1. That Organic Farming is better for the environment.
2. That Organic Food tastes better.

From my own previous discoveries I have several pre-formed opinions:

A. Organic Farming’s output is sufficiently lower than non-Organic farming that we could not feed everyone if we all adopted it.
B. Organic Farming in general MAY not be the same thing as sustainable farming and non-organic farming practices MAY be sustainable.
C. Organic produce is no better in taste or nutrition.

Being a person of sound scientific method I am open to changing my opinions based on evidence. So I will try to address both the media assumptions and my own views. But first we need to know exactly what Organic Farming is. Does it mean no chemical fertilizer or pesticide? No fertilizer or pesticide at all? There must be differences from farmer to farmer but in terms of the legal ‘Organic’ phrasing in UK shops, what does it mean? Must they be non-GM products? What does GM even mean? Where’s the boundary between Modified and Genetically Modified?

Firstly the term Organic in relation to farming or produce is a generic one. To sell your food as Organic you must be certified by an agency. The most well known of these bodies, in the UK, is The Soil Association.

It was quite a wild goosechase to get to that previous statement that seems so trivial. From Wikipedia I found DEFRA from where I (eventually!) found the right BusinessLink URL for Organic certification, which here in the UK, is defined by the European Union and regulated by DEFRA. You have to be certified by a Certification Body of which, in the UK, there are 9 approved bodies. The link to find this list took me back from businesslink to DEFRA again. But then each of these bodies has its own certification requirements – they may be very similar but they are not the same – and from this page you can only get an email address for some of these bodies – apparently they don’t all even have a website!

So what can I find out about their certification? After a bit of searching I found their information pack and downloaded the one appropriate to agricultural farming. Only problem is that there’s nothing in there about what you have to do, just contractual stuff and an application form. Eventually I downloaded a standards document which is the closest I can find to a set of instructions.

So what’s involved? For the most part it’s what you would expect. Genetically Modified Organisms and nanotechnology are absolute no-no’s. Crop rotation is required. Packaging has to be ‘Green’. But there is a lot of content about everything beyond the actual food itself. From managing hedgerows to protecting forests, from keeping uncultivated land for wildlife to maintaining and restoring old buildings. Of course there is a great deal of detail on managing the soil, from not doing any deep ploughing to only using natural and organic fertilisers.

There are exceptions to pretty much every rule but they generally say “Where not possible to use organic xxx you MAY…”. However the sheer number of exceptions listed for supplemental nutrients is shockingly large. It speaks about “Where Justified” and “Heavy Metal Analyses” and “With Approval” but there are TEN such revisions taking up several times more space in the document than the actual Rules. See section 4.8. This same pattern is repeated in section 4.11 regarding the use of pesticides.

It would take a biochemist to state whether the options available to Organic farmer for Fertiliser and Pesticide “where justified” are relatively harmless compared to what is regularly used on non-organic farms. And it would take a team of researchers and a Freedom of Information act to work out how much non-organic fertiliser and pesticide is being used in our supposedly organic food. The conclusion one must draw though from the sheer number of exceptions in these rules compared to the rest of the document is that the Soil Association is having to give in to farmers’ needs to keep productivity up.

Interestingly you cannot burn crop stubble which, as anyone can tell you, is a zero carbon activity, but which I thought was the best way to return lots of nutrients to the soil. When I reflect on that I suppose it is the best way to get some nutrients back into the soil quickly so you can replant the field for the very next season, but if you are using crop rotation letting the field lie fallow and then mowing/ploughing is probably better. At least you allow everything to break down that way rather than risk losing some of the nutrient content to oxidation.

Overall the intentions of these Organic Certifying Bodies is undoubtedly good and I really applaud the requirements concerning wildlife habitats, boundaries, buildings and all the ancillary stuff that isn’t the food itself. But, given my above points about the exceptions to the rules, I have serious doubts as to whether the average Organic food is any more ‘organic’ than food produced on a modern non-organic farm which simply uses sensible policies. Just recently the BBC ran a program on farming in Australia where by creating custom nutrient mixes based on each field’s requirements the farmers have seen an increase in productivity and a decrease in both volume and cost of fertilisers. In the same program the same farming consultant showed how he had created another additive which allowed the water that the irrigation system delivered to penetrate deeper into the soil resulting in stronger plants and less water used.

