Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off re-cycling we go!

Every so often I gather a motley collection of plastic bags and sally forth to do my bit to save the planet. Glass bottles and jars go to one container, paper and cardboard to another and then I trek a bit further afield to the big yellow bin for plastics. I must look a bit comical with my bags but it’s all in a good cause and if we all do our bit ..... well, you know the theory.

In the supermarket of El Corte Inglés they sell re-usable bags in a range of colours – fluorescent pink, day-glo orange, even sea-sick green – all labelled “Esta bolsa es verde” – This bag is green. No-one has yet pressed me, or even politely invited me, to buy one of these at the very reasonable price of 50 céntimos. No, they continue stuffing my shopping helpfully, tidily, very efficiently, into plastic carriers. Froiz and Eroski supermarkets do the same.

This is all going to change though. The big French supermarket chain Carrefour with two huge hypermarkets here in Vigo has started a campaign to encourage recycling and is stopping giving free plastic carriers. Instead you can buy biodegradable bags made, I understand, from potatoes!! (Yes, I find that hard to believe as well but it must be so as I read it in a newspaper. Does this mean that Galician biodegradable bags will be the best in the world, made from the best potatoes in the world? Or will they use inferior potatoes to make the bags? Will we see people eating biodegradable bags as an accompaniment to bacalao?)

And now I learn that Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia are thinking of recycling telephone boxes. As a way of encouraging the use of non-polluting electric cars in the three biggest cities in Spain, phone boxes could be converted into recharge points for electric cars’ batteries.

Now that just about everyone has a mobile phone, many phone boxes stand abandoned and unused on street corners, ideally placed to be converted to battery chargers: close to the kerb and already supplied with electricity. The Spanish government plans to spend €10m (£8.7m) on kick-starting the use of electric cars over the next two years, with €1.5m going on recharging points.

Barcelona apparently plans to use lampposts as well, attaching recharging points to “intelligent lampposts” (not the stupid ones!) and aims to install 191 recharging points over the next two years.

Other incentives could be: -

• offering extra points to companies tendering for services to town halls and government offices if they can show they intend to use electric-powered vehicles;
• free parking in the city for owners of electric cars;
• a 75% cut in car tax for electric cars.

The aim is to introduce some 2000 electric vehicles into cities over the next 2 years and the mayor of Madrid, Alberto Ruiz Gallardón foresees electric cars becoming obligatory in city centres.

A brave new world is just around the corner – a la vuelta de la esquina.