CarbonRambling

Disposable Heroes

One of the habits to have become engrained into western societies is a knee-jerk instinct to replace rather than to mend. There is an assumption widely embedded in our minds and in our behaviour and in our economy that when a product fails we buy a new one rather than repair it.  This logic is reinforced everywhere we look around us. If H&M will sell you a shirt for £10, does it really make sense to get out a needle and cotton? If your mobile phone is upgraded for free every year, could a mobile phone repair shop ever exist in the UK?

Similarly, we have learned to turn a blind eye to waste. One of the most staggering statistics in a recent Mintel report on environmental consumption was that nearly 1/3^rd of food bought in the UK is thrown away.  Just over 50 years after the end of rationing, it has become an entirely normal, unconsidered act, to throw away billions of pounds worth of food. If such a dramatic change has occurred in just a few decades it is surely conceivable that we can create a more sustainable consumption culture. However, once again, I would sceptical about asking consumers to drive the change themselves. In the examples cited above, the current logic of the market is so geared towards replacement and waste that it takes great energy to act differently. What is needed is companies to offer consumers a visible and reasonably straightforward alternative.

One example of leadership here is Interface carpets, one of the organisations most committed to sustainability. Since the 1990s they have changed the way they sell their product. Where large retailers traditionally focus on selling you a whole carpet for a room, Interface will provide small samples that allow you to replace easily worn and dirty areas[1].  Secondly, whilst companies will traditionally sell you their product and then expect you dispose of it, Interface lease the carpet to you and hence take responsibility for reusing it and recycling it when you have finished with it.

Interface is not asking consumers to go out of their way to consume more sustainably; they are reworking the market to make it an easy, almost default behaviour. This is the way that every large scale corporation needs to be thinking if they are sincere about encouraging greener consumer behaviour.

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[1] http://www.greenmarketing.com/articles/JSP1Apr98.html

I'mboycottingyou.com

There was an interesting article recently on the trends site PFSK about ‘brand abstinence’. http://www.psfk.com/2007/01/2007_trends_bra.html The argument is that we have long recognized that our power is as consumers as much as citizens – that companies will respond to the kinds of product and brand that we buy. But now we are realizing that we can influence companies through what we don’t buy – through our abstinence. If companies don’t offer a greener version, consumers will start to buy less often, upgrade less frequently. As PFSK write

Larger brands make money by selling their products in the millions and billions; in their eyes, ethical products remain niche and low volume. In response to this inertia by larger brands, some consumers will react by engaging in brand abstinence. When no healthy products are available, these consumers will ask questions like, "Why should I replace my phone so often? What will happen to my old one? Why upgrade my PC? Do I really need a faster machine made of plastic and metal just to surf the web?"

This made us think: should there not be a website that allows you to communicate this kind of boycotting, to make it clear to the companies involved why their sales figures are down? The site would register boycotts, spread information and trigger emails to the companies that people are silently boycotting, turning small, individual protests into something much harder to ignore. 

Writing about writing

We’ve got a bit indolent recently and let poor carbon rambling slip into a state of virtual raffishness – if not outright disrepair. One of the reasons/excuses is the increased volume of other sources of green info. When we started a year or so ago, there was still a bit of piecing things together involved – the odd story in a national newspaper, a mention from a friend, or a photo taken in the street, something from another blog, or a website abroad. Today there seem to be green stories everywhere. Info’s less scarce, arguably less valuable. It feels uncomfortably close to what George Monbiot suggested/prophesised in the maxim that adorns his Heat website: “My fear is not that people will stop talking about climate change. My fear is that they will talk us to Kingdom Come”.

One odd thing of late is to compare everyday conversations about climate change with the media coverage. Do so and it’s hard not to conclude that it’s a bigger media story than an issue that people are engaging with personally, in real life. Go beyond serious green believers and people see it as important and high profile, but there is rarely a huge sense of urgency or desire to uncover and discuss the details.

So why is it such a fertile area for media? Well first off, it’s a nice combination of what newsrooms sometimes call light and shade. I.e. it has manifestly huge implications, but it touches on everyday ‘person in the street’ type stuff– it’s an issue at summits and in Sainsbury’s. Secondly, knowledge and attitudes are changing rapidly, so there is always something new to report. There are lots of ‘firsts’ available – the first company, person, film, town, county and so on to go carbon neutral; the first to display their carbon footprint, or launch a green marketing campaign. In this sense it’s a bit like Second Life, which is a perfect thing to cover in newspapers - ‘Second Life today saw its first music festival, first news agency, first mock Athenian animal sacrifice etc. There's always a new angle. Lastly and importantly there is huge room for speculation – if our emissions increase that much, if the ice recedes this much, if the water levels rise so much. There’s a lot to hypothesise and generally a long time before you’re proved wrong. Who wouldn’t want to write green news stories?

Cheese Miles

Funny how the stories and values of the high-carbon age are starting to date so quickly. Five years ago this ad’s descriptions of an epic journey of cheddar would have marked the brand out as premium quality. Today it does almost the opposite. Where are the references to local farmers, community products, low food miles etc.? And what exactly are you doing shipping these lumps of congealed milk so many miles around the country? Do you, or cheese, really want to travel that far?