If the soil on your farm is just deficient in Manganese don’t you think it’s better to take your waste (which may well be ‘organic’) and process it in a factory to produce a Manganese product for you and other products for someone else, rather than just dumping a generic product with everything in it on your land? And do you think that plants grow differently depending on whether that Manganese is organic or synthetic? Do you think any other part of the eco-system that it may get into reacts differently based on its origin? If Manganese is harmful, say in the nearby river, then is it better to dump a small amount in the river from using a small amount of organic fertiliser or is it better to dump a tiny amount in the river from using the precise amount (large or small) of a modern, targeted, soil-penetrating, synthetic?

What I’m trying to get at here is that Science is a tool to be used. Without doubt in the past huge amounts of broad spectrum fertilisers have been dumped on fields simply because ‘they do the job’. However modern farming techniques use targeted fertilisation and pesticidal techniques. This is cheaper and results in the minimal amount of run-off from the fields to the rivers for the maximum crop yield. If I can create a targeted fertiliser that results in no run-off from your field but it happens to be synthetic and not organic would it not be the right thing to do to use that instead of the organic solution? Does it therefore not follow that a certifiably organic product may not have been produced in the most environmentally friendly way? And isn’t the real driver behind organic produce that of being Green?

Moving on, consider for a moment what a genetically modified organism is. The particular phrasing means that a scientist in a laboratory has specifically altered the gene sequence of an organism in order to change something about it. It may be that the change makes it glow in the dark, or have larger leaves, or be resistant to a parasite. It might even make the fruit of the plant produce a chemical which can be manipulated through the ingestion of another chemical to produce an immune reaction. This last point is salient. We know how to modify rice such that by prescribing a simple pill people will gain the same benefits as an anti-malarial injection – it’s been done with mice already – and it could save millions of lives. The conventional injection techniques do not reach the vast majority of people who need them because of the need to refrigerate them. I’ve been searching for the link to this article but sadly cannot find it – it seems to have been lost in the furore of on using modified mosquitos instead!

So are GMO’s evil? No. Could they be mis-used? Yes. Can you trust the companies that are going to produce these things? In general of course you can. They may backstab each other and stories about them forcing farmers to burn crops that have been contaminated with their patented GMO may be true, but ultimately they want to make money. And how do you make money? By selling a successful product to more and more consumers. If you damage or even kill your consumers you generally lose money, go bankrupt or go to prison. In addition I DO trust the scientists who do the actual ground work, the tests to see if there are any unintended side-effects; and I trust the government bodies who approve products for use.

But take away the word ‘Genetically’ and you’re still left with something ‘Modified’ and we’ve been modifying food since humans first stopped wandering nomadically and became a sedentary society at least as far back as 11,000 years ago, when, as the megafauna of North America declined, the Clovis people turned to cultivation of plants for an increasing amount of their diet. Naturally they re-cultivated the strongest and highest yielding plants and those with the most useful products. Within only a few hundred years they had created, by selective cultivation, plant breeds that could not survive without human intervention.

In the rather more recent past, from the 1950’s onwards, large-scale and intensive cross-breeding produced most of the strains of cereal crops that are grown around the world today. Even those grown on organic farms are Modified by the actions of the past. These breeds would not exist without human intervention in their genome, albeit through macroscopic manipulation. There is an Episode of Penn and Teller’s “Bullshit” which discusses this in some detail that I would highly recommend viewing. This “Green Revolution” was driven by Normal Borlaug who is often referred to as having saved 1 billion lives with his work.

I should also mention a program I watched on the BBC a few weeks ago on farming and specifically one farmer who had some wonderful (and organic) farming methods that had increased his yields, completely removed his need for fertiliser and reduced his waste products.

