Daily Telegraph: "'Moby-Duck' by Donovan Hohn is a literary voyage into our rubbish-strewn oceans"

Link to Daily Telegraph

"... For all its distractions and limitations, the message at the heart of this book is truly worthwhile. In southern Hawaii he finds 'the dirtiest beach in the world'. It is chilling to learn that sieving seawater at the centre of the North Pacific Gyre (a gyre being the confluence of wind, tide and currents that rotate at the centre of the world’s oceans, gathering detritus) produces a higher dry weight of plastic than of plankton.

The best part of this journey is its beginning, when Hohn goes to Alaska, a place we imagine teeming with grizzly bears, wild salmon, great mountains and miles and miles of wilderness. At the uninhabited Gore Point, Hohn joins the genuinely quixotic Chris Pallister and his motley crew as they retrieve and place plastic debris into thousands upon thousands of 'super sacks' that can be airlifted back to a municipal landfill.

The facts about our despoliation of the world need no embellishment. There is good science here, obscured only by Hohn’s ambition to seem literary, but he conjures a truly terrifying vision of how much new plastic tat will be born, as China’s consumerist growth outstrips even that of America."

The Guardian: "Sainsbury's changes food freezing advice in bid to cut food waste"

Link to web site

"Long-standing advice to consumers to freeze food on the day of purchase is to be changed. New labelling on food products in all Sainsbury's stores will instead advise customers to freeze food as soon as possible, up to the product's 'use by' date.

"Andrew Parry, consumer food waste prevention manager at WRAP (link to food waste) said:

"Changing the guidance to freeze before the use by date is a welcome move. Now we can all look in our fridges and know that we can freeze most items which are about to go out-of-date, and enjoy them at a later time.

In doing so, we can expect to reduce the amount of out of date food we throw away, which will in turn save us all money."

BBC: "The toughest place to be a binman"

Link to BBC web site

"Jakarta and the surrounding metropolitan areas are home to 28 million people, and the Indonesian city is struggling to cope with all the rubbish it generates. What's it like for the binmen?

"Each day soon after sunrise, Imam Syaffi sets off with his hand-pulled cart to collect the rubbish from some of the more desirable residences in Jakarta.

"With his cheery cry of 'Sampa!' (rubbish), he lets the residents in their gated homes know that he has arrived."

"London binman Wilbur Ramirez is heading to Jakarta, the vast mega city that is the capital of Indonesia. For ten days Wilbur works with Imam, one of the army of semi-destitute binmen, who collect rubbish in one of the biggest and fastest growing cities in the world."

Toughest Place to be... a Binman was on BBC Two on Sunday 29 January, and Toughest place to be features further stories Sunday 5 and 12 Feb at 21:00 GMT.