Green Labels

When out shopping its often difficult to differentiate products on their environmental merits. With the addition of green labels manufactures are trying to help us understand how their product meets environmental standards, but whilst some labels and logos are self explanatory some labels are not so easy for us to decipher. Included on the posts below are some logos you may have come across in the past or will in the future with explainations and links.

• Product-Specific Labels
• World Labels
• Fuel Economy Label
• Energy Labels
• Timber Products
• Ecolabels
• Organic Produce
• Food
• Recycling and Packaging

If there are some you think we should list on these pages please feel free to email us and we will add them to the appropriate category.

Video: Tall Chimneys Demolished

On 6th July the skyline of Belfast was permanently altered when three 240ft chimneys from a coal fired power plant which was closed in 2002 were demolished. At the height of production the 240MW power plant used 600 000 tonnes of coal annually, unloaded by four cranes from a continuous stream of trucks, 150 tonnes an hour. This power station alone produced over 1 million tones of CO2 annually. This image of the fall of the chimney of a coal fired power plant should be the image for the future of electricity generation. No longer should we be so reliant on fossil fuels especially coal to produce electricity.

"The demolition of the chimneys not only changes the Belfast skyline, it marks a new opportunity for power generation in Northern Ireland. Once the demolition project is completed, the site will be kept in a landbank reserved for future electricity generation."
Robin Greer, Northern Ireland Electricity

How Are Tyres Recycled?

Over 50 million tyres (just over 480,000 tonnes) were scrapped in the UK in 2001 and around 80,000 tonnes was disposed of in landfill. When disposed of in landfill sites, tyres in large volumes can cause instability by rising to the surface of the site, affecting its long term settlement and therefore posing problems for future use and land reclamation. Rubber materials contain proportions of organic chemicals and little is known about the long-term leaching effects of these materials.

Tyres account for around 3.5% of the weight of an average vehicle, and as a controlled waste under the Environmental Protection Act 1990, a Duty of Care is placed upon waste producers to ensure that waste material is disposed of safely through registered carriers to licensed sites. According to the Used Tyre Working Group's 2001 survey 22% were recycled, 8.3% went to energy recovery, 9.9% were retreaded, 16% were reused and 3.3% were used in landfill engineering. The remainder (approximately 40%) will have been landfilled, stockpiled or illegally disposed of.

There are many ways tyres can be recycled in their original form;

• Reuse of part-worn tyres
  Extracting the maximum safe life from a tyre saves valuable resources (oil, rubber, steel etc).
• Reuse through landfill engineering
  Whole tyres can be used in the preparation/construction of landfill sites, where they are used as leachate draining systems.
• Tyre Retreading
  Tyre retreading is a major industry in the UK. Colway, now C-Tyres, processed 1 million tyres in 1999. Manufacturing a retread tyre for an average car takes 4.5 gallons less oil than the equivalent new tyre and for commercial vehicle tyres the saving is estimated to be about 15 gallons per tyre. Car tyres can only be retreaded once but truck tyres can be retreaded up to three times.
  
  

However when they can't be recycled in their original form they can be chipped. TyreGenics, the UK and northern Europe’s only cryogenic tyre recycling company has officially opened in Baglan, Neath Port Talbot, Wales. The £4m facility (£1.4m of which came from a grant from the European Union’s Objective One fund in support of the jobs and commercial opportunities) will process in excess of 9 000 tyres a day, amounting to 30 000 tonnes a year which would have otherwise been disposed in landfill or in some cases burned producing toxins. The launch follows on from a statement from the Environment Agency in 2003 that urgent action was needed to cut the number of tyres dumped illegally in Welsh beauty spots.

"The volume of tyres being recycled was the equivalent of all the tyres produced in Wales annually. Instead of those going for landfill, drainage or being burnt in cement kilns, they are getting recycled into usable product"
Nick Wyatt, TyreGenics

So how are tyres recycled?, first they are collected and reprocessed by shredding the tyres into millions of tyre ‘chip’, pieces of rubber approximately 50mm x 50mm that have a variety of uses. In the case of TyreGenics, this process is complete by their venture partner Credential Environmental, this company will also collect tyres for recycling in most parts of England & Wales.

This tyre ‘chip’ is the raw material for the cryogenic recycling process. The ‘chip’ is loaded into an enclosed freeze chamber cooled using quantities of inert liquid nitrogen. The 17m chamber takes the chip, cooling all the way along the 15 minute journey, to banks of mechanical hammers. When the chip reaches the hammers, it has been cooled to a temperature of –80 degrees centigrade where the rubber becomes very brittle. The hammers are enclosed in large steel chambers mounted some 2.5m below ground level, where drive shafts running through the chambers propel the hammers to strike against themselves thousands of times each minute. As these hammers hit the frozen tyre chip, they smash rubber off in pieces of various size (known as grade) of tyre ‘crumb’. This crumb is then extracted from the hammer chambers and graded and sorted within the plant into one of 6 grades of crumb for further treatment or direct use.

The process delivers three end products; rubber crumb, steel and fibre.

• The main by-product is rubber crumb, separated and graded for a variety of uses. Around 70 percent of the plants output is used by Field Turf Tarkett who designs and manufactures the surfaces at some of the world’s most famous sporting clubs and stadia including the Denver Broncos, New York Jets and Barcelona’s Nou Camp. Other uses for the crumb include as a component in the manufacture of durable recycled safety flooring systems, within specialist sound insulating wall coverings and in the manufacture of other rubber products.
  
  
• Annually the 4000 tonnes of steel that is recovered during the process at the plant is used by Welsh steel works to produce a wide range of steel products.
  
  
• Annually the 6000 tonnes of fibre extracted during the process is recovered and is currently sent to landfill, but soon hopefully to be used to produce energy. Other potential uses include insulation and cattle bedding.
  
  

If you have Tyres that need recycled find a company that can take them off your hands.

What's in Season from Your Local Farmer in August?

Vegetables
Beetroot
Broad Beans
Broccoli
Brussel Sprouts
Carrots
Celery
Cucumber
Leeks
Parsnips
Peas
Peppers
Savoy
Scallions
Tomatoes
Turnip

In Season All Year
Cabbage
Cauliflower
Lettuce
Mushrooms
Pammphrey
Potatoes
Red Cabbage
Soup Veg
Swedes

Fruit
Raspberries
Strawberries

Meat
Beef
Chicken
Lamb
Pork

Other
Eggs
Milk
Oats
Other Grains

Please note the above selection of foods is based on what is in season in the United Kingdom.