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I’ve always been fascinated by solar power. It’s leccy from the sun! That’s cool! I’ve also always been fascinated by LEDs. Stuff that lights up is ALWAYS cool to at least some minor degree. With this in mind you can see why a £2.99 solar powered garden light in Poundstretcher was purchased fairly quickly.

Here’s my plan: glorious sunshine in, cool LED light out. I could hack it to suck light from outside and put it indoors. The problem is that this gizmo is just too small, I need to scale up a bit (but not to ‘big’, more from ‘pico’ to ‘nano’).

With a bit of prodding from Sarah, and after some eBay searching I settled on a 12 Volt, 5 Watt solar panel which wasn’t too expensive. It looks a bit (well, a lot) like this:

That’s it sat on one of the front window sills. The solar panel will get hooked up to a big arse battery (arriving soon) to charge up during the day and power (initially) some lights at night.

There are are a couple of minor issues here:

• I live in Edinburgh, and Scotland isn’t famed for it’s glorious sunshine. But it has been very sunny for at least two days this year and until rain power is cracked it’s probably the most reliable environmentally friendly power source around.
• I’m on the second floor so this is going to have to sit on a window sill and only get sunlight for half of the day.

Neither of these issues are going to stop me, I’ve done stupider things that have worked!

And, just to prove you can get something out of a solar panel in Edinburgh…

That’s an RGB LED lit by solar power, bask in it’s brightness! There were resistors involved, I’m actually quite hopeful about getting some useful juice out of the panel, I measured 23 V open circuit and the short circuit current was 130 mA.

We’ll see what happens when the battery arrives. I’ve got a book out of the library that might help a touch: Solar Electricity: A Practical Guide to Designing and Installing Small Photovoltaic Systems. It’s actually got some handy stuff in it, it’s a book aimed at the practicalities of installing a low cost system using simple parts and tools. This appeals to me.

I’ll let you know how it goes when more bits arrive!

Tetrapaks. They’re excellent at keeping the orange juice on the shelf in the fridge (and not in a puddle at the bottom of the fruit drawer). All well and good. But, after I have full enjoyed my orange juice, can I recycle them? After half an hour’s serious internet browsing the answer is… maybe, possibly and I don’t know.

See, on Sarah’s carton of milk that I was flattening to recycle/bin there was this URL: tetrapakrecycling.co.uk which leads to some excellent hyperbolic propaganda that told me just how wonderful Tetrapaks are and that if my drink isn’t provided in a Tetrapak then I should be suspicious and prepared for death should the drink not have been shielded from the deadly sunlight. It’s quite dark in my fridge when the door’s closed but I’ll put that aside for now.

The website did tell me that Tetrapaks are formed of a seven layer laminate (this makes them nigh on impossible to recycle into anything meaningful). The recycling process apparently goes like this:

1) Baled cartons are dropped into a pulper, similar to a giant domestic food mixer,
2) filled with water, and
3) pulped for around 20 minutes.
4) This breaks down the packaging to produce a grey-brown mixture.
5) The aluminium foil and polyethylene are separated from the fibre,
which is recovered to make new paper products.
6) The remaining mix of plastic and aluminium can then be used in furniture, to generate energy or even separated out into pure aluminium and paraffin.

So basically you dump them in water and beat the crap out of them and at the end you get two types of sludge, papery sludge and plasticy sludge. You can then make paper out of the paper sludge and pretty much bugger all with the plastic sludge. Oh, but you can always set fire to it! Sorted!

OK, so can I recycle it? Well that depends on your local authority having the right (wet and beat crap out of) facilities. And does my local authority? Maybe. Hop on to www.edinburgh.gov.uk and have a look. I found this PDF which helpfully tells me the stuff I can put in the tenement recycling bins. The closest thing to a Tetrapak in the list is “Cardboard Drinks Cartons”, but there is a photo of Tetrapaks (to the right, the central photo is of beer cans, welcome to Scotland!). But I’m not supposed to put in the lids which the Tetrapak Recycling site said I could.

So my final answer to “can I recycle a Tetrapak” is a tentative “mostly”.

If you’re not lucky enough to have a council that will recycle Tetrapaks (and according to the Tetrapak Recycling site the entire UK is “coming soon”) then they have a cunning plan. And it really is cunning. Take all your Tetrapaks, put them in a big cardboard box, print out and affix this label, take the box to your local post office and pay a small fortune to have the box shipped to Somerset! Baldrick would have been proud.