Katiewood88′s Blog

In an article I have recently written for Birminghamrecycled I have discovered the Retailers “take back” scheme.  I think this is initially a good idea as it will encourage people to recycle rather than just throwing their electronic goods away.

According to Valpak WEEE each and every year in the UK alone the general public dispose of all 1.2 million tonnes of electrical waste. This is the equivalent to:

• 150,000 double decker buses
• 164 Eiffel Towers
• 200,000 African Elephants
• 444,444 Range Rovers

But I think other things need to done to make people think about throwing their electrical goods away. Apparently there is going to trial kerbside schemes for collection but I am unsure how it is going to work. Is it going to be a bi weekly collection like other collection services or will you contact a service and they will come and pick it up for you?

On another note my online journalism module is coming to an end. It has been a good module to take and I understand the basic elements that concerns online journalism but whether I can do them or not is another matter! Overall its been throroughly enjoyable and a really good skill to add to the collection that I am gaining while at Uni. It’s quite scary that my second of university is nearly coming to an end! This time next year Ill be looking for a job. Time to figure out what I want to do with my life!!

As part of the second online journalism assignment we had to create an interactive element to support an article or be strong enough to stand alone.

I decided to create a Google map for a story I wrote for Birminghamrecycled . This story is about a student calling for the need of plastic bottle recycling bins in Birmingham city centre alongside the general waste rubbish bins.  Therefore I thought this story could use a good video aide such as a map.

While writing this article I discovered that on average the UK produces 3 million tonnes of plastic waste each year. Approximately 85% of that goes into a landfill, 8% of it is incinerated and only 7% of plastic is recycled. 

When I started to play around with Google maps at first the initial set up I found easy, but trying to get all my points in the right place was a challenge as the map kept going all over the place and I couln’t get my points in exactly the right place. But after a couple of hours practice I cracked it! The only problem is now, I don’t know how to embed it into my blog or onto Birminghamrecycled.

Any advice on how to would be much appreciated!

With more litter fines being proposed to deter people from littering, is the reward scheme that goverment are proposing going to work and make us as a nation stop littering?

When discussing this issue in our recent podcast it had also been discovered that children as young as ten could be fined£40 when found littering. We decided that education in schools would be the best way to let children know why they should not litter and what it does to the environment.

There are schemes and organisations in place such as waste watch, that go round to schools and business to educate and advise them on how to be more environmentally friendly. But how effective are they? Talking to my mum who is a teaching assistant at a local primary school where I live, she believes that when they have recyclebot in school talking about recycling and littering the children take on board what it was saying and tend to go home and tells their parents what they have done in school today and they pass on the message that recyclebot initially gave out.

But by telling children not to drop litter and to make sure they recycle the basics such as glass, plastic and paper are they really going to convince their parents to do the same? As not littering and recycling is one of these things that we all know we should do but is not always possible, for example in Birmingham there seems to be a lack of bins so people just drop litter rather than put it in their bags until the get home as this is deemed as the easier option as you don’t get the left over crumbs or stickiness all over the bottom of your bag or new purchases!!

So are the fines and reward schemes going to be enough to stop people from littering and if someone has always littered will they always be a litterer?