His cattle were confined to a relatively small tranche of a field at any time. There was plenty of room for them have no fear but he had parcelled his fields off into 30 or more smaller fields. They were kept in a given tranche for just a few days at a time and then moved to the next. The first result of this was that the cattle had changed their grazing style. Rather than pick and choose the best grass from a larger field they simply ate what was in front of them. It wasn’t that they had to eat the area bare to get enough to eat but rather as the farmer described it, the cattle knew they wouldn’t be able to eat that grass in the near future so they just grabbed whatever was nearest. This keeps the entire field area in a growth cycle rather than just the best bits of it. I assume that it beneficial for the field as nature’s abhorrence for a vacuum will surely increase the nutrient levels in those less luscious areas of the field if the plants require the nutrients to regrow. Additionally I assume that the cattle are better off for having a more varied diet.

The next step in the process is to move the cattle on to the next tranche and to introduce hens to the tranche the cattle have just left. The hens do several things. First they stamp and strut through the cow-pats, mixing it with the grass to form a high quality fertiliser. Secondly they feed on the parasites in the cow-pats. As a direct result of the latter the cattle have become entirely disease free and the farmer claimed that he had reduced his vet bills for the herd to zero.

The farmer had reduced his bills, improved the quality of his fields, increased the meat yield from the herd AND gained another source of income from the hen’s eggs whilst utilising the exact same space as he had previously. This is sustainable farming working brilliantly.

A second system the farmer had set up was to have a barn with rabbits in mesh cages, suspended above the floor. On the floor were more hens. The rabbits and hens both require a food input for this and additionally sawdust is scattered across the floor. The rabbits provide the farmer with meat and pelts and the hens mix the rabbit droppings with the sawdust to make fertiliser that can be sold, as well as laying eggs. The farmer makes a significant profit and has no waste products.

These are the kinds of techniques that we need to be encouraging. An organic certificate does not ensure that these kinds of approaches with minimal inputs (particularly fertilisers and pesticides which are the pollutants we really need to cut down on) and maximal outputs are being used. But neither does not having said certificate mean that methods like this are not being used.

My first search was for ‘Organic farming pros and cons’ and my first link was to this hugely long domain name. As I started reading it I thought it seemed quite rational. The page is even titled ‘Advantages AND disadvantages of…’. However by a third of the way down the page I realised something was awry. Perhaps you’ll notice that there are no links to any research or that there are lots of links to books for you to buy.

The graph of cancer rates fails to correct for anything except life expectancy so it remains a graph showing the impact of everything else on cancer rates. Everything else and Exposure to toxic chemicals are not the same.

And lastly the Disadvantages section claims all perceived disadvantages to be advantages or at least desirable.

My second search result led me to Buzzle.com. Sadly this website falls down on its homepage with the bold statement that:

Organic Farming is a technique used in farming without the use of any chemicals or synthetics.

As we already know that is incorrect. Synthetics are allowed.

Aim of organic farming is to produce crops which have the highest nutritional values with least impact on nature.

We have yet to address this issue. We will shortly!

Crop rotation, green manure, use of natural fertilizers and biological pest control form the crux of organic farming. It is a proactive ecology management strategy. This strategy enhances the fertility of the soil, prevents soil erosion and at the same time protects the humans and animal kingdom from the side-effects of chemicals and synthetics.

Crop rotation does enhance soil fertility by giving it time to recover between periods of intensive use. However many non-organic farmers do this anyway as purely sustainable, green and economic sense. Soil erosion is caused by deep ploughing – another thing that most farmers do not do anymore.

Organically grown food tastes better too.

We haven’t addressed this yet but no evidence is offered by the site.

The overall cost of cultivating the crops reduces as the farmers use green manure or worm farming to replenish the lost nutrients of the soil.

Kind of… All farmers will re-use their own ‘organic’ waste products if it is the appropriate source of nutrients for their fields. However if the soil is deficient in something specific the most effective, sustainable and cheapest solution is a narrow-spectrum fertiliser which may or may not be organic.

The life of organically grown plants is longer than the plants cultivated by traditional methods.

A plant only grows the way it is genetically programmed to grow. It matters not what nature of external forces acted on it. The lifespan of a given species will always be the same with the same inputs – whatever their source.

Organically grown crop is more drought tolerant.

