The Guardian view on ice-cream vans: shame about the pollution | Editorial

Their tinny chimes may be an essential sound of the summer. But are they out of tune with the times?Few things could be quite so evocative as the memory of childhood greed sharpened by the jarring, tinny sound of Waltzing Matilda or Greensleeves heard several streets away. Ice-cream as soft as raw meringue, piped with a flourish into an orange cone the consistency of cardboard. The creamy swirl impaled by a crisp, and friable chocolate flake. Sticky fingers as the sweet vanilla melts over small hands. The ice-cream van is as much a trope of suburban British nostalgia as warm beer, cricket on the green and endless summers - notwithstanding a rather less cheerful association with Glasgow's notorious ice-cream wars of the early 1980s, in which ice-cream vans were used to "fence" stolen goods and to sell drugs.But the ice-cream van in its traditional form is increasingly out of tune with the times. The vans emit black carbon and nitrogen dioxide because they need to keep their engines on to power their onboard freezers. In Britain's most polluted urban areas this is a problem. In London, Camden council has announced that it will more vigorously enforce regulations it has already established to ban trading in certain streets. Westminster council is also trying to tackle the problem of idling vehicles near school gates and in other public spaces. Continue reading...