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No.72 April 2009
Ahead of the curve Bright sparks – can entrepreneurs save the world? Biochar – green gold or black magic? Peak oil – is transport on track?
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TAKE SOMETHING POSITIVE FROM THIS YEAR
We could all do with some feel-good-factor right now, and what better way to end a particularly tough year than by winning a Green Award. The 4th annual Green Awards are now open for your entries. There are new categories, and a revised format for the prize-giving night in November. Find out more at www.greenawards.co.uk
Jonathon Porritt - Guest Speaker
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Contents
Contents
Number 72 April 2009
20
26 34 30 45
Features
Regulars
Partner viewpoints
20 Peak time travel
4
Briefings – the cutting edge of news and green innovation.
33
24
A thousand words – A sense of perspective…
The world’s first windpowered sports car – Ecotricity
36
Can we learn to love the floods? – Entec UK
41
Light paper, heavy industry – Beacon Press
42
Tipping the scales for sustainable fish – Marine Stewardship Council
45
Ethical banking as financial phoenix – Triodos Bank
46
Greening the metropolis – The Natural Step
How prepared are the UK’s leading transport companies for a world of climate change and peak oil? Martin Wright talks to Brian Souter, Moir Lockhead, Will Whitehorn and Richard Brown.
etter way
37
26 Burn the trees to save the world?
e are new mber.
It’s been touted as a solution to hunger, deforestation and global warming. So is biochar the magic bullet we’ve been waiting for? Chris Goodall investigates. Photos: Eurostar; Getty/Jeff Hutchens; Adam Brett; Southern Solar; Ecotricity
nathon Porritt - Guest Speaker
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30 The cooker, the cow and the carbon capture Rajendra Pachauri and Ed Crooks argue the case for an entrepreneurial response to global warming, as we profile the winners of the Climate Change Challenge.
Forum update – Flowers, fashion and finance get the Forum for the Future treatment.
43
The Knowledge – M&S’s Richard Gillies on lycra, lingerie factories and the credit crunch.
47
American Eye – Polly Ghazi asks whether carmakers are on the road to oblivion or transformation.
48
Jonathon Porritt – How to live within our means.
49
Letters – Readers respond to Green Futures online and in print.
34 Dried fruit, juicy prospects Bananas are not the only fruit… Kay Sexton talks to Tropical Wholefoods’ Adam Brett.
Ecotricity changes gear, p33
Front cover: iStock/Sze Fei Wong
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Partners Partners
About us Green Futures is the flagship publication of Forum for the Future. It aims to be a leading source of information, opinion and debate on progress towards sustainable development. Its focus is on communicating solutions and best practice in business, central and local government, universities, the voluntary sector and society as a whole. The magazine is financed by subscribers, advertisers and charitable trusts, and by contributions from Green Futures Partners and the Forum’s Foundation Corporate Partners.
Partners are selected on the basis of their demonstrable commitment to the pursuit of sustainable development. They take an active part in the debate through Partner Viewpoint pages, where they share their views and experiences. Green Futures works with its partners on ideas for, and editorial scrutiny of, these pages, to ensure that they are consistent with the overall aims of the magazine. If you’d like to join us as a partner, please contact Anna Simpson: 020 7324 3660; anna@greenfutures.org.uk
Our Partners Food and Drink Federation Julian Hunt, 020 7420 7125 www.fdf.org.uk
Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Caroline Miller, 020 7695 3078 www.sainsburys.co.uk
Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy Jane Howarth, 020 7410 7023 www.ashdenawards.org
Groundwork Fiona Taylor, 0121 237 5815 www.groundwork.org.uk
Skanska Tanya Barnes, 01923 423906 Greg Chant-Hall, 01923 423614 www.skanska.com
Christine Dewey, 020 7496 4000 www.bp.com Commission for Rural Communities Paul Pennycook, 01242 534056 www.ruralcommunities.gov.uk Ecotricity Matt Thomas, 01453 756111 www.ecotricity.co.uk Ecover Mick Bremans, +32 3 309 2500 www.ecover.com Energy Saving Trust Paula Owen, 020 7654 2411 www.energysavingtrust.org.uk Entec Francesco Corsi, 0191 272 6128 www.entecuk.com
Managing Editor HANNAH BULLOCK Publishing Coordinator ANNA SIMPSON Consulting Editor ROGER EAST Contributing Editor BEN TUXWORTH Magazine Design JENNY SEARLE ASSOCIATES/ ANDY BONE Founder JONATHON PORRITT
AkzoNobel Elizabeth Stokes, 01928 511695 www.akzonobel.com
BP
Editor in Chief MARTIN WRIGHT
GSH Group Robert Greenfield, 01782 200400 www.gshgroup.com Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) James Simpson, 020 7811 3315 www.msc.org The National Trust Mike Collins, 01793 817708 www.nationaltrust.org.uk The Natural Step International Louise Bielenstein, +46 8 789 29 00 www.thenaturalstep.org Pureprint Group Yvie Dear, 01825 768811 www.pureprint.com Royal Mail Group Martin Blake, 01252 528 681 www.royalmail.com
Triodos Bank James Niven, 0117 980 9721 www.triodos.co.uk TUI Travel Jane Ashton, 01293 5888511 www.fcenvironmentandpeople.com Unilever UK Helen Fenwick, 01372 945000 www.unilever.com Vodafone Group plc Chris Burgess, 01635 677932 www.vodafone.com WWF-UK Dax Lovegrove, 01483 412395 www.wwf.org.uk Yorkshire Forward Mike Smith, 0113 394 9741 www.yorkshire-forward.com
RWE npower Anita Longley, 01793 892716 www.RWEnpower.com
Green Futures would like to thank: Anna Pigott and Rebecca Schischa (interns) Helius (proofreading) Shelley Hannan (web)
Editorial Overseas House, 19-23 Ironmonger Row, London EC1V 3QN Tel: 020 7324 3660 Email: post@greenfutures.org.uk Subscriptions Circa, 13-17 Sturton Street, Cambridge CB1 2SN Tel: 01223 564334 Email: greenfutures@circaworld.com Green Futures is published by Forum for the Future Registered Charity Number: 1040519 ISSN No: 1366-4417 The opinions expressed in the magazine are not necessarily those of Forum for the Future, nor any of its associates. © Forum for the Future. 2009
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2 Green Futures January October April 2009 2008 2008
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Editorial
Contributors to this issue include:
F
ingers on buzzers, here’s your starter for ten.
Which government’s economic recovery package contains the highest proportion of spending allocated to green initiatives? Sweden, perhaps? Or Germany? No, you can forget the usual suspects. The answer, according to analysts at HSBC, is South Korea. It has allocated a cool 81% of its fiscal stimulus to green industries – notably in the energy field. The UK, by comparison, manages just 7% – barely half that of the US. Now, this doesn’t mean that Seoul is over ten times as keen as Britain to fight against climate change. Far from it. Anyone familiar with the Korean capital will know that this is hardly a city which oozes environmental concern from every pore. Rather, its mammoth commitment simply suggests that the Koreans are doing what they’ve done repeatedly, with striking success, over the last four decades: spotting the emerging trends in the world economy, and pouring in resources to make sure their leading companies catch the wave. By contrast, Britain is looking almost wilfully sluggish. Here’s a warning from a man named Stern. “How good will the business judgement of companies look in five, ten, or twenty years’ time, when it becomes clear [that] high carbon goods and services have simply become untenable?” Familiar stuff, perhaps, but this isn’t Lord Stern of Stern Report fame. It’s his namesake, Todd – Special Envoy for Climate Change at the US State Department. So with even the Americans seizing the day, it’s no wonder that business leaders on this side of the pond are getting impatient. In the words of Richard Lambert, director-general of the CBI: “The government should get on with it.” Otherwise, he warns, billions of pounds of investment will leak away to America and Asia. It’s an impatience echoed by everyone from Lord (yes, that one) Stern (‘Briefings’, p9), to the UK’s leading transport chiefs (‘Peak Time Travel’, pp 10-13). But where big business and government falter, light-footed entrepreneurs grab their chance. As Ed Crooks points out in ‘Small is ambitious’ (p32): “It’s rarely the large established companies that come up with revolutionary ideas – they have too much invested in the status quo”. (This might, incidentally, be a crumb of comfort to those of us who have watched askance as BP and Shell reverse with indecent haste out of their commitments to solar and wind.) Instead, says Crooks, it’s the smaller, sharper operators who have the imagination to come up with the sort of innovative breakthroughs we so urgently need. It’s exactly these breakthroughs which are highlighted in ‘The cooker, the cow and the carbon capture’ (pp30-32), which profiles the five shortlisted entrants to the FT Climate Change Challenge, staged jointly by Forum for the Future and the Financial Times. Among them is what’s intriguingly referred to as “a microwave for biochar”. For some, biochar is the ‘killer app’ the world’s been waiting for in the fight against climate change. For others, it’s a disastrous false trail which could lead to massive deforestation and worsening poverty. In ‘Burn the trees to save the world?’ (pp26-29), Chris Goodall sets out the potential and the pitfalls of this beguilingly simple technology. It promises to be a long and impassioned debate – and it’s only just beginning.
Martin Wright Editor in Chief martin@greenfutures.org.uk
www.greenfutures.org.uk
It’s not often a writer gets asked to green a country. But that happened to Chris Goodall when he was invited by the Maldives President to devise a strategy for making the low-lying island state carbon neutral [p16]. Author of The Green Guide for Business and Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, Goodall homes in on the ninth – and perhaps most controversial technology of all – biochar, on pages 26-29.
As the world’s leading expert on climate change and chair of the IPCC, Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr Rajendra Pachauri has strong views on the role of business in combating global warming. Read them on pages 30-32.
Green Futures’ US correspondent and former Observer Environment Editor Polly Ghazi takes a trip to Detroit’s annual motor show – and finds a humbled industry desperate to go green [p47].
Outspoken environmentalist, Chair of the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission and Founder of Forum for the Future, Jonathon Porritt talks about natural debt, national debt and his hopes for a very different kind of economic recovery [p48].
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Briefings
Briefings Engineers claim to reverse impact of carbon-intensive industry A team of British engineers claims to have developed a novel CO2-capturing process, which could transform one of the world’s most carbon-intensive industries into a significant carbon sink. It could mean that, over its lifecycle, concrete could soak up around 1.1 tonnes of CO2 for each tonne of cement – so absorbing over twice as much CO2 as is produced in its manufacture. see page 16>
The hanging gardens of the future Within a few decades, every one of us will own a ‘farm in a box’, which will sit on our balcony, roof or next to a window. Advances in aeroponics – growing in a mist of nutrients, rather like in a rainforest – will give us emissions-neutral food at the heart of our cities. And there will be vertical farms, too, in the redundant high-rise office blocks we no longer commute to, and in the multi-storey carparks we no longer need… continued in our new Weak signals from the future section page 7>
35% The growth in brown hare numbers on farms managed with wildlife-friendly schemes this year. The Wildlife Trusts worked with farmers to leave wide field margins and delay grass cutting. Overall, brown hare numbers have declined by 75% over the last 50 years.
“
Never waste a good crisis... when it can have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security. Hillary Clinton
”
42.5% The overall increase in value of the FTSE renewable and alternative energy index in the five years to end-February 2009. The FTSE global all cap index fell by 17.4% over the same period.
4 Green Futures April 2009
Photos: nysunworks.org, iStock/Mark Leeman
Concrete captures carbon?
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Briefings
Retrofits for Brits Government promises householders green refurbs Seven million UK homes are to get green makeovers by 2020. The £350 million government initiative, known as the ‘Great British Refurb’, will see insulation and low-carbon technology, such as solar panels and biomass boilers, rolled out to the poorest areas of the country. see page 15>
50% The increase in windgeneration capacity in the US in the last year. The US has now overtaken Germany as the world’s largest wind producer.
Co-op works on water Local store plugs into community-funded micro-hydro Power from a Peak District river is to be harnessed to generate green electricity for the local Co-op store in New Mills, Derbyshire. For the Co-op’s Chris Shearlock, it ticked too many boxes to resist. As he says, “the local community is involved, it’s co-operatively owned and it’s generating renewable electricity.” see page 13> Meanwhile, both B&Q and Tesco have unveiled new ‘eco-stores’, designed to be blueprints for the low-carbon supermarkets of the future. see page 11>
Greener companies “more crunch-proof”
Photos: Mark William Richardson/Shutterstock; Vasilius/Shutterstock
New report tracks value of sustainability commitment during recession Businesses with a ‘true commitment’ to sustainability are weathering the downturn better than their rivals, according to a new report. Green Winners: The Performance of SustainabilityFocused Companies in the Financial Crisis looked at 99 companies on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and/or the Goldman Sachs Sustain focus lists. And it found they were outperforming their industry peers – by an impressive average of 10% over three months and 15% over six. Far from being seen as a luxury, sustainability spending is a tool to beat the recession, concludes the report. see page 10>
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“ ” Low carbon is not a sector of an economy – it is an economy... There is no highcarbon future. Peter Mandelson
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Briefings
From lotus to cannabis Lotus’s Eco Elise features a hemp spoiler and body panels, sisal carpets. The woollen fabric seats and water-based paint. The unusual materials reduce the environmental impact of production. Hemp and sisal are natural, renewable fibres that absorb CO2 as they grow; the chemical-free wool uses no dye and little processing, and the waterbased paint saves energy thanks to its very low cure temperature. Performance is enhanced too, as the Eco Elise is nearly 4% lighter than the 860kg standard Elise – enough to reduce the CO2 emitted in powering the car from 196g per km to 184g, and to boost fuel efficiency from 34mpg to 42.7mpg. Lotus claims that the weight loss has improved the handling and braking performance. But why, you might ask, is the Elise a petrol model, when Lotus has pioneered electric and hybrid engines? Matthew Reed of Lotus Engineering explains that the car is intended to showcase the materials, not the latest eco engines. And although the ‘technology demonstrator’ car, launched at last year’s British Motor Show, is still undergoing testing, Reed is optimistic about its prospects: “I wouldn’t say that mass-production is out of the question.” Indeed, successes are already being fed into the production of other models – water-based paint will be used throughout the company by next year, a world first in car manufacturing. – Anna Pigott
Natural high?
