World’s population reaches 7 billion today - Monday October 31st  

I rather like this cartoon from http://subdude-site.com/WebPages_Local/Blog/topics/environment/enviro_worldPopGrowth_charts.htm which highlights part of the problem of this statistic but there are other problems!

According to the U.N. the world's population will reach 7 billion people today. Since the turn of the 20th century global population has soared from 2 billion in 1927 to 4 billion in 1974 and 6 billion in 1999. This has sparked all sorts of discussion over the past week.  For those of us concerned about the future of our planet this is rather depressing - all these extra humans apart from needing food - and millions of people are already undernoursihed - will use more of our scarce resources and cause more pollution and send even more of the other wonderful life forms we share our planet with, speeding to extinction.  Not that people aren't lovely but you can have too much even of a good thing!

Here in the UK, the Office for National Statistics has released projections showing that the current UK population of 62 million is rising at 0.8% a year and may increase to 73 million by 2035.  The carbon footprint (or impact on the Planet) of UK citizens is much greater than those living in Africa and most of Asia so rising population here and especially in the energy hungry USA is particularly worrying.  Here are some links to some excellent interactive websites which may help you understand why some of us are worried.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/datablog/interactive/2011/oct/26/un-world-population-growth
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/interactive/2011/oct/24/how-big-worlds-population-born
http://www.breathingearth.net/

Another good website to exlore is http://populationmatters.org/

On Saturday 1st October, Transition Bookham will be paying a visit to Compost Works in Fetcham. If you'd like to join them, from 10.30am, please send them an email so they have an idea of numbers.

Having picked up your £10 compost bin (see previous article), why not come along to Transition Bookham's September open meeting, on Wednesday 21st, when Catherine Porter of SITA (pictured above, second from left) will be talking about 'Home Composting'.

For those without a compost bin, there'll be a chance to win one, and there will be some free seeds and information material on offer as well.

The venue is St Nicolas Church's Pastoral Centre (at the rear of the churchyard, path behind the bell tower or beside 'Heads Up' barber in Church Road - beneath the green arrow on the map), Great Bookham, from 7.30pm to 9.30pm.

Compost and Self-sufficiency

Saturday 19th March 2011 

2 - 5.30pm at 8 The Drive, Fetcham, KT22 9EN.

Admission free.

Composting

Compost Works volunteers will be on hand to explain how to get started, advise on the compost container best for you, answer your compost queries, and demonstrate ways of speeding up your compost using a mower and a shredder. And with our shredder, which you can borrow, you can see how to dramatically reduce the bulk of your woody prunings, and provide an ideal mix in the compost heap with your kitchen waste and grass cuttings.

We have working examples of all sorts of compost containers, including numerous low cost DIY examples, and how to make them. If you want to get even quicker and better compost, we can show you an insulated pallet composter, made from free materials. Also a home made wormery.

Self-sufficiency

• Find out how you could eat your own fruit all the year round, helped of course by lots of good compost!

• See how to grow soft fruit - Rhubarb, gooseberries, blackcurrants, boysenberries, jostaberries, blackberries, strawberries, and raspberries, as well as fruit trees - apples, quince, damsons.

• And most importantly, how to preserve the fruit by bottling, freezing, storing properly, making jams and chutney. All these methods will be on show.

• You can also find out how easy it is to propagate so you never need to buy new plants.

Late autumn/pre-winter is a good time of year to either start or keep composting as there’s a great deal of material collected from your garden clean up which could be thrown into the compost bin and left to compost throughout the colder months, ready for the spring bloom.

Falling autumn leaves can become a nuisance, especially if you're constantly raking them off the lawn and picking them up. Leaves, prunings, dead plants and flowers are great additions to the compost bin, producing a rich compost ideal for spring planting. If you've ever thought of making compost, autumn is the perfect time for it, and come spring you'll have some wonderfully rich and nutrient-filled topsoil, all made for free.

Throughout autumn, the Surrey Waste Partnership is continuing to offer home composting bins at great prices, starting from £14.00 (RRP £39.00).

