waider

I finally got around to hauling some (in fact, very little) of my old computer gear plus some bedding and a bag of shoes to the recycling depot in Ringsend. Finding information on recycling is a bit confusing: there's the Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown County Council website, which tends to focus more on getting information out there than it does on laying it out clearly, so the details on Ballyogan Recycling Centre (my alternative to Ringsend) are duplicated, stale, etc. depending on which versions you look at. Repak seem to go to great lengths to hide information from you, putting a thin menu on each website section that your attention is completely distracted from by the boilerplate rubbish on the rest of the page. WEEE Ireland, the newest of the bunch, provides a county-level map of the country but no links to useful information like what waste is accepted at which centers. And finally Dublin Waste is about the best of the lot, with the minor exception that the price list for Ringsend is out of date, which makes me wonder what else is out of date there. The location of the Ringsend Centre is a little tricky, too; it's the first exit off a roundabout where, if you miss that and take the second instead thinking there might be an alternative route around, you find yourself paying €1.65 to cross the Liffey on the East Link toll bridge and there's no means of correcting your navigational error short of turning around in the middle of a narrow two-lane road. Anyway, when finally I got there, the guy on the gate looked at the stuff in the car and waved me in without charging, which was neat; the prices, as noted, are not those listed on the web (they've actually dropped, perhaps to encourage people to recycle) and at worst I'd have paid a tenner for my bootload of junk. Now to try and consolidate the rest of the computer junk into as small and non-commercial-looking a pile as possible and see about getting rid of that.

Our current minister for transport feels that there will be sufficient traffic in Dublin in 2011 to merit banning private cars from the city centre during LUAS/Metro works. This despite the fact that petrol is now running at a rough average of €1.25 per litre, biofuel is proving to be a great way of triggering rising food prices, and oil in general is continuing to creep upwards in price. And I don't see affordable non-oil-burning cars on the market any time soon, either.

Someone measured. Of course, this doesn't quite address the reality of the situation: our consumption this year is rising, so a 1.5% reduction for one hour isn't going to make the slightest dent in our consumption for the year. It'd be better if the government devoted more effort to meaningful energy-saving initiatives and alternative power sources (such as ESB's announcement last week that they were planning on a €22bn investment in alternative energy over the next 12 years) than to this showmanship that serves only to make people feel good about themselves because they're "doing something".

Tune in next no-car-day when once again Dublin experiences its worst gridlock of the year.

So apparently there's a big hole in the Earth's crust. These boys must be pissed.

It's been a typical August Bank Holiday Weekend here.