Green pound power Leicester sets itself ethical procurement challenge
6 Green Futures April 2009
The percentage of toilet roll sold in the US that currently comes from virgin forests. Greenpeace has launched a campaign in the US to raise awareness of the environmental cost of using luxury brand nonrecycled toilet paper. Allen Hershkowitz of the Natural Resources Defense Council has called the use of virgin wood to make toilet paper “one of the greatest excesses of our age”.
Photos: Lotus, Fairtrade Foundation
Leicester City Council (LCC) is forging ahead with an ambitious new approach to procurement: making sure that everything bought is sustainably sourced. The policy will impact on some £190 million worth of spend. Since February, all goods and services – from paper clips, vending machines and uniforms to transport, energy and construction works – are subject to a dazzling array of ethical and environmental criteria. These include using lowcarbon technologies, favouring locally sourced products, and working only with suppliers and contractors who adhere to International Labour Organisation rules on child labour. LCC is also phasing out GM produce and bringing in fairtrade products. Plans are currently in the pipeline to introduce fairtrade What a bananas and fruit juices in all council-run lovely bunch (of procurement targets) school canteens. Fiona Dowson, a procurement expert at Forum for the Future, says we shouldn’t underestimate what’s involved in implementing a completely ethical approach to sourcing in a public sector organisation: “Lots of organisations have policies… but don’t really follow up with practical actions beyond fairtrade tea and coffee. It’s great that Leicester are taking a joined-up approach to sustainable procurement, considering environmental, is ethical and community issues together.” LCC’s sustainability officer Helen Landsdown stresses that, given the scale of the task, implementation will not happen overnight but rather on a ‘case-by-case basis’. Each big spending area will be targeted, with LCC “working with procurers to find ways to make necessary changes”. Although the council “won’t have the same level of influence as Tesco or Gap”, says Dowson, the fact that it is prioritising its efforts where “there’s most scope to create change” is encouraging. And with a collective purchasing power of £40 billion a year, the UK’s local authorities could start a hefty ball rolling. – Rebecca Schischa
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Briefings
Weak signals from the future Water fight Oil wars are a thing of the past, and water has become the one resource worth fighting for. Only businesses with the foresight to cut down on waste and build future access to water into their strategies will hold up. So says a report by Ceres Group, urging companies to work out their dependence on water. The report backs Nestlé Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe’s warning that “under present conditions… we will run out of water long before we run out of fuel”.
The hanging gardens of the future Peter Madden sees a future in which cities feed themselves. By 2020, two-thirds of the world will live in cities, often sprawling megalopolises. Growing populations will put further pressure on land already degraded by over-farming and desertificaion. Given that we are always only a few meals away from anarchy, how will we feed these cities? There is a strong possibility that – two and a half centuries after the start of the industrial revolution – we will all become farmers again. Every one of us will own a ‘farm in a box’, which will sit on our balcony, roof or next to a window. Advances in aeroponics – growing in a mist of nutrients, rather like in a rainforest – will give us emissions-neutral food at the heart of our cities. These boxes would be supplemented by neighbourhood vertical farms housed in the redundant high-rise office blocks we no longer commute to, and the multi-storey carparks we no longer need. They will employ closed-loop systems, generating their own energy and harvesting and recycling rainwater. Front gardens, flat roofs and patches of wasteland will also become mini-market gardens, helping to green, cool and feed the city.
Fieldwork from afar Wireless sensors powered by tiny chips and solar panels could revolutionise the ways scientists, conservationists and farmers monitor nature. Responding to movement or chemical balances in the environment, the data they transmit can alert a park ranger to the first sparks of a fire, or keep a check on toxic waste from a safe distance.
Once, it was a carpark...
Personal PV A new generation of small, lightweight plug-and-play PV panels, developed by start-up company Veranda Solar, has hit the Dutch market. The US designer Capra J’neva won m100,000 in the PICNIC Green Challenge to bring solar to a mass audience with her easy-installation panels. Moving away from the traditional concept of roof-panels, this relatively affordable product can hang from any window-ledge or gutter.
Rent bays
Photo: nysunworks.org
A new renting trend has risen out of the credit crunch. Why cut into a tight budget to meet an occasional need when you can have that camera or handbag just when you need it for a fraction of the price? The online community platform www.zilok.co.uk offers peer-to-peer renting as a sustainable alternative to eBay for have-nots, and an easy money-making ploy for the haves.
The seeds of this are already being sown. Urbanites want to grow their own – some 100,000 people are now on waiting lists for allotments in the UK, while in France, urban vineyards are fast taking root. The technology is also developing apace. Here in the UK the police recently announced that they are raiding at least three indoor cannabis farms a day, while in the US, NASA is experimenting with aeroponics for space travel. Imagine a few food riots and rocketing food prices in the decade to come, and a new ‘dig for victory’ approach to feeding ourselves starts to seem very likely. Will this urban farming be a positive trend for sustainability? Many will find the idea of a high-tech world of computer-controlled indoor mini-farms scary. Yet, such urban agriculture could bring climate benefits, put people back in touch with growing food, and provide part of the answer to feeding the world. Peter Madden is Chief Executive of Forum for the Future.
www.greenfutures.org.uk
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Briefings
Green routes out of the red Governments around the world have been spurred on by the downturn to do more, not less, to combat climate change. That’s the powerful conclusion for the ‘green economy’ agenda which emerges from a report by specialist asset managers at Deutsche Bank (DB). But there’s still widespread worry about whether – and where – more opportunities for a game-changing ‘green new deal’ are going begging. The DB Climate Change Advisors’ report was published in late February, looking back over an eight-month period. It identifies a combination of 250 new regulatory initiatives supporting climate change action (particularly to mandate more use of renewable energy) and over $200 billion worth of green spending and incentives in the recent stimulus packages introduced in the US, China, the EU and elsewhere. And it credits this double push with providing attractive opportunities to investors in such key areas as: • scaling up solar electricity and wind power generation • energy-efficient buildings and lighting • opening up the prospect of a ‘smart grid revolution’ • developing mass market hybrid and all-electric vehicles – [such as GM's Volt, below] with $26 billion going into battery technologies, fleet purchasing and helping manufacturers re-tool. Mark Fulton, DB’s Global Head of Climate Change Research, believes that the overall trend of stimulus action “will provide crucial support to climate change industries during the current global economic downturn”. Without it, the outlook could be grim. Global investment in clean energy technologies (including wind, solar, biomass and tidal) rose 5% to $155 billion in 2008, according to Angus McCrone of New Energy Finance. But, he warned, “we will struggle to get anywhere near those levels” in 2009, with developers strapped for funding in the credit crunch, and the price of fossil fuels tumbling.
What is striking, though, is how company values in the renewable energy sector – and other green technologies – have consistently outperformed the global stock market average. Over five years to the end of February 2009, a new set of FTSE indices shows the peaks and drops in startling relief – but the renewable and alternative energy index records an overall increase in value of 42.5%, while the FTSE global all cap index has fallen by 17.4%. These companies should continue to offer superior growth in the long term, Will Oulton, FTSE’s Head of Responsible Investment, told Green Futures. “I’m not finding many people who’d disagree with that,” he added. The impact of stimulus packages has yet to be fully felt, he believes, and will continue to feed through into the market this year and next as it becomes clearer where the money is actually going to be spent. Commitments on carbon cutting and switching to more renewable energy should contribute to the momentum, he believes – and much of the potential that’s been sitting in small companies will go on proving attractive to major global business.
Star power turns Highlights of green energy initiatives identified in the DB report include: ★ US tax credits, cash refunds and loan guarantees for renewable energy development, allied to a proposed federal standard for energy suppliers’ renewables portfolios ★ particularly generous new French feed-in tariffs for solar power ★ a $70 billion upgrade of China’s electricity grid ★ $12 billion in investments in smart grid technology in the US and EU.
1/3 Photo: GM
The proportion of China’s carbon emissions which come from the production of goods for export. CO2 calculations by the Stockholm Environment Institute based on both consumption and production of food and goods show a rise of more than 20% since 1990 for the UK; by contrast, government statistics based on emissions generated within the UK alone show an 18% fall.
Spark of recovery: will GM's electric Volt help US carmakers turn the corner?
8 Green Futures April 2009
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Briefings
UK action lags far behind US, China, Korea Future generation: is China’s commitment to green energy putting the West to shame?
“ ” Action is rather attractive, inaction is inexcusable. Nicholas Stern
Photos: Martin Wright/Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy
Stern calls for action
The stormy passage through the US Congress of the Obama administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act hogged most of the ‘green stimulus’ headlines in the Western media for weeks. But most of the good stuff did get through. As signed into law on 17 February, its ten-year package valued at $787 billion is reckoned by Deutsche Bank to be 13.5% ‘green’, of which $85 billion will be direct government spending and $21 billion renewable energy tax breaks. The figures differ slightly in HSBC’s February report, A Climate for Recovery – the colour of stimulus goes green. Here, the headline must surely be that it’s China, not the US, which has put most into the green pot lately: over $221 billion, or not far short of 40% of its total 20092010 stimulus funding. Korea stands out in this report for the high proportion – over 80% – of its recent overall package which is devoted to maximising opportunities for its environmental sector. The EU is doing well too, earmarking 58.7%. The UK, sadly, is a long way down towards the bottom of that league. And, as the Government struggles with criticism of the affordability of its (scarcely green at all) stimulus efforts to date, few critics remain optimistic that it will do a huge amount more in the budget on 22 April. Indeed, it was already notable in late March, on the eve of the London meeting of leaders of the G20 countries, how far Prime Minister Gordon Brown was toning down his earlier rhetoric about creating “a global ‘green new deal’ that will pave the way for a low carbon recovery”. – Roger East www.dbadvisors.com/climatechange www.ftse.com
www.greenfutures.org.uk
“Green recovery programmes have the potential to stimulate private investment in low-carbon technologies, thereby developing new opportunities for employment, innovation, and wealth creation.” That’s the conclusion of a report presented to the G20 summit by Nicholas Stern of the LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate and the Environment, best known for his ‘Stern Report’ on the economics of climate change, and Ottmar Edenhofer of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. The report identified seven key areas in which government action could prove decisive: • Increasing energy efficiency – particularly by incentivising homeowners and SMEs to take action. • Upgrading physical infrastructure – in areas such as electricity grids, public and freight transport networks, and carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology. • Supporting clean technology markets – “by providing and expanding feed-in tariffs, renewable portfolio standards, production tax credits, guarantees and loans”, as well as boosting clean technology funds and dismantling trade barriers in cleantech goods and services. • Initiating flagship projects – such as pilots of new CCS plants, concentrated solar power, cellulosic biofuels, power storage and integrated hydrogen systems. • Tripling spending on energy efficiency, renewables and CCS. • Incentivising investment – primarily by pricing carbon and other fiscal measures. • Co-ordinating G20 efforts – focusing on open markets and resisting protectionism, “including green protectionism”.
Beacons of hope Among the ashes of the 20th century economic order you can find some “rare birds”, says John Elkington, author of The Phoenix Economy: 50 Pioneers in the Business of Social Innovation, a new report published by think-tank Volans. It picks out the inspired entrepreneurs and investors who are using innovative business models to offer solutions to world problems, including companies as big as GSK – and as small as Bangladesh’s CellBazaar, which provides a cell-phone-based virtual market place for the poor.
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Private equity gets principled Blackstone, Permira among firms signing up to ethical guidelines Better late than never? That would be a forgivable reaction to the news that 13 global private equity firms – who between them hold stakes in some of the biggest names in British business, such as Birds Eye, Boots and United Biscuits – have taken a key step towards integrating environmental and social concerns into their businesses, by signing up to a new set of guidelines on responsible investment. The signatories, all members of the Private Equity Council, also include major names such as Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR and Permira – which became famous amid the buyout boom of the pre-credit crunch years. Now, under the auspices of the UNbacked Principles for Responsible Investment, they have met with institutional investors to create a set of guidelines specifically for the private equity industry.
