komadori’s green corner

I don’t wish to denigrate the efforts of the Swindon Real Nappy Network. (I’ll quite happily denigrate the Adver’s ability to get a web address right though: swindonrealnappynetwork.org.uk, as published in the Adver, won’t get you very far.) I’m old enough to have been in nappies before disposable nappies were commonplace, and my parents were sufficiently thrifty that once my sibling and I were beyond the nappy-wearing phase they cut them up and re-used them as face flannels. So I have nothing against their objectives. I’m just rather puzzled by the logic — if you can call it that — behind their support for the proposals from Swindon Borough Council and Wiltshire Wildlife Trust for a publicly funded nappy laundry service.

Disposable nappies are filled with a chemical gel that draws the moisture in to it. But it also draws all the good moisture away. At a time when parents are so keen on organic food for their children it seems madness to be putting chemicals so close to a very sensitive area.

Good moisture? Do they think there’s good water and evil water? And if they’re so concerned about the use of chemicals, does that mean that this laundry service will not use any chemicals? No detergents, no disinfectants, just nappies returned after a thorough rinse in pure water? I suspect not.

A company planning to build an incinerator a wood-burning energy generator at Park Grounds Farm near Wootton Bassett would like people to believe it is something better than an incinerator. According to Mr Overfield, the chief executive of Purepower Holdings, it’s much more high-tech than that.

This is certainly not an incinerator. An incinerator is basically a glorified bonfire, whereas this is a piece of advanced technology that can transform the wood brought to the site into enough energy to power 5,000 homes.

So in what way is this different from an incinerator. Again, according to Mr Overfield, it’s advanced!

This is advanced conversion technology, which basically sees the wood heated up to 1,000 degrees. The wood becomes a gas and we put that gas into an engine that uses that as a fuel to power generators.

Hmm…. Perhaps Mr Overfield should have a word with the people at SITA UK ltd who know a thing or two about incinerators, having plans of their own for ‘Energy-from-Waste’ facilities. Here’s the SITA description of their process.

Inside the furnace, a series of grate bars move the waste through the furnace where it is dried and burned at temperatures of around 1000 °C. Burning waste in the furnace creates 2 different materials:

• Hot flue gas – which is then used to create energy. This is known as renewable energy.
• Incinerator Bottom Ash – which can be used in construction.

That’s an incinerator producing gas at 1000 °C, unlike Purepower’s ‘Advanced Conversion Technology’, which is something-too-high-tech-to-be-called-an-incinerator creating gas at 1000 °C. If you’re not convinced that this is an incinerator, look at what the equipment supplier at Purepower’s other bonfire power plant project manufacture: furnaces.

incinerator noun a furnace for burning rubbish

I suspect that to Mr Overfield, something that looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck, is not a duck but an advanced amphibious aeronautic organism.

On my daily walk to work I have noticed that the direction signs at the subway entrance to the old railway works have been replace. Swindon Borough Council has now provided an explanation.

The new signs – five large map ‘monoliths’ and 19 fingerposts – will replace the existing 31 fingerpost signs which were installed in 1995…. At the moment the layout of the town can be confusing and the new signage is intended to help people find their way around in a safe and predictable way.

Presumably not quite as confusing as it was in 1995 though, as there are now seven places that had direction signs but don’t anymore.

Today I have visited Swindon’s new Central Library. Like some others, I was rather underwhelmed. The building is impressive and is very light and airy inside. But whilst the new building may be a fine permanent replacement for the not-as-temporary-as-they-should-have-been portable cabins it replaced, inside it all looks rather temporary.

That lightness and airiness are mainly a result of the bookcases all being low-height, light-weight and on casters. It gives the impression that someone might wheel them all away at any moment. It was quite quiet and library-like… except for some of the librarians who clearly didn’t feel the need to mimic the hushed tones of their customers. Finally, the local history collection within the reference section was very good. ’Tis a pity that there’s almost nowhere to sit and read from said collection.

Swindon’s new Central Library is well worth a visit, but not as well worth a visit as it could have been.

It’s all very well Mr Wright suggesting that local Police Community Support Officers be given the power to give fixed penalties to dog owners who don’t clean-up their dog’s excrement, but the PCSOs are already fully stretched and have other important priorities, such as drugs and other anti-social behaviour. If forced to make a choice, which we are, I’d rather they were dealing with those issues.

I’m also not convinced by Mr Wright’s view that it’s a serious problem in the Railway Village. In Faringdon Road Park, yes, but not the Railway Village. And at the time when most of the dog walkers are around, early morning and early evening, I’ve not once seen a PCSO in the area… but I have seen most, though not all, dog owners cleaning-up after their pets.

As their slogan says, ‘Every little helps’ but in the case of Tesco’s plans for wind generation at their Ocotal Way store in Swindon, it’s very little indeed. They like to puff that the output from the turbines is impressive.

This is part of our commitment to reducing the carbon footprint of our existing stores by 50 per cent by 2010…. Each turbine generates 6KW, enough to power four households, and reduce carbon emissions by 24 tonnes a year.

The reality is less impressive. Despite the spin, their spokeswoman seems not to know what impact these turbines will have.

What proportion of the Swindon store’s power could be generated by the turbines would depend on the size of the store.

Well, yes, but the proportion will always be virtually nothing. To get this in perspective, as the supporting statement to Tesco’s planning application says,

Given the intermittent nature of the wind it is generally assumed that wind turbines in the UK will have a capacity factor around 30%, meaning that they will, on average, generate power equivalent to around a third of this ‘Installed Capacity’.

