Rodent's Rebellious Ramblings On Renewables

Yeah. I live in Vietnam where everything but everything comes in plastic bags. You see them floating down the rivers and out to sea, full of crap. And there isn't an alternative to putting your stuff in plastic bags here yet.

In the first apartment we had in Saigon there were two bathrooms. I installed an electric shower in each one. They weren't cheap and they cost an arm and a leg to run. In the next apartment we had I had to install 3 electric water heaters one for the kitchen, and one for each bedroom en-suite. Now the cost of running them was an arm and two legs. And then the price of oil and gas fell by quite a bit, so I was looking forward to a bit of a financial respite. Not so much. The govt hiked the price of electric massively. I am aware of the economics behind doing it, but it smarted a lot.

So, when we moved to a new house, I insisted on having a solar water heater fitted on the roof. No more electric water heaters and a significantly lower electric bill. And the thing is that nearly every new house where we live has a solar water heater in the roof now. And because we live in the tropics the solar water heaters work very well indeed. And the cost for a reasonable solar heater and storage tanks is around 700 dollars. 

Now with the sunshine we het here you would think that there would be solar panels every roof. Nope. Too expensive and ...... Well the government taxes oil and gas and charges for electricity, too solar electricity is a low priority.

And despite the plastic bag problem, recycling is very big in Vietnam, There are old ladies who go through the bins at dawn and take out all the beer and soft drinks cans, all the plastic bottles, all of the paper and card, all of the steel and aluminium and sell it. Every beer can has a price.

By contrast, the Western Province of the Solomon Islands, where I worked for a year, has a beer can problem. There are about a million discarded beer cans in and around the town of Munda. No kidding. But what to do with them? The scrap merchants wont take them because it is not cost effective to transport them to the scrap yards on Guadalcanal. And anyway the seas around the Western Province are awash with crashed aircraft, ships, bombs propellant and so on. Guadalcanal itself has an area off the coast called Iron Bottom Sound, so called because it is full of sunken ships and vehicles. 

Aquatic life in the seas around the Solomons are showing levels of detectable heavy metals like cadmium as well as mercury which has been known for years.

Water is is short supply there at times because of a lack of decent storage tanks. The biggest hotel on the island either burns its waste, or takes it outside the reef and dumps it in deep water, something they have been doing for years.

And on the island of Funafuti, Tuvalu, where I sent a month a couple of years ago, they import drinking water in plastic bottles from Fiji - hundreds of thousands a year. But, Funafuti has massive annual rainfall. So why don't they reserve the rainwater, filter it and use it?

In the Solomons and Funafuti its because "no one will pay for it".

Which is similar to the unexploded ordnance problem in Vietnam. Little has been done to clear up the bombs and bullets because.... No one will pay for it. Although Vietnam is spending billions on infrastructure development, there are still huge areas of bomb contaminated ground.

Its the same the whole world over,

its the poor what gets the blame,

its the rich what gets the pleasure

Aint it all a blooming shame......