“
The nine principles include considering “environmental, public health, safety and social issues” when evaluating investments; seeking “to grow and improve companies in which they invest for long-term sustainability”; and respecting the human rights of those affected by investment activities. There need not be a contradiction between pursuing profits and sticking to such principles, the Council believes. “In today’s world, in order to maximise return on investment, we believe that businesses must address these issues,” said Robert Stewart, its Vice-President for Public Affairs. Stewart suggested that so-called limited partners – mostly institutions such as pension funds and asset management firms, who invest in private equity funds – would seek to ensure that the guidelines are being followed before investing. Alice Chapple, Director of Sustainable Financial Markets at Forum for the Future, said that while some limited partners are active on sustainable development issues,
it was by no means “a matter of course” that they would hold private equity funds to account. But she said that these do have an opportunity to think about long-term business risks such as climate change – because they take companies out of the stock market and buy and sell over a three- to five-year cycle. “You have the luxury of pulling a company into a private place while you sort out long-term perspectives – and come out at the end with a company more robustly positioned for the long term,” she said. – Chris Alden ◆ Institutional
investors’ interest in climate change appears to be increasing despite the recession. The Carbon Disclosure Project, which holds a database of corporate information on climate change, said that 475 investors signed its latest annual request to companies for climate change information – up nearly 25% on the previous year. www.unpri.org
”
Business as usual is dead – green growth is the answer to both our climate and economic problems. Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen
Greener companies “more crunch-proof” The study, by management consultancy firm A.T. Kearney, warned that green initiatives need to be truly embedded in the company’s value chain; it finds scant justification for efforts made “simply to improve public relations or catch up with industry leaders”. The most surprising finding, says the report’s co-author Louis Besland, was the consistency between industries: in 16 out of 18 of them the companies on the sustainability lists came out ahead financially as well. “It’s those companies who understand that the world is really changing – and have maybe anticipated it – who are the winners,” says Besland. He adds that such businesses have realised that when you look at sustainability issues, “you are more resourceefficient” too. Sally Uren, Deputy Chief Executive of Forum for the Future, says these latest findings reflect what she’s been seeing. But in terms of investments in sustainability, she has discerned a slight emphasis shift. “Companies are focusing more on those investments and initiatives geared to deliver shorter-term paybacks,” she explains. So they are investing in greener energy and energy efficiency, for example, rather than in R&D to innovate new products. Uren believes that, within the next year, we will see a divided outcome. Companies that have worked out that addressing climate change will really benefit their bottom line will still be “doing sustainability”. That won’t be the case for “companies that just had
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a set of tactical, reactive responses to this agenda, that have largely ended up in their branding [alone]”. Of course, Uren continues, companies may well survive the recession without really embracing sustainability, thanks to good business planning. “But if they haven’t looked at sustainability, how will they fare in a low-carbon world? You might survive the credit crunch, but you’ll not survive the climate crunch.” – Claire Baylis www.atkearney.com
Photos: Shutterstock/Vasilius
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Blueprint for green stores B&Q pushes green products, sets stretch target on emissions It boasts the UK’s biggest building-mounted turbine, a rooftop garden, and solar panels. And it’s challenging the notion that consumers won’t go green in a recession. Opened in February, B&Q’s eco-store in New Malden, on the southern outskirts of London, is the DIY retailer’s most sustainable so far, with just half the emissions of a standard B&Q store. Other key features include: • geothermal space heating • solar thermal water heating • energy-efficient lighting • ‘sun pipes’ to bring natural daylight into darker areas of the store • rainwater harvesting for the garden centre plants and for flushing the toilets. David Childs, B&Q’s Director of Properties, said the building was conceived as a “testbed” for energy-saving and renewable energy measures, and is a step towards its goal of a zeroemission store by 2012. The company has set itself a stretch target of cutting carbon emissions by 90% by 2023. There is, of course, a commercial side to the initiative: just as energy-saving technologies are used in the eco-store, so they are available to customers – albeit
on a different scale. “We use the same solar thermal panels as we sell in our stores,” said Childs. “We have a 30,000-litre rainwater recovery tank; our customers can invest in water butts.” Forum for the Future’s Dan Crossley welcomed the news. “Retailers like B&Q are trying to make sustainable products available, easier to understand and more affordable – and we would encourage that,” he said. The company got customers through its doors with a cleverly timed offer on loft insulation, just a day after Ed Miliband announced plans for green makeovers for UK homes [see p15]. It sold a million rolls priced at £1 each (a 90% reduction) in just three weeks. The 90% carbon emissions reduction target – one of the most ambitious yet adopted by a major retailer – is part of a ‘One Planet Living’ initiative devised in conjunction with sustainability charity BioRegional. Specific measures include: • building and retrofitting low-energy stores • sourcing local, seasonal, organic and fairtrade food for canteens and cafes • devising a logistics strategy to reduce haulage fuel use. – Chris Alden www.diy.com/oneplanethome
Photo: Tesco
3 billion The fall in the number of plastic bags given out by shops last year under a voluntary scheme. Figures from WRAP, the Government’s antiwaste body, show that the number of plastic bags fell by 26% from 13.4 billion in 2007 to 9.9 billion in 2008.
Every little helps?
DIY giant opens eco-store Retailer’s latest Manchester supermarket sets its eco standard Tesco is to use its latest ‘eco-store’ – a new 52,000 sq ft supermarket at Cheetham Hill in Manchester – as a ‘low-carbon blueprint’ for all the new supermarkets it builds in future. Stephen Heal, the company’s director of climate change programmes, says that the Cheetham Hill store’s carbon emissions should be 70% less than those of an average store of its size in 2006. The sixth Tesco supermarket with the ‘eco-store’ tag, it boasts a natural refrigeration system, a combined heat and power (CHP) plant, a timber frame and cladding, rooflights to allow natural daylight inside – and a ‘very good’ rating for the building on the BRE Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) system. Investment costs were around 10% higher than a typical store – but fuel bills are predicted to be 48% lower. Heal emphasises that, by building such outlets, Tesco will boost the market for sustainable building technologies. “It will help those technologies improve, help markets grow, and help bring costs down,” he said. “Like all of these things, the more you do it to scale, the cheaper it becomes,” agrees Peter Madden, Chief Executive of Forum for the Future – who visited the store before it opened in January, and said its use of timber cladding and natural light made it feel like “a more pleasant environment to shop and work in”. He added: “Building stores in this way costs more than a traditional model, but their sense is that they will recoup that through lower energy prices, higher staff productivity and better customer engagement.” Madden now thinks it’s time for Tesco to raise the bar and start talking zero-carbon superstores. “With the right design, they can go a very long way in that direction,” he said. And what about the retrofitting of existing supermarkets? Heal accepts that the Cheetham Hill store isn’t a retrofit blueprint, but says it still offers “guidance for architects and designers” who are retrofitting and replacing existing stores. There could be more to learn on this from Marks & Spencer’s ‘eco-conversion’ in Bournemouth, which also achieved a ‘very good’ BREEAM rating. The store, originally built in the 1940s, benefits from energy-saving measures and water-saving initiatives, such as dualflush toilets and self-closing taps, that have cut water use by 15%. – Chris Alden www.diy.com/oneplanethome
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New NHS strategy aims to lead the way on sustainability From low-carbon buildings to swapping bottled water for tap, the NHS has published a carbon reduction strategy designed to slash its footprint and meet tough 2020 targets. At 18 million tonnes CO2 per year, the NHS carbon footprint has increased 40% since 1990. Now the NHS Carbon Reduction Strategy For England sets out plans to cut emissions in stages as follows: • 10% by 2015 • 26% by 2020 • 80% by 2050. It promises tight energy efficiency standards and rigorous carbon management, with “regular board-level reviews” to keep it all on track. “If you focus on energy usage, you’ll only be hitting about 20% of the carbon footprint,” explains Dr Dave Pencheon, Director of the NHS Sustainable Development Unit (SDU). “So if we’re really going to fulfil our aspiration of being an exemplar sustainable and low-carbon organisation, we need to work across travel, transport, food, procurement and energy.” Procurement is key: buying goods and services is responsible for nearly 60% of the NHS carbon footprint. Every organisation, says the strategy, “needs to consider their approach to commissioning, sourcing and buying”. This includes considering whether new items are even needed, and looking for reused or recycled options where appropriate. When it comes to food, says Pencheon, “we know the provision of high-meat diets is carbon intensive and environmentally destructive – and it’s not particularly good for human health to overindulge in high saturated fat”. So this could lead to fewer meat and dairy dishes on the menu, and more sustainably sourced fish.
Scrubs up nicely
All new NHS buildings should aim to be ‘low-carbon’ by 2015. While giving no set definition of the term, Pencheon says this would mean “significant measurable reductions” to help meet the Government’s aspiration of zero-carbon status for all public sector buildings by 2018. There will be greater emphasis on designing buildings to encourage sustainable behaviour. “If you work in a hospital and it’s too hot, and there are no building controls around, you simply open a window and waste the energy,” says Pencheon. “So giving people access to thermostats is one example.”
www.sdu.nhs.uk
Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust has announced a new hospital development, aiming to “far exceed” NHS carbon reduction targets. Due to be finished by 2016, the Mittal Children’s Medical Centre will include green features such as LED lighting, natural ventilation, sedum roofs and combined heat and power units.
Photo: Flying Colours Ltd/Getty
Putting the green into green wing
Water, too, “should be managed as a precious resource”, says the paper. The first step, adds Pencheon, is to measure and cost use. Water-saving moves could include tap water (rather than bottled) for onsite meetings, speedy identification of leaks, water efficiency technology and recycling. ‘Scrubbing up’ could get smarter, too: research at two Glasgow hospitals revealed that of two types of tap used for surgical scrubbing – ‘knee on’ and ‘elbow on’ – the former helped save 5.7 litres of hot water, and approximately 80g CO2, per scrub. There’s a powerful economic incentive for action, says Pencheon: “Even if you’re only saving a few thousand pounds [through reduced energy bills], that’s money that could be going into direct patient care.” “It’s really good to see the NHS are waking up to this,” says Helen Clarkson, Deputy Director of Forum for the Future. “Making it happen is the real challenge, so we’re working with them to look at delivering on it.” The key, she says, is not to stop at ‘tweaking’ existing practices. She’s currently working with the NHS SDU, looking at how the healthcare system needs to be adapted to prepare for climate change. And work is under way with the Sustainable Development Commission on a vision for a sustainable healthcare system, as part of the evidence base for the Marmot review of health inequalities commissioned by the Government. The sheer size of the NHS means that if it does get sustainability sussed, the impact could be huge. “It’s the biggest employer in Europe,” says Clarkson. “If you could persuade everyone who works there to start thinking about sustainability, the impact on awareness levels would be massive.” – Claire Baylis
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Co-op works on water The Co-op signed up to purchase the power from the Torrs Hydro Electric scheme, and provided a capital grant to help fund more such projects too. Torrs is the UK’s first community-funded hydropower scheme. It was kick-started by Water Power Enterprises, a social enterprise dedicated to cutting carbon emissions, which also helped project manage the building phase. The simple technology, based on ancient principles, uses a reverse Archimedean screw [see GF69, p8] nicknamed ‘Archie’ [right] at Torr Weir. The screw is turned by the flow of the river Goyt to generate up to 70kW of electricity, wired to deliver straight to the New Mills store. “It’s forecast to do about 250,000 kilowatt-hours per year, about half the store’s requirement,” says Chris Shearlock, Sustainable Development Manager for the Co-operative Group. “If we use more power, we import from the grid; if we’re using less, we export.”
Archie drops in
David Williams, Chief Executive of the British Hydropower Association, believes the New Mills approach is worth pursuing. “Community schemes are probably the best way for small hydro to go ahead at the moment, certainly in the present political and renewable energy climate – they get most support both from government and public.” According to Shearlock, the Co-operative Bank has a £400 million fund for investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency measures, with about £100 million invested
Power in the swim Fish-based technology to harness hydropower
Photo: The Co-Operative; shutterstock_NadinaS
Inventor’s inspiration
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www.torrshydro.co.uk ◆ Next
year should see the first of 25 new small-scale hydro-electric schemes installed along Britain’s canals, rivers, docks and reservoirs. British Waterways is collaborating with the Small Hydro Company Ltd to invest around £120 million of private capital, over the next three years, to generate 210 gigawatthours of energy. This is part of a wider renewables project, encompassing wind power, announced last year [see GF71, p11].
VIV is a phenomenon that engineers normally try to protect against. In one notorious incident, such vibrations caused the collapse of three cooling towers at the Ferrybridge C Power Station in 1965, as strong winds whipped round the curved towers, creating vortices that destroyed structures in their wake. “Using something that is normally destructive, and harnessing it, is fantastic,” says Stephanie Merry, Head of Marine Renewables at the Renewable Energy Association in the UK. But she points out that nothing in marine flow technology has even approached the scale of the 10MW-device that Bernitsas is envisioning. The biggest to date in the UK, the marine current turbine at Strangford Lough [see GF70, p13], is a 1.2MW installation. Bernitsas knows there’s a lot still to prove. “We are where cars were 100 years ago,” he says. “Hopefully it won’t take a century to get where we want to be.” – Chris Alden
>
A US entrepreneur is testing a renewable energy mechanism to harness the power of slow-moving water currents – using technology based partly on observations of the way fish swim. The Vivace could be in production within five years, says University of Michigan engineer Michael Bernitsas. His company, Vortex Hydro Energy, has received US Navy funding for a prototype and aims to have pilot devices ready by 2012. The Vivace mimics what happens in a shoal of fish. They curve their bodies as they swim
and shed vortices of water on alternate sides. Fish behind them glide between these, moving faster than they could by muscle power alone. The Vivace, which consists of arrays of oscillating cylinders suspended below the surface of the water, simulates and harnesses this ‘vortexinduced vibration’ (VIV). Slow moving water is a “virtually untapped energy source”, says Bernitsas. Marine turbines typically need currents of fiveseven knots to be financially viable; most bodies of water in the world flow slower than three knots. Once the technology is mature, a “relatively large” 10MW Vivace would be “pretty competitive” in terms of installation costs – at about $3,000 per kW – with energy production costs of about 5.5 cents per kWh.
so far – mainly in small to medium-sized wind projects, combined heat and power schemes, and small hydro. Community-level renewable projects are an important part of the mix, and the bank has made a £48,000 grant to Water Power Enterprises to help establish more co-operatively-owned microhydro projects around the UK. “Frankly, I don’t think we’ve got time to say, ‘Let’s just have offshore wind’, or ‘Let’s just have small scale’,” he says. “Let’s have them all!” – Claire Baylis
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47% The yearly growth of fairtrade sales worldwide between 2003 and 2008. While this amounts to £2.4 billion worth of sales, it represents less than 1% of global trade.
