HOW GREEN IS YOUR POLITICIAN?
car. If that car happens to be travelling at 40mph - and many of them are - then there is a 95% likelihood that the child will die. If the car had been travelling at 20mph 95% of these children would have survived. Traffic calming measures are therefore vital to the safety of our children. Such measures have become the cinderella of government transport plans, directed, as they are, towards new road building. Friends of the Earth suggest a target of 20mph zones and traffic calming measures in all residential streets by the year 2010.
Make business accountable to society by requiring Directors to report on, and take into account, their environmental and social impacts.
Big business creates huge social and environmental impact. Despite this, the government still favours voluntary guidelines as far as environmental reporting and practice is concerned, something that has been proved not to work in reality. Businesses are required to make shareholder profits their first concern but are not even required to make independent reports on the social/environmental impacts of running their businesses.
Fewer than 20% of the top 350 UK companies produce separate environmental reports and, while 50% have environmental policies of some sort only about 15% have set themselves any realistic environmental targets, making any sort of monitoring virtually impossible.
Friends of the Earth would like mandatory social and environmental reporting in order that these businesses be held to account. With this sort of monitoring it will soon become apparent which companies do care about the environments and societies which they inhabit and which only give lip-service to these ideals.
Provide every household with quality doorstep recycling ensuring no new incinerators are needed and half our waste is recycled by 2010.
Much of the 'waste' we throw away consists of valuable resources. We could reduce our resource use by recycling and reusing these items. The UK Government's Waste Strategy 2000 suggests recycling levels of 30% by 2010 and 33% by 2020 which are decent standards, however more could be done. Unfortunately, many local authorities, encouraged by government are considering incineration as the easy option. This is certainly not the best option environmentally.
Despite improved emission levels, these incinerators still pump out dioxins, heavy metals and acid gasses into our environment. They also produce other pollutants like fly-ash and bottom ash which needs to be disposed of as well. Because they burn non-renewable fuel, they also have a detrimental effect on climate change. The waste
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