Paper towels vs air dryers!

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!

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

Sorry.

Amusing carbon calculation

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

Ocean acidification

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

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

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

Legislation, legislation, legislation - A post by Catherine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selling the perfect food factory - Comment from Alison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Too tired to blog...

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

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

Changes in Government funded environmental support

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

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

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

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

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

Waste exemptions

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

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

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

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

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...

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?

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.