It was announced today that my wonderful Tory run local authority, Walsall MBC had spent £6,419 in the last two years replacing 1,139 stolen and presumably lost or broken wheelie bins but as Walsall Council has a policy of making residents pay for replacement bins to the tune of £16.50 a time this figure seemed a bit odd. (note, these figures are for last 2 years although they do cover some of this financial year so presumably mainly cover the period when the cost of a wheelie bin was £16.50. The Council gracefully subsidised the ‘cost’ of the bins to the tune of £2. Anyone wishing to purchase a bin now has to pay the full £18.50)

Now for a little sum. 6,419 divided by 1,139. That would be £5.64 each. So here’s a question. Where does the other £10.86 go then or £12.86 since this years budget increases?

Now there’s a quandary in these figures because if we correspond the costs per bin released against neighbouring Sandwell £11.74 or Wolverhampton on £14.98 the costs released by Walsall Council seem to be well below average. So there’s two scenarios here, neither of which particularly puts the Tories in a good light.

They are either really super-efficient being able to supply wheelie bins at a cost rate of £5.64 and creaming off the rest of the money they actually charge residents because they have a monopoly cartel over the local supply and can abuse it. Or, somehow their figures seem to exclude things like administration and delivery that other Councils have included and the £18.50 figure that residents have to pay for a wheelie bin reflects the true value of purchase and costs in which case why can Wolverhampton and Sandwell deliver the same product and service significantly cheaper than Walsall?

I’m a keen gardener. I’m proud of my humble little garden and we try to live a fairly ‘green’ lifestyle in our house. Apart from all the recycling and re-using of items we also compost as much as we can.

I have one of the Dalek style composters in the corner that I managed to pick up in the days when Walsall Council actually used to give them away for free. It suits the size of our garden and the household waste we produce which is why I’m completely envious of this.

This is Mrs Penguin’s father’s compost heap and it’s not far off the size our our entire garden. It’s got pumpkins growing on it and everything. Must buy a house with a bigger garden. With a compost heap that size and the amount of heat it throws off I could run the central heating through it.

I’ve been away for the last fortnight on holiday. Although not guaranteed, it was highly likely that we would be out of net connectivity at least for part or the whole time. This in the end turned out to be the whole fortnight so although I haven’t had oodles of time to pen thoughtful pieces for publication, I did have the odd half hour here or there to sit down with the knackered old laptop and write a few articles.

These articles have now been published in roughly the chronological order that they were written in and as noted in each article, I have changed the timestamp to reflect when it was written. As the pieces are not of a particularly time related importance I’m sure no one will have a problem with that and I’m being completely honest about the fact and not in anyway trying to alter timestamps to pretend that I’ve got a scoop ten minutes before Sky or the Beeb as I’m sure no political blogger would ever stoop so low as to do that.

Some of the articles relate to things I’d meant to write about before I left but didn’t get round to and given that I’ve had no net access and will probably be too lazy when I get back, there won’t be any hyperlinks to various references like usual. This has been very interesting given that I would normally be quite fastidious about references but for these articles from the last two weeks.

I’m sure all parents wish that their offspring become cleverer than themselves that they do more and learn more than we do. However and although I wish this for Little Penguin I didn’t expect that it would come after only 18 months of him being around.

Here was the plan. I don’t speak German but would like to learn so as we are bringing up Little Penguin bilingually the theory was that I would learn with him.

That was the theory but the little sod’s capacity for picking up words is unbelievable and far outstrips my own. Not only is he learning the English for things but also the German and he now knows what a whole raft of things are in German that I don’t. I’m rather miffed and feeling distinctly humbled.

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What do we British have about roundabouts? I’m not saying they’re good or bad but we seem to have a lot of them in Britain. There’s hardly any around here, I don’t know if that’s typical of Germany as a whole but they seem to very much favour the junction which you probably notice mostly when you’re on the Autobahn.

