Less waste, more speed

Jeremy Smith & Jon Hughes

29th March, 2007

Growing crops to solve the planet’s energy needs doesn’t work. Recycling the energy in our waste just might have a significant part to play. By Jeremy Smith & Jon Hughes

Bush’s latest’ state of the union speech – wanting 20 per cent bio-fuels from food crops to be driving the US fleet in 10 years –makes two things remarkably clear. First even the Toxic Texan now sees the environment as a vote winner. And second, people such as him are still looking for the answers in the wrong place.

To see where the answers might lie he needs to look beyond the cornfields of the Midwest. To somewhere aiming to be nuclear free by 2010 and oil-free by 2020. To Sweden. This radical energy policy, the most ambitious of its kind in the world, was introduced by the socialists and adopted, after a recent change of government, by the equivalent of the Tories. In terms of ecological consciousness and seeking bipartisan solutions to environmental problems it affirms that Sweden is a good 20 years ahead of either Britain or America.

The country’s environmental awakening started in the Eighties when two separate but connected events shocked the country. First there was the bleached coffee filter paper scandal. People liked the filter paper for their...

 

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