ECUS Blog

No one raindrop thinks it's responsible for the flood

2011-11-21T05:43:00.001Z

Over the last couple ofweeks there have been some worrying headlines in the environmental ~~ghettos~~sections of the various newspapers. For those of us paying attention it hasbeen fascinating. Most of these are appearing now because Durban and theclimate change talks are coming up. I’ll link to these shortly but first I wantto talk about attitudes and ways of thinking.

The headline that had methinking was not about ‘the end of the world as we know it’, as so many seem tobe, but on a much more prosaic topic, local air quality. The headline in theGuardian is ‘UK government puts thousands of lives at risk over air pollutionfailures’. It’s an interesting article, one in a long line of news items I’veseen over the years that have warned that lives are being shortened due tolocal air pollution, mainly caused by traffic congestion.

What this highlights is aproblem of perception and power. It isn’t members of the government who arecausing the pollution, although each will play their part, but all of us. It isall of us who drive, particularly in busy cities, who are putting thousands oflives at risk. None of us would intentionally harm anyone but our cumulativeactions are doing this. There is a disconnect between our day to day decisionsand the effects these have and it is difficult to see how the government, inour democratic country, can make us change. In fact, one of the interestingthings to come out of this article is that under the localism bill centralgovernment will be passing the responsibility for paying the fines imposed bythe EU to the local authorities. In effect our council taxes will pay the finesimposed in an effort to stop air pollution harming us. This doesn’t seem to bethe best way of protecting us. The suggestions made by the environmental auditcommittee are ‘a new national framework of low-emissions zones and a public awarenesscampaign.’ Both of these are, of course, good suggestions but I’m fairly surethat most of us are aware that we contribute to air pollution by our drivingand don’t change our behaviour despite that knowledge.

If we can’t deal with localair pollution where the evidence is obvious and the damage happening to peoplehere and now the effect of trying to get people to take responsibility fortheir contribution for climate change is even more difficult. There have beenconcerted ‘marketing’ efforts to discredit the science behind climate changeand it has become a divisive and polarised debate. To see this just look in thecomments section following any environmental story. It tends to the level ofplayground ‘debate’. We continue to bicker about whether it is happening, whois to blame and who should deal with it.

The following stories have appeared in the last couple of weeks:

The small island states, whose land will be inundated by the sea, watchwith a mixture of despair and anger as countries with higher land seek to putoff coming to an agreement on what to do until 2018 or later. Perhaps Norwayand Australia can take the refugees when it comes time.

Recent readings of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have jumped by arecord amount. ‘The figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases arehigher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four yearsago.’

The International Energy Agency (IEA) warns that the world is likely tobuild so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories andinefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible tohold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerousclimate change will be ‘lost forever’. What gives this further power is thatthe IEA has always been a very conservative organization.

I am not totally despairing. I spend a lot of time speaking to companiesand organisations that are working very hard to minimise their energy use andtheir waste production, not because of a green sensibility, although they havethat too, but because cutting energy use and waste cuts costs and makes themmore competitive. With the advent of BS EN 16001 and ISO50001, the energymanagement standards, the BSi did a survey and discovered that almost a quarterof businesses they asked did not know what their energy costs were as aproportion of their total costs. The government has recently consulted on aproposed requirement for more organisations to report on their energyuse/carbon emissions. I hope that this will play a small part in improving ourenergy efficiency. As it is small repeated thoughtless actions that are causingthe problems I am hopeful that many small positive actions will start to make adifference.

In the meantime, my personal actions are the only ones I can fullycontrol and I do my utmost to minimise my carbon footprint, not least becauseit saves me money too.

What a waste!

2011-10-28T11:49:00.000+01:00

I’ve written about thisbefore but I think it bears repeating because things have changed somewhat. I’mtalking about junk mail. I would suggest that it is worth reviewing you junkload at least once a year. Why? I’ll come back to that.

First, I’ll redefine what Ithink junk mail is. It is mail that arrives unasked for that gets stripped ofits plastic wrapper and goes straight into the recycling bin. The wrapper goesinto general waste. Very, very, very occasionally something turns up that turnsout to be useful but generally, not.

So, what’s the problem? It’stwo seconds work to strip and bin.

The problem, of course, isthat you are then paying to have that waste disposed of. Think of it aslegalised flytipping. You might think that it doesn’t cost so much but in anoffice of twenty you will often find that a good part of the recycling bin isfull of unwanted adverts, unread magazines and the stuff that comes tuckedinside them. And from an environmental point of view, tree have died, beenprocessed into paper, printed and then gone straight into the bin. Much of thestuff isn’t even good for composting due to the gloss and colour.

The other thing is,important stuff can get lost in among the junk. I found my voter registrationform this morning whilst I was picking up piles of junk mail to photograph.(I’m working from home and therefore don’t have access to the recycling binsdotted around the office.)

In fact the stuff in thephotograph bears looking at. Some of it is addressed to the former occupant ofmy house – four years gone. When I remember I send these ads back with ‘Nolonger at this address’ scrawled across them. I have been doing this for fouryears. I’m still getting stuff. This is complete junk and a total waste for thesender too.

Then there are take awaymenus. This is inevitable. I live in a student area. Students live on takeaways.Leafletting my street every other month is cost effective because the studenthave probably lost the menus in that time. My method with these is toimmediately throw away anything not in ten minutes walking distance. I used tokeep the local ones. Now I don’t. I throw away all the local ones too and lookthe menu up online. If they don’t have a website they don’t get any businessfrom me. (It must be said that the Bilash (red (meat) and green (vegetarian)menus) is an excellent take away but I do resent the number of leaflets I getfrom them.)

There is the NaturalCollection catalogue. I’ve bought stuff from them, on and off, for years. Ithought I asked them to stop sending me catalogues last year when I did aconcerted campaign to stop my junk but I can’t find my email so maybe not. Anamail has gone today. The send me regular alerts on at least two of the emailaddresses anyway. I don’t need the paper copy.

And then there is ChristianAid. This was the charity I donated my sponsor money to when I lived on £1 aday earlier this year. Now they email me regularly and send me lots of paper. Iget the emails. I don’t need the paper. I hadn’t even opened them. They werejust sitting on the junk pile. Now I’ve taken them apart, put the freepostenvelopes for reuse and binned the rest. I know that any charity wants moresupporters and more money from their current supporters but I would actually preferthem to spend the money I donate on helping people in need, not printing andposting stuff to me. I get the emails! In the past I made a one-off donation toa charity that I suspect spent all my money on sending me letters asking formore cash. They didn’t get any more cash. An email has gone out to ChristianAid.

The point is, in a year abusiness will have contact with a great number of new organisations. A goodnumber of those will take the opportunity to send their marketing to you inpaper form. Those need to be culled. Also, we asked a number of membershiporganisations to only send one magazine. We are a small office. We can share.At one point I think we were getting six copies of The Environmentalist. Theproblem here, I guess, is perhaps adverisers need a certain number of papercopies to go out before they are willing to buy space. Whatever. You areprobably going to have to remind some organisations to which you subscribe thatyou really meant, ‘Only one please.’

Times are difficult and the onething that doesn’t go down in a recession is the marketing budget but thatdoesn’t mean that any organisation wants to pay for getting rid of junk paper.So, to add to the improvement log:

Rather than just bin therubbish, spend a day asking people not to send paper marketing – you can offeryour email address as an alternative
Revisit the organisationsthat are sending you magazines. Ask them to keep it to one for the wholeorganisation or none at all and read it on line.
Talk to the people who sendyou catalogues. In some cases the paper catalogue is useful but often it ismuch easier to search and buy on line. Again, cut the number of cataloguesreceived from each supplier to one or none at all.
Make sure that theresidual paper is recycled.

Climate change again

2011-10-25T08:22:00.000+01:00

Climate change has been inthe news again recently. The Express notes that La Nina is in force in the Pacific and will gradually strengthen as the year ends leading to another potentially bitterly cold winter. TheTelegraph reported in June that there may be a “little ice age’ in store based onastronomers’ belief that the next sun spot cycle will be less intensive thannormal or fail to happen.

I remember reading aboutthis in the New Scientist quite some time ago now. One of their conclusionsseemed to be that this would give us some breathing space to sort out ourcarbon emissions. Reading comments on any climate related story however, causesme to despair for that scientific and logical hope. The main sentiment seems tobe that warming is a government plot but, if not, this gives us moreopportunity to ignore the issue.

Joanna Haigh professor of atmospheric physics at Imperial College London,cautions that "Even if the predictions are correct, the effect of globalwarming will outstrip the sun’s ability to cool even in the coldest scenario. And in any case, the cooling effect is only ever temporary. Whenthe sun’s activity returns to normal, the greenhouse gases won't have goneaway."

Whilst on the subject of skeptics, the results from the Berkeley EarthSurface Temperature (BEST) project are out. This was set up by climate skeptic,physicist Richard Muller following the email hacking scandal. As Real Climatereports the intention was to, ‘create a new, independent compilation andassessment of global land surface temperature trends using new statisticalmethods and a wider range of source data. Expectations that the work would putteeth in accusations against CRU and GISTEMP led to a lot of early press, andan invitation to Muller to testify before Congress.’ The BBC reports that, ‘The project received funds fromsources that back organisations lobbying against action on climate change.’

The big news from this study is that actually the earth is gettingwarmer or, as Mother Jones reports, ‘ButMuller's congressional testimony last March didn't go according to plan. Hetold them a preliminary analysis suggested that the three main climate modelsin use today—each of which uses a different estimating technique, and each ofwhich has potential flaws—are all pretty accurate: Global temperatures havegone up considerably over the past century, and the increase has accelerated over the past few decades.Yesterday, BEST confirmed these results and others in its first set of published papers about landtemperatures.’ The graph below shows how well the figures match:

And yet, the comments don't change. There's a lot I might blame the government for but imagining climate change is not one of them. Sigh.

Woodbrooke - a truly sustainable place

2011-10-14T16:56:00.000+01:00

Last week I led an EMSImplementation course on behalf of the Environmental Association ofUniversities and Colleges (EAUC). It was a very interesting course with somethoughtful and hardworking delegates. It’s always exciting to lead a courselike this, hearing of people’s experiences, problems and achievements. Whatmade this course rather special was the location. We ran it as a residentialcourse based at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Selly Oak, Birmingham. Itwas formerly the family home of George Cadbury, the chocolate maker.

The Quaker ethics areembedded in the service provided so the place was both friendly and welcomingand very beautiful. We all ate together in the communal dining room overlookingthe grounds. The food was wholesome and tasty and catered for meat eaters,vegetarians, and those with food intolerances. I’ve rarely eaten so well and sohealthily. At the end of each meal we took our plates and stacked them readyfor washing, emptying food waste into a bin, none recyclable material (butterwrappers) into a separate (small) box and put our cutlery into a container ofhot soapy water which would make the cleaning process more efficient. There wasminimum waste, not least because you were welcome to keep returning for secondsand didn’t, therefore, take more than you turned out to need.

During the breaks in thetraining day not only was coffee and tea available but herb and fruit teastogether with home baked biscuits and cakes. Yum. The water was notcommercially bottled but filtered tap water in reusable glass bottles, again amuch more sustainable option.

Our training room, the EvaKoch Room, was lovely. We had comfortable armchairs rather then cold plasticchairs and tables. It made for a very relaxing experience with a view throughthe sash windows of the glorious autumn garden.

I don’t know what everyoneelse’s rooms were like. Mine was small but very cosy and they left my towelsalone. I can’t count the number of hotels I’ve stayed out where I’ve followedinstructions so that they shouldn’t wash my towels and they’ve taken themanyway. It was so nice to have a room that was not messed with, other then thecoffee and tea being refreshed.

Much of the activity at thecentre is Quaker based but wider education and accommodation is very muchwelcomed. When we arrived there was a class of children learning to worktogether and we were not the only outside adult training course they have.

They work hard to besustainable and invest in sustainable refurbishment. At present they have a boxwhere you can donate to cover the carbon footprint of your travel. The moneyraised will contribute to installing solar water heaters. This together withthe egg timers in the showers (my showers were always over before the sand ranout) will reduce their impact again. All but one of us arrived by train/taxibecause this is a very accessible place, within walking distance of Selly Oakstation, unless you are carrying a laptop, clothes for three days and a lot ofcourse paperwork. The grounds are wildlife sanctuary and a haven of peace forthe residents. Who knew there was such beauty just off the A38? Certainly mytaxi driver didn’t.

I think training facilities,conference centres and hotels could all learn a lot from Woodbrooke. I’dcertainly like to work there again. (Hint).

Environmental grumbling

2011-09-30T12:15:00.000+01:00

There has been a flurry ofLinkedin emails in my Yahoo! inbox recently and so this morning I checked tosee which of my former colleagues I am now linked to. It’s rather exciting,finding connections that I thought had been broken as people have moved on. Andit’s fascinating wondering how Linkedin knows I know some people.

This morning there wasnothing other than people updating their profiles, which I skimmed quickly, andthen wandered back to the front page and looked at the Yahoo! news headlinesdisplayed for my delectation and generally ignored unless I’m particularlybored.

This morning’s crop were asuninspiring as ever but two of them stood out as very worrisome. It wasannounced that the government is proposing to fund a return to once a week bin collectionsand that they are intending to raise the speed limit on motorways to 80mph.

The reason given for thespeed limit rise is the economic benefits from shorter journey times. I don’tdrive very much these days but when I do it is generally during rush hour and Ifrequently find, on the M1 and M62, that 70mph is just a dream.

I have a number of concernsabout this proposal. One is that with the speed limit set at 70mph peoplegenerally drive at 90mph. Raise it to 80mph coupled with a weird aversion tothe use of speed cameras and people will tend to drive at 100mph. Thisincreases the fuel used, the carbon dioxide emissions and the chance of anaccident, which stops traffic dead for an appreciable amount of time.

I have, over the years,spent many unproductive hours sitting in a car waiting for the accident infront of me to be cleared. The most recent of these was on the Snake Pass on 17^thSeptember. Whilst we sat there two fire engines, two ambulances and a policecar drove past. As it happens the Snake is an A road so we were able to turnround and find an alternate route. This is obviously not possible on a motorwayso an accident results in stationary traffic, sometimes for hours, whilst thewreckage is cleared away and the bodies helicoptered out.

The Transport Secretarynoted also ‘the benefit ofbringing millions of ordinary motorists, who are otherwise law abiding, back onthe right side of the law.’

Thisseems to me to be, frankly, ludicrous. In no other area would we change the lawfor the benefit of the law breaker.

Wonderfullythe head of the RAC Foundation Professor Stephen Glaister seems to have similarthoughts to mine. He commented, ‘Drivers travelling that 10mph quicker mightreach their destination sooner, but will use about 20% more fuel and emit 20%more CO2. There is also likely to be a slight increase in road casualties.’ Hecontinued, ‘Before you change a speed limit, you have to know whether you aredoing it for safety, economic or environmental reasons. Unfortunately not allof these are compatible.’

So,that’s the first unsettling news from ‘The Greenest Government Ever’. The nextis the idea that the government should pay councils to restore weekly bincollections. This is a fascinating one given that we are supposed to bereducing the amount of waste we produce.

Whyshould we want to reduce waste? Three main reasons. One is that biodegradablewaste buried in landfill site releases methane. This is both dangerouslyexplosive if it builds up and a potent greenhouse gas, around 23% worse thancarbon dioxide. One is that resource is becoming more expensive – plastic ismade from oil and as the price of that rises the cost of plastic increases. Andthe final one is that we have limited landfill space left in the UK and no-oneis terribly keen on having new ones excavated and filled near them. And then,of course, there is the hidden cost of managing waste. We are not aware of thecost of all that packaging but we pay for it in our grocery bills. And then wepay for it again in our council tax bills as the local authority’s bin menmagic it away for us.

There are some fascinating waste facts here.

InSheffield we still have weekly collections of general waste and fortnightlycollections of recyclables. The fact that we are ‘lucky’ makes no difference tome. I usually put my general waste bin out monthly (I don’t eat meat and I compostmy vegetable waste) and my recycling bin quarterly. I’d like to be able to rentout bin space to my neighbours. I might sound holier than thou. It’s notbecause my soul is pure but that I’m watching the pennies with two kids atuniversity. Having my milk delivered, making food from scratch and takingpacked lunches to work greatly reduces the amount of packaging waste and Idon’t drink pop so no bulky PET bottles in the bin.