Totally incorrect. GMO crops are vastly more drought tolerant than unmodified versions of crops. The gene that makes them so came from an existing crop of course. Nature provided it and we copied it.

And the site continues to be inaccurate when it comes to the disadvantages of Organic farming, although I give it a little credit for mentioning that there are some:

The first disadvantage of organic farming is low productivity. With the highly developed chemicals and machinery, the farmer is able to multiply his harvest manifold times. The organic farmers use the cultivation method as opposed to drilling method used by the traditional farmers. The cultivated soil is prone to wind and water erosion. The traditional farmers opine that direct drilling does not cause any disharmony in the soil structure.

Organic farming uses machinery too you know!? Traditional farming also eschews deep ploughing because of the problems it causes with the soil.

The next argument, which goes against organic farming, is that the organically produced food is expensive. The cost is very often 50-100 percent more than the traditional food.

This doesn’t have to be the case. If you take the examples above of the farmer with cattle/hens or rabbits/hens he was able to produce more for less. By being sustainable your costs will always be lower and by manipulating synergies you can increase your yields. But sustainability does not go hand in hand with the presence or lack of an organic certificate. Being sustainable is an entirely independant call. Yes there will (always?) be some farmers willing to dump vast amounts of fertiliser on their land to gain a short term productivity that cannot be rivaled and to make a small margin of profit on a lot of product. But hopefully we can make them see sense.

The other valid argument is that organic food is not always available. There is a reason behind that. The organic farmers grow crops in accordance to the season. Neither do they artificially grow any crop nor do they extend the life of the plant or use chemicals, synthetics or pesticides. Therefore, oranges will be found only in winters and mangoes only in summer. Looking at it from the health benefits point of view, there is no doubt that you will benefit if you eat a particular food item, when it is actually in season.

There’s no reason you can’t create organic food out of season. I don’t recall anything from the Soil Association’s guidelines that preclude the use of UV Lights. I admit it’s fairly unlikely that an organic farmer would use them but either way there’s nothing unsustainable about the poly-tunnels in The Netherlands that produce an enormous proportion of the UK’s vegetables on a tiny amount of land. As a sealed system the ‘run-off’ could be collected and processed to prevent any pollution which would in fact be more sustainable and Green than anything else.

The last statement about benefits of eating foods in season just leaves me bemused. Can anyone think of any reason why anyone would even put this forward as a rational hypothesis?

Anyway, enough of quoting from random websites. I have to assume that, somewhere out there, there exist equally biased sources on information on the other side of the fence. I haven’t found one yet but they must exist. If someone hasn’t come up with it already I announce the law that ‘If it can be perceived of then it exists on the internet’, which is probably analogous to infinite monkeys and typewriters.

I still need to tackle the issue of whether organic produce tastes better.

My first search took me to TheNibble.com, a gourmet food website. In a non-scientific test 11 products were tested and:

Organic was the clear winner in one and tied in five others.

What she fails to mention is that the conventional food won in two of the remaining 5 categories (!!!) with the last three being described as ‘NONE’. I think this tied-but-not-tied result was where both products were just horrible.

So that’s twice as many wins for conventional food as for organic (which I can happily state about this non-scientific test).

You could also check out another episode of Bullshit which I would trust as reasonably good testing. No double-blinding but I don’t think Penn has anything to gain by fudging his results. 71% preferred non-organic products. And 90% (9/10) people were tricked into thinking that one half of a regular banana was in fact half of an organic banana. Actually this video excerpt from the same episode puts across most of what I’m writing about in the kind of manner I would normally like to put it across!

What remains to be answered? Whether or not Organic Farming could be used to feed the entire world…

I could tell you the answer is No. I could point you to the mathematics and you might respond that it’s too abstract. You might argue about crops we could use in areas we don’t currently cultivate. We could go back and forth for ever. So let’s instead ask the one man who probably ought to know, who since the 1930’s has been working on increasing crop yields around the world and feeding the starving, Norman Borlaug, in his 2000 interview with Reason Magazine:

This shouldn’t even be a debate. Even if you could use all the organic material that you have–the animal manures, the human waste, the plant residues–and get them back on the soil, you couldn’t feed more than 4 billion people. In addition, if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests.

