In a striking example of how climate harm spins out in unexpected directions, a dentist in Pakistan writes about prolonged outdoor working in extreme heat destroys people’s teeth. He describes it as “environmental collapse writing itself directly into human biological systems”. One of his patients puts it more directly, saying that climate change is “here, right now, in my mouth.”

Social media has become the biggest source of news for the first time, according to the Reuters Institute’s annual report. I thought that had happened already, but TV news and news websites had been ahead until 2025.

Are hot schools putting pupils and teachers at risk? My wife Louise, the proper journalist in the house, writes about school overheating for the BBC.

Let’s Go Zero, the schools campaign I work on with Ashden, has released its impact report for 2026. With over 9,000 schools signed up, it’s now the biggest schools climate campaign in the UK.

Recent highlights

• The changing colours of the energy transition
• Price parity for EVs has arrived
• Why buildings overheat

The big story is of course the global transition to clean electricity. If we were able to fast-forward, we’d be able to watch the colours change. Brown and red would blink out as countries move away from burning coal and oil for electricity. Some of them will switch to gas instead, so the orange areas of the map will shift and then erode. More and more yellow and teal will appear as renewable energy accelerates. The UK is likely to be wind-powered teal the next time this image is compliled. Large parts of the map, especially in the global south, will turn yellow.

We have forerunners already, and this is where we get the smaller individual stories. Take Lithuania, which had historically run on nuclear power. When it closed its aging Soviet plant in 2009, it switched almost wholesale to gas. That’s proven to be a major liability, and Lithuania has led the way in reducing Europe’s damaging dependence on Russian gas. It built wind turbines and solar power, and in 2022 became the first EU country to stop buying gas from Russia.

Uruguay is another country to flip colours recently. Like much of South America it has been largely hydro-powered, but is experiencing more frequent periods of drought due to climate change. When this happens they have to turn to more expensive energy imports, and so wind power is a form of climate adaptation in Uruguay. It’s an unusual example of a country transitioning from one form of low carbon energy to another.

Chile is also diversifying its energy mix to make it more resilient to droughts, and in their case it is solar that dominates, with hydropower providing the baseload.

Another country in yellow on the map is Spain, although it has very nearly equal amounts of wind, nuclear and gas. True solar states will emerge, with Pakistan moving fastest towards it. From less than 1% a decade ago, solar power has grown to 19% in record time. It’s overtaken coal as a power source and hydropower and gas are next.

Pakistan has been hailed as the fastest solar transition in the world and I’ve written about that myself. There’s another country with a less noted but similarly steep upward trajectory. That’s Hungary. It had ticked along with Russian gas, oil and nuclear fuel during the Orban rule. It is now building solar at a formidable rate, with solar power rising from almost nothing to 27% of energy generation in ten years. Not everyone will match that pace, but it shows how fast things can change when a solar boom takes off. Looking at the trend curves, it’s likely that even big coal users like Australia or Turkey will be yellow on this map in ten years’ time.

There are many more such stories. There will also be stories of laggards and obstruction, places where cheap fossil fuels delay the rise of renewable energy or where grid infrastructure fails. Other energy stories are in play as well as renewable energy, such as gas in Africa. Overall however, a huge shift is underway, another industrial revolution in how we generate energy.

With so many to be getting on with, does the world need another ‘ism’ to fret about? It’s a question I asked myself on first encountering Paul Dolan‘s book, but the definition won me over. Beliefism is prejudice against people you disagree with, and if you live in the same world that I do, that might sound very familar.

In fact, some of the people who are most passionately against other ‘isms’ are most likely to be beliefist, ready to judge, avoid or act with hostility towards others based on their beliefs. There is a tendency in certain circles to write a person off on one aspect of their views. If they think the ‘wrong’ thing on one hot-button topic we care about, that can spill over into the assumption that nothing else they have to say could possibly be relevant.