So that’s just 2 kW per turbine… enough to boil a kettle. Three kettles’ worth of power is insignificant in comparison to the energy consumed by a large superstore. The supporting statement goes on.

A 6 kW turbine will, at its maximum, generate sufficient electrical power to supply the equivalent of around four average UK households, and would prevent, on an annual basis, the emission to atmosphere of 13.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.

Only 13.6 tonnes? What happened to the other 10.4 tonnes that Tesco’s spokeswoman was talking of? It seems that Tesco’s press statements have even more puff than their pastry!

The real purpose of these turbines is demonstrated by their positions. As the plans show, the turbines are located around the store for maximum visibility, with one of them, contrary to the supporting statement, even being shielded from the prevailing wind by the store itself. This planning application has everything to do with Tesco trying to promote an image of being environmentally friendly and very little to do with serious renewable energy generation.

I’ve been looking at the latest planning application for a Jurys Inn in Swindon. You’d have thought that, having revised their original planning application a couple of times, they would have tired of the habit, but no. So now they are back with a new application, very similar to the first, but with 20% less restaurant space and five fewer flats apartments.

Externally, there seems to be little difference between the two applications: it remains a ten storey slab of bricks and painted concrete. However, reading through the garbage that accompanies the application (and no, I’m not just talking about the refuse disposal strategy) I did notice that whoever drew some of the illustrations in the design statement has some problems with their balance. If this bit of developer-puffery is to be believed,

The scale of buildings rises towards the town centre

and they’ve drawn a pretty picture to show how their slab will fit in at the shorter end of this rising line…. It’s a tad unfortunate that they’ve only managed to produce this rising line by having it cut through the top storeys of the proposed hotel whilst passing several floors above the buildings closer to the centre. Anyone sober with a steady hand would have drawn a line that was level.

As an aside, I’m not quite sure what a ‘superior budget hotel’ is, nor what is ‘budget’ about paying £70 for a room, but that is what Jurys Inns claim to be. Just trying to bump up their search engine ratings in these economically troubled times, methinks.

What do you do if you’ve just bought a loss-making radio station, where things have got so dire that it’s almost down to just one presenter and has gone for long periods repeating the same tunes for hours on end? The South West Radio Limited approach seems to be to jump on the biggest passing media bandwagon.

THE new owners of Brunel FM are inviting comic Russell Brand to take a presenting role on the radio station…. Brunel FM is currently searching for a breakfast presenter and hasn’t ruled out the possibility of attempting to lure the witty motormouth to Swindon….
“Russell, give me a call,” said South West Radio director Paul Roberts, who hails from Wales. “We’ll sit down and discuss the possibilities.”

For a station that’s had the financial difficulties Brunel FM has experienced recently, those ‘possibilities’ could more accurately be described as Mr Robert’s fantasies.

We want the station to relate to the listener. It needs to be engaging listening. There has to be on-air personality. It shouldn’t be that you are just listening to a DJ, it should be like a chat in a pub or a conversation in a park.

In what way would recruiting Mr Brand help the station achieve that? The current breakfast show presenter, Kate Constance, may only be on that show as a temporary measure, but her presenting style is far closer to ‘a chat in the pub’. And neither Mr Brand nor anyone similar would attract the sort of listener that would bring in the best-paying advertisers — a significant factor for a hard-up station like Brunel FM.

We have been at the station a week now and the format hasn’t really changed. There should be no major internal changes.

Aah… some reality at last. With very little money to spare, big-name changes are unlikely soon.

As it will, no doubt, be subject to a considerable amount of spin, below is the text of the amendment (number 48) that Ms Snelgrove has had inserted into the Climate Change Bill.

Insert the following new Clause—

“Report on the civil estate

1. It is the duty of the Office of Government Commerce to lay before Parliament each year a report setting out the progress Her Majesty’s Government has made towards improving the efficiency and sustainability of its civil estate.
2. The report must include the progress made towards—
   1. reducing the size of the civil estate;
   2. improving the sustainability of the buildings that already form part of the civil estate; and
   3. ensuring that any new buildings procured for the civil estate are in the upper quartile of energy performance.
3. Where any new building procured for the civil estate is not in the upper quartile of energy performance, the report must state the reasons why this is the case.
4. A report under this section must be laid before Parliament not later than 1st June in the year in which it is to be so laid.”

I leave you, for the moment, to judge for yourselves whether it matches Ms Snelgrove’s current rhetoric or earlier intent.

Anne is therefore intending to table an amendment with the provisions of her Bill at the Report Stage of the Climate Change Bill. The amendment will require all newly procured central Government buildings to have an energy efficiency rating of A or B in accordance with the energy rating system used for Energy Performance Certificates.

With the economy in trouble and signs that the local economy could suffer soon, you’d think that how the government spends billions of our money as it attempts to prop-up the economy would be worthy of serious debate. The government’s representative in South Swindon, Ms Snelgrove, thinks otherwise and can contribute no more than petty point-scoring to the debate in parliament.

Ms Snelgrove

Is it bad judgement to oppose Government action to protect small savers’ money in banks and building societies, or just another example of social justice from the perspective of the Bullingdon club?

Mr Speaker

Order. The honourable Lady really should cut that behaviour out.

Ms Snelgrove often berates Swindon Borough Council for not talking to her first before bidding for money from central government. With the infantile approach to politics that she displays, it’s amazing that anyone would waste their time talking to her at all.