Water!

I'm having another week staying in a hotel and, the TV being full of stuff that will make me grumpy, I am spending my sad lonely evenings (and mornings) reading blogs and environmental news stories. This one from the Guardian is interesting. As the author notes, we have made great strides in understanding carbon emissions but in the UK we use a lot of water and we generally haven't addressed this at all. This article is about industries that use a lot of water but even those that are not water intensive could do with taking a look at their water use. It's an untapped source of money savings.

Sorry.

Amusing carbon calculation

My lovely colleague, Catherine, forwarded a link to me showing that the carbon saved by the airline industry closing down for a week was more than that emitted into the atmosphere by the Icelandic volcano. Have a look here. I assume the calculation doesn't take into account the additional rental car and ferry miles for those who were abroad on business and desperate to get home.

Ocean acidification

We talk about climate change in most of our courses and awareness of the issue informs much of what we do. Despite this, we don't talk an awful lot about this very worrying aspect.

One of the reasons that the carbon dioxide we have emitted over the years since the industrial revolution has not produced the higher levels in the atmosphere that might be expected is that much of the extra dissolves into seawater. This is a problem because it changes the pH of the water, making it slowly more acidic.

Seawater has been slightly alkaline for a long time and the creatures and plants that inhabit the oceans are adapted to this. Changes are likely to cause problems. There have been two pieces of news about this within the last week. Reuters reported on the National Research Council's report here. ABC News report a problem with oyster hatcheries in the US. One of the predicted issues with ocean acidification is that shellfish whose calcium carbonate shells need alkaline conditions to form will not thrive in more acidic conditions. This seems to be starting to happen as can be seen here.

Legislation, legislation, legislation - A post by Catherine

The beginning of April was pretty busy in terms of legislation coming into force, so I thought I’d do a bit of a roundup on all the key pieces that will affect most businesses, as well as the odd bit which is a bit more specific!

The Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2010 further extends the scope of environmental permitting to cover discharge consents, groundwater authorisations and radioactive substances authorisations. If you currently have a discharge or authorisation for any of these activities, you don’t have to re-apply, they will automatically become environmental permits. Revisions to waste exemptions, which we blogged about previously here, are also contained within these new Regulations. Check the Environment Agency’s table to ensure you register your new exemptions by the end of the transitional period.

The £8 per annum landfill tax escalator continues to raise the cost per tonne, and from 1st April the standard rate is now £48 per tonne for active waste, with inert waste staying at £2.50 per tonne.

The Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme went live on the 1st April. If you have a half-hourly meter and used 6,000 MWh of electricity in 2008, you have between now and the end of September to register here. Last week there was a live question and answer session on the CRC with an expert panel, including representatives from the Environment Agency and IEMA, and you can read the discussions here.

The Flood and Water Management Act 2010 received Royal Assent on 8th April. The Bill was introduced partly as a response to the severe flooding of summer 2007. It places obligations on the Environment Agency to develop and maintain a national flood and coastal erosion risk management strategy. One of the more interesting provisions is the removal of the automatic right for new developments to connect to sewers, which is to encourage the uptake of sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDs). You can read the full text of the Act here.

From April 1st, duty rates for biodiesel and bioethanol increased to the same level as conventional petrol and diesel, but the Biodiesel Duty (Biodiesel Produced From Waste Cooking Oil) (Relief) Regulations 2010 means that biodiesel derived from waste cooking oil will continue to benefit from a 20 pence per litre duty until 2013.

With the date now fixed for the general election, it will be interesting in the coming month to see how the main parties play their ‘environmental’ cards, and what hints we’ll get for any future environmental legislation.

Selling the perfect food factory - Comment from Alison

There appears to have been a shift in TV adverts selling food. And it seems to have happened rather abruptly. One day I am being bombarded with the health effects of buying and eating certain breakfast cereals, snacks, yoghurts and the like eaten by perfect people and perfect families in beautiful natural surroundings, and the next I am being ushered into witness the delights of the food factory and/or fields themselves.

Selling food on TV has always had a strange fascination for me – perhaps because I like food, or perhaps because I find it strange that we have so much food and so many different brands that cheese can no longer just be cheese. When I was 8 or 9 I would draw the final snapshot of TV food adverts. My favourite was “Du pain, du vin, du Boursin”. Even that advert has now had to change to differentiate itself and become darkly humourous with the addition of “du Tracteur” to the end of the sentence. I’m not sure why anyone would link being run over by a tractor with a French soft cheese, but then I’m writing about it here, so it must have made an impression….

