June 9th, 2017
As the dust settles on the introduction of new recycling and waste collection days for 54,000 houses in the London Borough of Islington, I’d like to share with you some key lessons learnt, especially for anyone doing the same thing elsewhere and for those helping us to run our services better in the future.
Read more on A triumph of optimisation: re-routing Islington’s waste collections…
April 21st, 2017
by George Cole
At home in the UK, I’m used to the council regularly collecting my household waste from the street outside my door. Missing a waste collection is a little inconvenient. You have to keep the waste until the next collection day, by which time you might have more waste than you can fit in your boxes and bins.
February 24th, 2017
by Nick Stott and Peter Jones
It’s now a little over two years since the separate collection requirements under the amended Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011 took effect. For waste collectors, this made it compulsory to ensure that, if they were collecting paper, metals, plastics or glass, they did so by way of separate collection – subject to the rather hard to interpret condition that separation is ‘necessary’ and ‘practicable’ (‘TEEP’).
January 26th, 2017
What are people most likely to litter? This is a surprisingly tricky question to answer, as the data on litter is poor. However, if we want to have effective policies to reduce littering, it’s important to understand the behaviours we need to change, and the scale of the impact they could achieve.
January 6th, 2017
by Peter Jones
Three-weekly residual waste collections are on the rise, but remain highly controversial. Their introduction has been heralded by stories of over-spilling bins, growing populations of rats, and people buying “top-up” collections from opportunist private bin companies – in fact, all of the same ill-founded fears that were raised about fortnightly collections.
Read more on What’s behind the rise in three-weekly rubbish collections?…
August 12th, 2016
by Adam Baddeley and Rob Reid
Although heating accounts for almost 50% of UK total energy consumption, it remains strangely absent from the renewable energy debate. Former Energy and Climate Change Secretary Amber Rudd brought it up last November, but only as a begrudging admission that slow progress was putting us way off track to meet 2020’s 15% Renewable Energy Directive (RED) target. Yet just a week later, Rudd’s ‘policy reset’ speech contained no major goals on renewable heat – instead, it signalled renewed support for gas to replace coal-fired electricity generation backed by streamlined regulatory and consenting requirements for hydraulic fracturing.
January 22nd, 2016
by George Cole and Jonathan Roberts
It would be a committed environmentalist indeed whose antipathy to packaging never wavered at the temptation of a takeaway. While the thought of a greasy container in the residual bin might not be your biggest regret after a night out, the green-minded diner cannot totally overlook the adverse effects of this eminently throw-away product.
Read more on Container drivers: tackling the takeaway packaging problem…
