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4:28 AM
Unknown
Well, sir. You've stirred it up again this time! Like Father Christmas bringing the promise of happiness to the masses, dropping down our chimneys weekly to empty our overflowing rubbish bins!Nice one!Oh stuff any chance of this being an erudite post. I haven't got time for that. Instead I'll just say it as it is.The weekly rubbish collection bribe that your department has announced amounts to nothing but backtracking on any other forms of common sense that has come out of this year's Waste Review, especially with regard to encouraging greater recycling rates.Today's media talks about treating the public with respect. How about treating us with intelligence as well as respect and not just a herd of sheep who will welcome your proposals with a happy bleat.Our...
Friday, September 30, 2011
Monday, September 26, 2011
Calling self-experimentation N=1 is incorrect and misleading
This is not a post about semantics. Using “N=1” to refer to self-experimentation is okay, as long as one understands that self-experimentation is one of the most powerful ways to improve one’s health. Typically the term “N=1” is used in a demeaning way, as in: “It is just my N=1 experience, so it’s not worth much, but …” This is the reason behind this post. Using the “N=1” term to refer to self-experimentation in this way is both incorrect and misleading.Calling self-experimentation N=1 is incorrectThe table below shows a dataset that is discussed in this YouTube video on HealthCorrelator for Excel (HCE). It refers to one single individual....
Friday, September 23, 2011
Measure your recycling with the new Recyclometer
Measuring the impact of recycling is always a challenge, especially when trying to communicate the wider benefits of what is, let's face it, a pretty mundane household task.However, during the summer, along with other bloggers, I was brought in to help road-test Coca-Cola's Recyclometer, a brand new stats-crunching tool, which has been developed in association with WRAP. After a few tweaks, the Recyclometer has now been officially launched, on the company's website and at Recycle Now. providing consumers with a means of calculating the wider impact of their recycling activity, by simply translating the action into energy saving data.Saving...
Monday, September 19, 2011
Being glucose intolerant may make you live only to be 96, if you would otherwise live to be 100
This comes also from the widely cited Brunner and colleagues study, published in Diabetes Care in 2006. They defined a person as glucose intolerant if he or she had a blood glucose level of 5.3-11 mmol/l after a 2-h post–50-g oral glucose tolerance test. For those using the other measurement system, like us here in the USA, that is a blood glucose level of approximately 95-198 mg/dl.Quite a range, eh!? This covers the high end of normoglycemia, as well as pre- to full-blown type 2 diabetes.In this investigation, called the Whitehall Study, 18,403 nonindustrial London-based male civil servants aged 40 to 64 years were examined between September...
Friday, September 16, 2011
Almost Mrs Average gets to speak at waste exhibition
It was a real honour to speak yesterday at RWM, the UK's largest recycling and waste management exhibition, especially as I was sharing the stage with the very inspiring Joy Bizzard, chair of the Local Authority Recycling Advisory Committee (LARAC)The context was very much how local authorities can engage with householders to help individuals and communities reduce waste. Joy's presentation was packed with advice on how councils can raise awareness and find new ways to inspire new audiences, despite the current economic culture of squeezed budgets.The area that particularly interested me was the subject of peer endorsement, i.e., the difference...
Monday, September 12, 2011
Fasting blood glucose of 83 mg/dl and heart disease: Fact and fiction
If you are interested in the connection between blood glucose control and heart disease, you have probably done your homework. This is a scary connection, and sometimes the information on the Internetz make people even more scared. You have probably seen something to this effect mentioned:Heart disease risk increases in a linear fashion as fasting blood glucose rises beyond 83 mg/dl.In fact, I have seen this many times, including on some very respectable blogs. I suspect it started with one blogger, and then got repeated over and over again by others; sometimes things become “true” through repetition. Frequently the reference cited is a study...
