NEWS: Red Ken pushes the green

With Londoners still bagging and binning enough rubbish to fill an olympic sized swimming pool every hour, it seems Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has a long way to go, getting citizens to use his recycling facilities.

Services throughout the capital are improving all the time, with better doorstep collections and additional processing available at many recycling centers, but how are the busy inhabitants supposed to keep a handle on what’s available to them?

Some bright spark has found a green way to do it - no paper publicity involved either, just the good old mobile phone.

Many people have sport and news items delivered via text messagine these days so what about information on recycling services available to you in your London borough? Text the word “Recycle” and your full postcode to 63131 and the info will follow.

This is a great step forward and one that I hope will start to break the apathy connected to this important subject, but the key lies in individuals taking more responsibility for what happens to their trash and physically doing something about it.

Penney Poyzer is hard at work on BBC2, with her “No Waste Like Home” programme. She battles away with a good cross section of the general public, none of whom were malicious with their thoughts on sustainable living, they just hadn’t seen the errors of their ways until they met the Eco-queen, Penney P.

National Downshifting Week is another project designed to create more public awareness, in an encouraging fashion. It offers a list of suggestions for people to get on the right eco-track, as well as slow their lives down a gear. Tracey Smith, its creator explained, “Downshifters give themselves the time to embrace green issues, the two are inextricably linked”.

These ladies have, without a doubt, helped to prick the conscience of the nation and until we all think twice before slinging stuff in the bin, it’s up to the Penney’s and Tracey’s of the world to keep ramming home the point and for the ones that have got ‘The Point’ to pass the message on to their friends and family too.

Recycling is not rocket science, but if we keep feeding our landfill sites at the present rate, we might all need a rocket to get off once it’s full…now there’s a thought…

Namaste

CH

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