I coulddo a lot more to reduce my waste and I’d be more than happy to take a counciltax reduction to do so. Or, more to the point, save some of the jobs andservices that are being cut under the government austerity measures. One of thecomments (by Stephen) on the news story went like this:

‘We’re going to make you unemployed.

We’re goingto make you lose your home

We’re goingto charge you £9000 for university

We’re goingto sack servicemen

We’re goingto get rid of Aircraft and ships.

We’re goingtor raise VAT

We’re goingto let the banks off the hook

We’re aregoing to stay in Europe

We’re goingto keep raising fuel prices

We’re goingto alter political boundaries

We’re goingto cut NHS Spending

We’re goingto cut education spending

We’re goingto increase foreign aid

We’re goingto involve us all in conflicts that don’t concern us

But we’regoing to collect your dustbins weekly, aren't we clever?’

(Apostrophesadded)

I don’t agreewith all of his criticisms but I do agree that the government should perhapsthink more carefully about what best to spend its (our) money on. We could alldo a bit more, waste less (and that means wasting less money) and retain moreessential services. Mr Pickles believes that every household in England has abasic right to have their rubbish collected every week. I think there are somebasic rights that are more important.

Open for debate...

2011-08-05T12:07:00.003+01:00

Alison has been reading again. This time it's government policy, a thing we should all keep our eyes on. Here is her response:

So the Communities and Local Government Department have recently issued a Draft National Planning Policy Framework. They state that it is a “key part of our reforms to make the planning system less complex and more accessible, and to promote sustainable growth”. All good so far.

There definitely seems room for improvement in the planning system and the ability of it to react to a changing economic, social and environmental landscape.

We use the existing Planning Policy Guidance and Statements (PPG/PPS) considerably as part of our work. For example, we carry out Environmental Impact Assessments of large scale developments and renewable developments (e.g. onshore wind), and the PPGs/PPSs provide information on the requirements that the developments have to meet in order to be agreed. Further to this we do a lot of work with clients at the pre-planning stage, such as carrying out ecological and contaminated land surveys and putting together sustainability statements.

So any updates and changes to policy seem important to keep up with the times. However, although this is only a draft framework, some concerns are already being raised. The report starts off by clearly defining sustainable development to include the economic, social and environmental impacts on society. But it quickly moves on to start talking solely about ‘sustainable economic growth’. It also states “There is no necessary contradiction between increased levels of development and protecting and enhancing the environment, as long as development is planned and undertaken responsibly.” Some critics have highlighted the final part of this sentence to be the most worrying. They feel, that the problem is that it is often NOT undertaken responsibly.

Whilst we are remaining neutral on our judgment a quick search of the 65 page report highlights that the words ‘climate change’ and ‘natural environment’ only appear 7 times each in the main text. It will be interesting to see how influential this document will be to the planning system once it has been through consultation. I think the consultation responses will make good reading over a glass of red wine….

Keep the customer satisfied...

2011-07-28T17:10:00.004+01:00

I had an interesting week last week which culminated in me catching the train into work on Thursday morning rather than cycling. I had my iPhone with me and was sending emails backwards and forwards to someone who wanted my opinions on the efficacy of the waste legislation in England. Whilst carrying on this conversation I paid for my ticket by card at the ticket machine in Sheffield station; not only does it not give change but it refuses to issue a ticket if you don’t put in the exact money.

It’s only a short trip to Meadowhall so I finished my emails, dashed off and walked briskly to work. It was only when I sat down with a coffee and the intention of booking a train ticket to Leighton Buzzard on the internet, that I realised I didn’t have my purse. As you can imagine I flapped around, looking in all the places I might have put it down. And then I looked again, in the same places. No dice. It was a little after 8am when I called Northern Rail, with fairly low expectations of their response. To say I was pleasantly surprised is an understatement.

I spoke to Ann in customer service. She was very sympathetic and didn’t point out that I was an idiot to leave my purse on the train. She took the details very efficiently and told me she would call the conductor on the train. I called back a little while later, worried that I should get on with cancelling the cards. Ann apologised about the delay in replying and explained that the conductor wasn’t answering his phone for whatever reason. The train would shortly be arriving into Goole and Ann had arranged for the woman in the ticket office to meet the train and talk to the conductor. A few minutes later she called me back and confirmed that the conductor had my purse safe and would give it in to Lost Property in Hull. Phew.

An hour or so later I got a call from Hull. Alan Dixon asked me if I’d lost anything. Oh yes! Apparently Ian Baxter, the conductor, had just handed it in and Alan was letting me know as soon as possible that he had my purse. I asked him to have a look and he confirmed that none of the money or cards had gone missing. I arranged for my colleague, Catherine, who was in Hull anyway, to pick it up. A happy ending all round, given that I’d just taken £100 out of the hole in the wall in the station and my train tickets for my holiday at the Edinburgh Fringe (non-refundable) were in my purse.

Obviously two of the people involved were just doing their job, although they were doing it very well and with quiet good humour. The conductor and particularly the woman at Goole were going out of their way for me. There are two lessons I take form this. One is that I am completely useless. The other is how much positive feeling I now have for Northern Rail, to the extent that where I can I will choose their services over competitors. I have dealt with rail company customer services departments before and have never come away feeling very positive about them. This is how customer loyalty is generated.

More on carbon

2011-06-26T15:17:00.002+01:00

I do not apologise for being a little obsessive about carbon. I tend to think of myself as being a little ahead of a trend that everyone will, sooner or later, have to accept.

I use the word ‘carbon’ as shorthand for two linked issues. When we look at environmental issues there are usually linked problems, resource and pollution. Resource is to do with the tendency to take so much of a commodity that it is driven into scarcity. Pollution is the effect on the wider environment caused by the waste products of this overuse. When we look at ‘carbon’ the resource issue centres on the fact that we are using astonishing amounts of a finite resource, fossil fuel, to maintain our lifestyles. The pollution issue is the vast amount of greenhouse gases we are releasing into the atmosphere as a result of this.

In my job I talk to lots of people about environmental concerns. Everyone is aware of climate change but awareness of the fossil fuel depletion is almost non-existent. Last week I spoke to a group of a dozen young men in the construction industry, a sector that must be fundamentally involved in the movement towards a lower carbon society. They were bright and focused on doing the right thing environmentally but both completely unaware of the fossil fuel issue and suspicious of the reality of climate change. This week, unprompted, fossil fuel depletion was nominated by a delegate as the single most important sustainability issue at a workshop I was involved in and I was more than a little surprised. I’ve spent quite a lot of time wondering why people seem to be unaware of our predicament. People are naturally aware of the high petrol prices at the pump and increasing energy prices and yet seem not to connect this to a fundamental supply difficulty. George Monbiot recently pointed out that despite being very aware of the issue the last government was not publicizing it at all. The original document is also well worth a look bearing in mind that the IEA have since suggested that peak oil occurred in 2006. I haven’t seen a major change in emphasis with the coalition.

I wonder whether the government is also grouping the two issues as ‘carbon’. There is, potentially, a major resource crisis looming. Our energy security in the UK is falling. Last year we imported over 40% of our natural gas having been very comfortably self-sufficient until recently. This information can be found on the DECC website but is certainly not ‘in your face.’ In addition, making money from commodities has increased over recent years as the financial industry has pushed for and obtained (dangerous) levels of deregulation, so any increase in public awareness could escalate the problem – fossil fuels taken out of circulation to be used as money substitutes resulting in higher prices resulting in even more fuel taken out of circulation.

The results of the reluctance to talk about ‘peak oil’ and the public’s perception that climate change is a government scam perpetrated to justify taxing us at higher rates is that these linked emergencies don’t seem to be being addressed openly. Conspiracy theories abound on the internet but I do suspect that the government is trying to do the right thing (tackle the linked carbon issues) by introducing seemingly random pieces of a jigsaw of legislation. The reason conspiracy theories are so popular is that we all hope that there is someone somewhere who is competent and knows what they are doing. This is what I am hoping for here.

I recently wrote about the government’s Green Deal, which is a glimmer of hope, and this week I would like to mention the Defra consultation on measuring and reporting GHG emissions by UK companies, closing on 5^th July. In the report, ‘The contribution that reporting of greenhouse gas emissions makes to the UK meeting its climate change objectives: A review of the current evidence’ the authors note that the ‘reporting of GHG emissions is considered an important part of the GHG management cycle and a tool for embedding sustainability into a company’. I think that the hope is that a clear awareness of their emissions will remind organizations that, in a time of escalating prices, they are throwing away money on inefficiencies in their energy use and that should translate into a desire to minimize those costs with the desirable knock-on effect of a conservation of resource and a minimization of pollution.

If this is to be an effective measure the best of the four reporting options on the table would be the one that captures the largest number of organizations. For this reason alone I will be ‘voting’ for Option 3: Mandate under Companies Act for all large companies, as it will capture information on between 17,000 and 31,000 public and private companies. Option 2, Mandate under Companies Act for all Quoted companies, would pick up around 1,100 companies but not large private companies and Option 4: Mandate under Companies Act for all companies whose UK electricity consumption exceeds a threshold, would capture 4,000 or up to 15,000 with a lowered threshold. Option 1, Enhanced Voluntary Reporting, would have the disadvantage of all voluntary schemes; there is no level playing field and those who need to do it most will be most reluctant. In addition, if we appear to be taking the softly, softly approach to the issue there will be no apparent urgency to reporting.

My preference, when discussing anything at all, is to get as close to reality as possible. Philosophically, we cannot ever know what reality is. We attempt to understand what is actually real by building models, telling stories or, as they say these days, framing. Given that absolute reality is unknowable I still prefer not to have the ‘facts’ obscured. I don’t want anyone to reassure me that everything will be fine when it won’t. I want to be treated like an adult, someone who will recognise her responsibilities and act on these. Trying to make decisions based on incomplete information is part of life but having information ‘hidden’ from me does not reassure me at all and makes me distrust those who are supposed to be representing me. It would work far better for me to have our government say something along the lines of, ‘We have put too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we are having to use more and more expensive (in terms of money, pollution and energy input) fuel which is in increasingly short supply and we must cut back on our use of fossil fuels hard and urgently.’ Of course this would probably be political suicide and so I suppose I support what any government will be prepared to do, the slow piecing together of the carbon control jigsaw. If only it were more comprehensive and quicker coming into force.

The good news, the bad news...

2011-06-10T15:50:00.002+01:00

Yet again, sorry for the hiatus in publishing. There seems to have been an awful lot going on here, mostly training, mostly about waste. This is great. Waste is one of our biggest issues as a society. It costs a lot of money to waste as much as we do.

But, what I want to write about today, whilst related to waste, comes at it from a different angle. I want to look at carbon in construction and, in particular, the influence the government’s proposed Green Deal might have to help both the construction industry and society’s need to transition to a lower carbon economy.

This is not new stuff, but I have been presenting at the EcoShowcase events for the last couple of weeks instead of Alison, and had to read up about them. Having done that I thought I’d take the opportunity to blog about them before they leak out of my brain again.

First of all a brief reiteration. Climate change is happening and we all contribute to it in our daily activities. At the same time, fossil fuel is depleting. There is only so much oil, natural gas and coal in the world and we’ve used the easy to extract stuff already. The rest of it is in deep water (Deep Water Horizon wasn’t drilling at the very edge of technical expertise for fun), countries that don’t like us much (and need their resources for their own burgeoning populations) or accessible only using hugely polluting and/or dangerous methods (gas fracking, tar sands etc). The UK, having been energy self-sufficient for years, now has to import gas. Over 40%. That’s a big fall from maximum production as recently as 2004.

So we have two predicaments. We are contributing to climate change and we consider our right to pollute non-negotiable. We are moving into an era where energy will be costly and prices will be increasingly volatile. The strategy the government seems to be pursuing is to try to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, which should also cut our emissions of greenhouse gases. This does not seem to be a wholehearted policy or to be terribly effective at the moment but it’s better than nothing.*

On the positive side there are a lot of competent people working on the Government’s behalf. They keep coming up with great ideas. A lot of these focus on the construction industry. Why?

Construction, as the government’s Innovation & Growth Team (IGT) point out, is a large and complex industry, ranging from huge construction groups undertaking design and highly technical operations to more than a million individual tradesmen working alone. Together the industry contributes around 9% to UK GDP and employs 2.6 million people. More importantly it influenced almost half of our total carbon dioxide equivalents in 2007 and around 10% of our national energy consumption is used in the production and transport of construction products.

Two major strategies that have been influential in promoting sustainable construction are the 2008 Strategy for Sustainable Construction and The UK Low Carbon Transition Plan, produced in 2009 by the last government. Paul Morrell of the IGT comments that, ‘Over the next 40 years the Low Carbon Transition Plan is virtually a business plan for the construction industry’. It’s an opportunity, just as long as the industry looks at it that way and doesn’t lobby (again) to have the requirements watered down.

The IGT, on the behalf of the government, looked at the readiness of the construction industry to deliver a low carbon future and produced their final report last year. There are three overarching actions identified:

Decarbonise the business throughout the supply chain
Provide new and refurbished buildings allowing energy efficiency
Provide infrastructure to enable the supply of clean energy

They also identified a number of barriers:

Information overload
Industry structure
The need for up-skilling
The gap between the design spec and the actual performance of buildings
The continued focus on initial capital costs rather than lower operational costs
The need for workable methodologies for carbon accounting**
Providing drivers to increase customer demand
A need to address the current old and draughty building stock

The report is fascinating (and long) and is well worth a look, if only at the excellent Executive Summary.

So one of the clever ideas that has emerged is the government’s Green Deal. Work on energy efficiency for new builds is pretty much covered by increasingly tight Building Regulations, planning and, often, funding requirements through Code for Sustainable Homes and BREEAM, but in the UK we have large quantities of older properties. How do we encourage homeowners, landlords and business owners to improve their properties? Given that no-one has huge quantities of available cash at the moment, the upfront costs can constitute a major barrier together with long payback periods. The government has also identified lack of awareness, information overload and lack of confidence in information and a fear of being taken for a ride. There is an abiding fear of small contractors who will ride into town, bodge a job and disappear without trace.

The Green Deal, which is only available in proposal form at the moment, will be designed to deal with this. It is defined as ‘a framework to enable private firms to offer consumers energy efficiency improvements to their homes …and businesses at no up-front cost and recoup payments through a charge in instalments on the energy bill.’

The Deal is based on eight key principles. The first is the Golden Rule; the expected financial savings must be equal to or greater than the costs attached to the energy bill – i.e. it has to be at least financially neutral to the consumer. Then, the measures must be approved, advisors and installers must both be accredited, the provider must give appropriate advice within the terms of the consumer credit act and take account of the individual circumstances of the applicant, and the consent of all parties, particularly the bill payer, must be obtained. The debt generated by the work stays with the property so that the person benefiting from the work, if the property changes hands, is the person who pays the instalments but this must be disclosed to the new owner/leaser. Finally there will be a requirement to protect vulnerable consumers.

Further work will be needed before this idea is put into practice and potential shortcomings addressed. For example, those living in energy poverty at the moment are unlikely to be able to benefit from the clever funding method. Also, those (like me and one in four homes) living in properties with solid walls are unlikely to be able to pay off the high insulation costs (up to £15,000) using savings from their energy bills. Other options through new Energy Company Obligations are being considered.

The first Green Deals should hit the market in autumn 2012, all being well. That’s great although we might want to speed that along a bit. Just before presenting this at Reading I Googled the current concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. You may know that the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change was based on the assumption that at 450 parts per million (ppm) we’d probably be uncomfortable but alright. James Hansen of NASA has since presented the opinion that 350ppm is the maximum that we should allow without long-term detrimental effects. The historical level, before the industrial revolution, seems to have been 280ppm. I was really shocked to see that the figure for May 2011 was 394.35ppm. I’ve since come across an article in the Guardian about this but it was in the environment section. Surely this sort of thing should be front page news.

*One of the major problems the gvt have with tackling climate change and resource depletion is that the economic model they (we all) use requires growth to provide us with prosperity. This means that the treasury and the environmental sections of the government are psychotically permanently at odds. They need to see a psychiatrist or, at the very least, a marriage guidance counsellor. And this is even before we look at the other issues embedded in the very idea of coalition.