I’m trying to remember a single junction off a motorway in Britain that isn’t a roundabout and I’m sure there must be some but I’ve never come across them. Haven’t seen a single roundabout here off the autobahn but presumably there must be some here too.

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It’s now the seventh day of not being hooked up to the Internet. Half way through the holiday and it’s a strange cultural change from living both ones primarily professional life and to some extent social life through electronic communication. When we’d arrived we’d hoped to have a connection set up but it appears that it’s either tradition or the law in Germany that when you sign contracts you are given a fortnights cooling off period to change your mind meaning that any connection would be setup the day after we have returned home which isn’t much use.

It’s strange but the first couple of days were the worst, a bit like going cold turkey I craved my net connection. Now sitting outside with the laptop penning a few posts with distinctly no connection to the Internet, it all feels that little bit more relaxed. I’m not a vexed about not being online and apart from not being able to keep up with news back home that’s about it. It is after all August so I’m sure nothing of any importance will have happened in British politics in the fortnight I’m away and it’s good to get a break from it anyway.

It is interesting to come to realise how not dependent on technology we are. I know people who live their lives through the net and I do a little too but I’m of an age that remembers life before it. It’s going to be very interesting to see how my son grows up in an increasingly online society deals with it. That reminds me, was going to pen a post on equality and modern communication methods ages ago and never got round to it. Might just remember to do it in the next week I’m here or then again I might not.

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I like doing these comparisons between different countries, after all comparative systems (primarily social welfare) are my academic background although I’m quite rusty these days.
The one thing you notice in Germany, or at least I do which probably says something about my love for buildings and architecture is the roofs. When I think about the roofs on buildings back home they seem drab, boring and unimaginative in comparison. Even on our older buildings that in other ways are beautiful to behold, it seems that the roofs are an afterthought, something plonked on top to keep the rain out but not utilised to their full effect.

When we get into housing estates that most of us reside in the picture gets worse. From the late 60’s onwards to the present we seem to have become addicted to lifeless and drab concrete roofing tiles as if there were no alternative. Mark this against slate which for obvious reasons dominates Welsh roofs and emanates a sheer natural beauty of its own.
However in Germany, the traditional baked terracotta, a design and style that stretches back to Roman times is the one that is favoured.

It’s not used uni-formally though in a single style. There’s multiple styles and shapes of roofing tile, of different colours and textures. Personally I quite like the glazed tiles which shimmer in the sun and you can see here.

I wish I had more time to get around and take more photos, I don’t think we’ll be going back into the city centre before we leave but some of the roofs there have been imaginatively used to almost artistic extent. Even in the suburbs there’s a great sense of individuality about roofing which probably stems from it being more traditional in Germany to buy a plot of land and build your own house as opposed to our get a developer to put up a lot of homogeneous lifeless boxes mentality that we have in the UK.

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OK, lets qualify that title first. Germany isn’t cheaper for everything, definitely not healthcare, of which there’s a lengthy post/essay on that to come whenever I can get round to finishing it. We’re talking about general stuff to buy in the shops. I’m not much of a consumer, shopping is one of my least favourite activities but when I do partake of the consumer activity I’m fairly ruthless when it comes to getting a good deal.

There are a few things I’m interested in at present. Mainly techie stuff, computer components and DIY stuff, building materials and the like so with this in mind I’ve been comparing prices.
Before I left I was looking up the price of RAM for PC’s. I might one day have the finances to build a new computer and I’d like to have at least a Gigabyte of RAM. There were some strips of 1Gb RAM in Maplins circa £80 and some special heatsinked two strips of 512Mb ones mainly used by gamers and over-clockers for £110. I took a look in MediaMart the other day and the same strips of 1Gb RAM were going for 79.99EUR and two strips of 512Mb with heatsinks were only 69.99EUR. I have to nip back at some point before we leave to do some price checking on other things but in terms of components I could get a much better deal here.

