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!!

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!

These seem to be a success and a fair amount of students are using them but I was wondering whether they would work in a larger environment such as the city centre.

At the moment there are no recycling bins accessible to retail shoppers in the city centre therefore plastic drink bottles that people purchase just go into the normal bins.

Roughly 4.7 million tonnes of plastic is put into generic waste bins every year and one tonne of plastic is the equivalence 20,000 two litre drinking bottles!

So will plastic bottle bins ever appear in city centres or will they not appear due to the lack of available funding to back this type of scheme?

Your comments would be much appreciated

After handing the first assignment in for my online journalism module, which this blog was originally set up for, I really thought I was struggling with the concept of online journalism and social networking. But after an encouraging mark, which was a pleasant surprise, I think I understand it better than I originally thought.

So after getting back into the swing of things I am now in the process of writing an article on computer recycling. Millions of fully functional computers are thrown away every year rather than being recycled! There are companies all over the UK that will pick up your old computer and wipe the data off it and recycle it by either using the good parts to make a new computer or put it into a scheme such as the one in Birmingham. This scheme allows residents who would not normally be able to afford a computer to purchase one for as little as £40!

After checking Flickr,(something else that I created an account for for this module), I learnt of the problem of recycling plastic bottles and that they do not disintegrate for over 700 years! So this has sparked another idea for an article!

One of the elements I have to think about is an interactive element for the websiteBirminghamRecycled based on waste and recycling. Any ideas would be much appreciated!

I realise this blog is a bit all over the place but it is more of an update of where I am for myself as well as readers of Birmingham Recycled! And any other followers who would like to help a budding online journalist

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?

Our podcast took the structure of all area members discussing three topics that have been posted on the news site through articles, these were litter fines, carrier bag charges and what else do we think Birmingham can do to improve waste and recycling in Birmingham. The editor took the role as host to make sure we spent an even amount of time on each topic and tried to stimualte conversation.

But is this a streotypical structure of a podcast? With being a podcast virgin only hearing snippets from the Chris Moyles show when they advertise it on Radio one, it sounds like a round up of the best parts of his show that week. So should our regular podcast take this format or should we try and be more creative?

One suggestion already made to me by my Dad was to have a guest speaker feature in one of the discussions we have, maybe an expert in the area or how the topic has affected them personally. 

But are podcasts even vital as people can read the articles on the issues we discuss on the website anyway and can comment on the article themselves or on the blogs written by the author, so why would people want to listen to a group of journalists discussing the topic?

It may just be as I am uneducated in the art of podcasting that I may be naive to why they are a good source of social journalism? Or is it just one of those things that only a few people are interested in and its a medium that needs to grow such as the recent boom in social networking such as Twitter?

The waste and recycling podcast should be up on Birminghamrecycled in about 2 weeks time, your comments would be much appreciated.

My family who live in my house consist of me, my brother whos 12 who has just started to eat the place out of house and home, and my mum and dad. On average it works out we spend £60 a week on food and my mum reckons we dont throw that much away as we only buy what we need.

As a family we are quite lucky when it comes to cooking as my mum and dad were both chefs at some point so we have been taught to cook everything from scratch using the best fresh ingredients that are available. But this tends to mean that if they havent been used that week and dad isnt able to make his soup out of the left overs, it gets thrown away. So i calculated we must at least throw away about £6 of unused food a week.

Where this doesnt seem much now, in a year it means that we throw away £312 worth of fresh food away a year! As my family try to use every thing we buy throw a week, I wondered how much food the majority of families throw away per week and whether the surveys conducted by the Waste and Resources Action Programme, www.wrap.org.ukare acurate. And also what can someone do to reduce their own food waste?

After some research I found the website, Love Food Hate Waste, www.lovefoodhatewaste.comit gave me some tips such as plan your meals before your weekly shop and freeze half a loaf of bread so it doesnt go of before you get to use it all. All these seem useful but how practical will they be when put into practice? As we all know its easier to say how to do something that doing it yourself sometimes.

Do you keep an eye on what food you throw away? How much do you think you throw away per week? Any handy tips for the rest of us? I would love to know and maybe it will be the basis of my next article.

These tips may become the basis for my next article!

As Diesel is currently priced at about £1 a litre and with Birmgham joining The European Commission’s Covenant of Mayors onCO2 Emissions and Sustainable Energy surely this is the most cost effective and environmentally friendly way to boost Birmingham’s recycling drive? 

Residents of Birmingham currently produce in the region of 550,000 tonnes of domestic rubbish each year. This means that every 60 minutes enough rubbish is produced to fill a swimming pool.  http://greeningbrum.org.uk/

This will only add to the lack of space for landfill sites creating excessive pressure on the environment. Maybe this is why Birmingham has suddenly decided to up it’s game and act by promoting all these new recycling schemes? 

Ooo this gives me an idea for another few articles. I never realised blogging could release inspiration by letting me write about the thoughts and views on the articles I have already written.

One of the main reasons I am using Flickr is to build up a social community of people who photograph environmental issues. Hopefully they will be able to inform me of any issues that are arising or they feel that should be covered. Also by browsing peoples photos, (even though I know nothing at the moment about photography techniques) I feel I can appreciate a good photograph! Once I have found a good photograph I will be able to communicate with the photographer themselves and find out the story and origins of the photo.

As the notion of online journalism is ever developing and my latest brief is to write articles covering the waste and recycling issues of Birmingham for a new online environmental magazine I feel it is important to discover these new methods such as Blogs, Twitter and Delicious to get the issue out there and being talked about!