** There is a consultation out at present looking at how to best report carbon for UK businesses. It can be found on the Defra pages here.

What a waste

2011-06-09T12:45:00.005+01:00

Amanda and I were out and about this week. We presented to the construction industry at Ecoshowcase in Reading. It is a rewarding thing to do and I love chatting to the delegates after the presentations. It's also nice to be staying somewhere with a colleague instead of being in my lonely hotel room on my own. We stayed at the Travelodge at Reading Services (Eastbound). As we checked in our receptionist asked us when our breakfast bags should be delivered to our rooms. Oh.

I'm not a fan of breakfast bags. I know it is probably good for the hotel but it can't be good either for the environment or for society at large. It meant that Amanda and I sat in our rooms separately and ate our almost-but-not-quite-food instead of having a sociable breakfast and discussing our day ahead. It also means that not so many people need to be employed which isn't good for the local economy. And, goodness! How much waste?

Settling in

2011-05-13T19:35:00.003+01:00

We’ve been in the new office for almost two months now We’re well settled in. One of the most exciting things about the new office is that it is open plan and all the departments sit together. It has given me a real insight into the workload of the ecologists at this, their most hectic time of the year. The late night newt surveys, in particular, leave them exhausted by the weekend. Yet again I failed to have time to join in as I’d hoped but Catherine and Amanda have helped out. It makes a great difference from our normal work of legal compliance audits, training and EMS assistance but they seem to have enjoyed it.

We hear much more of what is going on outside work as well. I bullied everyone into sponsoring me to ‘Live Below the Line’ and we all spent the first ten minutes of every morning discussing what I had brought in as part of my food for a pound a day. I’m very glad to be back to being able to have my morning mug of coffee (Tom is running the new coffee club as well as the office lottery) and waking up to my favourite caffeine jolt. The same week that I was eating frugally Amanda and Rob were preparing for the Sheffield half marathon. Amanda achieved her best ever time and Rob raised £570 for Dreamflight to take terminally ill children on an exciting holiday. For some reason he ran dressed as a nun. He hasn’t given us a clear explanation for this which can only have added to the pain of the run.

The current subject for discussion is how we all make it in to work. A majority of us lived on the other side of the city, most of us within walking distance of the old office. Walkit.com tells me it would take two hours at a fast pace to walk to the new place from home, and somewhat longer back. Amanda can run it, and is doing so regularly to train for her next marathon. I contend that I am too old and, as my father always said, built for comfort not speed. The solution to those of us who take being low carbon seriously turns out to be a combination of public transport (we chose the office near to the Meadowhall Interchange for its PT connections) and bicycle. Alison, Amanda and I all cycle the complete distance there and back most days as do Claire Browne, our principal landscape architect, and Andrew Lake, our new geoscientist. Rob, our half marathon running graduate ecologist has bought a bike but he’s spending so much time newt ~~bothering~~ surveying at the moment that it’s locked away. We compare notes about the latest short cuts we’ve found and what time we set out to avoid the last-minute-idiot-drivers who fail to notice our high visibility vests. My preference is to cycle in along the canal path, which is delightfully quiet if bumpy. It also gives me a remarkable opportunity to see the backsides of the industrial units lining the canal and their activities. I cycle back along the Five Weirs walk, which is much smoother but crosses a fair number of roads.

We’re currently debating what to do if everyone who cycles turns up on the same day, potentially seven of us including Paul, our FD, fighting for four bike spaces. I’ll let you now

The irony of improved building fabric performance

2011-04-15T17:06:00.002+01:00

Alison contributes the following (I am always too hot in the new office):

As Yvonne recently mentioned, we have just moved offices. The move has been interesting and has involved all kinds of changes in office behavior, commuting principles and how we interact we each other.

However, most obvious to me (as someone who is always a bit cold) is the change in temperature. I now no longer have to spend 10 months of the year in my ECUS fleece as our new office is well insulated and generally not drafty (unlike our very leaky and old-fashioned Victorian office building we moved from). This is a GOOD thing in general for people at ECUS like me who are always a bit cold! Others who are more warm-blooded are not necessarily so pleased.

However, today, for the first time in my ECUS career, I am too hot. The windows are open, but it is a wind-less day and the air conditioning unit is not working. I can only assume that it has something to do with good building insulation, 14 people in the office and lots of electrical equipment giving out heat as it is not sunny or particularly hot outside.

I am therefore left pondering the ironies of improved building fabric – fantastic in principle, but potentially an issue if we don’t have the right heating, cooling and ventilation facilities in place. And how will climate change affect this? The fact the air-con is not working is good for the environment, but not good for employee satisfaction and contentment…yet another sustainability dilemma!

The Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011

2011-04-10T21:26:00.006+01:00

The following is a legal update from Catherine:

The Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011 (finally!) came into force at the end of March, and implement changes to waste legislation made by the Revised Waste Framework Directive, as well as making long-awaited changes to the waste carriers and brokers regime. If you have any sort of dealings with waste as a producer, carrier or treatment/disposal facility (so pretty much everyone!), then read on, and make yourself aware of the changes:

The waste hierarchy has now been given legal effect, rather than merely being a principle. From October 2011 there will be a declaration on WTNs and HWCNs that companies have applied the waste hierarchy.

SIC codes will have to be included on WTNs as well as HWCNs – again, this won’t take effect until October 2011.

For new environmental permits, they will contain conditions which state that operators will have to apply the waste management hierarchy (such conditions will be added to existing permits when they are reviewed).

New category of waste “dealer” = those who use an agent to buy and sell waste

New 2 tier system of registration for carriers, brokers and dealers:

Upper tier carrier or broker:

If you carry/broker/deal in other people’s controlled waste (unless you fall under a lower tier)

If you carry/broker/deal in your own construction and demolition waste

Existing carriers and brokers won’t have to do anything (and dealer will be automatically added to existing registration)

Lasts for 3 years as existing registration does

Fee for registration

Lower tier (referred to in the Regs as “specified persons”:

If you carry/broker/deal in animal by-products, waste from a mine or a quarry or waste from premises used for agriculture

If you carry/broker/deal in other people’s controlled waste and you are a waste collection, disposal or regulation authority or a charity or voluntary organisation (i.e. charities are no longer exempt) – those that are currently registered as exempt will automatically be transferred to the lower tier

If you normally and regularly carry controlled waste produced by your own business (other than construction or demolition waste) by end of December 2013

Registration lasts indefinitely

Free registration

A single registration will cover carrier/broker/dealer. In order to simplify the transition, the EA will automatically consider all registered carriers as carriers and dealers and all registered brokers as brokers and dealers.

Some changes to hazardous waste = a new category, H13 Sensitizing, will be added to the list of properties defining waste as hazardous (the former category H13 now becomes H15). This means that some previously non-hazardous wastes may be reclassified as hazardous wastes e.g. ecotoxicity added to the properties that can define a leachate as hazardous.

The Regs explicitly state that transfer notes can be provided electronically.

From January 2015, a duty is placed on anyone collecting waste paper, metal, plastic or glass must ensure that where these waste streams have been separately collected, they are not mixed with other waste or other material with different properties.

Resource

2011-03-25T14:41:00.004Z

I’ve just spent the last three days presenting the IEMA approved Internal Auditor course to seven delightful delegates from various sectors. I love presenting in-house courses where everyone knows each other and they have lots of experience and requirements in common but courses based in ECUS with randomly selected delegates can be wonderfully enlightening. They may sometimes be more difficult because you may be trying to meet the needs of a delegate from a major manufacturing company whilst not neglecting the needs of a delegate from an office based company but the synergies you get can be marvellous. On this course we had some real experts in their fields who were very generous in sharing their knowledge and not only was it enlightening, it was fun.

I’m often surprised by how much people already know but I’m also occasionally disconcerted about what they are not aware of. On most of our courses we link waste and resource use, and sometimes quality as poor quality management can lead to a lot of waste.

On this particular course we talk about major resource issues that we are or will soon be facing. Some resources are, of course, renewable, but only if we manage them sustainably. Examples might be timber, soil, fish and so on. Some things are not renewable except in geological time scales, for example, metals and minerals. Some are not renewable at all and will eventually be exhausted, for example helium, oil and coal. All of these things, to one extent or another, are essential to our way of life. Rare earth metals, for example, are used in tablet computers, hybrid cars, wind turbines, catalytic converters and the more efficient solar PV panels.

Many of the resource issues are exacerbated by where the deposits of the materials are and the environmental impact of their exploitation. The vast majority (~97%) of rare earths are now sourced from China and with this effective monopoly comes increasing concerns for availability. Every time I have googled ‘China, rare earth’ in news over the last several months there have been stories about this issue. Today the news is of a huge increase in taxes making the cost per tonne more than $100,000. The availability and price of oil is also very much affected by the location of most oil reserves.56% of world oil reserves are in the Middle East, currently suffering from a period of unrest.

My big surprise was that when I asked my training group who was aware of the idea of peak oil no-one said yes. Resource depletion is a massively important issue that will affect us all in many different ways and peak oil is one of the most urgent and important. With reference back to my resilience post of a few weeks ago, imagine how we would live without cheap fossil fuels. Our whole complex society depends on each complicated component being sourced from wherever it can be made most cheaply and delivered Just In Time to wherever it is needed. This can only work in an era of cheap oil. Currently oil is not as cheap as it was, bouncing around $100 per barrel.

At the same time that there is a global problem with oil, there is a national problem. The UK was, for a good amount of time, energy self sufficient thanks to the North Sea oil and gas fields. This is no longer the case. Last year we had to import more than 40% of our gas. 40%!! No wonder the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) produced The UK Low Carbon Transition Plan in 2009. It wasn’t just about climate change. To a large extent it was about keeping the lights on for all of us.

I spend a fair amount of time keeping up with what is happening with resource issues and I occasionally read through the comment threads as well. When I’m feeling strong. More often than I care to remember there are major skirmishes about how best to deal with these, whether governments should try to legislate to bring down consumption and hence protect out current comfortable lives for longer or whether the market should be allowed to operate without control. The argument is that as prices increase due to scarcity the almighty market will step in and cause the production of more of the important commodity. This only works if there is more of the commodity available to be extracted within a workable timescale. With oil it takes around ten years from discovery of a resource for an oil well to become fully productive. Oil wells are also no longer being drilled in easily accessible places where the return on investment is high so prices have to be consistently high for a long time for new well to be worth developing. If this does not work then the market is supposed to rush out and produce hyper-efficient vehicles, power supplies and the associated infrastructure. Also, presumably, people will be induced, by the cost, to look at minimising their own energy usage.

This is a wonderful idea as was the idea of taxing pollution sources with a tax escalator on fuel prices. The recent UK budget has, again, dealt a blow to the theory. Oil prices are rising so the chancellor has stepped in and instead of raising tax by the expected 3p/litre has reduced it by 1p/litre. I know that all drivers and transport companies are struggling at the moment with high prices but how is the omnipotent market supposed to save us all if the government steps in whenever we reach a level where it should start to work?

Interesting link

2011-03-20T12:00:00.003Z

This is a useful and interesting chart which puts radiation fears into perspective. Have a look here.

On yer bike!

2011-03-18T06:58:00.001Z

Well life has been very exciting at ECUS these last few weeks. We are now fully installed in the Meadowhall office and are settling in nicely. As predicted we are missing the charity shops, the independent cafes and restaurants and Margaret, our wonderful cleaner for many years. There are those who think that Meadowhall is a suitable substitute and there seem to have been a few trips out to M&S and Greggs. Chris has even found a possible replacement for Vittles to provide lunches for the EMS Internal Auditor course that I’m running next week. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

One of the things that continues to be a topic of conversation for us in our new place is how we all get to work. Most of those who have always driven continue to do so, finding the easy access from the M1 is a boon. Those of us who walked to work are considering out options.

One of the main reasons I used to walk to work, other than the fact that I got rid of my car and First cancelled the bus, was that it gave me some exercise that didn’t involve treadmills, aircon and MTV. Catching two buses, one into town and the other out to Meadowhall on the other side, would do away with that. Also, it is expensive and takes a long time. My first solution has been to walk to the station, it takes about three quarters of an hour, hop onto the train to Bridlington at 8.41, get off again five minutes later at Meadowhall and walk along the Transpennine Trail to the back gate into the car park. This has turned out to be both quite pleasant and good exercise. Because I’ve hardly been in the office lately and one thing and another, I’ve done that trip to work several times but not the trip back. The trip that involves the long uphill drag home.

This morning I was all set to walk in again but, predictably, I ended up running late. Oops! Not to worry though. I had an alternative just waiting to be tried. I couple of weeks ago I went shopping. Now I’m not a woman who enjoys shopping. Shopping for clothes is always disappointing because I’m not a size 10 and shopping for food is boring. This was different though and I had a personal shopper and everything. A helpful young man called Tom. I went to the Edinburgh Bicycle Cooperative at Nether Edge in Sheffield. I told Tom what I wanted and within a matter of minutes I had a bike ordered and all the extra stuff you have to buy these days; pannier rack, lights, locks, helmet, mudguards (!) and cycle clips. Which I immediately misplaced but a couple of red Post Office elastic bands do very well. A week later I was in possession of a beautiful white Specialize Ariel bike, a girly bike (no cross bar). I love it.

So when I was already five minutes late I looked to Ariel to save me. I manoeuvred it onto the road and then walked it down the hill. It’s got good brakes but that hill is too scary to ride down. I doubt I’d be able to stop at the bottom. And then I rode it, via back roads and cycle-paths, to the station and loaded us both on the Brid train. A special reason for choosing that train is that it arrives on the platform allowing immediate ramped access to the Transpennine Trail. I arrived at work on time and happy.

Full of myself and my achievement I decided to cycle the entire route home. There was plenty of advice available, both on the internet and in the office. I was assured that the best route back was following the Five Weirs Walk. Unfortunately the map I printed off was too vague to be useful and anyway, it fell out of my pocket at some point. I didn’t worry though. This is such a high profile path that it would be bound to be well signposted. Or, as it turned out, not. And it was getting dark and I had to get home under my own steam as a bike that fits in a train doesn’t fit so well on a bus or in a taxi. The off-road sections of the route were wonderful. Some of the route was on-road though. I could have coped with the occasional on-road section if I hadn’t found that the red cycle paths petered out without a sign in sight to point to where to go next. Luckily, at one of these junctures, I recognized the 69 bus route that I had taken three days last week and followed that into town. I had been hoping to avoid bus routes but the drivers, perhaps recognizing an unconfident cyclist, gave me a wide berth. I finally arrived home with a great sense of triumph and a need for a soft cushion to sit on.

What I learned from this exercise in unprepared confidence was that really a bit of pre-planning would have been useful. We’ve produced some great travel plans over the years and have given lots of advice about how best to ensure people travel safely. We recommend that copies of the, often, free maps are obtained and kept at the office. We recommend all sorts of information and help, much of it available from the council or organizations like Pedal Ready and Sustrans and, again, much of it free or very reasonably priced. We’ve just been a bit busy sorting out what fixtures should be in the toilets (we women would like a mirror for example) and who brings in the milk, to do this important job. I think I might volunteer.

George...don't do that!

2011-03-13T10:15:00.002Z

It wasn't just Alison out and about recently - we all went to this event but Alison wrote it up:

Leaving work on time and a glass of wine always heralds a good start to an evening. And this one was no exception. The environmental management team minus Catherine :( but plus our most faithful groupie (Sally, Yvonne's daughter) trooped off to see one of our heros in action the other night at the Showcase.

George Monbiot was in town for one night only. I wasn't sure what to expect. We frequently read his blog and almost got him to agree to meet us for lunch at our last Away Day, but aside from knowing he is an excellent scribe with very well-formed personal views on a progressive society, we didn't know much else.

The format worked well - George opened the event with a 10 minute speech presenting an opinion on the changes to the NHS. And then he opened up the discussion to the floor. It was well attended with young and old there in equal numbers. He has done these events a lot in the past few years and took care to allow equal comments from men and women. Whilst I expect he was preaching to the converted in many cases, it was also a great opportunity to challenge our own opinions by listening to comments from a wide range of people in the audience. There were chatterboxes, quietly considered opinions, rambling comments, rants, left wingers, right wingers and bang in the middle wingers and swearers. We talked about the economy, society, the power of individuals, climate change, fossil fuels, supply and demand models and prostitution.