At the present time, approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients are utilized each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically, you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the forage for these cows? There’s a lot of nonsense going on here.

If people want to believe that the organic food has better nutritive value, it’s up to them to make that foolish decision. But there’s absolutely no research that shows that organic foods provide better nutrition. As far as plants are concerned, they can’t tell whether that nitrate ion comes from artificial chemicals or from decomposed organic matter. If some consumers believe that it’s better from the point of view of their health to have organic food, God bless them. Let them buy it. Let them pay a bit more. It’s a free society. But don’t tell the world that we can feed the present population without chemical fertilizer. That’s when this misinformation becomes destructive.

Since this has been such a long article, let me summarise:

1. Is Organic Farming is better for the environment?

No. Modern scientific techniques that are not necessarily compatible with the Organic Certification result in less pollution.

2. Does Organic Food taste better?
C. Organic produce is no better in taste or nutrition?

While I haven’t found any broad double-blind scientific tests, what evidence does exist is that people assume organic tastes better because they are told that it does. Ultimately a food product consists of exactly what it is genetically programmed to consist of and it doesn’t matter one iota where the elements come from to make it and therefore the nutritional content is the same.

A. Organic Farming’s output is sufficiently lower than non-Organic farming that we could not feed everyone if we all adopted it?

True. I have mentioned some methods which can increase yields for some food products but they would equally apply to non-organic farming and in the arena of crop yields which are the most important source of the world’s nutrition I bow to Mr Borlaug.

B. Organic Farming in general MAY not be the same thing as sustainable farming and non-organic farming practices MAY be sustainable?

True. While the aims of the organic movement to provide sustainability are noble this is not their core aim. Green and Organic are NOT the same as Sustainable. Both Organic and Traditional Farming can be sustainable but organic farmers are not able to use many of the best scientific techniques and products to improve their yields and reduce their pollution.

There were some interesting articles in it and if you are at all concerned about the environment I would recommend you buy it. I would tell you what the name of the edition is but it’s buried somewhere in the house right now as I’m in a spring-cleaning / about-to-move-out frenzy.

One of the most interesting articles to me personally was about how increased Sustainability is not always dependent upon new technology. One area that currently attracts massive research and investment is in battery capacities. The electric cars that everyone would love to have or at least would love to clam they owned are limited by the range of their batteries. Most can do 100 miles at a stretch. If you can’t get where you need to be and back home again in that distance then your electric car must stay at home while you burn petrol/diesel instead.

Of course there are hybrids but I’ve heard allegations that the batteries in a Toyota Prius create as much pollution in manufacture and disposal as running a purely petrol car would during the same lifetime. I’m sure many of you have heard similar stories. As an aside of course if you run an electric car but your power grid generates most of its electricity from fossil fuels then you have had very little overall impact on the environment anyway before even considering the manufacturing implications.

So back to my point… (I love to get sidelined!) this one chap in the US has come up with a great idea. Rather than spend millions workng out how to make batteries that last 200 miles or 1000 miles or 100,000 miles he is investing in setting up battery-exchange stations at garages all over the US. You can pull up and swap out your discharged battery for a fully charged one for some (hopefully reasonable) fee and the station recharges yours ready for another customer. With a good enough network of these stations and with standard batteries on all electric cars there’s no need to worry about the range on a single battery. With one simple stroke of common sense, one man eliminates the actual need for years and billions of dollars worth of research and makes the electric car genuinely useful. Getting garages and 7-11’s to sign up to it of course is the hard part but at its heart the idea is pure genius.

None of this overcomes the need to stop burning fossil fuels of course if we aim to be sustainable but it is one step along the road. If the central energy grids can switch to wind, solar, nuclear, tidal and geothermal sources and we can all switch to using electricity instead of gas/coal/oil then all CAN be well.

