British Expat Newsletter

19 October 2005

Hello, and welcome to those who have joined up since our last newsletter.

In this issue

This week: Waste
On the website
Virtual Snacks
Sponsor
Bizarre Searches
Joke and quotation

This week

Sutton, which is the London borough where our UK house is, bills itself as London's greenest borough. That's not just a comment on the area of parkland or number of trees grown, although both are substantial. The council reckons it recycles 28% of the borough's household waste, the best performance in London and on course to hit the government's 30% target by March 2006. And just a couple of hundred yards from us there's an imaginative new housing estate called BedZED (Beddington Zero Energy Development), built with the council's backing on an old sewage works, which claims to generate no carbon emissions whatsoever. The houses are also designed and planned to reduce demand on water resources, cut down on use of private vehicles and make recycling easier.

A large part of the reason the council is so keen to promote recycling is the problem of landfill - and the need to reduce it. Currently about 80% of the UK's domestic waste goes into landfill, whereas (according to Friends of the Earth) about 80% could be recycled or composted. This is a massive waste of resources, as well as taking up scarce land which could be put to better use. And what a contrast with waste processing in, for instance, Bangladesh, where household waste is reckoned to go through seven different pairs of hands before all the reusable material has been taken out of it.

All this has been brought to the front of our minds in the process of getting our house ready to go on the market. Having done all the decorating, lawn laying and kitchen building tasks, we're now down to clearing out the loft and planning what will happen to our remaining furniture (the stuff the tenant didn't totally destroy or make off with).

As luck would have it, just a couple of miles away there's a British Heart Foundation charity shop which happily takes second-hand furniture and domestic appliances. They clean and fix them, if necessary, and sell them on. This adds to their coffers as well as providing a means for less well-off people to buy some good stuff at knock-down prices. Having just built a gas hob into our new worktop and fitted a built-in oven, we had no use for our perfectly serviceable free-standing gas cooker and thought they might be able to take it. But apparently not.

Knowing Sutton Council's commitment to recycling ("Re-use, not refuse") we contacted the council to take away our old cooker. We had thought the council would give it a quick service and then use it for some needy person. But no. It just got crunched up in their crusher lorry. More bulk for the landfill. Grrr!!

The council does recycle some things, though. Bins are provided for recycling paper, plastic, glass, and garden rubbish - which they turn into compost for sale. Our gardening expert, Mike Clark, says that he would never give away such a valuable resource. You can read his article on how to make your own compost here:
Clark in the Park: Never Underestimate Number Twos

Despite our council's boast about its greenness, there is clearly still much room for improvement. It's not just the council, either. We had a nasty experience at another charity shop recently (Marie Curie Cancer Research in Wallington) when we took along some used, but good quality bedding, only to be told by the very sniffy shop assistant that they wouldn't sell it. The council should provide the means for goods like this to go to an agency who could use them. The only alternative meanwhile is to put these perfectly good, but used, items into the brown bin and (along with perfectly good cookers) add to the need for more landfill sites.

Are people really so rich these days that second-hand is not good enough for them? I suppose that while the council keeps handing out money to them, then those with low or no incomes have no need to be frugal. Certainly our ex-tenant (latterly a recipient of housing benefit) had money for luxuries such as cable TV, two dogs and a car, although not for things such as paying the rent or the gas bill. But that's a different story.

How do they do things where you are? Do you have anything to say about this topic, or do you have some suggestions for other issues we might discuss in our weekly email? Why not tell us about it on the forum?
British Expat Forum: BE Newsletter discussion

On the Website

This week we're starting to get back to normality. Just the loft to clear out before making our escape again. Among other bits and bobs, we've added an interesting piece by Thomas Elam about Bangalore, Karnataka's vibrant yet leafy capital:
Letter from Bangalore

All new articles and features are listed on our What's New page:
What's New on BE?

Each week I delve into the dark cavernous interior of the BE website to see what gems I can unearth - good things you may have missed first time around. Here are my picks for this week:

Terry Wogan visited Aberdeen recently and caused a bit of bad feeling by saying that "rowies" tasted like a mouthful of the North Sea. Discussion ensued on our community forum, including from some of our regulars wanting to know what a rowie is in the first place. They'd guessed something exotic and probably fishy. Actually it's a bread roll, probably a relative of the French croissant due to the Auld Alliance. Anyway, it highlighted the issue that some of our Teuchter food isn't familiar to everyone. Here's a great piece about another North East delicacy, stovies, written by Mike Clark. Even if you read it you may still be left none the wiser - he's written it in Doric, the dialect/language of North East Scotland.
Fit Aboot a Stoved Tattie?

We've had a game on BE for a while. So long, I'd forgotten it was there. And now I've remembered I'll probably get addicted again. :-) Go on, it's worth a go for the terminally bored.
Expat Bar Game

If you're looking for travel features on the site, a good place to start is our Expat World page.
Expat World

Virtual Snacks

If you're interested in trying to save the planet from the worst of humankind's depredations, or just want to know more about environmental issues, then you can find out all you didn't want to know but feared you might find out anyway at Greenpeace's website.
Greenpeace

On a lighter note, our pal Jayne drew www.piada.com to our attention recently. A Portuguese language site, but there are plenty of pictures there to amuse people of any nationality. As a taster, here's a link showing an imaginative if rather bizarre use of a wheelie bin:
Piada.com: Wheelie Bin

Sponsor

British Expat is pleased to announce our new partnership with Offshore Companies House. OCH offer fast online registration of offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands, Belize, Dominica and other tax havens, as well as quick and easy setting up of multicurrrency bank accounts. OCH, through their offshore services, will provide you with the full necessary support at each stage and will always try to offer the best possible prices. They offer attractive and inexpensive offshore packages, and their reliability and quality of offshore service say even more for them than their prices. Most of their new clients - over 15,000 in the last ten years - are referred by previous satisfied customers. However, if you can get the same service, or an offshore package which is a genuinely cheaper offer, they promise to match it!
Offshore Companies House

Bizarre Searches

Some strange search terms which have led people to visit British Expat recently:

pub quiz free scottish questions
funny english activities
athletes with big penises
bogon moth season sydney
fatlips software good or bad
dog penis sculpture
pulled his foreskin
from a fool learns more wise man
roll out the barrel lyrics german
world bitch
songs that make a good wife
meddlesome ratbag

Till next time...
Happy surfing!

Kay
Editor
British Expat Magazine

Quotation

"I do not know of any environmental group in any country that does not view its government as an adversary."
- Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Norwegian Prime Minister and WHO Director-General (1939-)

Joke

Two women terrorists are shopping in Harrod's and trying on backpacks. One turns to the other and asks, "Does my bomb look big in this?"