www.vortexhydroenergy.com
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Stockholm: fossil-free by 2050
Prius-style power for London buses Hybrids to cut carbon in the capital
Swedes do it greener If you want to see the best that Europe has to offer in sustainable urban living, head for Stockholm. The European Union has just chosen the Swedish capital to be its exemplar city for 2010, and first holder of the title of European Green Capital. The title – and the torch it represents – will then be taken on by Hamburg, Germany’s second largest city, during 2011. Both make good role models, said EU Energy Commissioner Stavros Dimos at the award ceremony, “with their measures to tackle air pollution, traffic and congestion levels, greenhouse gas emissions, and waste and waste water management”. They have also shown some ambitious targets for improvement. Stockholm has set a goal of becoming fossil fuel-free by 2050, and has already cut its CO2 emissions per person by 25% since 1990. Hamburg’s progress on this is somewhat slower (emissions down by 15% so far) but it has plans to ratchet up the reductions to 80% by 2050. Quality of life and access are crucial criteria. In Stockholm, the great majority of residents (90-95%) are only a short walk (no more than 300 metres) from green space and from decent public transport links. These are things that people clearly value, encouraging the city to include plans for more bathing beaches, for instance, in its priorities. It all helps make certain restrictions more palatable, too. Congestion charging has helped cut car use, and there has been a big push on renewable fuels, accompanied by a switch to low-carbon vehicles across the public transport fleet. The title of European Green Capital is likely to bring material advantages too,
14 Green Futures April 2009
encouraging tourism and investment and attracting young professionals who’ll want to live and work there. For other cities it’s a pointer to sources of inspiration – and, for the likes of Bristol, the only UK city to make the shortlist this time, something to aspire to in future years. Paul Rainger, Head of the Sustainable Bristol City-Region Project at Forum for the Future, says “it’s good from our point of view” to subject the UK’s best performer [Bristol came top of Forum’s Sustainable Cities Index] to Europe-wide benchmarking, and thereby to show “that there’s a lot more that can be done” to drive sustainability forward in the Bristol city-region. It was “quite high-risk”, he says, for Bristol even to make a bid this time round, with a candidacy that was stronger “on what they wanted to do than on what they are actually doing”. But planning for a fresh bid in the future, he says, based on what can be achieved in the interim and what can be learned from other cities, would be “a good way of underlining the city-region’s commitment to sustainability and maintaining the momentum to deliver on its ambitions”. – Roger East
The bus is red, the engine is green
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/ europeangreencapital ◆ London came top of the list in a recent European Green City Index that assesses the market potential for green initiatives and the likely adoption of the latest environmental technology. The report, published by global consultancy firm A.T. Kearney, analysed indicators for 34 cities including infrastructure, market dynamics, government incentivisation and the environmental awareness of residents. Paris came second, with Stockholm in sixth place.
Photos: Volvo, a40757/Shutterstock
New EU scheme chooses its Green Capital cities for 2010 and 2011
A new generation of hybrid buses are to hit the streets of London, in the first stage of what is expected to be their largest rollout in Europe. The number of these ultra-quiet, lowcarbon vehicles is to quadruple to 56 this spring and reach 300 by 2011 – representing just under 4% of the London fleet. Their diesel-electric motors will cut CO2 emissions by up to 40% – bringing an immediate contribution to Mayor Boris Johnson’s strategy to reduce the capital’s emissions by 60% by 2025. He has already ruled that, by 2012, all new buses entering London’s fleet should be powered by hybrid technology. Transport for London is using the introduction as a way to put the latest advancements in technology “through their paces”, explains spokeswoman Vicky Morley. It will be monitoring the performance of the different models, manufactured by companies including Volvo, Wrightbus and Optare, to work out which systems are best suited to the capital. “It might be that we need a combination of technologies for routes with few stops, or longer-distance routes in outer boroughs,” she says. Debuting on route 141 (London BridgePalmers Green) is Volvo’s I-SAM (Integrated Starter, Alternator Motor) system, a parallel hybrid design similar to that already available in cars such as the Toyota Prius. The five-litre diesel engine and electric motor are able to run separately or in parallel in the bus, and an electronic unit controls various functions – including the motor, braking, A/C and hydraulics – to get a 25-30% more efficient fuel performance. – April Streeter
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The future’s made of straw Lincolnshire’s bale-out for housing shortages North Kesteven District Council in Lincolnshire is to become the first local authority in the UK to use straw bales to construct social housing, when they begin a pilot project of two semi-detached properties in West Grove, Martin, this May. The bales will provide the main structure of the three-bedroom homes, which are described by the council as “typical, affordable, council houses”. But there’s nothing typical about the amount of energy they’ll save: swapping bricks for straw will increase insulation by up to three times more than building regulations require, so these houses won’t need heating systems. They’re anticipated to cost less too: the council has budgeted £110,000 per house – £20,000 less than the equivalent brick-build. And in the future, thanks to the experience gained through this project, future costs could be lower still. The houses are designed by Amazonails, who are also behind the country’s first two-storey straw bale home, recently built in Somerset [GF71, p11]. Manager Emma Appleton believes straw bale homes could be part of the answer to housing shortages. They are simple to construct, easy to modify and can last upwards of 200 years. “We get the impression that other UK councils are certainly interested in using straw bales, but are waiting to see how North Kesteven gets on.” In order to generate capacity and skills for any future straw bale projects in the area, the council will select and train a local contractor for the job, and residents and organisations will be invited to watch the building process. Once completed, in approximately six months’ time, potential tenants will apply through the normal council housing allocation scheme. – Anna Pigott
Retrofits for Brits
Photo: Amazonails
< contd from page 5 Seven million UK homes are to get green makeovers by 2020. The £350 million government initiative, known as the ‘Great British Refurb’, will see insulation and lowcarbon technology, such as solar panels and biomass boilers, rolled out to the poorest areas of the country. Speaking at the February launch, Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband described it as a “pay as you save finance” model. Householders will take out a loan to install energy efficiency measures and lowcarbon heating technologies, which they then repay as they save on energy bills [see p39 for local schemes already under way]. Funded through a levy on fossil fuels, the scheme will also offer “street to street advice” on “whole house refurbishment”, and aims to make cost-effective energy efficiency measures available to all households by 2030.
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Lucy Pedlar, Director of The Green Register, a nationwide network of sustainable building experts, is excited by the initiative, but stressed that the Government must identify the most effective ways to retrofit: “There’s an awful lot of eco-bling out there, which people have bought to show that they’re doing something – stationary wind turbines bolted onto buildings, solar panels in the shade...”. She’s encouraged, however, that Miliband mentioned less sexy things like insulation. She adds that the plan ought to include saving water as well, and therefore the carbon needed to clean and heat it. A green makeover is planned for ten Bristol homes this summer as part of a demonstration by Refit West. The consortium, led by Forum for the Future and including The Green Register, is then scaling it up to the ambitious target of 1,000 homes by the end of 2011. – Hannah Bullock www.greenregister.org
Now they're huff-and puff-proof
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[Population] is the ghost at the table. We have all these big issues that everybody is looking at and you don’t really hear anyone say the P-word... Jonathon Porritt
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Concrete captures carbon? < contd from page 4 Traditional (or Portland) cement is made by heating limestone and clay in giant kilns to around 1,500˚C. The vast amounts of energy needed to heat the raw materials, along with the chemical reactions as the limestone decomposes, produces a hefty 0.83 tonne of CO2 for every tonne of cement, according to the International Energy Agency. When it’s mixed with water for use in building, each tonne absorbs up to 0.4 tonne of CO2. But that still leaves net carbon emissions of over 0.4 tonne for each tonne of cement in use. Now, Novacem (a spin-off company from London’s Imperial College) is developing a cement based on magnesium oxide, derived from mineral silicates. This material requires heating at the much lower temperature of 650˚C, and emits less than 0.5 tonne of CO2 per tonne of cement produced. But crucially, it has the potential to absorb large amounts of CO2 as it hardens. The Novacem team are now working with WSP Group, Laing O’Rourke and Rio Tinto Minerals to assess the material’s feasibility, and test its efficacy. If tests prove its suitability for large-scale construction projects, they expect it to be on the market within five years. MPA Cement (formerly the British Cement Association) believes this timeline could be overly optimistic. Senior Standards Manager Mike Taylor points out that it may be hard to find enough magnesium silicate minerals to manufacture the cement on a commercial scale in the UK – although the minerals are abundant worldwide. Transporting them to manufacturing sites will have a significant environmental impact, he warns. But it’s the cement’s performance as a construction material that will be key to its success. Unless it is able to replace the Portland variety on a large scale, says Taylor, it won’t have a significant impact on climate change. – Giovanna Dunmall
Concrete commitments The global cement industry is responsible for up to 8% of greenhouse gas emissions. So it’s good news that the UK sector, at least, has signed up to becoming a recognised world leader in sustainable construction by 2012. The commitments, which include setting targets to minimise waste to landfill and emissions associated with production and transport, were outlined at the launch of the first report of the Sustainable Construction Strategy, hosted by Forum for the Future’s Jonathon Porritt. The strategy brings together trade associations with the industry’s leading companies, including CEMEX, Tarmac and Lafarge Cement. Martin Clarke, of the British Precast Concrete Federation, said: “No one in our industry can claim to be ignorant of the immense challenges we face,” adding that “it makes neither strategic nor environmental sense to move heavy essential construction materials – such as concrete, building stone, steel or timber – halfway around the world when we have the natural resources, and the capability of adding manufactured value to them, within our borders”. Speaking at the launch, Porritt commented: “Sustainability doesn’t get much tougher than in concrete,” but added, “I am genuinely impressed at the progress that has been made and the quality of the leadership shown.” – Anna Simpson www.sustainableconcrete.org.uk
Maldives first country to go carbon-neutral
Setting an example on the front line
Renewables to power archipelago within a decade The Maldives outlined an ambitious target in March to power the islands completely through renewable power within the next decade. The move would make it the first carbon-neutral nation in the world. Put together for the Maldives Government by environmental experts Mark Lynas and Chris Goodall, the draft plan revolves mainly
16 Green Futures April 2009
around solar and wind power. The Government is also looking at possibilities such as ocean current energy and a coconut-husk burning power plant. The proposal includes steps to offset the emissions from international flights to the islands by buying carbon permits from the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. “If a small middle-income country can do this, then think what the rest of the world can
do,” Goodall told Green Futures. “It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a wonderful example of how renewable energy can be used to power a whole country.” “We understand, perhaps more than anyone, what would happen to us if we don’t do something about [climate change],” said Mohamed Nasheed, President of the archipelago, which stands on the front line of global warming. Situated in the Indian Ocean, many of the Maldives’ 1,192 islands are expected to be submerged by rising sea levels by the turn of the next century, according to a 2007 UN Climate Change Panel report. The package of low-carbon measures is estimated to cost $110 million a year for ten years, but could pay for itself during that time as oil imports are reduced. The Government is now looking for private investors to fund the scheme. Nasheed admits that it’s not cheap, but says that, effectively, it’s all about “saving for a rainy day”. – Hannah Bullock
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Photos: Henryk Sadura/Shutterstock, Lorenzo Mondo/Shutterstock
www.novacem.com
Sustainability in the mix
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Dig for victory? New wave of allotments to transform towns and country houses The UK is set to gain over 3,000 food-growing spaces in the next three years in response to popular demand. Plans by the National Trust and Capital Growth – the Mayor of London’s campaign for growing spaces in the capital – to develop unused land into allotment-style plots will encourage communities to make the most of local horticultural potential. The National Trust – one of Britain’s biggest landowners – aims to create 1,000 allotments in the grounds of 75 stately homes, including Norfolk’s great Jacobean house, Blickling Hall, and Kingston Lacy in Dorset. By reclaiming fallow fields and unused land adjacent to the properties, the Trust expects to free up 250,000 hectares of land without jeopardising conservation areas. Each new site
will be posted on the Landshare website, where 30,000 green-fingered enthusiasts have registered their interest to be matched up with a plot in the last six months. Their plan coincides with a Capital Growth initiative to develop 2,012 growing spaces in London by the year 2012, working with British Waterways to identify potential locations. Demand for allotment-style spaces is at its highest since the 1940s, with waiting lists stretching to 100,000. Fiona Reynolds, Director General of the National Trust, puts the demand down to “something in the air”. She explains that their initiative grew out of the success of local projects where volunteers have brought historic kitchen gardens to life. “This isn’t just about saving money,” she remarked. “It’s really satisfying to sow seeds and harvest the fruit and veg of your labour.” – Anna Simpson
A better class of fruit?
www.nationaltrust.org.uk www.landshare.net
New ‘intelligent’ London power plant will run on vegetable oil
Photo: Paul Harris/NTPL, John R Smith/Shutterstock
Super-efficient CHP plant chalked for capital Work is set to begin in East London on what is billed as the country’s first ‘intelligent’ combined heat and power (CHP) plant. The “super-efficient” machine will be installed at the site of a National Grid gas pressure reduction station at Beckton and will burn locally sourced vegetable oil, according to the company behind the plans, Blue-NG – a joint venture between the National Grid and clean energy company 2OC. Marketed as ‘CHiP’ (combined heat and intelligent power), the plant is to burn liquid biomass to generate electricity – but its output heat will be captured, used to heat the existing gas stream, and then used to create further electricity. It should be, on average, 72% efficient, according to Andrew Mercer, CEO of Blue-NG. That compares to 51% efficiency for a combined-cycle gas turbine, or 35% for a coal-powered plant, Mercer said. “We use the gas stream as a mechanism for capturing heat and turning it into more electricity,” he explained. “Taken together, they beat nearly every other form of generation in terms of electrical efficiency.” Blue-NG, which won planning permission for the plant last year with backing from Greenpeace, is currently seeking the go-ahead for another in Southall, west London. Mercer hopes to start building both of them by mid-May, and to introduce the technology at a further six National Grid sites.