This is a form of prejudice and should be resisted, argues Dolan, a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics. Unlike some other forms of prejudice, a certain amount of beliefism is useful – there are views that we should not tolerate or entertain. But we should be wary of reducing people to simple binaries and refusing to engage with them if they’re on a different side.

Unfortunately there is a natural human tendency to do exactly that. We like mental categories we can place people and ideas into to avoid thinking about them any more than necessary. We flock together like those proverbial birds, forming in-groups and out-groups. That much is normal, but the internet and its algorithms have accelerated this effect, pushing people into bubbles and exaggerating difference. The anonymity of the internet makes it easier to push back in ways that we wouldn’t do in person, making us less likely to listen or to challenge our own opinions.

Dolan draws on his own research and that of others to explore which topics have the biggest divides and are most likely to trigger beliefist responses. You probably don’t need me to name any, but in the UK Brexit is a relatively new entry alongside political pot-boilers such as immigration or illegal drugs. There is evidence of increasing “partisan sorting” in friendship groups, dating, and where people choose to live, all reducing the sorts of interactions that erode prejudice. The world ends up divided between people who see a duck in the image on the book’s cover, and people who see a rabbit, and nobody can even begin to understand anyone who sees it differently.

Healthy societies need this kind of interaction however, and need a diversity of views. The lifeblood of democracy is debate, a back and forth exchange of ideas and a negotiation between them. And we’re also missing out on more diverse friendships, Dolan argues. Surely we ought to choose our friends on attributes like kindness, generosity or sense of humour, rather than which way they voted in a referendum or where they stand on veganism, gay marriage or Coldplay.

Dolan is open about his own views, and uses himself as an example throughout the book – as an academic from a working class background, he’s not easily pigeon-holed. Refreshingly, he insists that he’s not out to police opinion or change anyone’s mind about anything. Rather, his focus is on how we disagree without disdain.

This is an important distinction. Political polarisation is rooted in disagreement over policy. The hatred and hostility that seems so prevalent at the moment is separate: not about the disagreement per se, but an emotional reaction to it. This matters because it suggests that we can lower the temperature without forcing everyone to agree, and the book offers a variety of techniques for doing that, including humour, seeking common ground, and the simple practice of spending time with people with opposing views.

Beliefism doesn’t get into some of the other forces at work in our polarised world, and there’s no analysis of the media landscape or the way that rage is provoked for profit by the tech giants. It’s a short book to present a straightforward idea, and it’s very readable and at times very funny. Whether or not the word beliefism catches on, we’d all be better people if we were more alert to the way that we treat people with different opinions.

• Beliefism is available from Earthbound Books

I will admit to a moment of hesitation. I was already stressed by the delays, and I didn’t want to let my colleague down by turning up late. I didn’t need the extra hassle of dealing with someone’s net zero cynicism, or having to defend the value of my job. I also knew I shouldn’t be judging the driver or assuming anything about his views, and that his honest curiosity deserved an straight answer.

I told him I worked for a climate campaign and was there to do a sustainability audit, and there was no roll of the eyes in the rear view mirror. Instead he told me enthusiastically about the solar panels he had installed on his house, how his daughter had come back from university and convinced him he should do it. As we pulled up to the school, he wished me well and discounted the fare.

It was a good reminder to me that stereotypes are lazy, and while we can’t prevent our brains from presenting us with cognitive shortcuts, we can and should resist them and treat people as individuals. Even West Ham fans.

It was also a good example of how important it is that people see the benefits of the clean energy transition for themselves. My driver had got his solar panels for free through an energy company scheme, and had saved thousands of pounds over the last decade. He didn’t need any convincing that renewable energy was a good idea, because he could see it working for him every day.

Unsurprisingly, people are more supportive of climate action when they will benefit from it, as polling from YouGov shows:

41% of people still support climate action even if it makes them worse off, which is higher than one might expect. But ideally we’d want to show as many people as possible that a sustainable future will be better for them, and it deserves their wholehearted support.