But the one thing I took away from it is the huge variety of opinions that are out there and the correspondingly huge privilege we have in terms of being allowed to express our opinions in public in this country. I agreed with some and I completely disagreed with others. But that didn't reduce the respect I had for anyone in the room. They are all entitled to their opinions. It would be great if we could find a way to get more and more people from all walks of life interested in sharing their views in this way.

So George....please keep doing that!

A 'lean' approach to sustainabilty

2011-03-04T07:48:00.002Z

Alison has been out and about again. Here she reports on an interesting topic:

I can honestly say that I never stop learning in my job. That is a privilege but also hard work sometimes! It means you constantly have to review how you think, what you are doing and how you are advising your clients.

Working with the manufacturing sector has taught me a lot about efficiency and waste, and not just tangible efficiency and waste. Time, use of raw materials, distance travelled, stock management, communication between the office and the shop floor; all of these elements of manufacturing have the potential to create tangible waste and intangible inefficiencies in the system.

However, when I look at that list of potential wastes I immediately think about sustainability as opposed to lean manufacturing. It is clear that the two are inextricably linked. Generally speaking, efficient processes, efficient use of raw materials, reducing miles travelled and improving communication are tools that we use in our jobs to discuss the environmental element of sustainability with clients.

Sustainability is about the environmental AND social impacts of the economic activities that we carry out. So we can’t forget the social side of this too. It may be that more efficient or ‘leaner’ processes in manufacturing leads to loss of jobs as processes become streamlined or automated. That is a challenge for society as a whole – if you ask a manufacturer what their primary aim is it will probably be something like ‘creating value’ not ‘creating jobs’.

On Tuesday I was at an excellent event on ‘Lean Office’ organised by the very practical and supportive Manufacturing Advisory Service. Despite the potential challenges of having ‘lean’ organisations on society, it is a tool that can be effectively linked to sustainability. Carrying out value stream or process mapping of any organisation’s processes can highlight areas of waste within the system that may be able to be managed out. Reducing physical waste has an immediate cost benefit to the company and will help you conform to the new legal requirements of adhering to the waste hierarchy (reduce, reuse, recycle).

We need to start taking a broader approach to all these tools and concepts available to organisations – sustainability effectively challenges us to see the bigger picture and look at things as a whole, without forgetting people and the environment. Taking a ‘lean’ approach can be an excellent starting point.

Alison Fanshawe

Resilience - some thoughts

2011-02-25T07:32:00.001Z

I’m doing a college course at the moment and one of the requirements is that I put together and deliver a five-minute presentation on a subject of my choice. It mustn’t be work related. Five minutes is a scarily short amount of time. When I’m training we usually haven’t even got to where the loos are by five minutes. I tend to be garrulous. Crikey!

So, if not work related, what? There’d be too much setting up required to talk about science fiction, my abiding passion. I’m not sure a knitting demonstration is what the tutor had in mind, and I’m not allowed to talk about climate change. Then I had an epiphany. I’m going to talk about resilience. It is related to work but, although I touch on it in relationship to environmental issues in some courses, it isn’t something that is central to my job and it is something that I’m concerned about in my personal life. Here’s the first draft:

I’m going to talk today about resilience. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from a shock. I think the opposite would be brittleness or fragility. It is a concept that can be applied to all sorts of things, from a material to a civilisation. Hands up those who think our current civilisation is resilient.

You might guess that I don’t. The fragility of our modern British civilisation first impacted on me in the early 70s. I remember it vividly. The family was watching Star Trek and some horrid black blob beast had battened onto Spock’s back when, Bang! The lights went out. This, our first power cut of the miners’ strike, dropped us from the far galaxy spanning future directly into the cold dark scary past.

At the time we lived on a modern housing estate. When it was built a large underground oil storage tank had been provided to serve the heating needs of the whole estate. Oil was pumped through to the central heating boiler of each house. No electricity, no light, no heat. In my grandparents’ home there would have been warmth and some light from the open fire. There’d have been hot water from the geezer and the gas cooker would work for a while until the gas pressure fell. And, coming from the generation that lived through the war, they had a healthy stash of candles.

Our modern and efficient house contained exactly one candle, the advent candle. By the time the lights came back on there was only a stub left… And there was a run on candles the next day in the village. None available, not even for ready money.

I think the experience had a salutary effect on me. That and the extensive reading of disaster SF. It’s not at the forefront of my thoughts all the time but the awareness of fragility squats at the back of my mind. I’m convinced we haven’t learnt from our experiences. Our systems are terrifically efficient and terribly brittle.

What could possibly go wrong? Drought in Russia, floods in Australia, land used to grow biofuels, a growing appetite for grain fed meat in the new middle classes in China and India, speculation in commodities; all leading to escalating food prices. Not immediate enough? We’re all rich enough not to go hungry after all.

We import over 40% of our gas now. Another very cold winter, low gas storage levels, a disruption similar to the one that affected central Europe whilst Russia and the Ukraine squabbled about who was or was not stealing gas. How would we fare? A lot of our electricity is gas powered now too.

Or imagine the same very cold winter, more likely as the climate changes, causing water pipes to freeze and burst. It happened in Northern Ireland this last winter. Weeks with only bottled water.

How about another volcano? A problem with oils supplies? Remember the oil refinery blockade a few years ago? No petrol at the pumps? Very quickly little food in the shops?

Just in Time deliveries are extremely efficient but they are not resilient. We have spent the last several years working to become super-efficient, to trim down to the bare bones. A system without fat is fine if there is no famine. Resilience is all about redundancy though. When the main system fails a secondary system takes the load. If that fails there is another backup. That’s not efficient. Efficiency is fine as long as everything goes to plan and nothing breaks down.

OK. Given my awareness of the dangers have I organised my life so I am safe from these failures? I have candles, I have a newly installed woodburning stove, I have a decent amount of food storage. I feel happy that I could weather a week’s disruption without pain but more than that? Water would be a problem in my urban environment, and a build up of waste. In reality my life can only be resilient in the context of a resilient society and not only do we not have one of those, our society is getting more and more brittle all the time.

OK, now I've got to see if I can say all that in five minutes and make it interesting.

Moving

2011-02-18T08:31:00.002Z

ECUS has been comfortably ensconced in Endcliffe Holt as long as I’ve been there. It’s a lovely old building owned by the University of Sheffield and leased to us. Someone told me that it used to be the Master Cutler’s house. It must have been very grand in it’s time. Not so much now. It’s looking very tired and most of the land that must once have surrounded it has had student accommodation built on it, leaving a small amount of green where we have built a pond to attract wildlife. It could be made really lovely again but a huge amount of money would have to be spent on it.

We’re all torn about this move. When we go I won’t miss the poor insulation leading to nasty chills in the winter, the antiquated heating system leading to nasty chills in the winter or the freezing loos and kitchen. I will bid a happy farewell to the nasty chills. I will, though, miss the beautiful high ceilings (in the summer), the ability to push up the sash windows to the top and welcome in the honeyed scent of the enormous Buddleia (in the summer), the magnificent views over the valley to my house, the tremendous old trees surrounding the place and the fabulous birds you can see flitting around the place; owls, nuthatches, long tailed tits etc. I will also miss being able to walk to work in 20 minutes. And the rich diversity of charity shops, and eateries, and the York, in Broomhill.

The new place is, I understand, pretty much under the M1 at Meadowhall. There are many good things to say about it. It will be much easier for our training delegates to get to, being just off the M1 but also within 5 minutes walk of the Meadowhall interchange where there are buses, trains and the Supertram. It’s well insulated, we will be open plan so our little enclaves will open up to a wider social interaction and it backs on to the Transpennine Trail with Concord Park on the far side of the railway line. It’s amazing how much green there is around this formerly industrial area. I looked it up on Walkit.com which says it’s 7.4 miles, door to door and would take me 1 hour 59 minutes to walk if I walked fast. I’m undecided about how best to get there. If I go by public transport it is two buses or a bus and a tram or a bus and a train. And quite a lot of time. I’m thinking it might be worth investigating biking to work. It would mean using the roads (scary) to get into town but following cycle routes and along canal paths going out the other side. And then, of course, there is always car share. I feel a green travel plan coming on.

In the meantime we are bidding a lingering farewell to the old place. Lingering not because we hate to break away, although that too, but because the company providing the cabling to the new building have utterly failed to get it done by the deadline set in the contract. We had an evening saying farewell to Broomhill last week and there’s probably going to be another one this Friday. We could keep this up for weeks. Our nice desks and filing cabinets have gone over to the new place so we are using old and broken desks and living out of cardboard boxes. It’s amazing how much Stuff we’ve all accumulated too. I’ve been here four years and have had to dispose of huge amounts of paper. I must learn to put it out for recycling in a timely manner instead of hoarding it.

We’ve had a lot of fun at the old place. The barbeques were awesome. The car park Tetris was interesting. But who will rescue the baby foxes that fall into the cellar from now on? Who will feed grubs to the resident robin? And will I ever walk through Endcliffe Park again? Ah well. One era draws to a close and another one opens, ripe with possibility and excitement! I’m quite looking forward to it.

News from the manufacturing sector

2011-02-11T06:50:00.002Z

Alison recently attended an event run by the Manufacturing Advisory Service in Yorkshire which contained an update on the government's thoughts on supporting this sector.

- The government have decided to support high growth manufacturing businesses (i.e. +20% growth for more than 3 years!) – this only represents about 6% of all manufacturing companies or 1500 across the UK. They will identify and support them through a Business Coaching for Growth Support Service. MAS will remain but at a lower level, probably at a regional level but the jury is still out on how the service will work. Business Link will no longer be supported

- One CEO of a manufacturing company is sitting on the board of the new Sheffield City Region local enterprise partnership (LEP) which covers Sheffield, Chesterfield, Barnsley, Rotherham, Doncaster, Bassetlaw & North East Derbyshire. These are NOT replacements for regional development agencies (RDAs like Yorkshire Forward) and no-one is quite sure how they will work or what their remit will end up being. The good news is, they are totally industry-driven to give support to business in the region from other businesses in the region. No more quangos or middle-men. There is only approximately £10m funding available for the next three years for each LEP and the first round of bids obviously shows massive over-subscribing. But each LEP is free to pick what will best fit the region. Key aims for our LEP: advanced manufacturing, employer-led skills and support, finance (i.e. access to finance for SMEs) and a digital hub.

- Skills – SEMTA is the Learning Skills Council for manufacturing. There was interesting information on skills gap (at skills level 2 + 3) – primarily lies in the 25-40 age range (i.e. the managers of the future). This is a big problem that needs sorting.

- The Leadership Solar System (by Bill McGrawley) – 4 planets, which I thought fed nicely into ECUS' Environmental Management vision and values. This states that you need the four qualities below to lead.

1. High morality

2. Optimal product portfolio

3. Unleash people

4. Understand strategic landscape.

In addition you need prudence, the ability to listen, decisiveness, honesty, communication, no greed, don’t exploit, diversity (skills) and a measured response to challenges.

Having visions

2011-02-04T09:06:00.001Z

I haven’t written about what we’re doing at ECUS recently and there’s plenty going on, but more of that in a later posting.

First I want to talk about Environmental Management and what we’re doing. As you may recall the team is four strong now. There’s our Glorious Leader, Alison, who is a great boss. What makes a great boss? For me it is someone who listens to my wild ideas and suggests that they’re worth a look and asks if I can make them work – go flesh them out. Then there’s Catherine, our legal obsessive – every environmental department should have one. We rely on her to make sense of the legalese as ever more regulations are issued. She has taken our newest consultant under her wing as Amanda expands her auditing experience. Finally, I am spending a lot of time at the moment developing and presenting a range of training courses.

One of the most exciting, though, is the one I’m delivering next Friday, training our potential new trainers. Catherine is so knowledgeable that we think she should start passing that on to our clients. Amanda will be taking on some of the waste courses; ideal with her background in the Environment Agency. We’re also training some of the Ecologists who occasionally need to present to clients. Being able to present training in an interesting and interactive way is a real skill and much of it comes from experience and a thorough knowledge of your subject but a lot of the skill can be passed on. We are considering making the course available to those of our clients who are interested.

Our team is looking at how to provide the best service we can. We have been considering this for a long time and a week or so ago we had an ‘away day’ where we looked at our strategy moving into 2011. I’ve suffered through a ‘Visions & Values’ exercise in the past where I felt that the visions were already decided on and the actual embedded values were not necessarily what the company professed. That consultation seemed like a box to be ticked. Not so this time. We spent the morning with Siobhan facilitating our debate about what exactly our aspirations for the department are and the afternoon getting down to the nitty-gritty – ‘given what we want to do how do we start?’ At the end of the day we had a working strategy.

The vision that emerged from our day away was:

Unlimited thinking, unlimited potential, fulfilled through work

Given that we are all working in the environmental field because we want to make a difference the mission that emerged is:

· Improving the environment through encouraging, convincing and challenging our clients

· Changing the world for the better through knowledge and influence

· Helping to integrate the environment and sustainability into our clients’ core business

· Selling solutions not services - working with clients in order for them to achieve self-realised business improvements.

We have an action plan, suitably SMART, with responsibilities and deadlines allocated. I’ll let you know how we progress.

FYI - to public transport or not

2011-02-03T12:10:00.005Z

I wrote a few days ago about using public transport as part of my professional life. To help people make the decision within my company about whether to use public transport or not, I have put together a flowchart. This, obviously, works for us. As they say, Your Mileage May Vary.

Double click on the image for a clearer view.

An atlas of pollution.

2011-02-02T16:45:00.008Z

There is a fascinating datablog from the Guardian showing who is producing what carbon and whether the emissions are increasing or decreasing. The UK is the 10th largest emitter which is rather interesting, especially given our huge contribution to the historic build up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The close up picture is here. The worst information is that even the global economic slow down has not reversed the increase in carbon emissions.

A transport of delight

2011-01-28T06:28:00.004Z

I was talking about my preferred mode of travel during the lunch break of a course I was delivering last week. It's come up a number of times in recent months, maybe because of the inclement weather. I travel by public transport.

Many years ago, when I was the environmental management representative for a company implementing ISO 14001 we had an environmental consultant visit us to do a legal compliance audit. I asked him for his car registration to let reception know because we always played car park Tetris - double parking was necessary. 'I came by train,' he said and I vividly remember thinking, how very odd! I am now doing that odd thing myself. I think it is a function of being aware of all the environmental issues. As a consultant I spend an appreciable amount of time keeping up with environmental news and researching environmental impacts. Transport is one of our big ones. Not only does it emit about a quarter of the UK's greenhouse gases, the congestion and pollution caused is choking our cities and making them unpleasant places to be. We cart around large quantities of steel, plastic, glass and polluting liquids to get us from one car park to another and during some parts of our commute we move so slowly and intermittently that we are almost parked then. On Tuesday morning I walked towards work in Sheffield. I stopped to chat briefly to an acquaintance at Hunter's Bar roundabout and was overtaken (very slowly) by a huge Co-op delivery lorry. After completing my conversation I headed up Brocco Bank. I'm not a power walker, in fact my preferred speed is the gentle stroll, but on reaching the top of the hill I had to hang around for a couple of minutes for the lorry to appear in my photo. It's not very effective to travel by powered transport in Sheffield at rush hour.

So, yes, but public transport. Isn't that a bit horrid? I haven't found it to be horrid at all. It's generally very relaxing as long as you reserve a seat when travelling on the more popular trains, and none of the buses I've caught have required me to stand. What it does mean, generally, is that I have to set off earlier and arrive home later than I would by car, although by no means always. The journeys usually take longer but that time can be used. I dislike driving to a venue to present training because it means I have to review the slides the day before rather than on the journey. Similarly, when I have performed an audit I will get most of the report written up on the train on the way home. The time is not wasted as it is when driving; listening to drivel on the radio. If I don't want to work I can read, knit, or just look out of the window. The train journey from Sheffield to Manchester through the Pennines is lovely in the summer and preferable to the impatient idiots overtaking on the Snake Pass at any time of year. The journey to Edinburgh or Glasgow along the East Coast line is also lovely with stunning views at Durham, Alnmouth and Berwick and along the coast up to Eyemouth. I love train travel everywhere but around London, where I tolerate it because the alternative is so much worse. I've had some fascinating conversations (except around London) and when I'm feeling anti-social I plug in my i-Pod.

