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My eye! Sweet Jesus, Ouch!


Sledge

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Personally, I don't consider that finding a 10-square-mile hole and throwing all the nation's ###### into it is such a good idea. For a start, just take a moment to realise just how HUGE such a hole would be. That's a LOT of rubbish. If even a quarter of it could be recycled, how many tonnes of fresh ores, trees, oil, or whatever won't need to be used to replace it?

 

I'm more concerned with diminishing supplies of raw materials than I am with running out of space to put rubbish. we're wasting precious, irreplacable hydrocrabons in cars and other vehicles which would be run on other fuel sources when we could be making harder-to-replace plastics out of them instead.

 

It's wasteful.

 

For what it's worth, I'm currently running my diesel car on at least 25% pure vegetable oil. Buy it from Costco in big drums it's only about 60p per litre, even Tesco is currently selling vegetable oil for less than £1/litre. It's better for the enivronment and it's actually cheaper than buying diesel at the pump. The only downside is a slight increase in fuel consumption and decrease in the time between fuel filter changes, but otherwise it's all good.

 

Just don't tell the taxman, or I'm doomed. :waggle:

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I think I said this before...

 

That kind of thing is fine as long as YOU'RE the only one doing it.

If everybody started doing it we'd be in the same situation but we wouldn't be able to fry food either.

The jocks would starve.

 

Alternative fuels, for the moment at least, are only a good idea as long as very few people actually bother with them.

 

Just don't tell the taxman, or I'm doomed. :waggle:

Also, I couldn't leave this alone...

 

Weren't you the one saying how we should just throw people in jail for tax evasion rather than trying to help get them to sort it all out?

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nPower are absolutely taking the ****ing ****!

 

So when I joined them in Feb 09 I was paying £116 a month, the same I was paying with British Gas, which was the same we were paying with 3 people in the house...

 

So I built up (over summer, part of winter) nearly £600 worth of credit. They reduce my payments for £4 a month, I compromised to £20 a month.

 

Next bill, £409 credit. Then it turns out they have 'transposed' the day and night rates, and its actually £200 credit. Still with the worst of winter in there.

 

So what are they wanting to do now? Give me back £130 into my account... and raise my bill to £85 a month. For a single person in a terraced house!

 

Jesus booby-plooking! I've told them to drop the direct debit, I'll pay as I go.

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Yep. And I pay VAT on the products I buy. Of course, if I'm burning them in my car, I *ought* to be paying fuel duty on top of that, but then again, double taxation is against the law. So I consider that it works out...

 

If I were to be caught, I would have no grounds to whine about it, and certainly no reason to expect "nice" treatment such as you seem to suggest should be offered to criminal types. And I wouldn't go on a killing spree either, but then, that's just me.

 

Rapeseed oil is the best for cars, and used oil actually burns better than unused, something to do with extra molecules getting stuck to the chains during heating. Of course, you have to filter the used oil more. The financial reasons are not the main reason for doing this, the environmental and sustainability issues are far more important. More veggie oil can be grown and it's essentially carbon neutral as the plants take carbon dioxide from the air as they grow and you send it back into the air after burning.

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Azubi - Like Hedganian said on the previous page just because some people seem intent on *fruitcage* the world over due to lack of outlook doesn't mean everyone else should. ;)

 

To quote Stealth:

 

I know. I was just, y'know, raising the point.

 

I never said we should just give up because other places can be a wasteful rubbish dump. I just think the focus on being more environmentally friendly should shift more towards these places as opposed to constantly being put on the likes of the UK as if we are the biggest wasteful bastards in the world.

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I never said we should just give up because other places can be a wasteful rubbish dump. I just think the focus on being more environmentally friendly should shift more towards these places as opposed to constantly being put on the likes of the UK as if we are the biggest wasteful bastards in the world.