Environmentalism is too often framed around bans and taking away things that people like. Indeed, this same YouGov poll makes that mistake and goes on to ask people if they support banning meat, petrol cars and flying on holiday. Thanks YouGov. In reality the cheapest form of energy generation in the UK is onshore wind, with solar right behind it. Research from Auto Trader shows that the average electric car driver saves £980 a year. Done well, environmental policy can address the cost of living crisis, helping to reduce poverty and inequality.

Conversely, the climate crisis is a major driver of rising prices – particularly of food, but also in more indirect ways such as rising insurance premiums

This should be an easy sell, but we find ourselves in a strange place in the UK. People are struggling with higher energy bills, and yet the party doing best in political polling at the moment wants to ban the cheapest forms of energy generation. Likewise in Trump’s America, where hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funding is going to suppressing cheap renewable energy and keeping the fossil fuel fires burning.

The Climate and Community Institute (CCI) is a US think-tank that argues for a ‘working class climate agenda‘ as the best reponse to this problem. Past climate initiatives in the US didn’t deliver tangible benefits fast enough to outlast the electoral cycle, and now they have been scrapped before they had a chance to prove their effectiveness. There’s a very real risk of the same thing happening in the UK. If the Reform party get into government, they have pledged to scrap the country’s climate policies and renewable energy strategy. So there’s an urgent need to demonstrate the worth of climate policy, and end the idea that it’s a middle class concern.

What sort of thing might that involve?

The CCI suggest that it would need measures that are delivered fast, that prioritise the public sector, and that shape flows of investment towards things that matter to ordinary people.

Practically, that could mean focusing on social housing, ensuring that those households are first in line for energy saving retrofits, solar and batteries. Bus travel is another natural priority, improving services and making them more affordable – or even free where possible. For those who can’t use buses or live in rural areas, charging infrastructure and help to buy electric cars can bring cleaner mobility there too.

To direct more funding towards the green economy, governments can use their procurement power and work with their supply chains to raise environmental standards. They can use government owned land and property to create green jobs in retrofit or in land restoration. Publicly owned banks and companies are a useful vehicle for raising investment too, as the UK is doing with Great British Energy.

These aren’t new ideas of course, but it’s useful to see them articulated really clearly for an American context. There’s no lack of real world examples in CCI’s paper either, with Zohran Mamdani’s priorities as mayor of New York perhaps the most high profile.

In the UK, I think the government is well aware of the need to demonstrate the value of climate policy for ordinary citizens, and this agenda is well understood. The question now is whether it can deliver on the first of CCI’s points, and act fast enough to beat the electoral cycle.

From then on, wind and solar would be the cheapest way to generate electricity and the economics would fundamentally change. Clean energy would win the argument on price rather than on carbon emissions or energy security. That doesn’t make the energy transition unstoppable, but from that point on you would have to actively hold it back. That point of price parity is now behind us, and clean energy is cheaper almost everywhere.

A similar pattern is underway with electric vehicles. They have also been seen as a luxury for those who can afford them, but the trends suggested it wouldn’t stay that way. I wrote about this in 2017, investigating two different studies that were aiming to predict when electric vehicles would reach price parity with fossil fuels.

There were a number of factors to consider. One was the price of batteries, which were very expensive and an obstacle to widespread adoption. There was the question of charging infrastructure and also of policy, whether governments would prompt demand for EVs or respond to it. As demand grew, car companies would be able to make electric cars in larger numbers and economies of scale would kick in. One study from Bloomberg suggested that the moment of price parity would arrive in 2025.

Were they right?

As with wind and solar, price equivalence with fossil fuelled cars will arrive sooner in some places than others. In developed countries car companies focused on the more profitable luxury car market, and there’s been a shortage of affordable EVs. In 2024 American car buyers had a choice of just six EV models priced under $30,000, and European drivers had a choice of seven. It was different in China, and that same year Chinese drivers could pick and choose from 122 different lower priced cars. The average price paid for an EV in China was $600 lower than the average price for a petrol or diesel car. Electric was more affordable, and if charging is easy why would you choose anything else?