In order to make sure I get a reserved seat I book my train travel on the internet. I use the East Coast website because it doesn't charge you for using a credit card or for picking the ticket up at the station. And because I'm used to it. Other train companies and the Trainline sell tickets for all journeys. I book as far in advance as I can and doing this means not only can I get a seat but if I can be sure of my travel times I can usually get cheap tickets. The Moneysaving Expert has useful tips on this here. I also keep a lookout for offers. East Coast sent me one around Christmas which had a single to anywhere on their network for £8. I promptly booked two weekends in Scotland. The travel for each weekend cost £16. You certainly couldn't drive for that.

Yes, but if you're not going to a city centre a train is no good you say. I must admit that the integrated transport system that the various governments have said we will have anytime now still doesn't seem to be in place but in the last four years there's only been a couple of places I haven't been able to get to by public transport, both in Yorkshire. Apparently it used to be possible to get to Heckmondwike but the service was discontinued. It's possible to get to the top of the M606 in Bradford but it takes hours. When I drove, though, it took going on for three hours. About the time it would have taken by train and bus. The M1/M62/M606 were pretending to be carparks on the day I went.

It is a good point though. I often need a connection from the station to my final destination. I use two methods here. One is the TrainTaxi website. This lists all the train stations in the UK and the local taxi companies serving that station. Obviously if you are arriving at a large(ish) station like Sheffield you can expect black cabs and the site notes this. For smaller stations it is prudent to call the day before. My only problem with taxis has been because I haven't kept an eye on the calendar and neglected to get in with an early booking on the two days of travel during Eid. Not a mistake I will make again! The wonderful A.B.Cars still got me from Garforth station to the Holiday Inn in time for my presentation and amazingly cheaply and then brought me back the purse I'd dropped in the cab. I never used to use taxis. I thought them an extravagance, but the cost of a taxi on top of the train fare has only once been comparable to the mileage and is often much less, and I pass these savings on to the client.

If money is tight, as it has been these last couple of years, you might still decide to avoid the cost of a taxi. I did this recently on a trip to Tanfield Lea in County Durham. I looked up its location on Googlemaps and realised it was about equidistant from Durham and Newcastle, around 14miles. That looked like an expensive couple of trips in a taxi so I looked on Transport Direct. It turned out that there was a bus that took me to within a couple of hundred yards of my destination and though it took 3/4 of an hour longer the entire journey was pleasant. Not so much going back. Someone threw themselves in front of the train just outside Sheffield. We were waiting an hour whilst the emergency services dealt with it and probably the train driver dealt with the emotional problems he/she must have felt. At least, though, we were warm, in a lighted carriage and could go to the loo. After quarter of an hour there was also complementary hot drinks and those going past Sheffield got sandwiches too. Very much more comfortable than the hours I've spent on various occasions sitting on motorways waiting for debris to be cleared.

The only advantage I see to driving to places for work is that you can take lots of stuff. Indeed, when I had a car I had to occasionally empty out the accumulated stuff and take it back into the office. The ecologists couldn't head off with their newt traps on public transport but with a laptop & a bag of paper I can and I feel that should, not just because of my environmental principles but because it makes my life better.

Climate & weather - and not losing our balance

2010-12-06T11:48:00.009Z

One of the joys of working in environment is the comments we get when it snows. Lower than average temperatures anywhere in the UK at any time are taken as proof positive that climate change isn't real. I can understand why people would like to dismiss the whole concept. If climate change is real and the effects on our children and grandchildren are as predicted then we all ought to do something about it. To make a real difference we are going to have to make large changes. It's so much easier if we can deny it. Unfortunately the science points to climate change being real and mostly our responsibility.

People tend to forget that there is a difference between weather and climate. Weather is what we get day to day. It is variable and difficult to predict accurately. Will it rain on 3rd July? We don't know in January. Climate is the big picture and is more predictable. We can be fairly sure that it will be warmer on 3rd July than it is today. In the UK our climate is temperate maritime which means it is generally mild and damp and subject to a lot of weather. Oscar Wilde said, 'Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.' In the UK it is one of the safest conversational subjects, suitable for all, especially at the moment when it is the second winter to be unusually cold following a prolonged run of mild winters. During last year's winter a taxi driver in Sheffield (font of all knowledge) commented that there was a whole generation of drivers who had little experience of driving on ice.

What we should remember is that weather is local and climate change is global. As you can see in NASA's temperature map below whilst November was unusually cold in the UK and northern Europe there are whole areas surrounding us that are very much warmer then normal. The other thing we might consider is that climate destabilisation can have a marked effect on our local weather.

I have been saying for quite some time now, in my entirely unscientific way, that continuing arctic ice melt can only result in strange weather. That huge amount of ice at the top of the world, covering the sea and reflecting sunlight must have a large effect on the weather we experience in the UK. The gardening book I am reading at the moment, 'The Resilient Gardener' puts it very nicely:

'Climatic changes cause irregularities in the patterns of ocean currents and winds. The local effects of those changes are huge compared with the few degrees cited as likely increases in average global climate in the next few decades. A change in wind patterns that brings Arctic inland air masses to you instead of mild ocean air will matter much more than a few degrees higher average global temperature.'

This may be what is happening at the moment. Arctic sea ice is lower than usual, as can be seen on the Arctic Sea Ice News website. Scientists are already at work looking at the potential effects of lower sea-ice. The Oslo Science Conference website, reporting Dr James Overland's comments summarised, 'a warmer Arctic climate is influencing the air pressure at the North Pole and shifting wind patterns on our planet. We can expect more cold and snowy winters in Europe, eastern Asia and eastern North America'. Recently Vladimir Petoukhov and Vladimir Semenov have issued a press release based on a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR) arguing that Global Warming could cool down winter temperatures over Europe, and a reduced sea-ice extent could increase the chance of getting cold winters.

Whenever I come across any climate related news I head straight for Real Climate, a blog about 'Climate science from climate scientists'. I have to concentrate really hard to remember my physics and occasionally do background reading to fully understand what they are talking about but it's worth the effort. They didn't let me down with these stories which are discussed in a recent blog posting. They critique the JGR paper and suggest that further work needs to be done before the link they describe is confirmed but conclude, 'It is nevertheless no contradiction between a global warming and cold winters in regions like Europe. Rather, recent analysis suggest that the global mean temperature is marching towards higher values, and Petoukhov and Semenov argue that the cold winter should be an expected consequence of a global warming.'

NB The temperature anomaly map is for November 2010, the most up-to-date at the time of writing.

Snow & Ice - and staying on our feet

2010-12-06T10:50:00.005Z

Last week was cold here. It snowed lightly on Friday and the light dusting turned very quickly to ice making the roads treacherous. On Saturday night it started to properly snow and we had several inches.

Despite that, on Monday I set off for Manchester to deliver a training course. Luckily it was an afternoon course and I'd given myself plenty of time to get there. I set out at ten and arrived at 13.30 to find the room not set up, no flip chart and only four delegates. By the time I'd sorted out the room the delegate numbers were up to just a couple short of the expected numbers and we made an enthusiastic start.

To be fair, I had quite a pleasant day. There was a long wait at Sheffield Station as I'd allowed plenty of time for the bus to be delayed, which it wasn't, although the train was over half an hour late. In the new world of high-tech connectivity I didn't waste that time. I bought a coffee in order to be allowed to sit and work at a table and got on with all my outstanding stuff. The trip over the Pennines was spectacular - at this time of year I rarely see it, it being dark for both the outward and return trips. By the time we got into Manchester Piccadilly we were running so late that they turfed us off and set off back to Cleethorpes leaving us to scurry along and catch the local train to the airport.

By the time I arrived back to the airport station on my way home, one minute after the scheduled departure time, they were back to running strictly to time and I had another 55 minutes to catch up with outstanding stuff. I must say that although public transport was disrupted by the snow I never for an instant though about trying to drive to Manchester which involves either the Snake or Woodhead Passes (often closed by this sort of weather and amazingly slow even when not) or the M62, a long way round and probably carrying the burden of the traffic from the other routes.

On Tuesday morning I checked National Rail Enquiries to find that the train to Leeds was running on time. Walking through fresh snow, even down my scary steep hill, was fairly pleasant so I caught my bus, then the train all bang on time. At Leeds the train to Garforth was delayed so, following a problem the week before with the taxi company (during Eid there are very few taxi drivers available in Garforth), I took the opportunity to call ahead and ask for a taxi to be waiting for me. At this point, standing in the snow on a frigid platform, I learned that none of the drivers were prepared to drive from the station to the training venue. Hmm. Luckily one of the delegates was already there and quite happy to brave the snow and pick me up. He had a front wheel drive car and so had rather more control than the posh BMW sitting in the car park, revving but going nowhere. It was a good training course and a lovely day in Garforth where it was cold but sunny all day long. Back in Sheffield though, the difference of forty miles was clear. Whilst it had been bright and biting in Garforth it had snowed all day in Sheffield. I was tremendously grateful that the taxi driver at Sheffield Station was prepared to risk taking me towards home. He wasn't prepared to chance going off the bus route because even that was a couple of inches thick with snow. Off this the roads were about six inches deep.

By Wednesday, when the snowman was built, the snow was fifteen inches deep and we reluctantly postponed the course in Birmingham scheduled for Thursday. There was only a light dusting there and the trains were running less than 30 minutes late but there was no safe way to get to the station in Sheffield carrying a laptop and all the paperwork or, more importantly, back to my house in the evening. I worked at home Wednesday and Friday and, given that it was -10C last night, the pavements and roads are icy, and I don't fall gracefully, I am working at home today, hence the catch up. Tomorrow I'll attempt getting to Birmingham. Because there is only so much stuff that is outstanding.

CLP Regulation

2010-11-05T08:33:00.006Z

Here's a post from Catherine:

1st December this year will see the first registration deadline under REACH for those manufacturers/importers supplying a substance above 1,000 tonnes/year. Perhaps slightly less well publicised but equally important is the coming into force of key provisions of European Regulation (EC) No 1272/2008 on Classification, Labelling and Packaging of Substances and Mixtures, otherwise known as the CLP Regulation. This Regulation is the method by which the EU has adopted the agreement on a Globally Harmonised System (GHS) on the classicisation, labelling and packaging of chemicals. Changes to the system include terminology changes such as ‘hazardous’ replaced by ‘dangerous’, ‘risk phrases’ replaced by ‘hazard codes and statements’, ‘safety phrases’ replaced by ‘precautionary statements’ and ‘warnings’ (irritant, corrosive etc.) replaced by ‘signal words’ (warning, danger etc.). Although the legislation was approved in January 2009, it won’t come fully into force until June 2015, and the transitional period coincides with some of the key REACH deadlines. However, the CLP Regulation is going to have a much wider impact than just REACH as much national legislation is based on the existing CLP system. For example, the classification of hazardous waste is partly based on risk phrases, so will the Hazardous Waste Regulations have to be overhauled? It will be interesting to see how the knock-on effects of the CLP Regulation will be dealt with in the UK. The transitional period will also mean an overlap between the new and old systems, so some downstream users of chemicals will receive data sheets from one supplier using the old system and some from a different supplier using the new system! Interesting times…

Civil Sanctions for the Environment Agency

2010-10-27T17:22:00.002+01:00

Here are a few words from Alison about the new powers for the Environment Agency.

The use of civil sanctions by the Environment Agency came into force in September 2010. This adds to the EA's 'toolbox' of powers to fine for and remediate environmental damage. Some would say this is a good thing. It may help to reduce lengthy and costly court battles in some cases where a civil sanction and fine is more appropriate. The key powers include:

- Fixed monetary penalties: up to £300 for a minor non compliance causing little or no environmental harm. An example of this may be paperwork related to waste legislation. It will not result in a criminal record.

- Variable monetary penalty - this is the biggest change. It provides for the EA to fine up to £250,000 and will be set by the EA dependent on each case. Fines will be awarded for more significant damage to the environment but which do not necessarily need to lead to prosecution. An example may be a packaging waste or a water pollution offence.

This may lead to more enforcement and penalties and could have a commercial impact on all organizations that fall under the scrutiny of the EA. Let's hope everyone views it as an even better reason for the prevention of pollution through good procedures and risk management systems.

If you have any queries regarding environmental legislation at your organisation, do not hesitate to contact our consultants.

Our new admin person

2010-10-25T17:11:00.004+01:00

We've got a fab new administrator; willing, good with computers, helpful and generally nice to have around. The brooding photo was provided by Catherine and as he hasn't made another available, that's what we'll have to go with. I'll let him introduce himself.

I’m Chris, ECUS’ brand new Administration Assistant. My job basically entails sorting, coding and filing (both physically and electronically) financial things such as invoices and purchase orders, printing off and binding reports and other bits and pieces for the other members of staff, and producing stunning cups of tea and coffee for any clients who might visit the office. I also spend my time doing little jobs for the rest of the ECUS staff- anything from clearing dusty old files out of the attic to tweaking Powerpoint presentations so that they’re all in the right format. Basically, I do anything that the rest of the staff feel is beneath them!

As well as all that, I’m responsible for dealing with the majority of telephone queries, so I’m usually the first person you’ll speak to when you call the ECUS office to ask about the bats nesting in your barn- or anything else!

Outside of work, I lead a healthy and fulfilling life as a ‘creative type’ (musician, writer, occasional artist) and spend a lot of my time either writing music, playing videogames or on stage with Northern Oak, Sheffield’s premier purveyors of folk music and nature-inspired progressive heavy metal. (Coincidentally, my arrival at ECUS means that two members of the band now work here- that’s almost an official endorsement!) I also have a particularly voracious interest in history, as evidenced by a BA in History from the University of Sheffield (hopefully soon to be followed by an MA in Medieval History, also from Sheffield Uni) which manifests itself in a tendency to get annoyed at the glaring historical inaccuracies in most of the films that I watch.

Refurbishing our tired & leaky old houses

2010-09-23T06:58:00.001+01:00

A new post from Alison:

Yvonne and I went on a very interesting training course at the Building Research Establishment (BRE) the other day on Sustainable Refurbishment. It really made us think not just about the implications on the clients that we work with (particularly those that do refurbishment of social housing), but also about the refurbishment of our own houses.

We both live in houses that are at least 100 years old and as such they are pretty energy inefficient however tight we both are with the use of our heating! They are basically like sieves in terms of the heat and carbon emissions that leak from them! There were 3 main things that I took away with me from the course that we thought may be useful to share:

1. the Building Regulations apply to ALL properties undergoing refurbishment - the implications of this are potentially huge, although it became apparent that local authority building control teams do not always have the resources and understanding to police this. That is a real shame - the regulations are changing again next month and the requirements for energy efficiency (i.e. air tightness and use of A-rated equipment) are increasing - it is only through encouragement (e.g. grants and incentives) and policing that we can actually help implement the new requirements which will ultimately reduce real carbon emissions from the significant older housing stock we have in the UK

2. it costs money - refurbishing housing to meet Decent Homes standards costs money. Refurbishing them to Decent Homes standard + getting them to a point where they are energy efficient costs lots more.

3. but the technology is readily available to help improve the energy efficiency of older homes. What is missing are the skills and information to use and know about the new technology. Aerogel, external and internal insulation, photovoltaic panels, phase-changing materials....the list goes on. The new technology is really exciting. But we do not yet have a construction industry that has the knowledge and skills to implement it. This will of course change over time.

Maybe this is a classic case of demand and supply. Until the demand for new technologies is there on a large scale then the supply of them will remain expensive. It may be that the private sector moves quickly on this itself, or it may require Government intervention to help things happen more quickly. Either way it's exciting (if not challenging) times ahead.

Expanding the team

2010-09-03T11:21:00.004+01:00

I'm very pleased to say that we've been expanding the team at ECUS. We are very pleased to welcome our new batworker and, finally we have an archaeology and heritage department all of our very own which is terribly exciting. I'm hoping to be able to talk them into introducing themselves to you but, in the meantime, I have managed to get Environmental Management's new consultant to write a little piece. When we advertised for the post we received over 300 applications and interviewed ten people over two days. The candidates were very strong and I only wished we could take more of them but Amanda proved to be everything we were looking for. Here she is:

I am an assistant environmental consultant with ECUS. I have experience in environmental management, environmental accreditation schemes, green procurement, and energy auditing. I have a background in producer responsibility having previously worked for the Environment Agency’s Producer Responsibility Regulatory Service in dealing with the packaging waste, battery, and waste electronic and electrical equipment (WEEE) regulations.