Anyway, back to food factories. Anyone who has ever been to a food factory will know that they are interesting places. My first visit was to a frozen pizza factory in Germany when I worked there for a year as a trainee accountant. I didn’t eat frozen pizza again for a long time. This was not because the factory was in any way dirty or unhygienic. Quite the opposite. It was spotlessly clean and sterile. All the employees were covered from head to toe. There were, in fact, more machines than there were people anyway. And my lasting memory is of huge vats of tomato sauce and grated cheese. In short, it completely destroyed my view of how pizza should be made (in a stone oven, outside, somewhere warm in Italy). I was horrified by the industrial nature and scale of food manufacturing. And it is a memory that has stayed with me for a long time.

Recently this memory was compounded by my other half’s visit to a chicken factory. Once again he said it was spotless. But the way he described the chickens being killed, plucked, sliced and diced and then packaged put a grim picture in my mind. Mass production of food is not pretty.

Yet the TV adverts say otherwise! And that is where my problem lies. The images portrayed to us by many food producers selling their wares on TV at the moment are simply not factual. Bakers dancing round a warmly lit bread-producing factory with smiles on their faces and loading individual pieces of dough into baking tins; salad growers picking individual salad leaves by hand whilst singing; chip manufacturers adding a dash of seasoning to individual frozen chips in a factory that looks more like it should be on a children’s cartoon. Food factories and commercial agricultural farms are simply not like this. And spare a thought for the workers in the factories and on the farms. I can guarantee they do not spend their days laughing, dancing and singing. In fact of the 1 billion poorest people in the world, I understand that over 50% of them work in food-related industries.

So is this a form of false advertising? Perhaps. There are many other issues at stake here as well, such as society’s demand for fast food that is not fresh. The demand for cheap food. The necessity of feeding nearly 7 billion people – it can’t necessarily all be done organically on local farms.

But that’s not really my point here – it’s the false image we are providing to the potential consumer of the product. Everyone should have the opportunity to visit a food factory and make their own minds up, but we should ultimately all be aware that food production is no different to the production of any other commodity these days.

Too tired to blog...

Well obviously not too tired to write stuff but too tired to do serious critical reading before recommending a few very interesting articles I've come across recently. Real Soon Now.

I'm currently being rather impressed with the Travel Lodge in Romford, even though it is market day tomorrow and there are numbers of people dragging the metal stall structures out and setting them up which is a rather noisy process. I'm also rather impressed with Romford and the opportunities to walk out of the hotel and find wonderful food. This is my fourth evening and I'm going back to the Italian. No offence to McDonald's which provided me with fresh palatable food whilst I stayed in Heathrow over the weekend but they have a fairly small selection of vegetarian food. Ciao Bella has a much wider selection, thank goodness. When you are away from home a lot, being able to find good, healthy food makes a big difference. Tomorrow I go home and hope (against hope) to find some food left in the house that I can cook with. Otherwise it's pasta and pesto again. If there's any pesto left. It's a great life if you don't weaken!

Changes in Government funded environmental support

At the end of many of the courses we run there is a slide, or a number of slides, that tells delegates about they can go for help on their environmental issues. Many of the websites and information sources we direct people towards are government funded. We've always pointed people towards Envirowise, WRAP and NISP.

From the 1^st April 2010 these organisations will be merged into one and called WRAP. The following organisations will no longer be stand alone bodies: Envirowise, National Industrial Symbiosis Programme (NISP), Centre for Remanufacturing and Reuse (CRR), Construction Resources and Waste Platform (CRWP), Action Sustainability (AS), and BREW (Business Resource Efficiency & Waste Centre) for Local Authorities but will be merged into one – Waste & Resources Action Programme(WRAP).

WRAP is now the single point of contact for businesses and organisations looking for support and guidance on improving their resource efficiency.

The Envirowise helpline and website will continue to operate until June 2010, but the WRAP website (www.wrap.org.uk) now offers the same access to information on material resource efficiency. Advice and support is also available through the WRAP resource efficiency helpline on 0808 100 2040.

I guess this makes sense in many ways and now our final information slide will be much shorter but I will miss the Envirowise website which I have used endlessly over the last decade.