Forget about recycling, we need to start re-using

With China banning all types of recyclable containers, it’s time for us to take a new path in the use of containers. In fact the word recycle could be replaced with the word reuse and to take our possible change of thinking further, let’s add the word zero to waste so we always refer to zero waste when discussing unwanted product.

We need to re-use, nor just recycle.

I believe that most people would agree that they would prefer purchasing household products and take away food and drinks in reusable containers. So it is time to seriously introduce container deposit legislation, which has been ignored by successive Victorian governments for many years.

To pay people to collect reusable containers makes a lot of sense rather than paying councils for a Band-Aid recycling service.

Read the comment by Peter Cox in today’s Age - “Forget about recycling, we need to start re-using.”

Victoria’s battery storage won’t be ready for this summer

Victoria’s plans to add at least 100MWh of battery storage to its grid by January – to help keep the network steady and prevent unwanted load-shedding – appear to have come unstuck.

The state government – which this week unveiled the details of the country’s biggest renewable energy auction (650MW) – has still to announce the results of its much-vaunted earlier tender for two large-scale battery storage installations in the west of the state.

The two projects – each of 20MW and producing a combined 100MWh – were supposed to be online by January 1. But despite attracting more than 100 proposals, the tender winners have still not been announced, way beyond the planned deadline of the end of the August.

A spokesperson for Minister for energy Lily D’Ambrosio said the government is still assessing proposals and further announcements will be made in due course.

Read Giles Parkinson’s story on RenewEconomy - "Victoria’s battery storage won’t be ready for this summer.”

Plastic will clog up the world's oceans by 2050

There is a lot of plastic in the world’s oceans.

Plastic will be more plentiful in our
oceans than fish by 2050.

It coagulates into great floating “garbage patches” that cover large swaths of the Pacific. It washes up on urban beaches and remote islands, tossed about in the waves and transported across incredible distances before arriving, unwanted, back on land. It has wound up in the stomachs of more than half the world’s sea turtles and nearly all of its marine birds, studies say. And if it was bagged up and arranged across all of the world’s shorelines, we could build a veritable plastic barricade between ourselves and the sea.

But that quantity pales in comparison with the amount that the World Economic Forum expects will be floating into the oceans by the middle of the century.

Read The Washington Post story - “By 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans, study says.”