In the past I have also worked with the Peak District National Park Authority (PDNPA) where I worked closely with the Environmental Quality Mark (EQM). During my time on this scheme I worked with a number of small rural businesses, primarily within the tourism & hospitality industry, to improve their resource efficiency.

Prior to my work at the Park I completed my MSc in environmental management. However, I actually initially started out studying Spanish at University and subsequently spent a prolonged period in both Central and Latin America working as an English teacher. As a result, I now have a great interest in Hispanic culture, literature and cinema but sadly failed to master how to Salsa. Other than that, in my spare time I enjoy running, walking and doing pretty much anything active in the great outdoors.

Alison goes for a little stroll...

2010-08-25T13:33:00.003+01:00

Sometimes the people of ECUS stop working and do something for charity! This time it was my turn. The three peak challenge - up and down Ben Nevis in Scotland, Scafell in Cumbria and Snowden in Wales in 24 hours.

Most of us at ECUS love the outdoors and I will happily spend hours outdoors in my free time - but usually it's for fun! My husband and I have walked Snowden and Scafell on separate occasions, but this time it was much tougher - we always thought Snowden was not that tricky but after no sleep for 36 hours and two other mountains it proved equally as challenging. The beer and snickers at the top in the sunset was well worth the wait. However I would recommend the challenge to anyone - the sense of achievement is immense and my body is aching but my mind is content this morning!

The hardest part is travelling between all three mountains in the time allocated and staying awake enough to get up when you arrive at the next mountain and put your walking boots back on blistered and tired feet!

So thanks to everyone who sponsored me - you helped to raise about £300 for the Bluebell Wood Children's Hospice (http://www.bluebellwood.org/) which I know will be greatly appreciated.

Reporting the environment

2010-08-23T23:33:00.002+01:00

I recently came across an interesting report on the Register. It's a fabulous example of bad reporting, drawing conclusions that are unwarranted from the information.

The piece is titled, 'People have NO BLOODY IDEA about saving energy' and subtitled, 'Those keenest to be green are most ignorant - survey.' I guess they provide fair warning in their titling that this is not an objective report. It is, however, based on a fairly interesting piece of scientific research and the Register were good enough to provide a link to the original paper.

Having read both the Register's article and the original paper, 'Public perceptions of energy consumption and savings', I can agree what the Register reported was not incorrect but the spin they had imparted to a sober little paper was so strenuous it is probably still reeling.

What the original article says is that people are not fully aware of the energy used by their various activities, appliances or embodied in the products they use. From the information presented this is true.

I will even admit, sheepishly, that the contrasting embodied energy costs for glass and aluminium surprised me. I hadn't really thought about it but it seems fairly obvious that this would be the case once I had given it some thought. The melting point of aluminium is around 660C, for glass it is at least 1400C, depending on constituents. From this the Register concludes that 'as a true eco-person, you shouldn't be recycling glass, you ought not to be using it at all.' Well, yes. And no. Unfortunately, at present I am unable to find the sort of wine I want to drink in aluminium cans. Given that I am unlikely to stop drinking wine in the immediate future it is still better for me to send my glass bottles for recycling than not*.

The article continues, 'Again, when asked what the single most effective thing they could do to save energy, the most popular response in the survey was to turn off lights. In fact lighting accounts for a relatively small proportion of the average person's energy use and almost all of us could save far more juice (and carbon) in other ways - for instance by turning the heating down as little as a single degree, something which many extremely keen lightswitch nazis** refuse to do.'

I have an issue with this paragraph. I am not disputing that turning the heating down will save more energy than turning off lights, but there is also no reason not to turn lights off in a room not being used. The Register seems very keen on either/or choices. It might surprise them but it is quite possible to turn the heating down by one degree and turn lights off in unused rooms.

They go on to quote the original paper that states 'participants estimated that line drying saves more energy than changing the washer's settings (the reverse is true)'. My concern with this statement is twofold. One is that I always wonder when I hear such loose phrasing. 'Changing the washer's settings' could mean anything from reducing the temperature by 10 degrees to reducing it from 90C to 30C or more. Looking at the paper's Figure 1 it is quite possible that, depending on what that phrase means, line drying may be a better saver. Difficult to tell; the graph is small with a logarithmic scale. My other concern again is, what does it matter? Both of these are potentially high energy saving. Change the washer settings and line dry.

Never mind though, the Register goes on from this paragraph to state, 'Perhaps the killer revelation from the survey is that it is, in fact, the very people who are keenest and most active about reducing their energy consumption who are the most ignorant.' Despite the exaggeration and emotive language this is, in fact, the conclusion of the paper. People are optimistic that what they are doing is having a positive effect. Their perceptions are not as accurate as they could be. This is a problem if for example, you comfort yourself that the impact of your flight to Australia will be offset by turning the lights out and recycling your wine bottles. It may also be a problem if, as a Register reader, you can only take one action at a time so rather than turn your thermostat down, line dry your clothes, boil only as much water as you need and cycle to work you unplug your phone charger.

The lesson the Register takes from the information contained within the paper is, 'In other words, ignore that earnest friend of yours who recycles religiously, turns off the lights all the time, and unplugs the telly every night... They quite literally have no idea what they are talking about.' Well no, that's not what the paper said. The original paper suggested that better and more accurate information would help to reduce emissions and public information campaigns should focus on behaviours that could have a greater effect - forget the phone chargers and turn down the heating. They conclude, 'It is therefore vital that public communications about climate change also address misconceptions about energy consumption and savings, so that people can make better decisions for their pocketbooks and the planet.' The Register, on the other hand, concludes that we should 'ignore the many worth organisations - for instance the Energy Saving Trust here in the UK, which you pay for through your taxes - which have made us all so ignorant.' I took a quick look at the EST website. The top ten tips did indeed include the admonition, 'Don't leave appliances on stand-by and remember not to leave laptops and mobile phones on charge unnecessarily'. It also, however, suggested sorting out dripping hot water taps, fully loading our washing machines, boiling only as much water as needed, changing to low energy bulbs, turning lights off, closing curtains at dusk and draught proofing, turning your water thermostat down (also reduces the risk of scalding small children) and turning your central heating thermostat down. The information on the site would be improved if each tactic was rated on energy saving effectiveness but the tips given were all generally good and do not seem to me to be making us ignorant. The worst that could be said is that it is not as informative as it could be.

I wonder what the Register gains by subverting a worthy piece of research. It makes no sense to me.

*Ideally glass bottles should be reused. My milkman very kindly takes my glass milk bottles back for reuse. It doesn't need vastly more energy to take them back because he was coming to my house to deliver anyway.

**As a rule of thumb, use of the word nazi in an article not talking about the german fascist movement of the mid 20th century is an indicator of a lack of objectivity.

Really useful link

2010-08-19T17:51:00.003+01:00

This is a BBC website (beta at present) showing the comparative size of things centred over whatever postcode you enter. I particularly like the environmental disaster section. Wow! The Gulf oil spill, the toxic cloud from Bhopal, the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl and, very worryingly, the Eastern Pacific garbage patch. Go have a look!

Thoughts from a motorway service station

2010-08-10T09:52:00.002+01:00

Some interesting thoughts from Alison:

It was a hot and sticky August day and the threat of rain was in the air. We pulled off the M40 on the way back from another carbon-intensive wedding in London to fill up our (reasonably fuel efficient) car. My husband dealt with the fuel payment (can it really cost £70 to fill up a 1.9 litre engine car these days?!) and I walked back to the actual services to buy some lunch.

The services resembled a cross between Alton Towers during the holidays and that old favourite TV programme ‘Supermarket Sweep’. There was a hideous queue for the ladies, every seat (inside and outside) was taken with families on their way to or on their way back from holiday destinations and people were literally throwing themselves on food wherever they could grab it from.

But quite aside from the enochlophobia that suddenly came over me I was completely overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of consumption that was going on in those 50 metres squared. Cappucinos, fast food, packaged sandwiches, sweets, crisps, fruit (not much), canned drinks. I stopped and looked around me and could not see one single person without their mouths open stuffing food and drink into it.

I freely admit that on this occasion I joined them. I usually try and make our own lunch/dinner in the car, not because I’m an eco-warrior, but because I refuse to dish out for the extortionate prices they charge you at the service stations (talk about a closed market). I paid £10 for two lots of sandwiches and two bags of crisps – ouch.

If this much consumption of food and drink and this much waste was being generated at this one small service station off the M40 at that precise moment in time (which probably accounted for 0.00001% of the UK’s population), how much was being consumed and wasted around the world at that moment? A scary thought.

So what can we do? Make our own sandwiches? Well yes, but that may not be the long-term, universal solution of choice. Somehow we have to wake people up to the reality of having a finite amount of space and resources on this earth. Organisations and the culture therein can play a big part in this – what type of culture do you advocate at your organization? Do you have a Green Travel Plan but your Directors still turn up to work in their 3 litre engine sports cars? Do you order in food for meetings from local companies but then always thrown half of it away?

We have to learn to complete the sentences which we are beginning to start. “We have a Green Travel Plan…..and everyone in our company from the top to the bottom is committed to trying to uphold the plan and reduce carbon emissions”. “We order food locally…….and have implemented a system to ensure that we do not over-order and that leftovers are distributed to staff”.

We are still thinking one dimensionally about resource efficiency and consumption – it is time we stopped leaving things unsaid.

ECUS BBQ

2010-08-03T15:16:00.004+01:00

We had a barbecue after work on Friday. Follwing a sunny intervals kind of week, Friday had a glowering look. Inevitably, as packing up time approached, the drizzle settled in. Cunningly I had failed to finish my presentation (BREEAM* awareness and rather a struggle) so I let the more efficient people faff. As the rain intensified and the light levels diminished (heading for dreach) a flurry of emails drifted into the right hand corner of my screen. Should we cancel? I hacked away at my presentation, reducing the 187 slides to 80 (still too many I know), whilst the bodging began. When I finally left the post-operative remnants of my presentation the building was eerily empty but there was a substantial jolly racket outside. The double doors of the garage had been opened and a huge blue tarpaulin stretched over the yard, held in place by straining bungee cords. Two barbecues were tended by the inevitable men; Tom, one of our ecologists sported a woman in underwear and stockings type of apron (sartorial elegance for BBQs) and John, Shona's chap, was togged out most attractively in a red and white spotty pinny with layers of ruffles. At the back of the garage, among the accumulated rubbish, a tiny MP3 player was attached to a set of speakers and pumped cheerful music out into the gloom whilst geoscience's coolboxes, only slightly grubby from carrying soil samples, had been filled with ice and beer.

You can probably imagine the rest. Billows of smoke, burnt sausages, toddlers splashing in the puddles, increasingly loud chatter, intensifying rainfall, darkness gathering and a huge amount of fun. Oh, and someone, usually Catherine, occasionally emptying the accumulated rainfall off the tarp to avoid collapse. The beginning of the break-up came as toddlers got increasingly grumpy and were carted off to their beds. We stacked chairs, let barbecues cool, finished up all the open bottles and wandered off into the night. Ed and Ali kindly gave Sally and me a lift home through the deluge. The young ecologists set off for the pub and then probably the clubs.

Would it have been so much fun if it had been a sunny evening? Well yes, probably. But the adversity was fun too. We're quite good at that.

* BREEAM - building research establishment environmental assessment method

Now with additional apron photo - sorry about the blurriness - it was taken on Catherine's phone.

Caring about biodiversity

2010-07-29T06:24:00.003+01:00

I don't write about ecology often enough, especially given that our Ecology Department is the biggest part of the company. I spend all my time thinking about management systems and waste disposal options and somehow forget the bigger picture.

The bigger picture is that ecology and biodiversity are central to our quality of life and, in some cases, much more than that. In the light of this I was fascinated to read George Monbiots blog this morning about 'Naming the Nameless'. His contention was that people generally do not connect or sympathise with the plight of a species whose name they cannot pronounce or remember. He suggested a competition to name some endangered species currently labouring under the burden of latin names alone. As he points out, latin names are essential for scientific purposes but common names are more meaningful to those of us not steeped in binomial nomenclature. Following this competition the obscure Stenus longitarsis, a beetle that escapes predators using natural 'jet skis' receives the rather spiffy and appropriate common name of skeetle. The full list of these new names can be found on the Natural England website here. Have a look.

Water. Too little, too much.

2010-07-21T09:42:00.010+01:00

I've been thinking about water a lot recently. There have been a number of reasons for this. I have been working with a couple of organisations that have recently realised that managing their water use could save money, and we've been working with a water company to provide environmental training. I guess that we tend to forget water, both use and pollution, as an issue because we don't see where it comes from or where the sewage goes to. It doesn't cost nearly as much as energy and the Government is not running an advertising campaign to remind you all the time.

Where I live we've had a a lovely warm dry spring and summer and recently my water butt reached completely empty. I had to (briefly) use tap water to keep my poor wilting plants alive in my garden, with all the inconvenience and cost that implies.

My boyfriend lives in Scotland and scoffs when I do my bit to save water. He notes that his water is not metered and anyway, Scotland has more water than it knows what to do with; it is resource rich. And then he lets the water run as he cleans his teeth! Are you regarding me strangely? Do you fail to see why that winds me up? I'll try to analyse it on a personal level and then look at it from the point of view of a large organisation.

Water is essential to life. It's also something that is aesthetically pleasing to most of us. Unpolluted water, that is. There are two main environmental impacts linked to water use; water use and water pollution.

Water use requires that we abstract water from the environment. The more we take the less remains. In a very soggy area, of course, there may still be plenty of water left in the environment and over-abstraction may not be an issue, but there are still reasons to minimise use of this valuable resource. One is that turning raw water into potable (drinking) water requires the use of energy and some dangerous chemicals. Even if the basic resource will not be affected by excessive use, wasting energy and chemicals (with their own embodied energy) should be avoided. The other is that all the excessive water going down the drain needs to be treated before sending the cleaned water back into the environment, with more use of energy and somewhat less noxious chemicals. And then, of course, there's the energy required to move all this water around. Some is moved by gravity but a great deal needs to be pumped. More energy use! To be quite honest, though, it just offends my puritan soul to waste anything.

The other issue is water pollution. To some extent, again, my feelings about this are aesthetic as much as economic. I hate to see an ecosystem or an amenity vandalised thoughtlessly and this is really how I regard water pollution; as vandalism. As a child I spent many hours paddling in our local brook, finding sticklebacks, water boatmen and caddisfly larvae. Streams and ponds act like a magnet to children, full of fascinating life and wonder. The very few species that live in oxygen depleted water may be interesting in their own right but paddling though stagnant water is not so much fun. So what causes water pollution? Sewage, oils, chemicals, excess nutrients (run-off from over fertilised fields), litter and even heat and invasive species can all result in depleted ecosystems and a general degradation of the environment. Related to this is that water is a very mobile pollution pathway. Water can move quantities of noxious emissions many miles to where they can do harm, even if your facility is located far away from sensitive receptors. Also, that your facility is nowhere near a watercourse doesn't mean that your emissions will cause no harm as surface water drains will feed, sooner or later, into a watercourse.

Personally I am more concerned about my water use rather than the water pollution I cause. For many years I lived with a septic tank and I developed the habit of being very careful about what went down the drains. If your sewage works is in your back garden you do your best to keep it as healthy as possible or it stinks. Once you've done that for 15 years you've got out of the habit of pouring pollution into the sewer. Similarly, if your septic tank has a limited capacity you develop habits of minimising water use because otherwise you end up with a boggy sewage contaminated area in the garden. Now that I live in an urban terrace, as well as my embedded good habits, I have a water meter. It's cut my monthly bill from over £30 to £12 but it does mean that I've got to keep my eye on things so that usage doesn't suddenly increase. My habit of only turning the tap on to rinse my toothbrush at the end or turning the tap off whilst I soap my hands stands me in good stead for minimising water use but I also save the water discharged as my shower warms up and use it to water my indoor tomato plants. Care with water is not embedded in modern UK culture and people tend to think I am rather strange to do what I do. It would be easier if I could retrofit grey-water use into my home but it would be expensive and, whilst I am careful, probably not really worth it. I've contented myself with fitting water saving fittings in my kitchen and bathroom and buying a washing machine with low water use.