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But the proposals have split NGOs. Campaign group Biofuelwatch opposed the plans, warning that market pressures, such as rising food prices, had in the past forced German companies into using less sustainable sources of biomass, such as imported palm oil. “Increased use of domestic rapeseed oil for bioenergy has been one of the prime causes of increasing palm oil imports into Europe,” said spokesperson Almuth Ernsting. Greenpeace agreed that the challenge now is to ensure the fuel is sustainably sourced. “We support strict sustainability criteria for any source of biofuel – and that’s where we’d be looking for strong steps from any company, including Blue-NG,” said Robin Oakley, Head of Climate Change. Mercer confirmed that Blue-NG has signed what he called a “green handcuffs” agreement with the Greater London Authority, committing it to using sustainably sourced crops. “For our first two sites, vegetable oil will be sourced, grown, crushed and driven around within 50 miles of London,” he told Green Futures. Oakley added that because biofuels and bioenergy are limited resources, they must be used in the most efficient way possible. “CHP is one of the most efficient options,” he said. – Chris Alden
Feeding the machine – or fueling destruction?
www.blue-ng.com
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Offshore turbines get government green light on environmental grounds There’s plenty of room for wind power offshore. Massive expansion, essential if the UK is to meet its renewable energy goals for 2020, should not be scuppered by environmental objections. That’s the headline message from a major study of the marine environment, based on over a year of research, and recently put out for public consultation by the Department of Energy and Climate Change. The study is part of the department’s offshore energy Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), which also covers oil and gas drilling and storage, for the territorial waters off England and Wales. It looked at everything from seabed geology to bird and marine species’ habitat and the impact on the fishing and shipping industries. The wind power industry, currently lining up for site leases from the Crown Estate in the so-called Round Three offshore development programme, welcomed its clear conclusion that there is scope for between 5,000 and 7,000 more turbines. Nick Medic of the British Wind Energy Association called it a “subtle but powerful” message that would make it difficult for objectors to block planning applications on environmental grounds. In Scotland, the Crown Estate has recently signed “exclusivity agreements” with its chosen developers for ten of the most promising offshore wind farm sites, so that they can go ahead with survey work, pending the completion in early 2010 of a similar SEA for offshore wind within Scottish territorial waters. – Roger East www.offshore-sea.org.uk Green light for blue horizons
50,000 The number of green collar jobs that could be created by prioritising the ‘thermal refurbishment’ of poorly insulated commercial and industrial buildings – saving organisations around £450 million in energy bills.
Smart switch to LEDs High-powered, low-carbon lamps ready for rollout across UK Britain’s street lighting is increasingly likely to be provided by LEDs in future, as this super-efficient lighting technology continues to show dramatic improvements in performance. In the latest development in this fast-moving field, streetlights developed by Advanced LED to last up to 50,000 hours – eight times the life of traditional streetlamps – are to be rolled out across Oldham and Rochdale as part of a £150 million deal secured by E.ON. E.ON trialled the lamps in the car park of its Coventry visitor centre, and recorded a 26% saving in energy consumption and a 40% reduction in carbon emissions. But, in spite of their high efficiency and reduced maintenance, the take-up of LEDs for street lighting has been held back due to initial installation costs. Rather than wait for prices to fall, E.ON bid to cover the necessary outlay itself – and recoup it gradually from each local authority as part of a 25-year Private Finance Initiative deal. Rochdale and Oldham are the first boroughs to sign up, and E.ON estimates that if these lights were rolled out to neighbourhoods across the UK, we could see a saving of 600,000 tonnes of CO2 a year. According to industry expert Giles Boardman of Efficient Light, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. “There’s been a huge shift in quality over the last few months. Building regulations demand a minimum of 40 lumens per watt, but LEDs are now on the market at over 100 lumens per watt. That’s more than twice the light for the same price.” Twice the light, but less cause for concern about light pollution. As Boardman explains: “LEDs are highly directional, so instead of flooding huge areas with light, you get it exactly where you need it”. And development seems to be directed towards intelligence. James Millar from GreenLED expects to see the development of ‘intelligent’ LED systems for A-roads and motorways within the next few years. “There’s no use in having lights at full beam on a stretch of empty road. LED lamps in the future will respond to traffic movement, using infrared sensors.” Innovations are already under way in electricity sourcing for LEDs. In Ireland, Donegal County Council is planning to light a footbridge over the River Finn with the gush of water through a micro hydro-turbine, and in Bangladesh, renewable energy company Grameen Shakti has installed over 15,000 LED solar-home systems. As Anne Wheldon of the Ashden Awards explains: “Where electricity is very expensive, the greater efficiency of LEDs means stand-alone systems can run on a smaller PV module and a smaller battery.” – Anna Simpson www.eonenergy.com
18 Green Futures April 2009
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Photo: Kamil Sobócki/Shutterstock
UK seas ideal for massive wind power expansion
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Renewables get global push New agency spreads the word on greener energy IRENA has a far-reaching goal. The initials stand for International Renewable Energy Agency – and, as the first international organisation concentrating purely on renewables, IRENA plans to become the key driving force in “promoting a rapid transition towards the widespread and sustainable use of renewable energy on a global scale”. Born in Bonn, Germany, on 26 January, IRENA started life with the signatures of 75 national governments on its statute. The UK was not one of them, though a spokesperson for the Department for Energy and Climate Change said that membership is under active consideration, with Secretary of State Ed Miliband “keen to join in the near future”.
Sceptics might say we need more action, not more agencies. Among the as-yetunconvinced is Dale Vince, CEO of green energy company Ecotricity, who feels that the time and money spent on IRENA “would be better spent actually doing something”. As he sees it, “it’s not like renewable energy is so new or hard to understand – it’s not rocket science (or nuclear power) after all. So I’m not sure what this agency can really bring to the party.” At IRENA, of course, they see things rather differently. To overcome obstacles preventing wider use of renewables (such as lack of financing or just lack of awareness), the agency plans to facilitate access to information and to provide practical advice and support for industrialised and developing countries alike, to “help them improve their regulatory frameworks and build capacity”. As for the overlap with
existing bodies already spreading the renewables message, IRENA insists it has a distinctive role to play and will regularly consult and co-operate with the likes of the UN Environment Programme and other networks, thereby complementing and pooling resources. Membership had reached 77 by midMarch, with India becoming the biggest energy consumer so far on board. Countries keen to host the organisation (Germany, Austria and the UAE have put in bids), or to nominate a candidate to be its first Director General, have to join by an end-April deadline, but there are concerns that it will be financially and politically hobbled unless the likes of the US, Japan, Russia and China agree to get involved. – Claire Baylis www.irena.org
Ramping up the watts Special roads aim to capture energy from passing cars
Photo: John R Smith/Shutterstock
Motorists are frequently lambasted for their unsustainable energy use and pollution. But an Israel-based firm thinks it has found a way to help offset their carbon footprint – using specially designed roads to harness energy from the movement of traffic. The system developed by Innowattech is embedded under the upper layer of asphalt. It uses technology incorporating piezoelectric materials, which deform when forces such as the weight, motion or vibration of a vehicle are applied. This deformation produces a voltage, which is subsequently converted to electrical energy, and can be used to power streetlights, road signs and advertising billboards, or be fed Harvest of the highway: at last, into the national grid. the car gives Innowattech’s Yael Greenberg says “there’s something back a potential for our technology anywhere which has high vehicular, train or pedestrian traffic”, such as stations, airports or dance floors. She adds that there’s been interest “from various companies and agencies in the UK”. Initial tests of the road-embedded system have demonstrated that a 1km stretch of dual carriageway can yield up to 500kW of energy, depending on the volume of traffic. Cost would vary depending on the
“
size of the road, but the firm claims investment will be paid back within six to twelve years. Environmental Transport Association Director Andrew Davis comments: “If these electric roads can be put in place without harm to the environment, they would be a silver lining to the cloud of heavy traffic.” Here in the UK, a supermarket chain and several councils are said to be considering a similar ‘electrokinetic road ramp’ which could double up as speed bumps. They work using a cog-based mechanism, which is set in motion by the weight of the vehicle. Designer Peter Hughes, of Highway Energy Systems, says he is in conversation with them about the ramps, which will cost between £20,000 and £55,000, and can produce 10-36kW of power with a steady stream of traffic passing over them. – Louise Vennells www.innowattech.co.il
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The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
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Dambisa Moyo
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Peak time travel
A
t the end of the year, eight UK
companies came together under the auspices of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security to publish a report entitled The Oil Crunch. It was a stark warning that cheap, easily available petroleum production is likely to peak by 2013, sending the price soaring and the markets into turmoil. It called on the Government to respond with a crash programme of investments in energy efficiency and renewables, among other measures. These would not only offset the impact of peak oil, it argued, but also deliver massive cuts in carbon emissions [see GF71, p6].
20 Green Futures April 2009
Among the signatories to The Oil Crunch were three of the UK’s principal transport operators, Stagecoach, First Group and Virgin. These are not the easiest of times for the sector: after several years of stellar growth, passenger numbers on trains in particular are levelling off rapidly, and the operators are locked in complex tussles with the Government over the terms of franchise agreements. Meanwhile, times are relatively sunny for Eurostar. Although not involved in the report, the company has recently become a vocal proponent of low-carbon travel. So Green Futures asked the key leaders in each company what peak oil and climate change mean for their business – and how they square it with day-to-day survival.
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Photo: iStock/Sze Fei Wong
If you’re fighting to stay afloat in the teeth of a recession, you’re not going to worry about distant threats like peak oil and climate change, right? Wrong, say Brian Souter, Moir Lockhead, Will Whitehorn and Richard Brown. The UK’s leading transport chiefs tell Martin Wright why action now is essential for their business survival.
Photos: Stagecoach; Virgin Group
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Brian Souter, Stagecoach
Will Whitehorn, Virgin Group
“Peak oil is a real threat,” says Brian Souter. “But most CEOs don’t really see the relevance of it [to their business]. They’re convinced about global warming, but not about peak oil. People are roughly where they were on climate change ten years ago – they’re agnostic. If anything, they see it as tomorrow’s problem. What worries me is that we need to be taking action now – but this recessionary blip may lull people into a false sense of security [based on cheap oil], which would be quite unjustified… Actually, I think the general public are more sensitive to this issue than chief execs. There’s a common sense in people – they know we can’t keep being dependent on [oil imports] for ever. It’s the business leaders, by comparison, who are out of touch.” That style of rhetoric won’t surprise anyone familiar with the self-made Aberdeen bus and train magnate – although the subject matter might. Souter’s famous for his robustly outspoken attitudes on everything from labour relations to social issues. A keen supporter of the Scottish National Party, he’s not exactly your archetypal fluffy corporate environmentalist. But Stagecoach has led the way in using recycled vegetable oil for their bus fleet, and Souter’s adamant that his customers are already on board the green agenda. “To give one example, we’ve just launched the first ‘reverse vending’ machine at a park-and-ride site near Aberdeen, where people can bring their recycling, and in return get points towards bus travel. The interest has been incredible!” So would he go so far as to say the oil crunch is also a business opportunity? “Definitely. And if you have new technologies in place – alternative fuels, in our case – you’ll be able to exploit it. The beauty of this is that you can address both threats – climate change and peak oil – with the same policies.” For Stagecoach, this means “recycled fuel – tallow, chip fat, etc. That has a massively lower-carbon footprint than mineral oil – around 85% less. And there’s enough supply to power the whole bus fleet… In some ways we’re just going back to a previous age when that was where most of the energy came from. Think of all those tallow lamps – the Victorians used tallow to fuel their economy! It’s a by-product of the rendering plants, but now it’s just waste – it has no value.” When it comes to biofuels more generally, Souter’s cautious. “When you’re using a cereal-derived product, obviously you’re opening yourself to criticism [over] what you’re doing to food supplies. I’m not totally convinced on that myself: I’m not saying it’s not an issue, I just think some of the fears have been exaggerated… [But] the real trouble with [cereal-based biofuels] is that they take so much energy to manufacture – their carbon footprint is around 70% of mineral oils… I’m much more excited about second and third generation biofuels, using wood waste and so on. It’s important that we follow that through.” Meanwhile, he says, Government could help by tweaking fuel duty to favour recycled fuels, as part of a wider fiscal shift to encourage lower-carbon travel.
“There is a real and present danger here. A real and present danger from climate change; a real and present danger from peak oil.” Described somewhat unfairly by one wag as “Richard Branson’s representative on Earth”, Will Whitehorn in person comes across as a robustly free thinker who sees no contradiction between his other day job as President of Virgin Galactica (the company’s space tourism arm) and his mounting concerns over natural limits. He was one of the driving forces behind the peak oil report. And he sees the recession as offering a salutary lesson in what happens if you ignore signals set at danger. “You had various academic reports warning that easy credit would lead to a bubble – but at no point did the financial services sector sit down and say, ‘Right, what are we going to do about this?’” Virgin and the other companies involved in the peak oil taskforce, he says “were determined not to find ourselves, ten years down the road, being accused of burying our heads in the sand over this.” So what can be done? As with the credit crunch, there’s a certain inevitability about peak oil, he believes. “It’s going to happen, and we have to plan for it.” For transport companies like Virgin, he says, it means weaning themselves off petroleum as fast as realistically possible, whether it’s running super-efficient electric trains like the Pendolino, or, more controversially, experimenting with biofuels in its airliners. The company has launched the Virgin Green Fund to invest in renewables in general and next-generation biofuels in particular. “This isn’t about altruism, because frankly that approach gets you nowhere. This is about long-term investment in the business opportunities of the future. It’s about industrial survival.” But companies can only do so much. “We really need Government to be deeply involved in this process.” It could start, he says, by relaxing planning laws and other regulations which stymie the growth of renewables. But at a more fundamental level, “we need to [massively] reduce our reliance on fossil fuels right across the transportation, construction and industrial sectors. There need to be a lot of big carrots there, a lot of sticks!” Like Souter, Whitehorn fears that the recession, combined with the current depressed oil price, will distract attention just when it’s most needed. “We’re in a sort of phoney war just now, and I think it will last about half a decade… But given what we know, there’s no excuse for inaction. And if you look at the true costs of investments made now in terms of their likely returns in the future, then [investing in renewables and energy efficiency] is exactly the sort of thing you should keep doing through the recession [because you will reap the rewards later]. The Government needs to grasp the nettle,” he adds, and use fiscal stimuli to drive companies down the renewables route. “This isn’t just about being a responsible citizen, or about getting ready for a carbon tax… This is about our basic energy security.”
