Australia which has an enormous carbon footprint.

Another problem is the whole concept of a 10% reduction target for everyone.  At one extreme is someone I know who must have the lowest carbon footprint in Mole Valley but cannot join the campaign because she’s already done all she can.  At the other is an MVDC Councillor who this year had a holiday by long haul flight (I know of one and I bet there are more).  All he or she (no clues on identity!) has to do is have a UK holiday in 2010 and they’ve reduced their footprint by over 50%.

So the part of the campaign aimed at individuals all looks naff to me and not good enough to sell to anyone.

Organisations can also sign up.  Organisations are required to measure and report their emissions and so this part of the campaign looks more sensible.  It recognises that some energy efficient organisations may find 10% too hard, and anything over 3% ‘will be celebrated’ whatever that means.  I asked Graeme Kane, Mole Valley’s Sustainable Development Manager, whether he had come across the campaign and if he thought Mole Valley District Council (MVDC) might join as an organisation.  He told me he has already considered it and had come to similar conclusions to me.

So the whole 10:10 campaign looks badly flawed to me.  This is only my opinion though, and not necessarily the view of the Transition Ashtead group.

Derek Smith

The site invites you first to answer a few questions about your lifestyle from which it estimates your carbon footprint in tonnes/year CO2.  To calculate your footprint accurately you have to enter gas and electricity meter readings, car mileage and destinations of any holiday flights.  Once you have entered two readings at different dates, your footprint for the period between the two dates in kg CO2 is calculated.  This is extrapolated to give an approximate annual footprint and this gradually becomes more accurate as you enter more readings.  I have recorded all my readings for the past year, and the calculator let me enter all these past readings, and here is a screen dump of the result.

My Carbon Footprint

Because I don’t fly my footprint is dominated by my gas usage which is dominated by heating as you can see from the big increase over the winter.

The website explains everything very well and so I do encourage you to have a look and start to enter your readings.  Please leave a comment on how you found it, and especially if you’re interested in joining a carbon monitoring group.

Derek Smith

Do we need wind turbines to tackle climate change or is their impact on our greatly valued landscapes a too high a price to pay? Join us to discuss whether we should invest in other sources of renewable energy like wood fuel?  

The advertising poster had a picture of the Surrey Hills alarmingly dotted with several wind turbines so I expected an angry meeting with lots of local people protesting about ruining our local landscape.  In fact it was not like this at all.  There were three main speakers who between them made a strong case for developing wind and wood as renewable energy sources.  Amongst the points made were:

• The South East Area Plan requires 25 wind turbines to be constructed in the region
• Most of the region has an adequate wind speed for wind farms
• There are ample wood resources in the UK – much waste wood presently goes to landfill
• Modern wood stoves are 80-90% efficient and can be used in smokeless zones.

However all three speakers spoke generally and did not mention Surrey Hills.  I tried to ask whether anyone had studied possible renewable energy sites across the South East and knew how Surrey Hills compared with rival sites, but did not get the chance.  I can only assume no-one has done such a study yet.

There were also three others on the panel who were asked questions about what they’d heard.  One was a leading farmer from the Surrey NFU who impressed me a lot.  He said Surrey’s agricultural land is under-used at present and Surrey needs an agricultural renaissance, and he wants to see anaerobic digesters installed to treat farm waste sustainably.  He bemoaned all the objections to proposals like this.  The other two were local politicians.  Perhaps predictably they didn’t attempt to challenge the speakers, but just said that Surrey Hills is the wrong place.  There were lots of questions from the audience and I was pleased and surprised that most were hostile to this NIMBY attitude.

I came away none the wiser about whether there are any serious proposals for renewable energy projects on the Surrey Hills.  The meeting probably gave a good foretaste though of the battle that will break out if we propose a good renewable energy project in Ashtead.

Derek Smith

http://climatesafety.org/

It is written by the Public Interest Research Centre and provides a simple summary of the latest science, delivering a clear message that to have any chance of maintaining a safe climate, we must rapidly decarbonise our society, preserve global carbon sinks, and address the problem with an unprecedented degree of seriousness.

Even with the UK government commitment to 80% carbon cuts by 2050, Climate Safety warns that our current policy response does not match up to the scale of the challenge.  I shall be explaining why this is the case at our next open meeting which is at the Brewery pub on Monday 28 September.

Derek Smith

He started by summarising the mess the world is in with climate change and peak oil and told us that the world needs a new economic model.  I don’t suppose he’s in a transition group, but at this point he was sounding like he was.  Most of the talk however was on the sorts of technologies needed to make buildings and communities sustainable, including:

• Anaerobic digesters that produce bio-gas and compost from food waste and sewage
• Mining waste for valuable materials (apparently New York’s landfill is potentially the world’s biggest cooper mine)
• Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants in North Africa can meet all Europe’s electricity demand
• Urban planning to reduce the need to travel and get cars off the road
• Urban farming incl. trees to help cool streets, food growing on roofs
• Grow algae in hot water on sides of buildings and send to anaerobic digester.

The overall message was upbeat – solutions are available and this is an exciting time to be an engineer.  However he admitted that all this needs political will and when his talk moved away from his engineering expertise I found him less impressive.  Here are some examples. 

1. He repeated the official government line that we need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions 50% by 2050 and UK emissions 80% by 2050 to be sustainable.  The science says we need to reduce much more than this to have any hope of limiting global average temperature rise to 2 deg C.
2. He said the all the UK’s housing should be upgraded street by street (hurray), but blithely said that “pension funds will pay”.  Surely pension funds are obliged to make the best return for the pensioners?
3. He said water shortages can be met by desalination of seawater.  But these plants are heavy energy users and not cheap.  How can poor countries possibly afford them? 

I’m glad I went but I didn’t identify anything that is immediately relevant to Transition Ashtead.  However the other Science Festival talk I attended was called ‘Energy from the Surrey Hills: Wind and Wood?’ which promised immediate local interest.  I’ll report on that within a day or two. 

Derek Smith