Composting is a natural process that transforms both your garden and kitchen waste into valuable and nutrient rich food for your garden, for free. For example, autumn leaves are a great source of "brown," high-carbon material for the compost. Simply alternate layers of leaves with the regular “green” materials you'd add to your compost bin (such as vegetable and fruit scraps, weeds, grass clippings, and plants that you pull out in your autumn garden clean-up) and let it sit over the winter. Turn the pile when you think of it, and by planting time you'll have finished compost. If you have lots of leaves to put into your compost bin, put the excess into a bin bag, make a few holes in it and leave in a corner of the garden or shed where they will rot down and make great mulch.

Making compost is simple; family waste such as empty cereal packets and egg boxes; fruit scraps and vegetable peelings; tea bags and coffee grounds, are in fact great ingredients to make compost. Mix this in with garden waste and you have the perfect recipe.  
Home composting is the most environmentally friendly method of dealing with organic waste. Separating and composting household waste, not only reduces the amount waste that you put out for collection, but also saves you money. Use it on your flowerbeds and vegetable plots, patio planters, hanging baskets and even window boxes.  Compost keeps your plants growing healthily, by improving soil structure and fertility, maintaining moisture levels and PH balance.
To buy a bin or to dig up more advice on how to turn your garden waste and table scraps into compost, visit www.surreycc.gov.uk/getcomposting or call 0844 571 4444.

*The Surrey Waste Partnership is made up of Surrey County Council and the 11 district and borough councils in the county to manage Surrey’s waste in the most efficient, economic and sustainable way possible.

Surrey Waste Partnership are reviewing their Plan for Waste Management in Surrey and want you to help shape it. Please take part in their public consultation between 17 May and 12 August 2010 and tell them your views.

Do mention the need to encourage waste reduction, in the first instance, and the requirement for plastic recycling collection, perhaps in place of the now removed bottle banks. This could be provided by Recresco, who currently just collect Tetra Paks.

Compost Works' Hugh Baker is holding a meeting at 7.30pm on Monday 15th March at 8 The Drive, Fetcham KT22 9EN, to plan for the year ahead.

Open to all, whether you'd like to volunteer to help at one of their events, want to get advice for your group or to find out how composting might fit in with your activity, or you're simply interested in composting.

With local food production being a key issue of Transition Town and Community Garden groups, Compost Works plays a vital role by providing expertise. On a more practical note, it's shredder hire service continues to be a boon (and money saver) to those of us who like to prune!

Surrey County Council (SCC) announced in December that there are no longer plans to build Energy from Waste incinerators in Surrey. Instead they are planning an Eco Park in Shepperton that will have an anaerobic digester (AD) to handle all Surrey’s domestic food waste. SCC is already working with the District and Borough Councils on separate food collections which should be operating throughout the county by the time the digester is ready.

This is good news of course, but is it the best option? The Green Mole Forum has set up a group to study this and we have met the SCC manager responsible for developing these plans. We learnt that SCC has only studied a single site to handle all of Surrey’s domestic food waste, but agreed there are viable alternatives that they have not studied properly. Importantly they haven’t considered having a number of local AD plants instead of one big plant, nor have they considered commercial food waste or farm waste as a possible feedstock for the plants. Smaller plants have a number of advantages including:

We have recently taken a big step forward by commissioning a student at Surrey University's Centre for Environment Strategy (CES) to carry out a thorough study of large versus local AD plants. Using Life Cycle Analysis, a study technique for which CES has an international reputation, it'll work out the best environmental option and will be her MSc project.

An important early part of the work will be collecting data from Mole Valley’s cafes, pubs, sandwich shops, school canteens, etc. to estimate how much commercial food waste is produced. SCC estimate that it could be about the same quantity as the total domestic food waste.

The recent leaf bag distribution events in Dorking and Leatherhead proved very sucessful with nearly 500 bags, large and small, and around 150 second-hand bags being handed out. As leaves take up to 2 years to compost it is important to keep them separate from kitchen and other garden waste.

Congratulations to Hugh Baker, of Compost Works, and his volunteers for a job well done. Thanks must also go to Surrey County Council who provided a lot of the bags. If you missed out you might find that SCC still has some left over, so check out the Compost Works website for where you may still get them.