The toilet in West St Helen Street Car Park has been replaced by a big pink box for recycling small electricals. There are regulations to try to reduce the tonnes of broken and outmoded electricals going to landfill. So this pink box must be doing some good. Better still would be toasters
and cameras made to last.
The mini version of Abingdon Hydro has been on the road for about three years now.
The aspiration is to generate electricity from the water flowing over Abingdon Weir.
In the last year some major hurdles have been cleared. The environment agency has granted the scheme a license, with conditions. Last week Councillors, on the district council planning committee, gave it unanimous support, with conditions. There has also been the need to ensure, for anglers, that fish spawning grounds are protected and fish passes are provided, and, for canoeists, that white water is still available as before.
So a simple aspiration to do something locally for the environment has become quite a major project.
Undaunted, Richard Riggs, and other people backing the scheme, with their money and time, have overcome many obstacles. They still have work to do. But given their determination so far they look a good bet to make the project happen.
Finally a co-operative will be set up into which we all can invest. See Abingdon Hydro for more details.
There were sail boats and rowing boats on the River Thames in Abingdon this morning, but unlike a year ago no steam was rising from the giant cooling towers of Didcot ‘A’ Power Station. The coal fired Didcot ‘A’ Power Station has been decommissioned and some of its transformers have already been transported away. The cooling towers, love them or hate them, will soon be gone.
More efficient, and less visible, gas powered generators have taken over at Didcot.
At Trinity yesterday we had the annual Harvest Festival. Most of the food donations were loaded into a car and taken to ‘Asylum Welcome’ – who need all the food they can get. Refugee numbers are up because of the war in Syria.
Rev’d Richard said there had been a good harvest this year with a wet spring followed by a dry summer.
Round the church were far more flowers than usual as part of a Harvest Flower Festival. Each display had a text … “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
Walking in fields yesterday, after the service, we saw Maize in abundance.
But for the UK inshore fleet – fishing boats mostly under 10 metres in length which operate in coastal waters – fish stocks are at historically low levels.