Feedback on Exercise

When we first got assigned China as our country i thought we had a good chance to do well, the fact that the largest construction boom in world history is ongoing in China, they are a major consumer of resources and energy and their environmental record is one of the worst in the world.

Whilst researching for the exercise we did find it quite hard to find China's sustainable development strategies. I was surprised at the fact that china is the only country in the world where its rainforest's are increasing in size. I was also surprised that one of there main environmental problems is desertification. After thinking about it i then realised that China is still a developing country and a poor country, so their are not to focused on sustainable development at the moment, hence why they don't have to join the Kyoto yet.

Our presentation didn't really go to plan, the main reason was time. We ran out of time before we could even begin to finish our presentation. I didn't realise how quickly the time would go. Otherwise i thought i did OK, but i was rather scared and do not like doing presentations. I thought Cat did really well especially with the tough questions at the end. I would also say that we were not really prepared for the questions either which kind of took us by surprise.

I thought our handout was good, it had a wide range of sustainable development strategy's and important relevant facts about China. If we did this exercise again i would definitely limit the information as much as i could to fit it in the time constraint. I would not read out from my handout with my head down as easy as it is to do. I would have post it notes to spark my memories about topics and i would talk about them and engage more with the audience.

I'm going to be honest i dreaded this task from when it was set, i really don't like doing presentations and i am really bad at them, but the only way to improve is to do them so this did benefit me. I also did learn allot about China's sustainable development strategy's and other countries. I definitely learned allot about giving presentations and how to improve and research for presentations.

Recycling in Northamptonshire

Northamptonshire introduced a Joint municipal waste management strategy to increase recycling and reduce waste. In 2001/2 the % of household waste that was recycled was 18%, since the new strategy has gone in place it has increased to 28% in 2004/5 and is predicted to reach 39.2% in 2007/8. The government has set targets of 50% by 2020, at the rate Northamptonshire recycling is increasing they are well on there way.

The reason why recycling has become such a big issue is because getting rid of waste is expensive, its becoming more expensive to use landfill sites its predicted £48 tax per tonne by 2010. There are many other obvious reasons such as its better for the environment reusing what we have instead of making more. Many of the resources we use are slowly running out or cannot be replaced quickly enough. We save allot of energy by recycling for example making new aluminium cans out of recycled cans uses 20% less energy than normal. If we recycle green waste this will save valuable space in landfill sites, and will get a product out of it.

The new strategy has made recycling easier by having new waste services on a regular basis. Also having colour coded bins, bags which makes recycling allot easier. They collect paper, bottles cans and organic waste up to every 2 weeks. Also bottle banks and paper recycling places around town are more common.

Recycling means people have to make effort with their waste and this is the problem. Many people are too lazy to organise their waste, so how could we make recycling easier to improve recycling rates. One way to provide people with an incentive to recycle would be to charge a little bit extra for bottled drinks, cans etc and when you take them back to the store empty they give you the money you paid back. They do this in Germany, they charge 10 cent extra and it does work. If taking you bottles to be recycled means you will get money back more people would do it. Businesses could label their products whether they are recyclable or not and use less packaging to reduce waste.

Northamptonshire currently has a total household waste of 345,329 tonnes and 135,329 of this is being recycled. in Northampton 450kg of waste is produced per person, the strategy aims to reduce this to 225kg by 2020. Recycling is definatly on the increase and the new strategy seems to be working.