 

To me it looks like an attempt at an excuse not to bother or some kind of weird nationalism. Just because we are better than somewhere else doesn't mean that we can't do better nor does it mean no one is trying to improve things elsewhere. No one has said the UK are the biggest wasteful bastards and no one suggests we should give other countries a free pass.

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TBH, the biggest problem, as I see it, is that for every scrap of paper we recycle and every plastic bag we don't use there's a pakistani corporation allowing an old supertanker to be scuttled on a beach and left to rot or an african city full of people who simply think it's okay to toss their junk into the local river.

 

In the grand scheme of things it all comes down to big business.

One of the main reasons a chinese factory can sell you an AEG for £70 is cos they don't have to worry about having waste products disposed of properly when they can just dump em in the sea etc.

 

I'm not saying that gives us the right to act in a similar manner when we know better but I'm sure it is very frustrating for individuals and for corporations trying to compete for their slice of a market.

 

To digress, on a brighter note, one thing that people seem to overlook is that advances in technology often yield good environmental benefits.

I read somewhere that new Saabs actually pump out cleaner air than they suck in and your fancy new 42" LCD TV only uses about quarter of the power of an old 22" CRT telly.

In the end I suspect it'll be new technology that saves us from an environmental meltdown rather than recycling and whatnot.

 

Again, obviously that's not to say we shouldn't do whatever we can right now to help things along though.

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I agree - but partly because new *recycling* technology will improve our ability to recycle things.

 

Sooner or later, the raw materials will run out. There's only so much iron ore, aluminium, etc in the ground. Eventually we'll have dug it all up. Before that happens, we'd better have come up with a solution.

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Interestingly enough, there have been a few good documentories about recycling and what not in the last few years, and a few things stick in my mind:

 

Cardboard & paper waste can only be stored for upto a fornight before it starts to rot ( indoors, warehouse ), after that it has to be incinerated; not so bad really as it is burned to make electricity.

 

Aluminium can in principle be stored indefinately, but there is only so much space at the depots; the councils have to sell this metal before they un out of space, otherwise it ends up in landfill. This is due to it often being cheaper for companies/ manufactures etc to buy new metal than to buy used stuff, so all that effort recycling your tin cans and such goes to waste alot of the time ( there are some good wiki articles about the difficulties of processing reclaimed aluminium and the toxic by-products that are diffiuclt to dispose of too ).

 

Its definately worth making some effort though, regardless of how worthwhile or not one finds recycling to save the rainsforests & all that b*ll*cks.

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To digress competely...

 

Sliced bread.

Why do they make loaves in sizes that don't fit in a toaster?

Does the guy who runs Warburtons want to make sure that birds will always get fed from with the bits I have to cut off in order to get it to fit in the toaster?

 

+1 on that, just this morning I had to tell the wife to use the "other" bread as it fits and toasts properly where the big W is just awkward.

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The cheaper the toaster, the more likely that a standard size slice of bread won't fit in completely, it seems to me. On the other hand, cheaper bread sometimes has smaller slices which fit better in the smaller toasters. It's a complicated equation...

 

You could always toast your bread under the grill, then it won't matter how big the slices are.

 

EDIT - and why on earth were you up at half five on Sunday morning making toast in the first place????

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VFC motors - excellent little high-speed motors, but WHY DO THEY NOT USE THE D SHAPED PINIONS?!?!?! I have a perfectly useable VFC short-shaft EG1300 sitting here that can't be used because the sodding pinion keeps slipping on the shaft, and short of arc-welding the sodding thing on I can't see any way of sorting it.

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EDIT - and why on earth were you up at half five on Sunday morning making toast in the first place????

Well, suffice to say it was the result of a spicy kebab I ate at roughly 11:30pm which left me feeling hungry by 5am. :(

 

FWIW, we have a big fancy toaster which was bought on the basis that it could manage "oversize" slices of bread but the current Warburtons loaves are just daft. The bread is about 2/3rds of the width of a regular loaf but about 1.5x the height.

maybe the guy who designed the loaves was using a 16:9 monitor set to a 4:3 resolution?

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