And let’s be clear on one thing… the fossil fuels are NOT running out. There are billions of gallons of it left. There are fields untapped that rival everything that has been drilled or sucked or whatever until now. But we can’t just burn them all and hope to have a sustainable future. We won’t run out of oil to make plastics and lubricants. We won’t run out of gas for our hot-air balloons but we will run out of an environment in which 6 billion people can live if we don’t stop. Actually it’s estimated that the population will exceed 9 billion by 2050. That is an extraordinary growth. Isn’t it about time people stopped having more than 2 kids? I almost feel like China’s 1-child per family policy is actually a good thing!

And here I hit a problem…. I wanted to write a list of things that each of us could do to help sustainability. But, you know what? There’s almost nothing you can do. I’m not kidding either.

• Stopped using plastic bags from the supermarket? No impact. Whether the carbon is in the ground as oil or in the bag as plastic it’s still trapped and a couple more landfills here and there has no affect on sustainability.
• Recycling paper? No effect. All that paper came from renewable sources. Whether you recycle it or not it’s carbon neutral. In fact by recycling it you are creating pollution.
• Bought an electric or hybrid car? No effect. The electricity came from the national grid which is 98% fossil fuel driven.
• Set up a wormery in your back garden? No effect. It’s just landfill you’re saving.

Want to actuallly do something that works? I think you might if you consider all of the above…

• Walk or cycle to work – or at least car-share!
• Take fewer flights.
• Turn off your appliances instead of leaving them in standby modes. Cheaper appliances in particular are very very bad for draining lots of power in standby mode. Cellphone chargers are also notoriously bad for this.
• Petition your MP to support the growth of sustainable energy sources for the power suppliers in your country. Nuclear is the only one which is reliable and you have to realise that if you oppose nuclear power then you shouldn’t even pretend to care. The other sources – wind, solar, tide, geothermal – are fabulous but they’re unreliable and can only complement nuclear.

And these things are marginal but if enough people did them then maybe we’d have a chance…

• Leave the excess packaging on your food IN the supermarket.
• Write to your supermarket and ask them to replace all the plastic packaging with cardboard.

But even if you did do all these things the impact on the environment would be minimal. Whilst collectively throughout our entire lives we do contribute a lot the majority of Carbon Dioxide release comes from industry. And with China stating that they will be increasing the coal consumption by 30% over the next few years nothing you and I can personally do will even balance that out let alone cause a net negative effect.

if you really want to have an impact… petition your MP to tax the heckout of the industries that cause the carbon pollution. Chances are a billion to one against you getting anywhere because the Oil industry owns the governments, but perhaps if 6 billion voices were heard then the few decent politicians might do us all a favour.

Oh here’s a few falllacies to avoid before I get some sleep:

• Double glazing saves money. No. It takes on average 25 years to pay for itself and has an average life of 20 years.
• Solar Panels save money. No. It takes on average (in southern UK) 50 years to pay for itself with an average life of 20 years.
• Insulating your loft to the recommended 27cm depth is expensive. Actually for an average house the cost is only about £500 and it’ll pay for itself in 7-8 years.

I personally think that the way forward requires us as an entire race to rethink our place. The earth is an ecosystem not a resource. We are breaking the balance of that ecosystem. And if we don’t vote in Politicians with the guts to actually do something about it and if we ourselves don’t have the guts to embrace what doing something about it means then we’re all doomed. Well no… the rich will be fine. The race as a whole however will reach a tipping point and billions will die.

So before you have that child, before you buy that excessively wrapped handbag, before you choose one potato over another, before you vote, before you switch off the TV, before you drive to work, before you turn on the air-conditioning… think about sustainability.

But here it is as of now:

Dear Sir/Madam,
On returning home today I discovered that I have apparently had my recycling boxes ‘tagged’ for including inappropriate items in them. This gave me the perfect reason to open a dialogue with you about recycling in the Borough.
From now on I will not be placing any items whatsoever into my Recycling Boxes with the sole exception of Aluminium. There are absolutely sound scientific, environmental and economic reasons for this but before I get to them let me place my decision in context;

When I shop I walk. My car stays at home as often as possible. I have moved house to be closer to my work and when time allows I walk the six miles each way between home and office. I take canvas bags with me and collect a minimal number of plastic bags. When I no longer have any use for something, if it still has any utility it goes either to a charity shop, or is given away on FreeCycle or occasionally is sold on eBay.

