Waste collection & recycling: example for municipalities from UK

The councils are being focused upon in a new scheme designed to improve recycling rates in the UK. The Local Government Association (LGA) is backing a project from the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) to get councils to commit to increasing their environmental efforts.

WRAP

a) WRAP helps individuals, businesses and local authorities to reduce waste and recycle more, making better use of resources and helping to tackle climate change.

b) Established as a not-for-profit company in 2000, WRAP is backed by government funding from England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. WRAP also receives funding from Advantage West Midlands.

c) Working in seven key areas (Construction, Retail, Manufacturing, Organics, Business and Markets, Behavioural Change, and Local Authority Support), WRAP’s work focuses on market development and support to drive forward recycling and materials resource efficiency within these sectors, as well as wider communications and awareness activities including the multi-media national Recycle Now campaign for England.

d) More information on all of WRAP's programmes can be found on www.wrap.org.uk

LGA

The LGA is a cross-party organisation which represents over 350 councils in England.

A ten-point voluntary agreement called the Waste Collection Commitment has been drawn up by WRAP and councils are being urged to sign up.

1 - Explain clearly what services you can expect to receive;

2 - Provide regular collections;

3 - Provide a reliable collection service;

4 - Consider any special requests that individual households may have;

5 - Design our services and carry out collections in a way that doesn’t produce litter;

6 - Collect as many materials for recycling as we can and explain to you what happens to them;

7 - Explain clearly what our service rules are and the reasons for them;

8 - Tell you in good time if we have to make changes to your services, even temporarily;

9 - Respond to complaints we receive about our services; and

10 - Tell all our residents about this commitment to collecting waste.

Waste collection and recycling is a serious problem in Indian cities. The effort made by UK government provides a good model for adoption by the municipal corporations.

India must review China policy

Barely weeks after it failed in its attempt to block Asian Development Bank (ADB) funds to a project in Arunachal Pradesh, China has successfully struck back. Last month, in a development New Delhi has been quiet about, China won a vote on a “disclosure agreement,” which prevents ADB from formally acknowledging Arunachal Pradesh as part of India. (A disclosure agreement is a formal notification of a project once it’s approved by the ADB Board).This is despite the fact that the US and most of western block voted in favour of India.

It is high time India takes a review of the policy towards China. Such review should take into account our experience before 1962, Chinese covert support to Pakistan, recent border incursions, Chinese invasion with substandard goods in Indian market and so on

China can't afford to go for a war. But the fact remains that its sole aim is to weaken India on all fronts. China wants to prove that it's an economic superpower in the region. Read more .. ..

Credit scheme for small scale renewables: Australian example

Australians who install rooftop solar panels are now entitled to avail of the Solar Credits program, a cost-reduction scheme on small-scale renewable energy systems established through the government’s Renewable Energy Target (RET) legislation.

Under the Solar Credits scheme, a household installing rooftop panels can receive up to five times as many Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) for every megawatt-hour of energy produced by their panels. RECs are an electronic form of currency which can be traded by its earners, as provided for by the RET. The solar Credits will significantly reduce the cost of going solar at home.

It is a very good example for the policy makers in India, who are currently considering schemes to encourage the use of renewable energy sources on small scale. Along with solar, the other form of renewables, such as wind, should also be brought under the purview of such scheme.

The world wide web is just 40

Chronology of events in the life of Internet

1969

On September 2, two computers at University of California, Los Angeles, exchange meaningless data in first test of Arpanet, an experimental military network 1972

Ray Tomlinson brings email to the network, choosing @ as a way to specify email addresses belonging to other systems 1973

Arpanet gets first international nodes, in England and Norway 1974 Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn develop communications technique called TCP, allowing multiple networks to understand one another, creating a true internet 1983

Domain name system is proposed. Creation of suffixes such as ‘.com’, ‘.gov’ and ‘.edu’ comes a year later

1988

One of the first internet worms, Morris, cripples thousands of computers

1990

Tim Berners- Lee creates the World Wide Web while developing ways to control computers remotely

1993

Marc Andreessen and colleagues at University of Illinois create Mosaic, the first web browser to combine graphics and text on a single page

1994

Andreessen and others on the Mosaic team form a company to develop the first commercial web browser, Netscape. Two immigration lawyers introduce the world to spam, advertising their green card lottery services

1999

Napster popularizes music file-sharing and spawns successors that have permanently changed the recording industry

2000

The dot-com boom of the 1990s becomes a bust as technology companies slide

2004

Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook at Harvard University

2005

Launch of YouTube video-sharing site 2007

Apple releases iPhone, introducing millions more to wireless internet access

World internet population surpasses 250 million in 1999, 500 million in 2002, 1 billion in 2006 and 1.5 billion in 2008

Just imagine how would it be if there was no Internet today?