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Brian Souter, CEO Stagecoach
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Business leaders are out of touch
Will Whitehorn, Brand Development and Corporate Affairs Director, Virgin Group
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This is about industrial survival
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Sir Moir Lockhead, First Group “Much to the disgust of the car industry, and some of my own relatives,” says Moir Lockhead, “I argue that the sooner we get fuel prices to move up again the better, because at that point we’ll stop wasting it. Even if we did nothing else, we’d at least be a better and more efficient company because we’d be conserving energy.” Lockhead’s public endorsement of a third runway for Heathrow may not have endeared him to environmentalists, but he’s adamant that First Group takes climate change seriously. The company has set itself a 2020 target of cutting carbon emissions from its trains by 20%, and from its buses by 25%. He acknowledges that there’s a lot to do. “Before, fuel consumption wasn’t even on the radar – even though it accounts for 5-7% of our costs. If anything, it was going in the wrong direction, because we’ve focused on better acceleration” – rather than more efficient engines. Like his compatriot, Souter, Lockhead spotted the competitive advantage of public transport at a time of rising pump prices – although First Group might be seen as a little unfortunate with their timing. They chose summer 2008 to launch their ‘Fuel for Thought’ campaign, highlighting the relative affordability of bus travel, just as petrol prices were about to plummet. But over the long term, says Lockhead, he has no doubt that dramatic action is needed – not least with his own rolling stock. “If science is driving us to reduce CO2, and it seems to be, let’s understand how we can dramatically effect that over the next decade. Our fleet renewals are over five to ten years, so if we can get the right product over the next two years, say, then in ten years’ time the fleet would be completely renewed.” ‘Right’, in this context, means light.
Sir Moir Lockhead, CEO, First Group
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Fuel consumption wasn’t even on the radar…
“Trains are massively heavy – and so are buses. At the moment, a bus is basically a derivative of a truck – in terms of the engine, the transmission – and that won’t work in the long term… Even the hybrid bus is very heavy… Now, I come from an industry background where weight equals strength equals reliable life and structural safety. But now we have to learn how to make a vehicle that is safe and strong as well as being light and fuel-efficient, and that’s my ambition.” It will mean looking at new compounds, at different power trains. And all the while playing catch-up with the motor industry, which in this area at least is no slouch when it comes to innovation. Somewhat controversially, Lockhead denies there’s any contradiction between his stance on Heathrow and his climate goals. “It’s not that I want to stick with air travel – far from it. But domestic travel should be by rail, and that’s why I’m pushing for new high-speed rail lines, where we’re way behind France, Germany and Japan, incidentally. But if you believe in the global economy, you’ve got to have a really good hub in the UK.” He’s less certain about the promise of recycled biofuels. “The big question is how you move from having maybe 5% or 10% biofuels to 100%.” Which is where rising oil prices could prove decisive. “We were experimenting with a biofuel on our buses in Aberdeen nearly 20 years ago, derived from rapeseed. But that was costing $60 a barrel at a time when the oil price was $15.” However, Lockhead believes high oil prices are inevitable as production peaks – and those, in turn, will drive research into more sustainable ‘new generation’ biofuels. But will the recession throw all these plans off track? No, insists Lockhead – if anything, hard times concentrate the mind. “I’ve honestly not had anyone, in management or elsewhere, tell me we shouldn’t be doing sustainability. People realise that this is a core business issue.”
Photos: Virgin Group; First Group; Eurostar
All aboard: the lightweight bus, the leaner train and the laid-back luxury of a trip to Paris...
22 Green Futures April 2009
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Photos: Eurostar
Richard Brown, Eurostar Richard Brown wears the unavoidably satisfied expression of a CEO whose company shows every sign of growing right through the recession. Ticket sales rose by nearly 11% last year, and, as he’s keen to point out, it’s fairly low-carbon growth, too. Eurostar runs on allelectric lines, a hefty share of which is powered by French nuclear electricity. This makes it well placed to exploit businesses’ eagerness for ‘quick wins’ on carbon by poaching their travellers off short-haul flights – at least as far as journeys from London to Paris or Brussels. “There was a YouGov survey which showed 53% of business travellers are concerned about their environmental impact when flying,” says Brown. “That is pretty powerful.” Maybe, but does it translate into action? “Well at least they’re aware of it and they feel they need to say it! And even if half of them are lying, it still means there’s an opportunity for greener businesses like ours to convert them [into customers]… We are seeing business travellers switch daily, and we also think we’re seeing a switch in the leisure market, too. It’s not happening on a vast scale, but it’s significant, and I think it will be the trend for years to come.” It’s not just carbon concerns driving the shift, of course. Shorter check-in times, less security hassle, and the fact that the stations are in city centres, rather than marooned on the outskirts like their airport equivalents, undoubtedly helps too. Train travel is inherently more productive, Brown insists. “You can work uninterrupted. There’s no-one telling you to put your seat into the upright position or turn off your gear during take-off and landing…” But just how much greener is Eurostar than flying? “We used to say to [our corporate customers], ‘We don’t know the exact figures, but you don’t need to worry, we’re bound to be much lower-carbon than airlines’. But they’d come back at us and say, ‘Actually we do need to know the exact figures, because we want to publish our carbon footprint in our annual report.’ So we commissioned independent researchers [a consortium led by AEA Technology Environment] and found, to our genuine surprise, that one of our train journeys emits ten times less carbon than the equivalent flight.” For what it’s worth, it also comes in comfortably ahead of car travel: an average Eurostar passenger is responsible for 13.5g/km; by comparison, four people in a Toyota Prius would still each contribute around twice that. “When we got the figures,” says Brown, “we thought, ‘Wow! – we should make more of this...’” That led to the launch of Eurostar’s ‘Tread Lightly’ programme, which commits the company to cutting carbon by 25% per traveller by 2012 – one of the toughest short-term targets set by any major business. To start with, this means “looking at the low-hanging fruit: making sure we operate our trains in as energy-efficient a way as possible, making sure they’re relatively well-loaded, because an empty train is not a green train. And we’re just starting on the refurbishment of our fleet, so we’re using every opportunity to make efficiency gains there, too.” The next step could be generating some of their own power: Eurostar is currently in talks with partners Eurotunnel, which is planning on building a wind farm near Calais.
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Richard Brown, CEO, Eurostar
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The Government is in catch-up mode
But all these actions together are unlikely to deliver a 25% cut, so the gap will be bridged by offsetting. Doesn’t that call into question the credibility of the target? “Well, I don’t think there is such a thing as an entirely zero-carbon activity,” Brown responds. “Even wind generation has a carbon footprint, because you have a lot of steel in a turbine, with a lot of embedded carbon.” So some offsetting, he argues, is pretty much inevitable. “Yes, there are a lot of dodgy offset projects out there, and people are being naïve if they think, ‘Oh, I can just offset and then my conscience is clear’. But we’ve selected our offset projects very carefully – we don’t do forestry offsets, for example – and we’ve chosen ones which have a degree of social benefit as well as carbon savings. In the Philippines, for example, we’re [investing in a scheme which will] retrofit threewheeled taxis with a new carburettor, which improves fuel consumption and reduces black smoke. So that has health benefits, local economic benefits and carbon benefits…” What the scheme doesn’t have, at the moment, are carbon credits – it’s at too early a stage. “Effectively, our role has been to pump-prime it; if we hadn’t done so, it wouldn’t have got off the ground. So even though we won’t get the credits till 2010, there’s genuine additionality there.” Meanwhile, he says, the lack of certainty around the carbon price is a huge obstacle to long-term planning. “At the moment, with the price rocketing up and down, it’s not going to change anything. You can’t take it into account in your planning because you’ve no idea what the price will be. So setting a [long-term] target price for carbon, and managing the release of permits and the auctions so that they’re working towards that price, would send a very strong signal to business. If you know the price of carbon is going to be £100 per tonne in five years’ time, say, you can start to factor that into your calculations as a business, and the Government can factor it into their planning. At the moment the Department for Transport does not use any carbon price when evaluating their investment decisions – even though these are going to be influencing transport networks and usage for 30, 40 or 50 years to come!” It’s the same with energy, says Brown. “The Government needs to set some long-term policy frameworks, because any sort of electricity generation requires investment on a large scale. The generators need to have more clarity, more certainty. I do believe quite passionately that consumers are ahead of business in wanting to have green choices – but I think businesses are ahead of the Government in thinking all this through. The Government is in catch-up mode. There are a lot things that need to change pretty quickly.” Our conversation hasn’t touched much on peak oil. Does this mean Brown is relatively relaxed about it? “Well, as a business we’re in a great place, obviously, since we don’t rely on the stuff. But for the world it’s going to be a huge challenge. And I’ve got more than a degree of apprehension as to whether we’re capable of rising to it.” Martin Wright is Editor-in-Chief of Green Futures. ◆ In
the next Green Futures, we’ll be asking some of the UK’s leading travel and transport experts what more needs to be done to shift practice right across the sector.
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A thousand words
A sense of perspective… The peaks and pyramids of London’s financial hub barely penetrate the dawn mists rising off the river. A visual metaphor, perhaps, of the relative scale of impact of the current recession on the one hand, and the wider sweep of climate change on the other. Entitled ‘City Descent’, Piers Calvert’s photo was a winning entry in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2008, which is owned by the Natural History Museum and BBC Wildlife Magazine.
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Burn the trees to sav
H
ans-Peter Schmidt runs
a small organic vineyard in the Swiss Alps. Careful to use no pesticides or artificial fertilisers, he relies on simple techniques to protect against pests and diseases, such as encouraging a wide variety of plants. But Schmidt also does something quite unique among Swiss winemakers to maintain soil fertility. He adds a rich substance known as ‘biochar’. A ground-up form of almost pure charcoal, Schmidt’s biochar is made from the leftover pips and pulp from his grapes, which he has heated intensely in a kiln. The technique itself is not new: pre-Columbian populations were burning waste to create terra preta (black soil) hundreds of years ago, and many people still rely on charcoal-making as a source of cooking fuel. What is new is the sudden interest in biochar as an extraordinarily potent weapon in the fight against climate change. Scientists found that terra preta not only created pockets of land in the Amazon which are still extremely fertile 500 years later – but that it kept at least half the carbon in the charcoal ‘locked up’ for all that time [see box].
26 Green Futures April 2009
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Biochar is sure to crop up at Copenhagen
Today, many climatologists are as excited as agronomists about biochar. Professor Tim Lenton, from the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, believes that, of all the large-scale solutions under discussion, biochar and reforestation stand out as the most viable options. Professor Johannes Lehmann, an eminent soil specialist from Cornell University, goes so far as to suggest that it is theoretically possible, by the end of this century, that we could capture 9.5 billion tonnes of carbon each year through biochar production in tropical agricultural systems. If we achieved that level of reduction, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide would actually be falling. It’s no wonder that, in January, Gaia hypothesist James Lovelock told New Scientist that “There is one way we could save ourselves, and that is through the massive burial of charcoal”. That prospect came one step closer at last year’s Pozna´n climate change conference, where politicians raised the idea of carbon funding for the technique – and there’s no doubt the issue will crop up again at Copenhagen this December. If biochar became part of the carbon market, by joining the list of technologies
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Photo: AFP/Getty Images/Menahem Kahana
Could reviving the ancient technique of charcoal making really solve the global food crisis, halt deforestation and lock up carbon dioxide for good? Chris Goodall sifts fact from myth on biochar.
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s to save the world?
The lock up Producing biochar ‘locks up’ carbon dioxide from organic matter, because it interrupts a plant’s natural carbon cycle. Schmidt’s vines, for example, abstract CO2 from the air as they grow, temporarily reducing the net stock of gases in the atmosphere – but the leftover pips and skins would eventually release greenhouse gases as they rotted, if Schmidt didn’t step in with his biochar kiln to transform them into a substance that holds onto the carbon for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. There’s also evidence that applying biochar to soil curbs the release of methane and nitrous oxide – even more powerful global warming agents than CO2.
Photo: AFP/Getty Images/Menahem Kahana; Robert Flanagan
Locks up carbon, boosts fertility
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If farmers switch from 'slash and burn' to 'slash and char', the benefits could be huge
qualifying for the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism, we could one day see the rich world offsetting some of its emissions by paying poor farmers to sequester carbon in their soils. An example of how this might work is found in Cameroon, where the NGO Biochar Fund is giving subsistence farmers, many of them using destructive ‘slash and burn’ methods of agriculture, the skills to make their own biochar. Run by a young Belgian pioneer, the organisation is working with 75 grassroots groups to produce biochar from materials like palm fronds, cassava stems, weeds and wood, and to test the effects in different soil types. It is developing highly efficient, villagescale kilns which use pyrolysis to produce both biochar, and heat and electricity (‘combined heat, power and char’, or CHPC). They could potentially generate money as well by selling carbon credits through the voluntary offset market. In effect, the Fund is helping farmers shift from ‘slash and burn’ to ‘slash and char’ agriculture, by encouraging them not to burn the trees that have been felled but rather to use the wood to make biochar. The char is then added to the soil. It helps improve fertility, enabling the soil to be used for many years, providing more food than can be provided by conventional ‘slash and burn’, and so reducing the frequency with which new areas of forest need to be cut. For the farmers, this means the chance to develop a more sustainable and prosperous agriculture. For the forests, it means the chance to recover from an increasingly destructive practice. About 400 million people in the Tropics rely on ‘slash and burn’
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agriculture. The benefits for the planet could be huge if they adopted this ‘slash and char’ method instead. Biochar Fund’s simple ceramic biochar stoves can even be used for cooking while the char is being made, so killing two birds with one stone, as it were. The idea’s being taken up in Central Asia, too, where the Mongolian Biochar Initiative is supplying simple biochar/cooking stoves to herders, vegetable gardeners and forestry workers. Compared to traditional cookstoves, these use far less fuel for the same amount of cooking. This both reduces the need to cut down more wood and also improves air quality. A large fraction of the world’s people do their cooking over open stoves that pollute indoor air, causing respiratory problems and reducing life expectancy. If they prove viable, such stoves could be sold to poor farmers on a large scale using microcredit to make them affordable – in much the same way that Grameen Shakti, for example, is rolling out improved cooking stoves and solar home systems to villagers in Bangladesh.