However when it comes to recycling I am extremely loathe to toe the party-line because quite simply that is all it is. Government makes a broadly green-sounding proclamation about recycling targets and everyone assumes it is the right thing to do and isn’t it jolly good that the government is taking a lead on this!

Wrong. Completely blindly wrong.

Firstly let us examine what actually happens to the materials we put out for recycling. Initially there is the economic impact. Our taxes pay for the materials to be collected and per ton we pay more for the recycling to be collected than we do for the landfill-bound general waste. It can be as much as three times as much as the cost of collecting regular waste! Given that the companies who are collecting the recycling make a profit from selling the end-products they should be paying us and not vice versa!

Secondly a large amount of the recycling materials that we foolishly pay to have collected never end up being recycled. The companies involved collect their cash and dump the materials directly into landfills. There are documented cases of, for example, a man’s paperwork being put out for recycling and turning up in a landfill in India. So not only, in this example, did we pay to have it collected as recycling but we then exported it several thousand miles, creating even more pollution!
Thirdly and most importantly to the central message of recycling being ‘green’ is that in fact everyone is seriously misguided about the environmental impact of recycling.

Take paper as the first example of this – it is the worst offender. The paper we make in this country from forestry is 100% from renewed sources. This means that the entire cycle from growing a tree, chopping it down, making it into paper and finally putting that into a landfill is a ZERO carbon exercise. Likewise if we instead recycle the paper we keep a net zero carbon process. Actually it is a negative carbon process up until we either burn or allow the paper to completely breakdown in the landfill. Along the way there is pollution caused by the papermaking process and the transport of course. However this is exactly where the two cycles differ. In order to convert wood to woodpulp some pollution is created but in order to turn used paper into pulp a much larger amount of pollution is created. The process is also more expensive, leading to increased costs for the consumer, not to mention lower quality paper as each time the paper is recycled it deteriorates.

So, paper recyling? No thank you. It causes pollution and wastes money.

Moving on we may consider the recycling of Plastics. I note with interest that our recycling collectors will only take a limited selection of plastics. Why only do a fraction of the job? Anyone with a basic knowledge of Chemistry can tell you that if you can recycle one type of plastic you can recycle another. And anyone that cannot work that out for themselves can google it…

http://www.wasteonline.org.uk/resources/InformationSheets/Plastics.htm

“All types of plastic are recyclable.”

Indeed the instructions on the sheet of materials collected makes even LESS sense when you consider the materials in use. They will collect Plastic Bottles – all but exclusively polyethylene terephthalate (PET), high density polyethylene (HDPE) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) – but they will not collect Food Trays – mostly PET and PVC, some polypropylene (PP). So they refuse to collect most of the materials that they can and do (allegedly) recycle. And anyway there is no reason not to collect all plastics with recent advances in microwave breakdown of plastics.

However my main gripe is not with the materials included but with the one simple fact that it takes more energy to recycle plastic than it does to create new plastic. A simple undeniable fact. Recycling plastic wastes energy. And please don’t go with the other party-line that the Oil is running out. It isn’t. I have worked in the Oil industry and there is plenty left. Of course it benefits the oil companies for us to think it might because it pushes up the prices and the profits!

Moving on, to glass. Once again the story is the same. Due to the energy costs and pollution created by Transporting, Storing, Sorting and Cleaning it is bad to recycle glass.

And finally Aluminium. It takes a vast amount of energy to create Aluminium from Bauxite but relatively little to reform once made. This is the only recycling worth doing.

Just take a moment to compare Aluminium and Plastics. People already collect Aluminium and have done for decades. You can still collect bags of it today and turn them in for cash. There is money to be made from the used Aluminium so people pay you to get it for them. The economics of a free market at work. Why will no one pay you for a bag of plastic bottles instead? Because there is no money to be made from it, or rather there is so little money to be made from it that it isn’t worth anyone doing it. Some claim this has changed. They say the plastics can be used now to make fleeces and shirts and all sorts of other things. The fact is that items made this way are of a lower quality and higher cost than the original items they replicate. Burying the plastic and continuing to make the other objects properly is cheaper, easier, less polluting and greener.