Same goes for building supplies. Now lets discount trade prices or having a mate in the know and go straight for comparisons for your average person who wants to do a bit of DIY and goes off to the local DIY superstore ala B&Q and Homebase. I was looking through and a few years ago I was interested in the possibility of a log burning stove. You’re going to need somewhere around 6-7kW for a house of my size but the prices were anything from £1,500 up to £5,000 in Britain and I plumped for a gas-combi boiler instead. Here, you can get a 6.5kW boiler for as little as 229 EUR and the most expensive I came across was a 7kW system for 1,899 EUR most being around the 700-900 EUR price tag.

Loft insulation is something I’m after at the moment although not necessarily for the loft. For some strange reason trying to find common rockwool loft insulation that isn’t wrapped in that bloody space-blanket stuff is getting incredibly difficult. Apart from being three times the price, there are some jobs when simple old rockwool is all you need. Of the DIY superstores I only know B&Q in Wednesbury that still sell it and they don’t do it in the convenient smaller rolls but in the trade size rolls. However getting back on to the point of prices. Here, a 160mm thick roll with silver foil backing on one side is 5,55 EUR a square metre. From memory the old rolls I got from Homebase with no silver foil that cover about a square metre cost £6 each and that space blanket stuff is closer to £15 a roll.

On plasterboard, for 12.5mm thick boards it 2.79 EUR a square metre. I bought a load a couple of years ago to do the attic which was thinner than that but for about 12 square metres it cost something like £79. So that would be £6.58 a square metre and ironically it was all made in Germany. I might add that included delivery which was free if you spent more than £75 and from trade being the cheapest I could find in the Black Country out of checking everyone in the Yellow Pages, have no idea how much it is in Homebase or B&Q but I suspect more.

I’d like one of those mixer taps in the bathroom. The ones with an attachment to fix a shower but also has a downwards facing tap that you can switch between the two. I priced one up in the UK last year. It was £109 so that project stayed on hold. Here I could get one for 29 EUR and this applies generally for all types of mixer taps, why they are so ridiculously expensive in the UK is beyond me.

Finally on to laminate flooring. I did our abour five years ago and it’s the quite cheap, not proper wood type because that was far too expensive at the time for my budget but it clocked in around £5 a square metre. I also remember looking at the proper wood flooring and it being anything from £12-£30 a square metre depending on how posh you wanted it. The same good quality proper wood flooring here is 6,49 EUR a square metre.

Those are just a few examples but there’s some pretty big differences in prices. Why is this the case? The last time I came back from Germany I did a post about price differentials on buying a copy of Windows XP. I ran through in more detail factors that affect prices then but just to recap. Germany is in theory a higher cost country, the people earn more so more has to be spent on wages, it has more employment regulations so there should be more costs to employers, it’s part of that nasty old Eurozone thing that the right-wing in Britain told us would increase prices, their VAT rate is 19% a whole 1.5% higher than in the UK and a lot more of the products are actually made in Germany by Germans being paid higher wages, not made in China by people earning a pittance as are many of the goods us UK consumers are paying out for.

I can only conclude that somewhere along the way in the UK there’s some greedy companies creaming off a higher proportion of profit from our consumers than companies in Germany do. It would be interesting to know what the relative mark-up price on goods are here compared to in the UK. Sadly though I’m sure that information is very hard to come by.

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The other month the Tories were playing to their more traditional audience by beefing up their position on marriage. More specifically on finally finding a policy of reintroducing the married couples tax allowance.

You see it’s all gone pear-shaped since Labour came to power. Their hellbent policies of trying to focus money towards people who actually need it, like young working couples with things like childcare costs and ever spiralling costs of getting on the property ladder has led to a breakdown in of morality in our society meaning that all these kids being raised by unmarried couples are going to turn out as hooligans, drug addicts and thugs.

The Tories are right, this could all be fixed by getting people to walk up the aisle together, don a couple of rings and erstwhile bad parents would miraculously be transformed into model members of society raising well-adjusted good children.