Some sectors in the UK have already looked seriously at water minimisation. As you can imagine, I stay in hotels often and these have really spent a lot of money on water minimisation. I can only guess that this is because it makes good economic sense. Many hotels seem to have dispensed with baths altogether and use aerators on taps and shower heads. This is not just new-builds but refurbishments too, and in both economy hotels and more expensive ones.

Other organisations have not looked at this opportunity closely yet. From industry to local authorities, there are savings to be made. Old fashioned toilets and urinals abound and although it is unlikely that anyone is going to be spending quantities of money replacing these with modern units at the moment there are many cheap fixes available from Hippos to urinal water managers. There is a lot of help available. WRAP are providing Rippleffect, a free water efficiency initiatives for all businesses. It's well worth having a look at the site to see if you could benefit. The registration deadline is 15th October 2010 and will run from October to December. If you don't want to sign up to something, water tools can be found at this page.

I must just say that my water butt could have refilled five times over with the weather we've had this last fortnight, which is great, but I'm thinking about where I can fit another water butt. It's the storage that's the problem. At this time of year two or three weeks without rain means that I'm running short again.

Cool tech

2010-06-21T07:10:00.006+01:00

I'm always interested in advances in technology which minimise environmental impact. There is an interesting new piece of air conditioning technology reported at engadget. Not only is it 90% more efficient but doesn't use f-gases with their high global warming potential, instead using a salt solution as a refrigerant. I tend to think that much of the UK could do without aircon but there are places in the world that are almost unliveable without cooling. Speaking of uninhabitable areas, there is another story that Nevada is set to become the Saudi Arabia of geothermal power. These two technologies are made for each other. Las Vegas, one of the least sustainable cities on earth, can now be a little bit greener! Finally, in the realms of greentech, a potato powered battery has been developed. This technology s being made freely available to the developing world.

Oil use statistics

2010-06-14T08:28:00.004+01:00

There are some fascinating snippets around regarding the increasingly appalling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. After the Exxon Valdez disaster Greenpeace ran an advert that said:

It wasn't the Exxon Valdez captain's driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours. ~Greenpeace advertisement, New York Times, 25 February 1990

As always with major environmental incidents there appear to be a large number of contributing factors. The culture of the three companies involved in the drilling, the lack of adequate regulation and oversight, the drive to cut costs to maximise profit; all the usual culprits.

And now the blame allocation is well under way. I have occasionally said that any Quality Management System has a secret procedure, QP00 'Allocation of Blame'. In this disaster it is quite obvious that management systems have not been properly implemented. The blame allocation flow chart is flailing around, coating everyone in a slime of toxic sludge. I know that politically everyone wants to be teflon coated however I feel that right now the extreme effort could be more appropriately directed to stopping the flow and dealing with the pollution. What was learned from the Valdez? That sooner or later, if corners are cut there will be a disaster. Here we have just such another instance. Cutting edge technology occasionally falls over. The closer to the edge we are the more likely the fall over the ragged edge of disaster. The closer to the edge the more important that we have an effective plan in place for when it all goes wrong. Because it will.

So, whilst we are looking for someone to blame, BP's statistics have been published in the Guardian with a fascinating graphic showing which countries have the highest oil consumption and where the proven reserves are. Have a look. There is also an interesting opinion piece in the Washington Times which brings you and me into the blame target and comments that if we want to avoid this sort of thing we (the general public) need to learn to live with higher prices because safety costs money.

I admit I have a mild tendency to smugness in my assessment of my own environmental impact but in reality I, in common with most middle-class greenies in the UK, account for the use of a great deal of oil. But then it is so much easier to see the mote in someone else's eye!

Summertime but the living is far from easy

2010-06-09T19:44:00.004+01:00

Again with the excuses. It's been a while since we have published regular posts. Life got hectic in May and June and there haven't been enough train journeys where we have had time to think and write. I'm glad to say that Alison had one of those yesterday when she travelled down to Birmingham and back to deliver talks familiar enough not to require a lot of preparation. Three hours on the train with minimal phone reception gave her enough time to catch up on some of her reading and write a piece for the blog, for which I'm very grateful.

I'm hoping that in July we'll get a bit of breathing space and get back to more regular postings. I've got a number of topics I'd like to hold forth on from the joys of public transport to the delights of auditing.

But for now there are presentations to be written, reports to be completed and admin to be done not to mention our Achilles audit to be prepared for when we're on the other end of the clipboard of questions.

Low Carbon & Construction - Top Ten Thoughts from Alison

2010-06-09T19:36:00.003+01:00

How are the construction industry going to embrace the challenge of the Government’s plan to work towards a low carbon economy in the UK? That is a question that has been considered in the recent report issued by the Construction Innovation & Growth Team working group. It’s a really interesting report, and I thought it would be useful to paraphrase a few of the key facts, findings and recommendations that have come out of it. Alternatively you can access the report here.

The UK is committed by law to reduce carbon emissions (Climate Change Act) and due to the significant emissions from built infrastructure, the construction industry have a big part to play in working towards the carbon reduction targets
The Government’s ‘Low Carbon Transition Plan’ should be seen as a business plan for construction over the next 40 years
Whilst the construction industry has a lot to think about at the moment, the focus on carbon provides a simple and rigorous focus for action
For companies in the construction supply chain, their task is threefold:

• De-carbonise your own business

• Build energy efficient buildings

• Provide infrastructure for a low carbon economy.

To do this, each part of the construction supply chain (client, designer, buyer/surveyors, site team, final user) needs to understand and accept their responsibilities for creating a low carbon economy
To achieve this, we need skilled and enthusiastic people in the industry
Currently, there is no accurate understanding of the scale of change required to meet these challenges
Carbon presents 4 key opportunities for the construction industry:

• Lots of work – newbuild and refurbs to meet stricter carbon requirements

• Reform the structure and practice of the industry

• Export products, knowledge and skills

• Enthuse future generations to work in a forward-thinking and exciting industry

There are barriers that may hinder progress, including:

• Over-regulation and confusing support from Government

• Silo-ism and lack of collaboration and communication in the supply chain

• Up-skilling

• The gap between design and implementation in practice of low carbon buildings

• Focus on initial costs versus lifetime value

• Lack of drivers for change in customer demand, which leads to inertia on the supply side

The report has just ONE key recommendation to Government: employ a competent person to make sure we can actually implement the UK’s Low Carbon Action Plan in the construction sector.

In (environmental) praise of budget hotels

2010-06-01T05:46:00.002+01:00

I have recently been spending quite a lot of time away from home. It's part of the job and I don't mind it, though it's by no means the glamorous lifestyle it seemed from the outside. When the client is paying expenses, staying at a luxury hotel is not an option. It has always been our policy to stay at budget hotels but it has taken a while for me to embrace the idea wholeheartedly. After three weeks, off and on, living in a Travelodge I think I've finally got there, mainly because I've been impressed by the reduction in environmental impacts demonstrated by the budgets.

Those little bottles full of toiletries are a huge generator of waste and, quite honestly, it's very rare that I love the contents. The honourable exception is Hotel du Vin who provide large bottles of Arran Aromatic toiletries that you are encouraged to take away at the end of your stay. These are so nice that I am tempted to scrape the money together for another stay with them at some point, when they have an offer on, maybe. But generally, no, most hotels provide only-just-good-enough toiletries. It would be untrue to say that I haven't accumulated a stash of half used tiny bottles in the pockets of my luggage that I used to use when staying in budget hotels. Following my recent lengthy stay, however, my nasty little bottles ran out. No problem. There was a Lush nearby (you can tell!) and I followed the overpowering scent inside and bought one of their solid shampoos. What a jolly good idea! No plastic to dispose of, no liquid to leak into my bag. Why hadn't I done this before?

I thought about the toiletry issue whilst packing my bag to go home. I always take my own toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, face-wipes and moisturiser. Why not add a shampoo/conditioner bar to the bag and save myself (and my client) £20 (at least) per night? All I want from a hotel when I'm staying away from home on business is a clean comfortable room with a window that opens within walking distance of a reasonable restaurant. I can live without the pictures on the walls, the trouser press and the 'free' packet of biscuits. The shower and sink fittings tend to be water efficient to minimise the water cost to the hotel and I like this too.

Only two things would make my experience of the Romford Travelodge better. One would be free wifi and the other is a mirror in natural light that didn't have a sink or a desk in front of it so that I can see to put my mascara on. Never mind. I've bought another dongle and I just hope for the best with the make-up.

Aspects and Impacts and Essex

2010-05-19T07:16:00.003+01:00

After an exciting week in Scotland I am now spending an exciting week in Essex. I love the peripatetic life but I struggle to keep up with the news, my life and the blog. I spent a couple of hours yesterday morning looking to see if there was any interesting environmental news to pass on but it's all massive oil spill and worrying associated effects so instead I offer this simple introduction to aspects and impacts that I put together in an e-mail yesterday.

At the moment I am putting together an aspect register for your organisation. You may not have come across this before so I'll just explain briefly. The environmental standard, ISO14001, has two major commitments; to comply with environmental legislation and to prevent pollution. The initial method for dealing with these two commitments is to identify all the legislation that applies to your organisation and all the things that you can do as an organisation that will affect the environment. This is usually done in the form of a legal register and an aspect register.

An aspect is defined as 'an element of an organisation's activities, products or services that can interact with the environment'. The effect of this is an impact, which is defined as 'any change to the environment, whether adverse or beneficial, wholly or partially resulting from an organisation's environmental aspects'.

Or, to put it another way, an aspect is a cause (of pollution) and an impact is the effect (of that pollution)

Or, in yet another way, and aspect is similar to a hazard for health a safety, an impact is similar to an accident, except that some impacts are positive!

The aspect, then, is how ISO14001 identifies and controls the potential for pollution from your organisation. The idea is that if you fully control you aspects there should be no impacts.

To complicate things still further, we try to minimise the number of aspects we identify by grouping them in order to have a finite number of aspects that we can manage. Particularly in a large and complex organisation, you may have the potential for many impacts on the environment but the environment does not care whether the impact of energy consumption comes for employees driving to work in the morning, lighting the building they are working in or removing waste from a site for disposal. Rather than looking at every impact as a separate issue we group all the similar ones together, in this example, as energy consumption.

So, following that rather long-winded explanation, a few examples.

If your activity is heating the building your aspect may be energy consumption and your impact may be use of finite resource and emission of carbon dioxide contributing to climate change.

If your activity is degreasing metal before coating your aspect may be use of solvents and your impact may include emissions of VOCs to air and depletion of ozone layer (if you are still using trichloroethylene). You might also identify an associated aspect of storage of solvents which could include the impact of pollution of groundwater and disposal of hazardous material. Or you could group the two aspects together as management of solvents.

I hope this helps.

Emergency response planning

2010-05-09T20:22:00.005+01:00

ISO14001, as part of the 'do' part of the standard, requires an organization to identify all the environmental emergencies that its operations could cause and put into place plans to respond to each of these. Depending on what you do or what you store on site there may be incidents that could happen which would be regarded as an emergency. For example, if your organization stores large quantities of oil or diesel on site, a big spill could cause a lot of local pollution. The standard asks that your organisation identify all the possible environmental emergencies that could happen on site and plan how to deal with them if they ever happen.

This is obviously an excellent idea. The standard requires that you spend time preparing and thinking about what you would do whilst you are calm, rather than making decisions whilst everyone is panicking. Your plan should tell you exactly what to do in all the possible emergencies, include the equipment you need (which you should get immediately) and should include appropriate contact details so you don’t have to waste time looking up this information.

In some emergencies, letting you neighbours know what is happening means that you don’t harm anyone off-site. You should occasionally practice your environmental emergency response to make sure that everyone knows what to do. An example would be doing a practice spill using water to see whether you could deal with this if it was diesel that had spilled. After a test you might change your plan to make it work better.

Should you actually have an emergency you should put your plan into operation. If you have done a good job the plan should enable you to quickly contain and deal with your potential pollution and once it has been properly dealt with the standard also requires that you find the root cause and make sure that this type of incident could never happen again. If your plan does not work as you had hoped you need to learn from its failure and improve it. Obviously.

So that is the theory. You may have noticed we have had a number of emergencies recently. One where the emergency response plan worked well and the other where it obviously hasn't. The first is the emergency that arose with the eruption of the volcano in Iceland. Once the threat became obvious all flights that might be affected by the ash cloud were cancelled. This stranded people across Europe, which is never ideal, but avoided any aeroplane falling out of the sky. There have been complaints of over caution but I would always rather that the precautionary principle was used. I never want to be in a plane that is taking a chance with my safety.

I have already mentioned the other emergency in this blog. That is the emergency arising on the BP oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico which is currently spilling unimaginably vast quantities of oil into the sea, devastating the area around the rig and potentially causing ecological and financial damage over much of the gulf coast and beyond as the gulf stream spreads the slick. This is an example of an ineffective response plan. There seem to have been many things that went wrong but this is almost always the case with emergencies. Generally when only one thing goes wrong the effect can be contained. There have been reports of safety precautions being value engineered out and, although having the secondary precautions might not have changed anything, having designed them out to save money has been a strategic failure of the company.

More concerning though, is the report here that despite having filed a response plan, the actual response has been a failure, and what containment has been accomplished has been put in place by the US Navy rather than BP. The other issue raised is that this is the second time that BP has been responsible for an emergency response plan that has failed in a similar way. It's been 20 years since the Exxon Valdez but those are not lessons that should have been forgotten.

No organisation wants to find itself in the deep trouble that BP is currently experiencing. An emergency response plan that is regularly tested and maintained should help towards ensuring that if the worst should happen you are not seen as having been negligent, responsible for huge clean-up costs and with your reputation for environmental responsibility in tatters. When it all goes wrong, cost savings based on the assumption that everything will go to plan are seen to be misguided.In BP's case it won't just be the company paying the cost of their error but the wildlife and economies in the way of their mess.

The meaning of the blog!

2010-05-01T21:30:00.004+01:00

So, a quick play with a piece of software (Tagxedo) reveals our preoccupations. I may try this again in a month or so and see if they change.

Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

2010-05-01T12:16:00.005+01:00

There has been coverage in the news about the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the allocation of blame procedure* has already started. As I understand it at the moment up to 5,000 barrels of oil a day are flowing into the sea with no immediate way of stopping the flow. It's location, in open water, means it has great potential to spread. This has come at a very bad time for the oil industry, shortly after the US had given the go ahead for off-shore drilling in certain areas, although President Obama has said this will not stand in the way of further development. Predictions were that oil would be pushed into the shoreline and barrier marshes of Louisiana threatening the diverse wildlife in the area. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has stated that the spill is of national significance which means, "A spill that, due to its severity, size, location, actual or potential impact on the public health and welfare or the environment, or the necessary response effort, is so complex that it requires extraordinary co-ordination of federal, state, local, and responsible party resources to contain and clean up the discharge."

My favourite quote so far is from Poppy757 commenting on a story in the Guardian:

'Oil is a finite resource, it seems to me to be rather careless to decorate shorelines with it.'

*I've always thought that the there was a secret quality procedure in every Quality Management System called 'Allocation of Blame'.

Paper towels vs air dryers!

2010-05-01T09:22:00.005+01:00

A few weeks ago my colleague, Alison, identified the question, 'are paper towels or air dryers better for the environment?' as one of the most frequent queries she encounters. I don't have a scientific answer for you yet, just another link from the Guardian where Leo Hickman reports 'Dyson and Kimberly Clark in hand to hand combat over paper towels'. This is fascinating and well worth a read, not least because here in full view is a wonderful example of why you should be careful when looking at environmental claims. Essentially Kimberly Clark (KC), a major producer of paper towels (and tissues, loo-rolls, feminine hygiene products and nappies) has published research claiming that warm air and air jet dryers increase the hygiene risks. Dyson, the manufacturer of the Airblade, has responded by saying that their dryers have independent hygienic credentials and have a carbon footprint 70% lower than paper towels. I haven't studied any of the studies used to make these claims and you really need to in order to properly assess the validity of the conclusions drawn about the environmental claims. Dyson compares its environmental performance against 'virgin paper towels' whilst KC remarks that paper towels can be recycled once used. Both of these comments are valid but will affect carbon footprint calculations. Obviously both companies will choose the framing conditions to suit their products. How does an Airblade compare with use of recycled paper towels? How often do KC's paper towels get recycled?

