Town’s recycling revolution has been launched (From Gazette & Herald)

Town’s recycling revolution has been launched

9:30am Wednesday 18th July 2012 in Columnists By Des Reed

Malton , July 10. Ryedale’s recycling revolution has taken off with a colourful start this week, and we are presented with a new black box for glass and a new blue bag.

The existing green box hasn’t been forgotten either, for we have a reminder sticker to fit to it.

Wonderful. Can you remember it all? Housewives did more segregating than this during wartime and without the fancy containers to achieve separation tidily.

Whether you like the strange blue bag remains to be seen. Tough and hard-wearing, I expect, not as neat and tidy as a box would have been around the house, but let’s soldier on. As a point of interest, I’m told that it is cheaper to produce than boxes would have been and that it’s made of scrap vehicle tyres. Now there’s a thing.

• The inability to accept envelopes for recycling has concerned me for years, especially as some local authorities do accept them.

I am told this is because the firms who reconstitute the waste paper can’t cope with the latex glue used to stick the envelope together.

Well, we can get a man to the moon, but this seems a bigger problem.

I suspect it is possible to cope with the small amount of latex in the recovery process, but that our specific people haven’t got the equipment yet.

Measuring up a 9” x 4” (215 x 102) envelope, I find there is about 5¼ sq ins (34 sq cm) of latex applied, and we have lost some 76½ sq ins (494 sq cm) of recoverable paper.

A considerable wastage here, countrywide especially, and it’s time we did better if we intend to take recycling seriously.

You might check my approximate figures and disagree, and all I can say is that my envelope was a random one which came today, and the conversion factors have been ‘rounded’ a bit, but I’ve never cottoned on to this metric lark other than for precise measuring.

Too many big numbers.

•  I receive a very nice glossy magazine from Honda every now and again, ever since I took delivery of one of their lawnmowers.

A clever affair because I’d been through the two-stroke lark, pulling at the starting rope, and often never getting a start-up.

Such things are for younger folk with loads of energy. Now I have a start-at-first-pull machine, even after it has stood unused all winter. It has an authentic decompression starting arrangement which has made life easier – clever folk these Japanese.

Any ex-military chaps might well remember the huge Lister generators used on ack-ack sites, on which each separate cylinder had a decompression knob which needed to be pressed, then you set to and got the thing turning over with the starting handle.

Bang the compression level down and, oh dear, it stopped because you hadn’t wound on enough revs to overcome the succession of four cylinders coming on compression at once.

I got over this one, for the time when an air raid warning came in and I was on my own, I had a little block of wood to slip under just one knob and was usually able to start up on one cylinder and once turning over, then the other three could be slipped in.

Later on, when Lend-Lease was in force, I was happy to work on the Caterpillar D4 which had its own two-stroke starting engine to turn over the main engine for you.

Always worked.

As for the Lister engined genny, when some AA sites were being named by ATS girls, some engines had an electric starter motor fitted.

Listed in the army parts lists as ‘Starters – ATS). Caused a little amusement, I recall.

•  While on with imperial v metric, these figures which usually appear in car adverts cause me some confusion, and I haven’t worked out yet what they are.

You may read the specification for new car ads with quotes for urban and extra urban. So what’s the difference?

This is followed by such as 34.5-56.5 (8.2-5.0) urban. I can guess at the first figures, but those in brackets haven’t yet registered.

Å Nothing to do with the foregoing, but I just made a note to mention that the stick, with a little ‘knob’ of chamois on the end, which sign-writers use when lettering as a handrest, is known as a MAHL stick.

Not a lot of folks know that. Have just checked on this and find it is from the Dutch ‘malen’ to paint.

•  I expect many of you watched the grand prix at the weekend. Others tend to favour the touring car racing teams, often being more exciting.

Just a snippet from the Dream magazine, which tells readers that the latter teams use Honda leafblowers to cool their brakes during pit stops.

 

• Old Malton St Mary’s annual fete, now held at the rugby club, came out lucky with a fine day.

Takings remained much the same as last year’s and so everyone was happy. I didn’t get there this year as I was busy mowing my lawn, and like many other folk we miss the atmosphere which used to prevail when held in the Orchard Field.

There the environment lent itself to the village atmosphere, the grass underfoot appealed too many, especially the children when it was a nice day. Those days are now but a pleasant memory.

• Just a smile: “I used to play football when I was young, but then my eyes went bad – so I became a referee.” (Eric Morecambe).