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UK goes back to school with the three R's

For many years UK education was served well by the three R's - reading, riting and rithmetic. Now, whether it be an advancement or not, two words sum up the fundamentals of the curriculum - Numeracy and Literacy and therefore the 3R's are being dispatched to the grave yard. But, perhaps we do not need to be that hasty; in a recent Parliamentary Report , www.parliament.uk/hlscience  the House of Lords would like the whole country to be educated in the 3 R's to prevent our Island disappearing under a waste mountain. This time the three R's have an environmental friendly feel about them - Re-duce, Re-use, and Re-cycle.

This report from the Science and Technology Committee is the sixth in the 2007-2008 session  The 127 page document most definitely challenges our current life-style and one has a feeling that either we adopt changes voluntarily or legislation will be introduced. Perhaps, deep down, we all know that our wasting habits consume, unnecessarily, hugh quantities of materials and energy and both are rapidly diminishing recources  -

could we ever go back to a make and mend mentality rather than our buy and bin philosophy of today?

Why not take the time to read "wasting away" by John Humphry  which has been filed in   https://sth-se.diino.com/f.thompson/migrated_data/EandH

As article tells us, several decades ago we had a world without plastic - most houses had no central heating, cars were a treasured item for only the rich - and no-one purchased any goods if they hadn't the money to pay for it. How life has changed.

A few of our present behaviours do appear to be very strange - let's mention Bottled Water. The water authorities take meticulous care over distributing clean drinking water and have found that distribution through pipes is the most efficient way of doing this. We now have a second tier system which distributes water in bottles. The liquid is no more superior than that which flows from the tap and yet a large industry has developed in this sector. Do we need it in this country?

( A comprehensive accout of WATER, on a global level, by Julian Caldecott (Virgin Books 2008) shows what an essential commodity this is. A water crisis will submerge mankind within decades - are we aware that this is less than a life-time away?)

Further details  http://www.juliancaldecott.com/page/510.

Another topic about waste that is rarely mentioned is that of human and animal excretia. In many parts of the world standards of sanitation are pitifully low and the magazine New Internationalist (NI 414, Aug 2008) has addressed this in "we need to think about tiolets". An adaptation of this is given on https://sth-se.diino.com/f.thompson/migrated_data/EandH  as "where there's muck". An in-depth paper regarding methane production from sewage is also on the site as sewage_methane.

So, waste is a topic which will never go away and the present Parliamentary report is very timely. Other reports to parliament address very contentious issues like Nuclear Waste but previous pages on this web have highlighted this topic. "Pressing problems" on the diino site may attract your attention but I can offer little hope for WASTE ON A WORLDWIDE scale as we have too many people doing too many things at too fast a rate.