gnome
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de-centralisationam i over simplifying things, or is it not obvious that de-centralisation is our best hope? we have polution problems, congestion problems, and fuel problems - surely the answer is to try to reduce transportation wherever possible? the farce of mass recycling is a prime example - we send refuse lorries out to collect segregated waste for recycling from doorsteps, take it to a waste site where it is baled and sometimes sorted, then transported in another huge lorry hundreds of miles to a processing centre, where it is sorted again, and possibly processed, turned into a recycled material (apart from the waste matter which is then disposed of via another lorry and another site halfway across the country), and then the finished product is transported god knows where to be used.
hundreds of years ago, most of our household waste was recycled in some way - but it was done locally. these days everything is specialised, so for instance a plastics molding factory will not have the means to recycle plastic. now i grant you that some recycling processes require very technical and expensive equipment - but the vast majority of it is not outside the budget of the average council to set up, and can be run locally. how much tax payers money has been spent in the past fifteen years in knocking down abandoned factories and warehouses because they are no longer used? many of these are situated by rivers and canals - so they could make use of the waterways by transporting materials by barge. let's face it - bales of waste paper and plastics aren't exactly in a hurry to move from A to B. most recycling projects can be (and often are) run by community projects.
it's not just waste though. how often is food transported from a farm to a storage fascility so it can then be transported many miles to a shop back in the town that produced the food in the first place?
our whole economic system is centralised, and history has proven that centralised systems just don't work - it was that which was instrumental in the fall of the Roman Empire.
with carbon emmisions, fuel shortage, and traffic congestion becoming such serious issues, it's time we looked at the obvious.
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Rob R
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Re: de-centralisation | gnome wrote: | | am i over simplifying things, or is it not obvious that de-centralisation is our best hope? |
I believe so. Most of our pollution problems arise from concentrating pollutants in small areas, that can't cope with them.
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James
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As a country we're still thinking in the cheap energy mind-set. We're slow to adapt, so energy will need to rise in price a great deal before people realise that we don’t need to ship cardboard to China to be recycled, or dispose of food to landfill tens of miles away.
During world war II, each street had a pig or two. When energy costs rise to the point were the true cost of meat is realised, I think these pig (/chicken) clubs will become common-place again as a way of recycling food waste.
The degree of waste is proportional to our affluence, and I think as we become poorer (related to the end of cheap energy), our use and re-use of our waste will become much more efficient and far more local.
It'll happen...but not soon enough. And when it does become localised, it'll be out of financial necessity rather than environment good.
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Shane
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| James wrote: | | When energy costs rise to the point were the true cost of meat is realised, I think these pig (/chicken) clubs will become common-place again as a way of recycling food waste. |
Isn't that illegal now, thanks to the EU (which is perhaps the best illustration of the evils of centralisation)?
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LynneA
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Think the no kitchen waste rule was the lovely DEFRA 
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Cho-ku-ri
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Think gnome is spot on. A trash burning stove to heat your immediate home instead of shipping it to China to be burnt on open fires (as is happening) has got to be better. Poor China by the way. 
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gnome
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| LynneA wrote: | | Think the no kitchen waste rule was the lovely DEFRA |
from what i'm told, it is because of the foot and mouth crisis a few years back. kitchen waste was fed to pigs, which is largely suspected as the cause of that particular outbreak. however, the fear that turning kitchen waste into compost to feed the soil might cause human beings to catch foot and mouth from eating a F&M contaminated potato is the most ludicrous piece of ignorance since someone told king james that witches breaking eggshells caused his fleet to sink.
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Rob R
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| Shane wrote: | | James wrote: | | When energy costs rise to the point were the true cost of meat is realised, I think these pig (/chicken) clubs will become common-place again as a way of recycling food waste. |
Isn't that illegal now, thanks to the EU (which is perhaps the best illustration of the evils of centralisation)? |
Yeah, but it's possible for laws to go the other way if the need arises. The real cause of the Hedon outbreak was imported meat, but they couldn't ban that, could they. 
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Cho-ku-ri
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Cheap imported meat to feed the British Army, as it was an army camp where the kitchen waste came from.
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Shane
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| Rob R wrote: | | imported meat, but they couldn't ban that, could they. |
Because they weren't French, presumably
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Maxwell Smart
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i would argue against it only because then you minimise impact to specific areas and also you are in a better position to develop supporting service structures including waste disposal and treatment.
i think decentralisation would only work if there was enough land (and there isn't) for everyone to have a small holding where they could aim to be more self-sufficient.
i went to an interesting lecture talking about plan B (because regardless of what Marks and Spencer's thinks, we need a Plan B as its too damn late for Plan A!) and they were talking about cities from 100 years ago and how there was a greater interweaving of country and city making the city more self-sufficient than a city of today.
an example was how many vegetable shops for example would have had their own patch of land behind the shop for growing the vegetables they sell in the shop. a food mile distance of a few meters!
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gnome
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i don't suggest total decentralisation overnight - i mean gradually move towards it as an aim, rather than away from it - which is what is happeneing. centralisation was also one of the major contributions towards the downfall of the USSR. politicians in Moscow tried to make decisions about what rural areas should grow, in total ignorance of agricultural matters, and then ran into the problem of transportation - food was rotting in railway sidings whilst people went hungry.
granted, London could never feed itself, and rural areas will always be able to produce far more food than it needs, but there has to be a happy medium. it is generally accepted that Whitehall is totally out of touch with most of what is going on outside the home counties. that's another ludicrous thing - how can a centralised system work when the capitol is nowhere near the centre? the way ity works now is commerce, goods, and money flows into London ; decisions, edicts, and budgets flow out from London.
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Rob R
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| Maxwell Smart wrote: | | i think decentralisation would only work if there was enough land (and there isn't) for everyone to have a small holding where they could aim to be more self-sufficient. |
There is, it is just that there is not enough land for everyone to have an economically viable unit in our current economic & social structures. Food is not a high enough priority to most people because they are financially rich & don't want to change that.
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gnome
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not 20 years ago we had too much land, and had to turn a lot of farmland into golf courses. there is plenty of good land in this country - despite our high population. it just isnt being used properly. we only use afraction of the available arable land for farming - yet we produce something like 60% of our food requirements. in the eighties and nineties we were producing so much food much of it was going to waste for "economic reasons".
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Shane
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| gnome wrote: | | not 20 years ago we had too much land, and had to turn a lot of farmland into golf courses |
What - at gunpoint? 
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gnome
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| Shane wrote: | | gnome wrote: | | not 20 years ago we had too much land, and had to turn a lot of farmland into golf courses |
What - at gunpoint? |
funny thing that - it was the people that sold their land for golf courses that held the guns.
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Rob R
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Our local golf course wasn't sold- the same people own it as used to grow wheat on it, but when people were paying naff all for wheat, there wasn't much incentive to keep producing it.
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