What the Tories are doing is making a value judgement on the circumstances in which people should raise their children. Personally I happen to disagree. I don’t think children are best raised by married couples, nor unmarried couples nor single parents for that matter. Children are best raised by good parents.

Myself and Mrs Penguin despite my referring to her in those terms aren’t married. We’d like to think we’re good parents. We take lots of time out to play with Little Penguin, do educational activities with him and give him a good healthy diet. We’re people of modest means, we don’t have sufficient resources to afford lots of field trips or toys but we do what we can within our means.

That’s not to say we wouldn’t like to at some point get married. We have no problems with our long-term commitment to each other, it’s just nasty horrible things like paying a mortgage, affording toys for the little one, travelling back and forth a couple of times a year to Mrs Penguin’s homeland to keep up with family get in the way.

Whatever criticisms might be placed at it, the tax credit system helps people like us out a lot. The Tories policy of abolishing tax credits and introducing a married couples tax allowance would not only not help us but would knock us back on a rough reckoning over a £1,000 a year.

That’s not helping people with families, that’s forcing people already on tight budgets into debt and poverty while giving people in their fifties who’ve got rid of their kids and paid their mortgage off a nice little bung purely on the basis of them being married.
I’ll never vote Tory of course, but if I were someone in my position who wasn’t such a fervent Labour supporter then on hearing these proposals I’m sure the Tories wouldn’t have a hope in hell of getting my vote.

They have of course missed an opportunity to be both pro-active in promoting married (if that’s their belief) and combating levels of social inequity. I spotted another article on the BBC before I left about the issue of savings and benefits. At present if you have certain levels of savings then you loose you right to benefits and the figures quoted were for £16,000. For someone who doesn’t know the system that well, you could be forgiven for believing that you’d have to have £16,000 in the bank before you loose benefits. This isn’t actually the case.

Let’s take the case of the person who just happens to suddenly be made redundant, I know because this happened to me once. Let’s imagine he’s single, toddles off to the Job Centre to sign on and drops in an application for Council Tax benefit at the Council’s swanky new one-stop shop. So far as his JSA benefit is concerned, it’s not £16,000 when he’s going to lose his JSA, it’s actually £3,000 (figure round-about there, I think the allowance raises annually and it’s been a couple of years since I checked). That’s the point at which the savings actually affect the level of benefits for JSA that are paid. So apart from having to live on a pitiful fifty something quid a week, any more savings than that and his benefit gets incrementally dropped down to nothing at £16,000. What this means is that we have a system that effectively discourages savings, particularly for those who work in areas where periodic lay-off’s or downtime happens. It’s OK if you’ve got a nice safe job with little chance of being made redundant, but if your employment is sporadic or indeed if you are trying to set up a business and have irregular work which means you have to sometimes sign on or off on benefits to get through while you try and grow your business then the system isn’t very friendly.

However that’s just JSA, what about Council Tax? Now Council Tax benefit isn’t actually receiving any money, it’s just purely to cover payment of tax that normally you would be liable for. Assuming you don’t live in Walsall and the council can actually sort it out without being threatened with being taken to the Local Government Ombudsman or sending you numerous court’s summons for non-payment or for losing your application then the process should be fairly simple although again it is very inflexible in relation to casual workers or those trying to set up in business for themselves. What you do get hit with is not a £16,000 limit on your savings before it affects your benefit, nor even a £3,000 limit before you have to start paying a proportion of your Council Tax. The limit is set at £1,600 which these days isn’t exactly a King’s ransom.

So lets take our hypothetical single guy. On top of getting next to nothing to live on with JSA, he’s not going to be able to have more savings than £1,600 before either that savings or money from his JSA has to start going to pay Council Tax. Sad thing is, before the guy was made redundant, he’d scraped together a few grands worth of savings because he and his girlfriend Stacey wanted to tie the knot. Well, not much chance of that now then.