Mobile/Home

Couple of useful ideas from charity groups.

Christian Aid are partnering to offer an easy way of recycling your mobile phone. Try Greener Solutions at www.pressureworks.org

And Shelter have a scheme where for a £40 donation they will put you in touch with a local architect who will give you an hours consultation on how to make your house more ecologically sound. Register at www.architectureweek.org.uk

Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

It’s tempting to see global carbon agreements like Kyoto as the end-goal. Once we’ve achieved the agreement, then the job is done. And right now with Bush’s diversionary tactics – ‘Folks, what we really need is a second, less effective system’ – and China insisting on its right to greater economic growth, such agreements certainly seem hard enough to secure. So it’s worrying to read about problems with the schemes set up under Kyoto – the closest the world has to a gold standard carbon-cutting agreement. A report by Nick Davies in The Guardian http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2093815,00.html
suggests four serious concerns:

1. Limited results – Since it began eighteen months ago the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism has contributed to projects saving 50 million tonnes of carbon ….Which sounds impressive until you realise that the UK on its own produces this much in a month.
2. Miscalculations of carbon allowances for large companies. These are the amounts of carbon that companies can generate before they have to start paying for carbon credits to burn more. These have been so over-generous, it is claimed, that large oil companies have ended up with more than they can burn. And so, being good capitalists and that, they have been selling them for a profit – £20.7 million for Shell, 17.9 million for BP. This is from a scheme designed to make them pay for doing carbon-heavy business…
3. Double-accounting: The system only works if the carbon schemes that polluters pay for are new ones. If a company or country buys carbon credits for a clean energy project that was going to happen already, then carbon-trading adds nothing. And it is alleged that this is exactly what can happen. For instance, Axel Michaelowa, an advisor to the Clean Development Mechanism, identified 3 authenticated schemes from the Jindal steel company in India which would have gone ahead purely for commercial reasons and hence should not be counted as part of the carbon-reduction scheme.
4. Inaccurate checking of projects. Davies reports of suspicious findings in an analysis by Ernst and Young of a project converting biomass (e.g. dung) into fuel. It found that community leaders were widely in favour of the project – with local farmers making decent profits from the scheme. What was peculiar was that with three schemes “each many miles from each other, Ernst and Young quoted three sources who had the same job descriptions, the same opinions, summarised in precisely the same words – which even included the same spelling mistakes (Secretry, monitory)”

Mice and things

Sometimes we find ourselves thinking whimsically about powering things in our office from wasted energy: could we extract the odd watt from the friction from our shoes; maybe harness the breeze that passes through our windows on balmier days; or feed the collective tapping at computers into some sort of amateur power solution? What about the mice that occasionally surface; could these unsavoury visitors turn out to be tiny energy sources?

So it was pleasing to see that some club-owners in Holland have designed a venue that captures energy – picking up the hundreds of feet hitting the dance floor and using it to help power the building, amongst other innovations. (See http://www.enviu.org/index.php?id=878 for more). And on a related note, apparently Nike are looking at how energy might be captured from the movement of shoes – hopefully a sign that motion-based charging of electrical devices will eventually be on the way? Like with our fanciful plans, the energy-saving is probably miniscule, but it builds carbon-awareness into the fabric of the world around us. This is something which we need a whole lot more of: obvious visual signs to remind us that energy is being used, and, hopefully, reclaimed.

International Plant a Sunflower Day

As declared by the excellent guerillagardening.org. Check out the site for simple planting instructions

Go on. Even the stuff you sprinkle on your cereal will do the trick

Carbon Laundering

Been thinking about doing a top-ten excuses for not going green.  Without doubt the Arctic Monkeys of the rundown would be the old China and India complaint: "there's no point in us going green unless China and India...." etc. etc.   

Interesting feature, then, on the world service today http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/worldtoday/news/story/2007/05/070501_podcast0105.shtml

Yes - China often tries to derail carbon cutting (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6610653.stm). But it is also the victim of a sleight of hand.  Because companies in the west are exporting to Asia not just their manufacturing jobs, but the carbon emissions that go with them. When a British firm makes an energy saving kitchen appliance in China, for instance, the goodwill and the large chunk of the profits go back to the UK. The carbon footprint involved in making it stays in China.

This was a nice feature. We need more people encouraging us to peer behind the 'China/India' cliche and to beware of a nationalist filter when looking at the elaborately interconnected world of global business.  World service can be genius

Still haven't forgiven them for axeing 'The Westway', though - the greatest west-london, medically based radio soap opera of all time http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/features/westway/index.shtml

More incentive to walk

As the sun comes out and we have the year's second wave of guilt at out gluttony (it was too cold to exercise more at new year, but this time...) take a look at walkit.com ...you put your start and end destination in and it gives you a route, an estimated time to walk it, calories burned and the all important carbon saving you'll make by walking.  It's quite scary how much CO2 is used in a 4 mile car journey...