One very final topic. Yet more scaremongering that is shoved in our faces is the idea that landfills are filling up our countryside or that it is dangerous. Most people would be amazed at how little land it would take to contain all of our waste as a nation for the next century with absolutely no recycling going on. Also any methane produced by such sites can be tapped. It can then be burned for power – a zero carbon process overall since the carbon came from the atmosphere in the fist place. Or there are numerous scientific investigations ongoing to find ways of more permanently fixing the carbon in different ecosystems.

Please may I recommend you read this article which covers the scienctific fallacies that recycling are based on. ‘The Eight Great Myths of Recycling’ is written by a well published Economics professor and makes for fascinating reading.
http://www.perc.org/pdf/ps28.pdf

I look forward to hearing back from you either with your scientific research debunking my statements or with your plan to prevent wasting taxpayers’ money, wasting energy and creating extra pollution. Until you can do the former I will be unable, in all good conscience, to continue contributing to the pollution and money-wasting that the council’s policies advocate. I will of course continue to re-use and avoid commuting where possible.

Sincerely yours,

Men Kill Fish!

Again we are not presented with enough data to support the conclusion. Initially they state that fishbones are found in sites all over NorthWest Europe but read carefully and the detailed data and the analysis and conclusion are only drawn from the York site. At York the bones show that freshwater fish being eaten diminished in size as time went on and simultaneously the proportions of sea fish being eaten in the diet increased.

The conclusion is: Man overfished the rivers and lakes and had to turn to the sea for more food. How can you conclude this from one site? Perhaps the other sites back up this conclusion but without further proof I think that is a tenuous conclusion. Perhaps the water course changed? Perhaps changing sea-levels affected the settlement, the fish, the river, or simply the ease of open water fishing?

I found some interesting data while thinking about this:

The oldest source I can find (Josiah C Russel, Medieval Demographics, 1984) states that in 1066 the population of England was 1,100,000.

I had assumed that at the time most of the country was covered in dense forest but that turns out to be incorrect. By 1000 AD most of the forest had been lost.

Men Kill Trees!

The article opens with:

The oldest and largest trees within California’s world famous Yosemite National Park are disappearing.

Climate change appears to be a major cause of the loss.

Really quite an aggressive and scare-mongering way to start I think! But if you read further:

The cause is difficult to pin down, but “we certainly think that climate is an important driver,” says Lutz.

So they think that climate is an important driver but nowhere do they provide any evidence. The problem is that the entire article is written to be about GW. Nowhere do they use those words, instead they use the covert secret code ‘climate change’ but we all know they are implying the human impact on the climate through warming.

And even if it is our fault… is this really a story worthy of much interest yet?

“We know that large trees disproportionately affect the ecosystem,” says Lutz. “But what the consequences could be of a decline in average large tree diameter, no-one really knows.”

So that’s a no then…

However I could suggest reasons why the numbers are declining that doesn’t invoke the dreaded GW! Crucially we note from the article that larger older trees are more able to withstand fire than other flora. Now I visited Yosemite in 1994 and at the time they had a policy of preventing natural fires in the park. When this happens the advantage the large trees have from their ability to survive such incidents is negated and they come under greater competition for resources from flora that would otherwise have died or been put back. Thereby some of the trees would have lost the battle for survival and this data supports the hypothesis that preventing fires causes reduction in large tree numbers.

Further, I visited Yosemite again in 2007. Sometime in the late 90’s there had been a massive wildfire in the park. It was severe because of the years and years of fire prevention (causing buildup of dead, flammable material) and in 2007 the devastation was still clear to see. A new policy is now in place to allow natural fires so far as they do not threaten human lives.

So my hypothesis can make a prediction here that will differ from the prediction of the ‘GW is to blame’ hypothesis. If I am right then the future will see an increase in the numbers of large trees back to whatever is a stable level. If their assumption is correct then the numbers will decline as the climate continues to warm up.