A couple of years behind China, the UK has just entered the zone of price parity. According to Auto Trader, new electric cars are cheaper than new petrol and diesel cars for the first time, as of April this year.

This is in large part due to China, and the arrival of brands such as Jaecoo and BYD on the UK market. It’s also thanks to discounting and competition from car companies, with a big slice of government intervention in the form of EV grants. Put together, the average price paid for a new electric car this year was £42,620, which is £785 cheaper than an average petrol car.

I say the ‘zone’ of price parity, because there isn’t an exact moment to point to. The total cost of ownership has been in favour of EVs for a couple of years already, and used EVs and leasing all cross the rubicon at different points. Government incentives that make EVs cheaper or petrol and diesel more expensive also nudge parity closer or further away. Global events matter, such as wars that affect oil prices. Market conditions contribute, such as the wave of post-lease cars that’s hitting the US market at the moment and making used EVs cheaper for the first time, something that I noted in the UK a couple of years ago.

The exact date of these different crossovers is unimportant. The point is that the direction of travel is towards electric. Once it is cheaper, people don’t need to be convinced by the environmental logic. They gradually become the default option. And while private cars are not the most important element of a sustainable transport system, we can all celebrate the gradual decline of internal combustion engines.

The National House-Building Council has a guide for architects and designers, and it includes this graph that shows five different factors:

1 – The first consideration here, marked with the number 1 in the image, is external factors. In the example above, the house has passing trains and buses. Residents keep windows closed because of the noise and the air pollution, and this makes it harder to ventilate the house. This is a familiar problem where I live in Luton. Open your windows at night to cool the house, and you’ll be kept awake by the noise from the airport.

A second external factor here is the ground outside the building. In this case there is solid paving at the front of the house that is heating up and releasing more warmth through the open window. This is something I see all the time with schools, where black tarmac playgrounds can heat up in the sun – I’ve seen them reach 50C. If you open the windows onto that you’ll only make things worse.

2 – The second factor in the graph is external temperatures, which is the one we’re generally going to think of first. A hot, cloudless day with little wind is going to present the biggest challenge, and it’s something we can’t do anything about.

3 – Next we have solar gain, indicated with the rays of sun hitting the back of the property, expecially the large windows onto the garden. Large windows let in lots of natural light, but they also let in the summer heat and trap it behind the glass.

4 – We also have to consider heat sources within the building. In homes these are likely to be from cooking and from hot water systems. In workplaces a lot of heat is generated from IT equipment or machines. A less obvious heat source is people, and it’s a highly relevant one for the schools I work with. Every child contributes 75 to 100 watts of heat. Fill a classroom with 30 kids and you have the equivalent of a three-bar fire, and a good case for outdoor education.

5 – Finally, there’s the design of the building itself. Unless cooling has been carefully considered – and it often isn’t in the UK – modern efficiency standards that save on heating in the winter work against us in the summer. A highly insulated property can keep the heat in during the summer months, building up over successive hot days.

Some of these things are beyond our control – particularly the weather, and surrounding noise. Other factors present some solutions, with solar gain being the most promising. Shade solutions keep the sun off the windows, preventing the heat from entering the building in the first place. Last year I wrote about the shading techniques I use in my own house, but I’m frustrated at how difficult it is to source more permanent solutions. I was in France last week and every other house had shutters or awnings or screens of some kind. These are vanishingly rare here, to the point that some of the best solutions just aren’t on the market at all. (This – a word to the wise – is a massive business opportunity.)

I’ll come back to this to look at how other countries create shade and keep buildings cool, because a big part of the overheating challenge in the UK is that this is a new problem. If you’re building houses in a hot country, you know what to do already. If your country becomes hot, even for just part of the year, you’re not ready. Architects and house builders haven’t had any training on the topic. You have to catch up, and learning from warmer countries might be a good place to start.