So there you have it. If the Tories really were interested in being progressive but also encouraging marriage, why not up the limit on savings that people on benefits are allowed. Accept that there are things in life that people might want to do, like buy a car or dare I say it, get married which tend to cost a bit more that £1,600 and allow them the opportunity not to be ‘discriminated’ against by the current system. Sadly though, this opportunity has missed the Tories by as I also read in that article that Labour are looking at reviewing the amounts people are allowed to have in savings and possibly even abolishing the limits altogether. Now that’s progressive and ironically could enable some to marry who aren’t in a position to at the moment.

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In my current location there’s two wheelie bins outside, a 240 litre and a 120 litre bin. I’ll just do a little disclaimer. I know next to nothing about how waste disposal is organised in Germany but I’m enquiring. Whether my current location is typical of the whole country or whether there is great difference between the different states of the Federal Republic I don’t know so what we’re doing here is just taking a snapshot of this particular bit of Brandenburg that I happen to be in.

The 240 litre bin, akin to the one that sits outside my front door back in Willenhall is solely for paper, nothing else. Its smaller counterpart is for generally non-recyclable materials. Also out of site in the outhouse are a further two other 240 litre bins that are yellow and are for plastics.

This sparked off a thought I’d had for a post before I left that I simply didn’t get round to. There was an article in the Express & Star about fortnightly collections in Walsall. A couple of weeks previously, our wonderful Cabinet Member for Environment in Walsall, Cllr. Rachel Walker had announced that Walsall would not implement fortnightly collections when the Express & Star did a survey of the local authorities in the Black Country. However just before I left she announced that Walsall Council would be looking at fortnightly collections and there’s going to be some public consultation on the issue.

By the way, when we say public consultation, we actually mean according to the article in the Express & Star that Walsall Council will ask residents whether they want a 240 litre bin that will be collected once a fortnight or a 120 litre bin which will be collected once a week.
This poses some interesting questions some of which are specifically related to Walsall given its other policies.

Now for myself personally, we never get anywhere near filling our 240 litre bin primarily down to us already being quite conscious about recycling and avoiding as much packaging on the things that we buy as we can or to the annoyance of Mrs Penguin, my own obsession with finding ingenious ways to re-use the packaging for other purposes.

However when it comes down to it, there is no choice that Walsall Council is giving residents. Whether you want a big bin or a little one, you’re going to be limited to producing 120 litres worth of waste a week as opposed to the current 240 litres and that is what it amounts to, nothing more, nothing less, Walsall Council wants to cut down on the waste it collects. I myself would prefer one of the small bins and I am rather keen on weekly collections. Some local authorities have switched to fortnightly collections and it’s obviously an issue that certain sections of the media are building up as an issue to bash local/national Government with.

When the likes of the scream sheets are building up a bit of a bandwagon against fortnightly collections and in defence of weekly collections it almost sparks off a questioning of my own views but we’ll deal with thatanother day, back to Walsall Council’s policies for a bit.
What does intrigue me about this plan by Walsall MBC is that Cllr. Rachel Walker appears to be indicating that people will have a choice between two systems that are in essence the same in terms of what you’re going to be able to chuck in the bin in terms of quantity, halving it to be precise. I have for a long time taken a great interest in public policy implementation. Those that know me well, know I’m a stickler for efficiency, I don’t like waste so please indulge me while I get my head around this policy.

As a resident of Walsall MBC, I can choose and I probably would, to ditch my 240 litre bin for a 120 litre bin that Walsall Council will empty every week. Lets say hypothetically that my neighbour and for arguments sake, everyone else in my street retain their 240 litre bin that Walsall Council will empty every fortnight.

If I’m due for a weekly collection that means the binmen have to come to my street every week just to collect my bin but nobody else’s. That at least from my perspective smacks of a very inefficient use of public resources. So will there be a quota? A set percentage of properties needed in a street to justify a weekly collection, if so then that’s not real choice or as this humble old cynic suspects, is this a case of attempting to introduce fortnightly collections by the back door without the Tories in Walsall having the bottle to go to the public openly with the policy at an election or stand up and justify it?

