Wednesday 8 August 2007

Monday 6th August 07

Today the festival was finished and beginning to be dismantled. I got up quite early as I had the chance to go with 'Fluffy Chris' the site driver, with the first skip of food waste and paper plates/cups, to 'Eco-Composting' near Bournemouth in Dorset. This is 69 miles away from our site, but the material is able to be 'in vessel' composted which complies to the Animal By-Product Regulations, which prevent us composting on site which I did in the previous two years on this site, and at the Warminster site three times.

I mapread and got us successfully to the Eco-Sustaainable Ltd site, which accepts waste wood and green waste, food waste, soil and stone, and produces woodchip, topsoil, composts and turf.

Our batch weighed 2.6 tonnes, and we tipped it in the 'in vessel' shed, where it would be mixed with shredded wood and waste meat pies from a local factory, put through a 12mm screen, put in a 'clamp' with forced aeration and allowed to attain 70 celcius for at least an hour, steamed to ensure all the material is heat-treated, and then left to mature for several weeks before screening again, and put through a machine which removes plastics and non-composted materials. The resultant compost is spread on fields and seeded with grass seed, the turf sold all over Southern Britain.

We went the same way back and got back on site by 1.30pm. Lorna had taken her tent down and I did the same before having lunch at 2. Then we went, fully loaded, to see if the bus was heading to Weston Super Mare, but it apparently had a long time to wait before it was full, so Lorna rang my folks from the top of the bus (the only place on site with mobile reception) and we accepted their offer of a ride back to WSM. We started walking towards Burrington Coombe and within the hour my parents' Prius purred up, turned round and we went back to Weston.

We got another lift to the station for 5.30 pm and the train left for Bristol soon after that. A quick change over in Temple Meads, and Lorna left the train at Derby at 8 ish, I got back to York at 11pm, and got a taxi home.

Gill had gone to Robin Hood's Bay on Sunday with the boys to keep then occupied, and got a B and B and then come back on Monday via Whitby, Grosmont, the North Yorks Moors Railway to Pickering and a bus to York, arriving back in York today at teatime.

Really good to see her, glad she had the sense to do something to keep the kids from imploding.

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