I’ve written about this before, but it was nice to see a proper explainer from Carbon Brief on how China uses solar power to combat desertification. It’s an important idea that could be applied elsewhere.

While I heard a fair amount of grumbling about temperatures in the 30s in Europe last week, farmers in India have been working at night to escape temperatures as high as 48C in their recent heatwave. People who work outside are among those most vulnerable to extreme heat.

With the World Cup kicking off imminently, a lot of people will be pondering the conflicted relationship they now have with the event, torn between the potential of the sport and the naked greed and corruption of its organising body. Reboot FIFA is a new campaign to investigate and reform the organisation through its ethics committee.

I’ve been away in France over half term, avoiding the news and thinking about other things, so I haven’t written much over the last couple of weeks. But here are the most recent posts:

Recent highlights

• Book review: Environomics, by Dharshini David
• Britain was built for a different climate
• Your role in climate finance

One of the rewarding aspects of covering sustainability stories over time is watching good ideas creep towards the mainstream. Technologies and approaches that were once filed as alternative move from being theoretical to operational. They spread from pioneers and early adopters to wide scale use.

This book demonstrates the transition. Not so long ago the subtitle would be ‘how the green economy could transform the world’ – or ‘will transform the world’ if you were feeling confident. Now it’s definitely in the present, documenting an unfolding reality.

Darshini David, a former economist with HSBC and now deputy economics editor at the BBC, aims to draw our attention to what is already happening. “Governments are acting,” she writes, “technology is advancing, our long-formed habits are changing.”

The books aims to bring the green revolution to life through daily actions and habits, grounding it in our everyday experiences. Each chapter starts a simple action as someone moves through their day, starting with switching on the light and making a morning coffee. Each action is then unpacked through its environmental consequences and the people and businesses that are doing things differently.

There’s a chapter on fashion. The morning commute introduces a section on transport. Later we cover green finance, waste, fishing and the oceans, before wrapping up with brushing our teeth before bed and a chapter on palm oil and deforestation. The tone is positive, the examples are drawn from all over the world, and it’s an engaging read.

I did raise an eyebrow a few times. Saudi Arabia’s NEOM is mentioned uncritically as a sustainable city project, whereas to me it looks like propaganda and the pinnacle of greenwash. A company called Biobean is celebrated for its reuse of coffee grounds as biofuels, but it had already completed the hype cycle and gone bust before the book was published. Things move fast, and events overtook Zipcar too – it’s mentioned as a success story in sustainable travel here, and has since disappeared from British streets.

Nevertheless, there are lots of interesting businesses and stories, some of which you will know about if you follow environmental news, and some that will be new. For those that don’t follow green news closely, it’s a really good guide to the emerging new economy.

That’s what makes this book important. The big challenge today isn’t to develop the ideas and the technologies that can reverse environmental damage. The challenge is to communicate them.

Every day I see articles in the British press decrying ‘net zero zealotry’. Fossil-fuelled politicians continue to insist that green technologies don’t work and are too expensive. Even though the green economy is a clear and present reality, plenty of people aren’t hearing about it, or believe self-interested populist lies about it. In such a context, progress can be snatched away, as we’ve seen with Trump’s deeply futile attempt to prolong America’s coal use.

We need books that make the green economy real for people, and help them to see themselves as part of it. Environomics is a good place to start.

• Environomics is available from Earthbound Books

Here’s a graph I’ve been using in presentations recently, showing the number of days of heat over 35 degrees in the UK. That’s the x’s at the bottom. As you can see, between 1960 and 1990 temperatures only reached 35C once, in the famous 1976 heatwave. That’s three days of 35C in thirty years. Looking at the end of that sequence, we see that we now hit 35 degrees at some point most years.