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We don't yet have a system that makes economic sense of biochar
Making the wood go further
28 Green Futures April 2009
This raises the prospect of a mass biochar movement across the developing world. It sounds ambitious, but it would be simple enough to tap into local charcoal-making expertise. The equipment is available locally and soil carbon levels could be measured reasonably accurately with simple devices. A carbon credit system could reward village-level enterprises for producing something to plough back into the soil, rather than something to sell as a fuel. Stephen Joseph, from Australia’s University of New South Wales, has done a cost-benefit analysis of a typical village-scale biochar set-up, and found that it could be worth more than $50,000 over five years. This calculation factors in increased yields, savings from planting fewer trees for fuel, reduced medical expenses thanks to less indoor air pollution from smoky stoves – and, of course, carbon credits. It all sounds too good to be true – and perhaps it is. As biochar has risen up the agenda, it’s also attracted its share of sceptics. Some argue that, if biochar does indeed become profitable, it could drive deforestation. Writing in the Guardian, George Monbiot envisages a ‘rush’ for biochar as we have seen with biofuels. He argues that financial incentives would encourage people to cultivate vast plantations of fast-growing trees in place of ancient forests, or on valuable land needed for food. Biochar enthusiasts respond that the flow of carbon credits would encourage farmers to continuously harvest and replant trees, using the charcoal to enrich the land as they do so. Chris Turney, Professor of Geography at the University of Exeter, adds that this type of cyclical scheme would be much more effective at removing emissions from the atmosphere than one-off reforestation schemes, “because mature trees reach a saturation point in their absorption capacity”. Meanwhile crop waste – such as straw, husks and leaves – is also a ready source of raw material for biochar. Almost half the nine billion tonnes of agricultural material produced each year is effectively waste material – which contributes to global warming as it rots or is burned off. More fundamentally, there’s the question: does biochar actually work as a carbon sink? Certainly, Amazonian earth would suggest so. One study shows that a hectare of terra preta typically holds two and half times the carbon of adjacent soils. Scientists believe biochar can sequester carbon in the soil for hundreds to thousands of years, but they haven’t yet calculated its half-life. “We don’t have a predictive theory for its behaviour,” says Mike Mason, founder of carbon offsetting company Climate Care and bio-energy company Biojoule. “We still need to find out what plant materials should be used, the right temperature for the kiln, what else should be added to the ground...” There are question marks, too, over whether biochar is universally effective as a soil fertiliser. There are even cases where adding char has been shown to deplete fertility. Current evidence suggests that fertility enhancements seem to be greatest in the Tropics, where soils are often low in other sources of carbon. Exploratory projects such as those under way in Cameroon and Mongolia should start to provide answers to some of these questions. Along with seven others, they’re being closely followed by the International Biochar Initiative – a network of academics, NGOs, investment bankers and politicians looking to promote commercial biochar production.
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Photo: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images
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Small but powerful?
Biochar does not, of course, need to be added to the soil to capture carbon. It can even be buried in underground chambers. This has some superficial similarities with the grand-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) schemes mooted for coal-fired power stations. But, unlike most CCS schemes, the technology is cheap and simple to install. And, while CCS can only prevent emissions entering the air (at a power station, for example), biochar can ‘claw back’ carbon that is already out there and seal it in the ground – thanks to its unique way of ‘interrupting’ a plant’s carbon cycle. Developing viable biochar businesses will mean coming up with a business model that rewards everyone involved. And here, says Mason, “the devil is in the detail”. He reminds us that we don’t yet have a system that makes economic sense of the complex relationships in biochar production. Who gets the credit? – he asks. “Is it the farmer, because he isn’t using so many pesticides? ... If electricity is produced as well, how is this credited?” While there is still this lack of clarity, it may hold back investors from getting involved on a large scale, he says. Despite remaining uncertainties, governments are starting to show an interest. The New Zealand Government has included biochar in a $10 million energy research fund; in Australia, the opposition Liberal Party is claiming the technique could cut the country’s emissions by a fifth; and the California Energy Commission is hopeful that biochar could be a recognised technology under a proposed new federal cap-and-trade programme. Britain, in comparison, seems a little slow on the uptake. The UK Biochar Research Centre opened late last year at the University of Edinburgh, but the government, for the most part, remains agnostic.
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It's the most potent engine of atmospheric cleansing we possess
Overall, though, as scientific attention has focused on the benefits of biochar, excitement has grown rather than diminished. As well as its numerous other benefits, biochar stands a good prospect of being one of the simplest, cheapest and most effective ways of capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it safely. One of the world’s best-respected earth scientists, Tim Flannery, has described biochar as “the most potent engine of atmospheric cleansing we possess”. In a world where the climate news is usually bad, that is one of the few glimmers of real hope. Biochar is one of the ‘Ten Technologies to Save the Planet’, written by Chris Goodall and published by Profile Books. Additional material by Hannah Bullock.
The soil booster Biochar has been shown to double or triple yields in the right conditions. Scientists believe this is because: • it holds water, so can work well in dry land • it’s fungi-friendly, because a vast network of tiny pores provides a safe home for beneficial soil micro-organisms • it reduces acidity, creating a soil more favourable to plant growth • it makes nutrients more accessible, such as potassium and phosphorus.
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Feature
The cooker, the cow and the carbon capture… As Forum for the Future and the Financial Times announce the winners of the Climate Change Challenge competition, Rajendra Pachauri tells Martin Wright why entrepreneurs have to be at the forefront of the drive to tackle global warming.
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Those who are ahead of the game now will reap the benefits
30 Green Futures April 2009
key to tackling global warming: without them, we will struggle to make meaningful reductions in greenhouse gases. That’s the view of the world’s leading expert on climate change, Dr Rajendra Pachauri. Entrepreneurs who respond to the challenge will reap commercial success – while businesses which fail to do so face oblivion. “We have to start thinking out of the box – there are opportunities in just about every sector of the economy,” says Pachauri, who, as Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. Some of the innovations are small-scale in themselves, but have a tremendous collective impact – like improved solar cooking stoves or methane curbs for cattle. At the other end of the spectrum are technical breakthroughs to slash energy use in transport or buildings, and radical new ways of taking carbon out of the atmosphere, such as biochar. It’s this sort of fresh thinking that is the focus of the Climate Change Challenge [see box]. Dr Pachauri, who sits on the judging panel, believes it offers an opportunity for ‘climate entrepreneurs’ to win much-needed profile, as well as investment. “You don’t have to be doing this for altruistic reasons. The future is low-carbon. So those who are ahead of the game now – who see the way things are moving – will reap the benefits.” He is quick to dismiss the suggestion that concerns over the recession should take priority over the environment. “A lot of the actions we need to take now to reduce emissions can also help revive the economy. They all have substantial co-benefits.” So is business doing enough? “It’s a very mixed picture. There are some companies who are ahead of the curve, who realise this isn’t just about responsibility – it’s an opportunity, too. Then there are others – which I won’t name, although I think it’s fairly obvious who I’m talking about – that have actively placed barriers [in the path of action on climate change].” And as the world inexorably shifts to a low-carbon economy, such companies will struggle to survive,
Pachauri says. “Look at General Motors. This was one company that did not read the writing on the wall, and as a result they are virtually facing bankruptcy. If they had only responded the way Toyota did seven, eight years ago, identifying and pursuing low-carbon opportunities, they would have been in a pretty strong position today.” Martin Wright is Editor-in-Chief of Green Futures.
Climate Change Challenge The Financial Times and Forum for the Future launched a competition to find the most innovative solution to tackle the causes of climate change. Sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, the $75,000 prize is intended to turn the best idea for a new technology, system, service or business model into viable reality. The competition sought out low-carbon innovations from across the world and asked FT readers to vote for the winner. They did so in their thousands.
Judging panel • Lionel Barber – Editor, Financial Times • Richard Branson – Chair, President and CEO, Virgin Group • Eileen Claussen – President, Strategies for the Global Environment/Pew Center on Global Climate Change • Mark Hurd – CEO, HP • Terry Leahy – CEO, Tesco • Rajendra K Pachauri – Chair, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change • Jonathon Porritt – Chair, UK Sustainable Development Commission; Founder Director, Forum for the Future • Leon Sandler – Executive Director, Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, MIT
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Loughborough University, UK Loughborough University has produced ceiling tiles that can cool rooms with minimal energy use. Instead of pumping cool air into a room, a false ceiling uses convection to draw warm exhaust air from the room. The air evaporates water held in a wick surface in the tiles, so they cool instantly. Moreover, they don’t clog and the materials don’t degrade, so there are no significant maintenance costs. “If you dip your hand into water and blow over it, you instantly feel cooler. Evaporation is a very powerful mechanism,” Dr Harry Salt explains. Salt and his colleague Professor Dennis Loveday, who have spent ten years working on the invention, say it can replace a traditional air conditioning system in most climates or, if used alongside one, will halve overall energy use. “If it’s too hot, it’s harder for people to work. Global warming will see increased demand for cooling, and this innovation can provide cooling with minimal energy usage.” Salt and Loveday hope to have their tiles on the market by 2010. – Anna Simpson
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Judge’s view: “As well as reducing carbon emissions and deforestation, this cheap and simple idea could save people in developing countries time and money.” – Terry Leahy
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ADEF Ltd, USA Deflecktors are cheap, lightweight fabric covers fitted to lorry wheels, which improve fuel efficiency by reducing drag. Fitted onto the eight wheels of a truck and its trailer, the Deflecktor can cut fuel consumption by 2%. It works by covering the wheel holes to reduce turbulence as lorries move at speed. It has already aroused interest from trucking company Schneider National, which is testing the product on its 15,000-strong fleet. On average, it takes just six months to break even on the $50 Deflecktor outlay. “I’m coming at this from an economic perspective,” says inventor Jon Fleck. “Quite frankly, carbon emissions aren’t top of the agenda for these companies.” Fleck designed his first wheel cover 20 years ago, but the product virtually made him bankrupt. Its 50-odd metal components were hard to fit, and its weight cancelled out some of the fuel efficiency gains. It wasn’t until he saw a pop-up laundry basket at a trade fair in Germany that the idea came to him to use fabric and wire instead: “That was the lightbulb moment.” If all American trucks used the covers, Fleck calculates they would save 460 million gallons of diesel a year. – Hannah Bullock
And there’s no doubt that in some circumstances, solar cookers are a life-saver – where fuelwood or dung is unavailable for example, or where people have been displaced from their homes and forced to live in refugee camps. As wood supplies become ever scarcer, more and more people will find themselves faced with no alternative but to change longestablished practices. The Kyoto Box makes it possible to do so. “This is the simplest idea I could find,” says its inventor, Norwegian Jon Bøhmer. He envisions a network of women distributing thousands of the flatpack devices from the backs of lorries to families across Africa and the developing world. His hope is that the cooker will be eligible for carbon credits – hence the name Kyoto Box. The b20-30 yearly profit per stove would be passed on to the users, meaning the device pays for itself. “It’s all about scaling up,” sums up Mr Bøhmer. “There’s no point in creating something that can only help a few million people. The needs are universal – everybody needs to cook.” – Hannah Bullock
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Kyoto Energy Ltd, Kenya Kyoto Box is a cheap, solar cooker for use in rural Africa, whose use could save two tonnes of carbon emissions per family per year. The $5 cooker uses the greenhouse effect to boil and bake. It consists of two cardboard boxes, one inside the other, with an acrylic cover that lets the sun’s power in and stops it escaping, while doubling as a ‘hob top’. A layer of straw or newspaper between the boxes provides insulation, while black paint on the interior and foil on the exterior concentrate the heat still further. The design is so simple that the Kyoto Box can be produced in existing cardboard factories. It has just gone into production in a Nairobi factory that can produce 2.5 million boxes a month. A more durable model is being made from recycled plastic. Most cooking in rural areas of developing countries is done on woodburning stoves, many of them smoky and inefficient. That means women and children suffer from the effects of years of smoke inhalation, and pressure on dwindling forests due to the constant need for firewood. The Kyoto Box helps solve both problems. If it’s to take off, it will need something of a cultural shift, as previous solar cookers have struggled to gain widespread popularity. Most people prefer to cook inside their homes (out of reach of the sun’s rays), and at times of the day (early morning and evening) when solar heat isn’t available. If the Kyoto Box could break those engrained patterns, it could be revolutionary.