Then we move on to the issue that is very much an individual case for Walsall as it doesn’t affect any of the neighbouring authorities.

In Walsall, residents who require a new/replacement for broken/stolen wheelie bin have to pay Walsall MBC £18.50 (I’m doing this from memory, could be £18 but that figure somehow sticks in my mind). Strangely enough the Express & Star seems to have started up a bit of a campaign on this issue after a few pensioners got rather miffed about having to cough up for nicked bins. I’ve no idea why this has suddenly happened because having to pay for bins has been Council policy for at least the last six years, the only difference being that prior to this year Walsall Council subsidised the cost by a whopping £2. I happen to know this as when I moved into my house over five years ago there was no wheelie bin and I had to cough up £16.50 (again from memory, have the receipt somewhere) for my bin.

So here’s a few questions. At present, pretty much everyone has a 240 litre wheelie bin except for various flats and new-builds, some of which either have communal bins or 120 litre bins. So if I chose to have a 120 litre bin, would I have to pay for it? Get one in part exchange for my 240 litre bin, in which case would I get a refund as presumably a 120 litre bin would cost less or if the new bin is free, can I keep my old one for other purposes as I’m presuming it’s my property after I had to fork out money from my own pocket to pay for it and then because there are all these potential differences in terms of those who own their bins/those who got them for free, does Walsall Council either have a database knocking around to tell the difference or the organisational competency to deal with it? I will leave you to decide on that one.

Moving back to a comparison in recylcing/waste disposal between home and my current location and broadening the debate slightly. The 120 litre household waste bin is quite common across many parts of Europe, other waste being handled by a variety of different recycling initiatives. Here for example, there’s the paper bin which is collected once a month. The plastics bin is emptied once a month and the general un-recycled waste bin, once a fortnight. However things like the plastic bottle (coke, orange juice, water types) don’t go in the plastics bin which incidentally you can also put things like glass jars in, but it’s not compulsory, these can just go in the un-recycled waste bin as well which I find strange because at least in theory even Walsall Council is keen on compulsorily recycling glass jars.
I say in theory and please indulge me another little dig at the professional incompetency of my local authority but I’ve had my ‘recycling box’ for about four years now. It’s never been emptied and where as I’ve just accepted this in the past as being part and parcel of life in a crap Borough, a couple of months back we all got stickers plastered on our wheelie bins reminding us to recycle using our boxes.

I plucked up the resolve to waste some of my time and money by calling Walsall Council to inform them that they’ve never collected my box. I was assured by the lady on the other end that my street does get collected and when asking if they could guarantee if I put it out now I’ve reported the issue that it would definitely be emptied, I was told yes. I did put my box out on the basis of this assurance, I’ll leave you to guess what happened.

Moving back to waste in general. I should also note that things like milk cartons made from Tetrapak can also be recycled by being put into the plastics yellow bin. So just to recap, we’ve got three different types of bin. A 120 Litre generally un-recyclable waste bin which is emptied once a fortnight. A paper bin which by the way, unlike back in Walsall, you can also put cardboard in as well so pretty much any paper based products except for Tetrapak can be recycled this way. Then there’s the plastics bin which can take all the plastic packaging from things like cheese, butter, yogurt pots, meats and plastic bags. On the whole, there’s not a lot I can think of that can’t be recycled in this system with the exception of polystyrene and hazardous waste like batteries.

However, things like cans, (these are a lot rarer in Germany, they don’t seem to have our propensity for shipping beers in them that we do, they tend to use bottles) glass bottles, primarily beer and plastic bottles for soft drinks and water aren’t handled by household collection. These are handled through the supermarkets. Yes, in theory we sort of have a similar system for glass in the UK. You can find the odd bottlebank tucked away in a dark corner of the car park but this is hardly putting the principle of recycling in focus.