Looking at the lower threshold of 28C, taken from the same 2025 study, we see that in the last century you’d be unlucky to get more than ten days a year over 28C. There are years where that happens, including that outlier of 1976 again, but it’s around one in three. Not any more. In the last ten years, every year is a hot year, with more than ten days over 28C.

Putting these two together, we can see that all of us in the UK are living with higher top temperatures and a longer warm season. But here’s the thing – most of our infrastructure was built for that lost cooler climate.

Over 10,000 schools were built during that thirty year period where temperatures only hit 35C once. Because that was so exceptional, very few of those buildings can cope with that kind of heat. Some of them are physically unsafe for children and have to close when it gets too hot. At the time of construction, it was recognised that there might be a few warm days in the summer term when the school would get uncomfortable. Because it was likely to be a few days, it was something staff and students could suffer through. It’s very different when the heat goes on for week after week.

When it comes to homes, Britain has a notoriously old and outdated housing stock and this too was built for a previous climate. Around a third of the country’s homes were built before the Second World War, including many Victorian houses. The biggest building boom occurred post-war, with estates and tower blocks built with little thought to summer heat and the need for shade, accounting for another 25% of our homes. Only 8% of Britain’s homes are newer than the year 2000, and most of them haven’t been designed with higher heat in mind either.

The Well Adapted UK Report, released last month, paints a similar picture across other sectors, including hospitals, care homes or courtrooms. There is a growing awareness, especially during heatwaves, that we need to do something about this.

As I work in schools, that’s the bit I’m working on, along with my colleagues at Let’s Go Zero. We advise schools on the various techniques they can use to prevent overheating and adjust to higher temperatures. It’s going to be part of a much larger conversation, and I thought I’d write a bit more about it this summer, while it’s hot and it’s on people’s minds. Consider this an introduction, and we’ll return to the topic of heat and adaptation in future posts.

Out of curiosity, I downloaded the latest Global Landscape of Climate Finance report recently. Care to guess what the biggest source of climate finance is?

There’s a lot of information and a lot of jargon* in this graph. For the purposes of this article, I want to draw your attention to the left hand side at the bottom, and highlight this fact: the biggest source of climate finance is households and individuals.

Collectively, ordinary private citizens across the world contributed $470 billion in 2023, spending on things like energy efficiency, solar panels or electric vehicles. This is considerably more than the $335 billion from corporations, and over three times more than the climate finance from governments. Only the banks – listed as ‘commercial FIs’ on the chart – come close with their $436 billion.

What does this tell us?

First, it’s a reminder that our own money matters. The funding we put towards retrofitting our homes or changing the way we travel is counted as climate finance and is the biggest driver of change. We are far from insignificant.

Second, this graph suggests that some other sectors aren’t pulling their weight. Is it right and fair that households are contributing the most? Perhaps not, if we want to see those most responsible for the crisis paying the most to remedy it. In which case, we need more from corporations please. More from the banks who funded the rise in fossil fuels in the first place, and continue to profit from their extraction.

Third, and more positively, the fact that households are able to participate in climate finance to such a degree tells us that climate solutions are being democratized. Households can’t build nuclear power stations or high speed rail. But more and more people can install solar panels. The rise of plug-in solar in Germany, or small rooftop systems in Pakistan, shows how solar isn’t a middle class luxury any more. It’s affordable and practical, and 21% of the climate finance from households is going towards small scale solar.

Likewise, e-bikes and low cost Chinese electric cars have made cleaner vehicles accessible to more and more people. Household spending on battery electric vehicles was $180 billion in 2023. While Western Europe dominated climate finance from households in the past, a growing percentage is coming from middle-income countries.

There’s a lot I could dive into in the finance report, including the gap between what is needed and what is currently available. But I had underestimated the role of ordinary households. That’s the bit I want to emphasize, because unless you’re reading this from the halls of power somewhere, it’s where you and I come in.

How we spend our money is a vote for the world we want to live in.

* FIs – Financial institutions, DFIs = Development Finance Institutions, SOEs = State owned enterprises.

