A good time to contact your councillor about waste

Next week Birmingham Friends of the Earth (along with other interested parties) will be giving evidence to the scrutiny committee's Municipal Waste review.

If you wish to read in detail a lot of the work we've done on this, then it's on our website, but I just want you to grab this opportunity to get your councillor to feed in to this review, too. I have been made aware that councillors have today received details of the terms of reference of the review, so will know it is happening and can respond if they wish.

If you are unhappy with the current system, do not want black bags whose contents get strewn everywhere, would rather we moved away from burning rubbish and creating 280 000 tonnes of CO2 per year from the incinerator to a system where we get maximum value for money out of the resources we have, please contact your councillor today and ask them to put this case.

Email us via campaigns@birminghamfoe.org.uk if you want advice on what to say.

Joe Peacock

E-petitions R Us

The council now has a site with e-petitions where we can ask them to do things that are within their power. I had a bit of trouble getting them to accept the wording of mine about train stations, but generally I think this has to be a good way of promoting campaigns in the digital age.
Anyway, we have three big transport campaigns at the moment and each one now has its own e-petition. Please sign them if you want Birmingham city council to do something about giving us a better transport system.

Firstly for our 20's plenty campaign to make the roads safer for everyone and encourage greener forms of transport, such as cycling and walking go here:

http://epetition.birmingham.public-i.tv/petition.php?id=51

Secondly, for our Better Buses for Birmingham campaign, this is the link:

http://epetition.birmingham.public-i.tv/petition.php?id=60

Thirdly, for the campaign to get railway stations re-opened in Birmingham: http://epetition.birmingham.public-i.tv/petition.php?id=67

I hope that we can get a lot of support behind these campaigns, but at the moment the old fashioned ways have got us far more signatures for each one than the electronic forms. Let's promote them wherever possible and show that we can mobilise support through the net.