The main point of issue, the hygiene performance, is also worth a look. The comments to Leo's article were very sensible (I haven't read all of them) and pointed out a number of things. One is that our hands are always covered on bacteria. Washing does not remove all bacteria. There is an interesting post here which tells you how to wash your hands and comments, 'the surfactant action of soap helps the running water flush the germs away. That's how it works. It's purely mechanical'. So, as someone in comments to Leo pointed out, the minute you touch the door handle on the way out your hand will be contaminated with whatever was on the last person's hand. Not everyone washes their hands effectively. Not everyone washes! This is not to say that the hygiene of the drying method is not important but that it is not the controlling factor for how clean your hands are when you get back to your desk. The differences in hygiene reported are immaterial in risk terms.

For what it's worth, my preference is to use an airjet, followed by one paper towel, followed by wiping my hands on my clothes, followed by a warm air blower. The clothes option only works when I'm wearing jeans and I haven't had the hygiene risks assessed.

Water!

2010-04-30T07:13:00.004+01:00

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

2010-04-27T17:44:00.003+01:00

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

2010-04-25T16:47:00.004+01:00

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

2010-04-12T12:55:00.006+01:00

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

2010-04-11T21:16:00.006+01:00

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...

2010-04-08T17:30:00.005+01:00

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

2010-04-08T08:44:00.003+01:00

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.

Waste exemptions

2010-03-31T15:16:00.003+01:00

UPDATE:

Following a detailed examination of the new legislation and a long discussion with the EA today, Catherine was able to confirm that, contrary to what I had written below, if you used to have an exemption 27 you no longer need to register. It now falls under one of the non-waste framework exemptions which do not need to be registered. In effect, with these exemptions, it is taken that you have an automatic exemption.

We mentioned the new waste exemptions a few weeks ago. The Environment Agency has a really useful page about it explaining the details, listing the new exemptions and giving a link to register your exemptions.

The new exemptions come into effect on 6th April 2010. From this date you will be able to register by following the link here.

Full information on these changes including guidance can be found here.

Resource issues

2010-03-28T18:49:00.005+01:00

There have been a number of discussions recently about resource issues. It is constantly in the news but never anywhere near the top level. During the various courses we run, particularly waste awareness courses, we look at resource efficiency and speak about fossil fuel (the UK's natural gas production has been declining since 2004), water (the south east of England is officially water-stressed) rare earth depletion and food security issues.

Peak Oil, something that has been causing some concern for a while, has finally caused Lord Hunt, the energy minister, to meet industrialists to calm rising fears over peak oil. According to the Guardian's report 'the government has agreed to undertake more work on whether the UK needs to take action to avoid the massive dislocation that could be caused by the early onset of 'peak oil'.' This follows on from a taskforce report in February which warned that Britain is unprepared for [peak oil and recommended packages including legislation, new technologies and behaviour-change incentives.

Peak Oil is a fairly well-known threat. Less well known resource issues have been raised by Sciencebloggers. Ethan Siegel is fascinating about helium, why we have any at all on Earth, why we need it and why it is a non-renewable resource. Dr Isis writes about 'why your medical care depends on weapons grade uranium'.

Business Week reports on further developments in China's management of various important metals including the rare earth elements so important in our modern technology and the Times updates us on the potential for phosphate depletion, a potentially disastrous issue that has been creeping up on us for some time now.

Finally, information about food security in the UK has been very nicely summarised in a one page document by DEFRA which the BBC publicised last year.

I don't have any particularly cheery words to say about any of the above other than to say that DEFRA seems to be more optimistic than I feel, and I really hope they are right.

UK may be fined for air pollution

2010-03-23T20:14:00.005Z

The Independent reports on the failure of the UK to cut local air pollution in line with the requirements set by the EU. As a result of air pollution more than 50,000 people die sooner than they might. The report mentions nitrogen oxides (NOx), particulates and ozone as the most damaging pollutants. Much of the pollution is transport related. We are told that our air quality is 'shameful'. Although health messages about obesity, passive smoking and alcohol have been well-funded, the issue of air pollution, which costs the NHS a similar amount, has hardly been mentioned. The government is expected to ask for more time to meet the limits. A similar request to give Greater London more time to meet the targets was rejected by the EU in December after DEFRA was unable to prove the city had worked hard to meet the target. In the meantime the potential for pollution related chronic illness remains.

Generating the Future

2010-03-18T20:02:00.003Z

There is a new report out from The Royal Academy of Engineering which aims to identify 'UK energy systems fit for 2050'. 2050 is, of course, the date by which the government wants us to have achieved an 80% reduction in carbon dioxide generated by the UK. It is also expected to be well past peak oil and heading quickly towards peaks for the various other types of fossil fuels worldwide. The UK is already past peak for our own oil and gas, as we have become aware over the last couple of years of bad winters when there has been increased concern over whether we have sufficient gas storage. Last July the Department of Energy and Climate Change produced the UK Low Carbon Transition Plan which can be downloaded from a link at the bottom of the page here. That was big picture, looking at why we needed to change our behaviour and outlining what different energy using sectors would have to do. This new paper looks a little deeper at possible energy generation systems necessary to achieve the targets set by the Climate Change Act.

It is no surprise that they comment that demand reduction will be essential and that all low carbon energy supply technologies will need to be used including nuclear, renewables and carbon capture and storage. It is also unsurprising that as a fundamental restructuring of the whole of the UK's energy infrastructure will be unavoidable, that the scale of the engineering challenge is massive. They note though, that as the last major investment in our electricity infrastructure was in the 70's and is reaching the end of its service life, investment in renewal would be required anyway which gives us the opportunity to develop an energy system that is 'state of the art'.

The paper concludes that this will require 'nothing short of the biggest peacetime programme of change ever seen in the UK'. They state that this transcends political ideology and call for a strategy informed by a high degree of whole systems thinking and be underpinned by critical evaluation of the economic, engineering and business realities of delivery across a system.

I would recommend having a look at the paper, it is very accessible. These are things we should be thinking and talking about now.

Drowning in junk mail

2010-03-09T11:46:00.005Z

There have been a lot of articles in the papers recently about junk mail. It used to be that we all wrote letters. These days there are not so many letters but we still want the option of having our Mothering Sunday cards delivered (trip out at lunchtime planned for Catherine and me to buy cards!) and this won't happen unless there is a nationwide service. It feels like unsolicited mail has increased perhaps because in a recession, companies need to get information on their products out to us. In the three years I have been in the house I have only once bought something from unsolicited mail so that is an awful lot of trees cut down to make instant recycling.

From my personal point of view the increase will just mean I put out the paper recycling bin twice as often. I have a canvas bag hanging on the back of my door which I sort junk into directly and I transfer this to my wheelie bin every other week. My issue with it is the amount of needless waste produced that my council then have to deal with, and the stupid use of resources to produce something that I regard as a nuisance.

There are some things that can be done and over the last three years I have cut down the unwanted material that comes through the door. You need to be aware that junk comes in different varieties.

The unsolicited mail that comes from the Royal Mail and can be stopped is unaddressed. If there is no address on the mail or it is addressed to 'the occupier' then you can contact Royal Mail and opt out. The details of how to do it with all the warnings about the information you might miss can be found at their website.

If you are getting junk addressed to you, either by name or to 'the occupier' followed by your address then Royal Mail is obliged to deliver it. It is, in fact, unlawful for them not to deliver it. In those circumstances you can contact the mailing preference service who will warn you about the great opportunities you might miss but give the option of, again, opting out of receiving their junk. On the same website you can find a telephone and an email opt out as well. This will cut down a lot of unsolicited mail although companies that you have bought goods from will continue to send their catalogues. This site will also allow you to stop advertising mail to former occupants of your house.

The third thing to do is to contact the people sending you unsolicited mailings directly. I have done this successfully with a number of companies. Usually I send a polite email asking the company not to send me any more catalogues. This works for companies I buy from too. I ask for an email catalogue rather than a paper one, not least because I am more likely to buy online from catalogues than send a hard copy of an order but also because I can delete anything that I am not interested in. This does not work for business addresses sadly or the ECUS paper recycling bin would be a lot more empty.

Yet another thing I do is to return mail for the people who lived here before me to the sender. I am never likely to buy a BMW. There is no point the garage sending out regular invitations to the former occupant. This has worked well.

The final thing is to put a notice on your door asking people not to deliver unsolicited mail. Apparently this works rather well. Stop Junk Mail will sell you a letterbox sticker or you can do your own. I am going to do my own so that I can say no to commercial leaflets and to free newspapers but yes to community information.

I suppose one more thing to think about. Maybe we should think about writing letters again. The immediacy of email is great but I've got two computer stacks full of no longer accessible emails and even if I eventually get them back, emails tend not to be things you treasure or even place a lot of importance on. You can see this in the weighting given to letters over emails in the 'real world'. I have sent many emails to my MP and my Prime Minister over the years but the only reply from the PM was when I composed a letter, printed it out, put it in an envelop, put a rather nice stamp on it and posted it. I've received very few replies to my emails to my MP.

I'm quite happy with the move to email catalogues and two sentence emails but I love to receive letters. Perhaps I should think about sending some.

More on methane...

2010-03-08T06:35:00.003Z

There have been a number of blogs picking up the methane release story I referred to last week. Real Climate has a useful article which puts it into a scientific context. If you do not know about Real Climate you should. It is a website run by real climate scientists. They provide a great service by making the scientific research accessible to the layperson. Whenever there is an overhyped climate story, in either direction of hype, I check this site out to gain a better and more realistic understanding. In the meantime, have a look at their piece on the accelerating methane release.

Methane time bomb?

2010-03-03T19:40:00.003Z

Some rather worrying news in the newspapers a week or so ago. Sorry for the delay in posting. This is reports following the significant rise in methane in the atmosphere for the third year in a row. Details can be found in the Daily Telegraph.

Why is it a worry? The theory is that large quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas approximately 23 time more powerful than carbon dioxide, are trapped in the permafrost in the arctic circle. As the world warms and permafrost melts there is the potential for this gas to be released in ever increasing quantities, maybe leading to a positive feedback loop. The scientists are reluctant to confirm the causes for this increase at present but it is something to keep an eye on.

Alison on sustainability

2010-02-24T19:52:00.002Z

If I could have a 'Frequently Asked Questions' list from having been in this job for 15 months, it would include the following:

- What does 'being sustainable' really mean?

- Why do Councils in the UK all collect different materials for recycling and why are the bins different colours?

- Is it more sustainable to use a hand-dryer or paper towels when drying your hands?

- If I got rid of my car and just used taxis and public transport would that a) be cheaper? b) be kinder to the environment?

- How do you get people to change their behaviour and switch off lights/equipment?

- Why am I being held back from making our company more sustainable by the grey-haired people in our boardroom who won't be around to worry about it in 20 years?

- Diesel or petrol engines?

- When does a waste stop being a waste?

- If something has a value is it still deemed to be waste if I'm throwing it away?

- Is Climate Change really happening?

And have I answered those questions? Well, in some cases the answers are a little more black and white, and in others the truth is I simply don't know. All I do know, is that we are still making our minds up about which activities in our lives ARE sustainable and those which are not.

I think being sustainable is 1/3 common sense, 1/3 having accurate baseline information from which we can clearly assess the issue and take informed decisions, and 1/3 hindsight. Which means 66.6% of it is something we can act upon now, and the remaining 33.3% we will learn with time. I guess the aim is to reduce the element of hindsight over time and hope that we act quickly enough to prevent long term damage to our planet.

The Glorious Leader has left. Long live the Glorious Leader

2010-02-24T19:48:00.003Z

So, Danielle Taylor has left us, heading for an undoubtedly illustrious career as Sustainability Manager for South Yorkshire Police. As the head of the Environmental Management Department she did an excellent job and we all loved the ‘chocolate and bubblebath bonus’ method of management (hint). We’ll know that she has changed the world when the uniform becomes locally sourced, environmentally sound and pink! In the meantime I’m expecting that she will help the local police focus with the sustainability of all their operations and will do a grand job for them. We gave her a jolly good send off, as can be seen in the photo of Danielle looking sad, and all the team and many of the company blubbed copiously.

Sad though we are that Danielle has left, we are thrilled that Alison Fanshawe has taken on the role. Ali is a very good manager and, having come from a financial background, has a solid grasp of the financial bottom line section of the triple bottom line of sustainability. She is a talented trainer, very organised and we, the team, are very pleased that she has agreed to be our new Glorious Leader. I have asked her to write a little something about herself but in the meantime, here are her (summarised) thoughts on sustainability. There will be more information on each topic over the next few weeks.

Practical EMS issues or The Thermostat Wars!

2010-02-21T16:09:00.013Z

In the world of Carbon Reduction Commitments and huge energy spends our little organisation might seem to have insignificant issues. The impact of our carbon footprint is as nothing compared to that of the metals industry in Sheffield or the power generation facilities in Yorkshire or even Sheffield City Council. However, our energy use is a significant aspect under our 14001 system, our energy spend is a significant part of our outgoings, we are an environmental consultancy and, as noted in an internet funny that eased its way though the firewall, no single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood. We spend a lot of time helping clients focus on their environmental impacts and, as a point of principle, we make the time to focus on our own.

We do have a number of problems when we look at minimising energy use. We lease our splendid old listed building. It is lovely in the summer when we can open the huge sash windows and let cooling breezes into the rooms. The ceilings are gracefully high, and the windows and doors provide astonishing amounts of ventilation. Even in the depths of winter. The boiler is not state of the art and none of the pipework has been relagged since the old asbestos lagging was removed. Oh yes, and the cellar is still contaminated with asbestos dust so we're not going to go down and put foam lagging around the pipes. Even worse for our measuring and monitoring, the meters are in the cellar. The leasor will be sorting out the asbestos issue when it's warm enough to turn the heating off for a few days. Not right now.

So working within this set of constraints there are still some things we can do to cut down on our energy use. We turn off the heating in the areas of the building not in use. The radiators in the meeting room are turned off at the end of each meeting. It's one of our little rituals. The corridors are not heated, except by the pipes between radiators. The radiator in the kitchen is turned off and the single thermostat for the building is kept low. The thermostat is in the building entrance hall which, given the drafts from the front door, means it will still keep the heating turned on even when set to ten degrees (C). It's supposed to be set at fifteen. I have been amused over the last few months to see what it is actually set at at various different times of day. Up to twenty five degrees on occasion. As I understand it you could set it to 100 and it would not heat the building up any better than when set to 15 which is why I don't particularly care that is being moved but it does give me some cause for thinking that we haven't got the energy minimisation message across.

There are always issues to consider when putting together an energy policy. You need your staff to understand and agree with what you are doing. Keeping the building uncomfortably cold means that people are going to sneak in electric heaters. This has health and safety implications because of the requirement to check the safety of equipment. It is also the least efficient way to heat a building, and expensive. If you need to 'police' your heating you are on to a loser; the policer is one person against many. We've seen this recently in the kitchen. As this tiny room is only used to make drinks and heat an occasional soup it has been designated an area where the radiator is kept off. We're in there for five minutes at most. Over the last couple of weeks it has been difficult to know whether to wrap up warm before going in or to strip off. I'm longing for the day when I go in and find one or other of the combatants under the worktop turning the valve on or off.

On the other hand, people who want to work in their shirt sleeves and want to heat a building to make it comfortable for that style of dress might be persuaded to consider a cardigan. I have an elusive memory that the National Trust had a 'Cardi' Policy, though I haven't been able to find reference to it on the internet, but I'm a firm believer in the 'don't turn up the thermostat, put on a jumper' message. I may be biased. Being a woman of a certain age and well padded to boot I often find it uncomfortably warm when my slender young colleagues are sitting huddled in their fleeces. As I have pointed out to them on occasion, they can put on a jumper but I can't respectably take any more clothes off.

So the moral of this story is that we need to reassess our approach and have a discussion where we all reach a consensus on our policy rather than just impose it. This may not be something that can work in a massive organisation but in our company, where we all know each other, it is something we can address. But in the meantime I'm also going to think about how to stop 20% of monitors being left on over the weekend. That's a waste from which no-one benefits.