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Off Topic The Environment

Discussion in 'Watford' started by Leo, Nov 29, 2015.

  1. yorkshirehornet

    yorkshirehornet Well-Known Member

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    <laugh>
    I will take a look
     
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  2. aberdeenhornet

    aberdeenhornet Well-Known Member

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    I was checking the claims on solar today for an average investment of £6500 they were reckoning payback in 22 years with £300 a year benefit. This though assumes you'd just sit and do nothing with that £6500. If you invest just at 2% it would mean you'd never be in a better position with the panels. I guess they might save a bit of CO2 over their lifespan but then you have to buy into that untruth that CO2 is bad for the planet when the reverse is actually the case and we're massively sub optimal in atmospheric CO2 for maximum life support.
     
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  3. yorkshirehornet

    yorkshirehornet Well-Known Member

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    I reckon on paying back my outlay in 6-7 years.......
     
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  4. Bolton's Boots

    Bolton's Boots Well-Known Member

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    #324
  5. yorkshirehornet

    yorkshirehornet Well-Known Member

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    mad eh... and when you look at what is happening on the planet....

    is there some great conspiracy to f@'k up the planet?
    does the devil exist?
    are we just some totally stupid species?
     
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  6. Bolton's Boots

    Bolton's Boots Well-Known Member

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    Mostly that I suspect.

    But not all of us I hasten to add.
     
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  7. aberdeenhornet

    aberdeenhornet Well-Known Member

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    That's excellent. Is that by organizing the whole thing yourself and getting good prices on parts and labour?
     
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  8. oldfrenchhorn

    oldfrenchhorn Well-Known Member
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  9. yorkshirehornet

    yorkshirehornet Well-Known Member

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    I will know better in a week or so... when my feed-in pay back for the year is calculated

    I just looked around... .was very competitive in Leeds... I got a full array for £5.25k which is a good price.

    I have a good mate who is an electrician but he wouldn't do it as not his field etc.... but any committed person could I am sure.
     
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  10. oldfrenchhorn

    oldfrenchhorn Well-Known Member
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    From the 1st January the supermarkets have been banned from supplying the very flimsy plastic bags to put your fruit or vegetables in. One chain has reverted to the dear old paper bag, while another has produced something that looks like a clear plastic bag, but feels very different, more like latex rubber. The good news is that both of them are compostable, so when I take a bag full of kitchen waste down my fields I will just be able to dump it straight in the bin rather than emptying it. Has this change been seen in the UK yet?
     
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  11. Bolton's Boots

    Bolton's Boots Well-Known Member

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    Yes and no - shops now have to charge (I think, 5p) for plastic bags, which has reduced the number used. Re-usable 'Bags for Life' are now very popular - and the old shopping bags are making a come back.

    The compostable bags are used here for home food scraps - councils have been collecting them on a weekly basis for quite a few years now.
     
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  12. Jsybarry

    Jsybarry Well-Known Member

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    I think it's funny that Jersey is behind in so many areas but we had to pay for plastic bags before anywhere else on the mainland. It was one of the cleverest moves a Treasury Minister in Jersey has made - he said it was either that or raise GST and given that everything here is subject to GST (no zero-rated or exempt items as there are with VAT) there were no complaints at all.
     
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  13. oldfrenchhorn

    oldfrenchhorn Well-Known Member
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    I wonder how much further we can go along this route. When I was a kid, before the days of supermarkets, there was none of the plastic packaging around cheese, bacon, etc, no little trays to put your chicken or sausages on. Only when supermarkets became the fashion was it thought necessary to enclose the food, as you never knew where someone had been before they inspected the goods. You can still go to the counter and asked to be served with your meat, fish or other deli items, but very often people are dashing in for a bit of shopping during their lunch break and don't have time to be served. Shame that the supermarkets devote so little space to fresh unwrapped food.
     
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  14. yorkshirehornet

    yorkshirehornet Well-Known Member

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    I can remember the few times i have been to the states always getting shopping packed in paper bags too...
     
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  15. yorkshirehornet

    yorkshirehornet Well-Known Member

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    This is one of the most inspiring environmental clips i have seen.... a must watch folks
     
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  16. colognehornet

    colognehornet Well-Known Member

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    Thanks for sharing this Yorkie. It is becoming a topical theme in some parts of Europe - how to plan for the future cohabitation of men and wolves. It involves convincing farmers, hunters and generally counterbalancing a thousand years of stories which have blackened the image of the wolf. The first wolves have been back in Germany since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact - mostly congregated in the Lausitz national park (East Germany) but individual animals have been sighted close to Berlin, in Lower Saxony, crossing the Elbe, and even in Belgium and Denmark (though the one in Denmark was sick with cancer). Their DNA comes from Russian stock. The wolf is also spreading his territory from Italy into the alps and the south of France - with one actually making it to the Netherlands. In Germany they are legally protected (but not as strongly as in Italy) but it still involves convincing people that the natural prey of the wolf is deer and wild boar, of which we have too many. Occasionaly a sheep or 2 may be taken but (in the absence of a wild dog population - as in Italy) it can be readily identified and compensated for. There is also not one documented attack on humans within the last 200 years, outside of amongst either zoo animals (who have felt cornered) or from human engineered cross breeds between Wolves and Alsatians. I imagine it would be possible for us here (In the Oberbergisches Land) to here the howl of the wolf for real within a couple of years - I hope so.
     
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  17. yorkshirehornet

    yorkshirehornet Well-Known Member

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    It says something very important about the balance of nature.... and how important it is... and how also in so many places, Tibet, China, South and North America it is being perilously interfered with....
     
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  18. oldfrenchhorn

    oldfrenchhorn Well-Known Member
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    Not very often there is a news item here about wolves killing some lambs since they were reintroduced into the Pyrenees in the SW of the country. There have been some sightings of them near to Paris, and a few reports of them in between. Only today in the local news an announcement was made that deer needed to be culled to a greater extent, as the numbers are getting out of control. Tell me about it as I nearly ran two over as I came down the lane in my car last week. Those of us who love and respect the countryside still have a battle with the farmers who would reduce the fields to prairies or wind farms, removing natural habitats for much wildlife.
     
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  19. colognehornet

    colognehornet Well-Known Member

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    I don't know what the situation is like in the Pyrenees (at least on the French side) but the situation in Italy is a difficult one. The Wolf population is estimated there as being around 600-700 but there are also wild and half wild dogs in Italy (apparently upwards of 100,000). It is very difficult to know the difference (by the wounds) between a Wolf and a wild dog attack, and the wolf often gets blamed for everything. It also makes the question of financial compensation difficult. I know what you mean about prairie like farms Frenchie - massive fields, monoculture, or just left for cows, and not a hedge in sight (they might look relatively harmless but to a wild bee they are an unsurmountable obstacle - like a desert to us). Germany and France are not much different on this.
     
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  20. yorkshirehornet

    yorkshirehornet Well-Known Member

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    please log in to view this image


    This info.... shows how blinkered we are as a race
     
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    Last edited: Jan 18, 2017

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