11,103 new cars were registered in Norway last month. Just 31 of them were petrol, 87 diesel and 33 hybrid. That’s a new record of 98.6% electric.

If you’re in London over the summer, Kulpreet Singh’s exhibition Indelible Black Marks looks striking and thought provoking (image above). An artist and farmer, his work reflects on the connections between climate and agriculture, the tradition of stubble burning, and is at the Hayward Gallery from mid June.

Luton folks, Friends of the Earth are hosting a free screening of the family film Savages on Sunday afternoon at the Library theatre, with craft activities to follow. Details here.

California’s current battery storage capacity is equivalent to 12 nuclear power stations,

Recent highlights

• How South Korea cut food waste
• On AI and the railroads
• Book review: Street, Palace, Square, by Jan-Werner Müller

Some countries have been well ahead of us on food waste, and South Korea is perhaps the world’s most ambitious nation on the topic. They recycle over 95% of food waste, thanks to a policy that makes complete sense but is hard to imagine politically in the UK right now – pay as you throw waste disposal.

The idea dates back to the mid-1990s, when Korea was struggling to find enough landfill sites for its rapidly growing cities and their consumers. Its solution was to pass new rules so that citizens could only throw trash away in official plastic bags, pricing in the cost of disposal and making it visible to households.

Needless to say, once people had an incentive to sort their rubbish properly and remove anything that could be recycled, they did. Recycling levels rose and total waste levels fell by a quarter over the next decade, inspiring the government to extend the scheme to food waste from 2013. The country went from 2.6% of food waste recycled in 1996 to just short of 100% today.

As households already do with their main bin bags, food waste has to be put into official bags, priced by local authorities. Residents of apartment blocks have a more convenient system: a food waste disposal machine that charges by weight. It’s charged at around 7p a kilo, and households scan a RFID chip to unlock the door and add the charge to their apartment’s service fees.

Seoul has 27,289 of these RFID units across its apartment blocks, covering over 80% of flats. Food waste in Seoul has fallen by a quarter since these were introduced.

There are fines for non-compliance, but the system mainly relies on people doing the right thing because it’s easy. If you have a RFID machine in your apartment block, you can drop off food waste whenever you like. If you’re using the bag system, there are daily collections and so you don’t need to worry about putting waste out on the right day. Councils have tested and refined their official waste bags to make them easy to use – the ones in the header are from the city of Seongnam, where they made them wider, friendlier and with ties and handles.

Once collected, the food waste is processed for useful things – it’s been illegal to send food waste to landfill since 2005, so there is a well established supply chain. Much of it is dried and compressed into chicken feed pellets. Some goes to compost and some to biogas.

In the UK we now have recycling and food waste collection, along with stiff taxes on landfill to discourage it. The targets and penalties are aimed at councils rather than households. There’s no penalty for not bothering with sorting your waste, as some of my neighbours make clear on a weekly basis. Everyone pays the same, so there’s no incentive for reducing household waste. I think there’s a good case to be made for a pay-as-you-throw model, though unfortunately there are historical reasons why we are unlikely to see it in the UK in the foreseeable future.

There was a moment when pay-as-you-throw might have come to Britain. In 2007 the Labour government of the time was discussing it, prompting opposition parties and the tabloids to howl pitifully at these proposed ‘bin taxes’. Conservative politicians such as Eric Pickles spread scaremongering stories about the ‘bin police’, trash burning in the streets, and how people would have to lock up their bins at night to prevent paying for their neighbour’s rubbish.

None of these concerns are anywhere to be seen in South Korea, where you pay your contribution when you buy your bin bags and don’t worry about your neighbours. But once the idea was framed in this way, it became politically toxic. The incoming coalition government made a big populist play of ‘scrapping’ waste charges even though they didn’t exist yet (they defunded the pilot schemes, is what they actually did) and that’s the last we’ve heard of it. But it’s a good idea that others might want to use.