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Shedwyn gets her skates on for the end of National Zero Waste Week 2011
To celebrate the last day of National Zero Waste Week, I sent the 1000 Bins mascot Shedwyn, into Suffolk's rollerskating venue CurveMotion, to check out their recycling.They have great recycling facilities behind the scenes, but don't have any specific recycling bins in the public zones. Consequently customers end up throwing their empty bottles and cans into the general rubbish bin.Even if there were public recycling bins, there is a real issue that the number of unemptied containers that are often thrown away by the customers, would quickly contaminate any efforts to recycle properly. So Shedwyn was on a mission to think of ways...
Friday, September 9, 2011
Making 2020 Zero Waste Work: Coventry Conference
Professor Paul Connett, presenting at the Coventry conferenceToday, representatives from central government, local authorities and universities gathered together in Coventry along with social enterprises, mulitnationals, waste management companies, the third sector and environmental bodies, to explore how UK society can create a proper zero waste economy in line with aspirations for 2020.For many, zero waste translates as 'zero waste to landfill', but a strong message that was made clear at today's conference was that a zero waste goal should be exactly what it says...simply ZERO waste, achieved through innovations that design out waste during...
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Can you recycle plastic film at your supermarket?
Whilst shopping today, I noticed that the carrier bag recycling bin had a new label on it, announcing that the store is also now collecting plastic film, you know the stretchy stuff that you get around loo rolls, multipack shrink-wrap as well as the bags inside cereal boxes. So as it's National Zero Waste Week, I'm setting you a mini challenge.Next time you're at the supermarket, it would be great if you could check if yours has got a similar facility.If you've not spotted it before you may be surprised as this should now be available in over 4,500 supermarkets nationwide. If you don't believe me, take a look at this press release that...
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
What happened when Shedwyn ran out of recycling bins
Shedwyn, the campaign mascot for the 1000 bins challenge, has been a bit quiet of late, despite the news that this IS THE LAST WEEK of the campaign and what with it being National Zero Waste Week and all, it was a bit of a shock to catch her putting her feet up in a cafe in town.Sipping coffee, while everyone else is sending in photos. What a cheek!But bless her. She's only gone and run out of recycling bins to photograph in Bury St Edmunds. I suppose there's only so much you can stretch your imagination with just two bins in the very centre of town, and with the car in for repair and having run out of train money, what else could our roving...
Monday, September 5, 2011
Moreton Hall café helps customers reduce waste with their Keep Cups
Meet Lucy and Jess, business partners at The Coffee House, a popular café in the heart of Moreton Hall, which itself is a busy housing development on the edge of Bury St Edmunds.When I dropped in with the family on Day 1 of Zero Waste Week, I warned them that I'd start talking to them about ways in which they help customers reduce waste. I was particularly interested in the success of the Keep Cups that they sell, i.e. the reusable coffee cups, as shown in the photo below.I noticed that they'd been selling these since the café opened in October last year. Priced at £7.99 for a small cup and £9.99 for the larger one, whenever a customer brings...
Nonlinearity and the industrial seed oils paradox
Most relationships among variables in nature are nonlinear, frequently taking the form of a J curve. The figure below illustrates this type of curve. In this illustration, the horizontal axis measures the amount of time an individual spends consuming a given dose (high) of a substance daily. The vertical axis measures a certain disease marker – e.g., a marker of systemic inflammation, such as levels of circulating tumor necrosis factor (TNF). This is just one of many measurement schemes that may lead to a J curve.J-curve relationships and variants such as U-curve and inverted J-curve relationships are ubiquitous, and may occur due to many...
What's in store for National Zero Waste Week 2011?
I've just realised that the title of this blogpost makes it look like I run a shop. So apologies to anyone who thought I might be doing a stock-check or reorganising my merchandising cabinets with a special twist for Zero Waste Week.Sorry, this is more of a talking shop than a retail space, but if there are any stores who are applying innovative ways of reducing the amount of rubbish they stock, then please do share your news here. After all, the theme of National Zero Waste Week 2011 is "Reducing waste away from home", so if you're doing anything to help reduce the amount of trash that you pass on to your customers, then your comments...
