Sustainability of the place I used to live in.

I used to live in Eccles in Salford (Greater Manchester)  before coming to University of Northampton and I'd like  to evaluate how sustainable is my community on the example  of this place where I used to live for a year. I want to start with some of the statistics I'm taking from the Office for National Statistics. According to the data on  the website the neighborhood is quite deprived, health  is worse than average in the country, life expectancy is  low, economic activity and employment rates are very  close but still lower than average in England and land  use 4-5 times worse with green space being at 19% in  comparison with nationwide level of 87%. Overall I would say that Eccles in not really a sustainable place even though in my neighborhood situation was much better in comparison with the rest of the area. I was living in leafy part of the area with a lot of new developments built there in the last 5-7 years. Close proximity of the shopping area as well as convenient transportation system made it very advantageous place to live in. Bus traffic was quite frequent but at the same time most of the people used cars because of the beneficial location of the place which, while being a main hub for locals of the area to get to work, was also very green with a lot of trees on the sides of the roads and clean pavements. The area I am talking about is laying on the north of Eccles and i dominated by residential buildings. At the same time market street with all the main amenities ,including some restaurants, bars, hairdressing salons as well as  standard post office and bank branch, make this place an attractive neighborhood for living while nearby school and hotel add something extra to the picture of  a local area. Basically hospital would be the only facility missing in that ensemble; I was also going to mention a big shopping centre but remembered that there's only 2-3 miles to the Trafford Centre, one of the biggest retail venues of the country. Overall, I'd say that statistics of the major part of Eccles overshadowed small but wealthy neighborhood I used to live in. Stats of unemployment, land use, economic activity and overall deprivation level are based on the combined data of the whole area and could be easily misunderstood in the leafy part of area where frequent and convenient transport makes no stress to local people,  busy roads are surrounded by trees and small residential place is provided with almost all the main facilities, amenities and activities a single household needs. That's the ambivalent truth of the place on the west of Manchester, place I used to live in before I cam to Northampton.

and just a little pic for the last post

How sustainable is my lifestyle?

The word "Sustainability" isn't the one I would necessarily use to describe my lifestyle but at the same time I couldn't avoid the fact that some of the aspects of my day-to-day living could make some positive impact on environment. For example I use public transport to get to the Avenue Campus (if I'd have a car I'd drive it). Speaking recycling-wise I used to sort the rubbish into different bins once I came to UK but never before (due to worse economic situation in my home country people tend to think about more important things over there and due to much lower level of consumption environment there is still at normal level) and not after I've moved to the Halls of Residence (due to student nature of my life). Yet there's still a potential for some more eco-friendly stuff in my life. Something like turning the light off could save up some energy - energy-efficient economy is the driver of success in sustainable economy - but that same "student life" doesn't help me a lot in this matter because it's easier to explain to a student that binge-drinking is bad than make them all switch the lights off after they leave the room. The same goes with heating problem. I like it that Uni really cares about the students' health and doesn't want them to freeze but starting heating rooms in early October might lead you to over-heating the room (what's now happening in our flat's kitchen) and eventually to losing massive amounts of energy (maybe not "massive" you can correct me on that one). Once again I'm trying to remind myself that it's a Person not the System that should be responsible for changes but at the end of the day it's up to the nature to decide. Nature of people now dominates the environment and dictates that driving comfortable car is good and standing like a sheep in the bus all the way between campuses is still bad, buying two times more products than you need is good and using exclusively recycled stuff is bad, talk about how you care about the ecology is good and actually do something to help the environment is bad.

first one

And the first one ... as a message for Mr Spellman : "It's done, Greg!"