In Germany, much the same as I wrote about the same system being in operation in Finland when I lived there nearly a decade ago, they have these big green machines:

usually by the entrance to the supermarket. Simple solution, it reads what you put in it, whether it’s a can, a glass bottle or a plastic one and once you’re finished it prints out a slip that can be counted against the cost of purchasing in the supermarket. There is also a more basic system in the case of using what are more akin to our cash and carry stores whereby you would buy say a crate of beer. You keep the crate to store the bottle in and when you take them back you show the crate to the cashier and they give you a token against future purchases. 3,50EUR for a crate of 24 bottles which doesn’t seem a bad incentive.

Of course such schemes aren’t completely altruistic, the cost of the refund is absorbed into the purchase price so it amounts to a system of coercion on the consumer to introduce an incentive to recycle. It does however work. There’s a little grassed/bushed area just along from my house and on a daily basis you will find discarded plastic drinks bottles and cans in amongst the bushes. You don’t see that in Germany, I haven’t spotted a single discarded plastic or glass bottle in the bushes here and I’m sure that this attributing a monetary value to the empty vessel has an important part to play. In Britain, once the contents have been consumed then it’s monetary value is zero, it just becomes a burden to carry or dispose of properly and sadly this leads to some members of our society determining that they are happy to chuck it anywhere in the street that they wish. If we were to introduce such a system that would add a monetary value to such objects then we could go a long way to addressing this issue. There is a rather recent precedent working in the opposite direction in the Republic of Ireland. They introduced a tax on plastic carrier bags and the rates of bags discarded plummeted.

I like the German system of using the supermarkets to achieve greater recycling rates. It seems strange that we haven’t picked up on this idea in the UK. They after all have the distribution networks in place, the experience of ruthless efficiency in their organisation and make massive profits out of UK consumers. It wouldn’t be too much to require them to put a little something back and take up responsibility for waste management, something of which they are directly responsible for producing in the first place.

Let’s take an example. Supermarkets are renown for their overuse of packaging, plastics in particular which is hard to recycle. If it is the responsibility of the supermarkets to deal with the end waste product then they would have a direct incentive to either reduce their own contributions to that waste or to pressurise the producers that they deal with to reduce packaging.

There is of course already a precedent for this approach. Forgotten which piece of EU legislation implemented it but it related to producers having to take responsibility for the end waste product. This related primarily to the producers of automotives, white goods and electrical consumer durables. I remember the scare stories run at the time by the right-wing press that this would be a yet another piece of EU bureaucratic legislation that would cost British consumers more. No doubt the same scare stories would be run if we put the onus on supermarkets to play their park in addressing this problem but I haven’t noticed a few years on since that piece of EU legislation came into effect that prices are any more for the end consumer, they appear to have simply been absorbed by efficiency.

I’ll finish on a last point. This idea of introducing 120 Litre waste bins in general across parts of the UK. I picked up on an article on the BBC about this where the issue was framed as ‘introducing Euro bins’. I really do have to say give it a rest on this anti-EU nonsense. They had the usual rent-a-mouth from the Tories saying how we didn’t want yet more EU regulation and interference in Britain. Can I phrase it another way. It’s a 120 litre wheelie bin. It’s not some over-arching EU regulation, it just happens that lots of other countries on the continent happen to use bins this size. What this Tory (apologies for not remembering his name, they are on the whole instantly forgettable) is saying is that whereas those continental lot are capable of organising systems of waste management whereby they can get down to only producing 120 litres (60 litres in this bit of Germany because of fortnightly collections) of non-recyclable waste a week, us Brits can’t do it. I happen to have a lot more faith in our nations ingenuity, our ability to adapt to new circumstances. I don’t think we are a nation incapable of ditching our addiction to chucking everything in the bin and forgetting about it. We should look around, pinch ideas from our near neighbours where they’re useful and efficient and rather than saying we can’t do what other already are. That’s not the challenging and aspirational attitude I’d expect from a party that wants to be in power. We should set our goals further, only then can we rise to the challenge and be leading the way rather than simple following.

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