Cover wheels, cut fuel use
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Judge’s view: “An innovative design [that will] be well-received by investors in the air conditioning industry.” – Eileen Claussen
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Neem Biotech, UK Mootral is a garlic-based feed additive that reduces the methane produced by cows, sheep and other ruminants – a significant greenhouse gas. It works as a natural antibiotic that limits the growth of bacteria in the ruminant’s stomach. The key ingredient is allicin, a compound derived from garlic, which reduced methane production by 94% in a laboratory test simulating ruminants’ digestive processes. Animal trials are now underway to work out the optimum dosage and frequency. Methane is a greenhouse gas 22 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Neem estimates that the digestive processes of the world’s herds and flocks are responsible for 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Wouldn’t it be easier just to eat less meat? Perhaps, but as Neem’s Jeremy Stone says, “meat production is huge in terms of business interests and livelihoods. This is a way to cut down on emissions without taxing beef”. Legislation may speed its adoption. Estonia is already implementing an emissions tax for farmers ‘per ruminant capita’, with Denmark and Ireland chewing over the idea, too. – Anna Simpson
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Carbonscape, New Zealand/UK The Black Phantom turns biomass into biochar, a form of charcoal that can be added to the soil – or even buried in mines – so ‘locking up’ carbon by removing it permanently from the atmosphere. The machine, small enough to fit inside a shipping container and be transported virtually anywhere in the world, is “effectively one giant microwave”. It works with raw material as varied as agricultural waste, wood thinnings, even sewage. The Black Phantom is well placed to cash in on the ‘biochar boom’ predicted by some, not without controversy, to be the next green growth industry [see ‘Burn the trees to save the world?’, pp26-29]. The machine captures and locks away significantly more carbon than is created by the electricity used to power it, explains Professor Chris Turney, part of the team behind it. And in the future, it may be possible to ‘recycle’ the gases produced and turn them into ‘green electricity’ to power the machine. Biochar schemes supported by carbon finance, Turney believes, “could become a source of income for [farmers in] the developing world, and an incentive for them to plant trees on a cyclical basis,” he says. – Hannah Bullock
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A “microwave for biochar”
Taking the methane out of the moo
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Judge’s view: “Very simple, elegant and easy to implement with significant impact.” – Leon Sandler
Small is ambitious Our best hope on climate change, says Ed Crooks, Energy Editor of the Financial Times, lies in entrepreneurial ingenuity backed by sound carbon pricing. Climate change is an intractable problem partly because those who are most able to tackle it have the least inclination to do so. A planetary-scale crisis demands large-scale solutions: changing the engines in every car in America, or supplying low-carbon electricity to every home in China. Yet the companies with the resources to meet those vast challenges are unlikely to have the strategic focus to deliver them. The history of innovation shows that it is rarely the large, established companies that come up with revolutionary ideas: they have too much invested in the status quo. Microsoft was born from an idea discarded by IBM. It is the smaller, more entrepreneurial companies that are always more likely to come up with the most radical ideas. That is why the FT was interested in supporting the Climate Change Challenge. Of the ideas that were submitted, many – perhaps most – will fall by the wayside. Even some of the ones with the greatest potential will make only a marginal contribution to the problem.
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History shows that it’s rarely the large, established companies that come up with revolutionary ideas
Nor are we deluded enough to think that an army of entrepreneurs alone can solve the problem. The market, if left to itself, would never take notice of atmospheric carbon dioxide. But a market that puts a fair price on carbon can set off a great wave of creativity in developing ways to cut emissions. There is evidence all around that the EU’s emissions trading scheme and the UN’s clean development mechanism are doing just that. But those frameworks are clearly not yet sufficient, which is why it is worth making the effort to find and reward ideas that need an extra push. It is only by supporting these entrepreneurs and countless more like them that the world can unlock the wealth of new ideas that we need: both incremental changes and great transformations. This model has its critics, and it undoubtedly has its weaknesses. But it has one overwhelming virtue: it works with human ingenuity and ambition, rather than against them. Any plan for curbing emissions that does not do that is bound to fail. Catastrophic climate change will be averted this way, or not at all.
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Partner viewpoint Dale Vince in the fast lane
Plug ’n’ go A wind-powered sports car? Sounds like a perfect whipping boy for Top Gear. But Ecotricity’s Dale Vince is deadly serious – and he thinks Clarkson might just love it…
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explains Vince, was a need for new wheels. “A couple of years ago I wanted to buy a car that was greener than mine, so I went out looking for an electric model – and I just couldn’t find a decent one, not one that didn’t look like Noddy’s!” Combine this irritation with his growing sense of a looming oil crisis – and his first-hand experience of green electricity production – and the challenge was born. “If we could electrify every car in the UK we’d make whopping cuts in CO2. We’d also save about a third of our oil imports,” says an opportunistic Vince. If everyone were to plug in, we’d also need a 12% increase in griddelivered electricity, he estimates – which would “require 10,000 windmills”. So did he go for a G-wiz-style sensible runaround? Hell, no. It had to be a sports car – to capture the public’s imagination, he says. “We wanted a car that would bust the stereotype wide open.” Sporty also made sense in terms of fuel efficiency. “Because it’s electric you can’t carry dead weight; you need a light car.” The technology would be pricey too; so that’s more justifiable, he says, with an exotic car. The initial model is being developed for the man himself, but the idea is to make a limited
Vince envisages drivers fuelling up at home, first through the grid and eventually via their own domestic microgen. “You could conceivably plug in at home, with one or two mini-wind turbines on your roof, and know you’re your own petrol station.” Ecotricity is on the case with that, too. The company is developing the Urbine, a small-scale turbine which, once out of R&D, could provide enough electricity for 5,000 miles of driving a year. Of course, microturbines haven’t been famed for superefficiency... “We’ve invented something quite special,” replies a confident Vince. What’s different about the Urbine, he claims, is the vertical, rather than horizontal, axis. This means it doesn’t have to turn to face the wind – especially important in an urban environment, where wind is much more multi-dimensional due to surrounding structures. The car, meanwhile, should be road-bound in July. The prototype’s costing a few hundred thousand pounds, but subsequent cars are expected to be a lot cheaper. There would also be savings in running costs. But will the Top Gear boys like it? Vince hopes so. “I want them to get out of the car, a big grin on their face, and say, ‘If this is the future of cars, count me in – because there’s no sacrifice here, there’s nothing missing.’” – Claire Baylis
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number – say 10 or 20 – which they hope will spark new thinking among car manufacturers. “It’s a challenge to them. We’re saying: ‘Come on guys, get your fingers out, because if we can do it – and we’re, like, a tiny company of environmentalists – what are you waiting for?’” But the ‘tiny company of environmentalists’ does seem to be pulling it off, starting with an old Lotus Exige bought on eBay as a donor car. “We took out all the internal combustion bits, took off the body, made it longer, lower and better balanced.” With British car designer Peter Stevens onboard to help, Vince reckons it will do 0-60mph faster than a Ferrari. He also claims its lightness and handling of corners will outstrip the Exige. Creating the new technology has proved the trickiest part. The car works using 90 “very lightweight, energy-dense” lithium iron polymer batteries. These are housed in a carbon fibre and Kevlar container, designed to monitor the voltage and temperature of each cell, with builtin cooling and heating. They’ve added their own “body controller”, a computer to control the car, “two big fat motors” and a flash dashboard complete with thumbprint recognition. There’s even a fancy re-charging connector, which Vince likens to a Hoover: “Open a flap, grab a plug, pull it out, plug it in and away you go. And it self-retracts,” he says proudly.
is a Forum for the Future Partner. www.ecotricity.co.uk
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Dried fruit, juicy prospects Adam Brett built a thriving business with the backing of a few smallholders from a war-stricken Uganda. He talks to Kay Sexton about solar drying, sales and sustainability.
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f it’s not raisins, you won’t
sell it.” This was the advice Adam Brett received from wholesalers when he tried to sell sun-dried bananas in Britain in the early 90s. But a group of farmers in Uganda thought otherwise, backing Adam with their own savings. Today, you’ll find Brett’s bananas – along with apricots, walnuts and almonds from the mountainous Hunza Valley of northern Pakistan – on the shelves of retail giants such as Tesco and Morrisons. Getting Tropical Wholefoods off the ground wasn’t easy. When wholesalers refused to take on a product that wasn’t raisins, Adam and his partner Kate Sebag, co-founder of the company, had to find a way to sell their Ugandan imports directly to the consumer. They turned to the London markets, doing six or seven shifts a week at Spitalfields, Camden and Portobello – and then dipping their toes into Glastonbury, WOMAD and even the Henley Royal Regatta: “We went wherever there was a crowd, because everyone from grannies to hippies likes dried fruit.” Sales escalated in 1993, when they convinced a handful of health food shops across the UK, from Infinity Foods in Brighton to Green City in Edinburgh, to take on their fruit. Then, in 1996, Tropical Wholefoods struck a deal with cereal bar specialist Fulwell Mill to make dried fruit and honey snacks. They still go back to the markets though. As Adam explains, “It’s really useful to have that face-to-face contact, even if we only pitch our stall once every couple of weeks.” Adam’s motivation grew out of a trip he took in the late 80s as a young graduate, back to his birthplace, Uganda. “The brutal civil war had just come to an end and the country was in ruins. I thought it’d be good to do something positive and useful.” With no capital at all, Adam had only his training as an economist to invest. He used it to engage a few farmers he already knew there, mostly friends of his family, demonstrating how exporting their fruit to the UK could get them a good return on investment, and making them an offer they couldn’t refuse:
34 Green Futures April 2009
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The war had just come to an end and the country was in ruins. I thought it would be good to do something positive
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Adam admits that food miles are a concern for the company as Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Burkina Faso join a growing list of partner countries, but he argues that the benefits of transporting lighter dried produce also apply to the export process. There isn’t the same urgency as for fresh fruit that is flown into UK supermarkets, and so Adam minimises the carbon footprint of his products by sea-freighting the fruit in unrefrigerated container ships. As Adam sees it, ‘buying local’ is only part of the answer to climate change. “We also need to consider the growing, transport and production processes that bring us fairly traded foodstuffs, while securing a market for farmers in developing countries.” Building on this ideal, Adam added dried porcini and oyster mushrooms to the Tropical Wholefoods ‘menu’. He explains that exporting dried mushrooms for the UK market means a secure income for women who were struggling to sell fresh ones locally – and, by agreeing the quantity and the price in advance, they know what that income will be. “The injustice in the commodities market is that, as the price of the produce fluctuates, so does the income of the producers, even if the amount of produce sold is the same. At least Tropical Wholefoods always returns to them a given sum.”
Apricots from Pakistan’s Hunza Valley, ripening in the sun...
“There were so few opportunities to earn money back then. I proposed to buy a set amount of fruit, for an agreed sum, before it was even on the tree, so really there was little for them to lose.” The agreement worked out well on all sides. For Tropical Wholefoods, it was a good mechanism for securing loyalty among the producers, and allowed them to market their products as fairtrade in the UK. For the producers, knowing how much money they were going to get meant they could plan and expand accordingly. “As soon as the producers began to make a profit, investment shot up. There were so few opportunities to spend money that at first they didn’t know what to do with it. Most reinvested straight away.” Each producer made an initial investment in a smallscale solar dryer, a simple device to channel the sun’s heat, consisting of a long wooden frame with slatted racks, covered in gauze to keep out pests and protect the fruit from dust and showers. The dryers meant that the producers could both grow and process the fruit, adding to the value of their produce. They also meant vast savings on transport for Tropical Wholefoods. “Take the example of mangoes,” Adam explains. “You have hundreds of smallholders in East Africa, connected by poor roads to your fruit-processing site. You’ll need to spend a minimum of £50,000 on a lorry to gather the fruit – and it won’t last more than a year on those roads. Now, you could put 20 tonnes of fresh mangoes in that lorry, ruin half of them on the way, and dispose of your waste at the processing site. Or, you could ask each farmer to peel and stone the mangoes at the smallholding, putting the waste straight back onto the field. The farmer plants the solar dryer within walking distance to the trees and processes the juicy morsels right there. Then you load just one tonne of dried fruit onto your lorry. It saves fuel and means you can pick the fruit much closer to ripeness, so the taste is really great.”
Photos: Adam Brett
Co-op Chair James Babumba hoists his harvest
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...and drying in it too
“ ”
As soon as producers began to make a profit, investment shot up
Like every other entrepreneur, Adam is watching the economic downturn. “The big problem is that our purchasing power has declined with the pound, and the supermarkets are asking us to lower our prices.” In spite of the current strain, Adam’s bullish about his prospects. “The great thing about our relationships with the producers is that there are guarantees on both sides. We know how much fruit we have to sell and can plan for that. And, overall, our sales have held up. I’m actually hoping they’ll improve over 2009.” He has numerous strategies to bolster them, including the introduction of a new snack – roasted apricot kernels flavoured with chilli – and a rebranding exercise with bold colours and a sun logo to draw attention to the use of solar energy. “I’ve seen it all before,” he says, harking back to the early 90s when he was just starting up. “In the last recession, wholefood and healthfoods remained growing markets because those who cut down on meals out and holidays turned their attention to eating well at home. There’s no guarantee that history will repeat itself, but I feel reasonably confident that the food market will be robust.” Additional material by Anna Simpson.
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Partner viewpoint
Go with the flow It’s time to reassess our difficult relationship with floods. Could we even consider them as a good thing? to apply for permission before they pave over front gardens might sound like yet another finicky planning hurdle for home improvers. But the law, introduced last autumn, actually marked an important first step in reconnecting people with their local water environment. Cumulative loss of garden area increases surface run-off and ultimately contributes to flooding in drains and watercourses, explains Bill Finlinson, Associate Director of environmental consultancy Entec UK. “I don’t think the average person has any idea about the implications, on the wider community, of what they are doing,” he says. At the end of a decade of headlinegrabbing flood events, our collective attitude to flood risk remains well behind the times. “We had a fairly flood-free period from the late 1940s until the end of the 1990s, and I think people rather forgot about flooding. During that time a lot of inappropriate development went on – and we’re paying for that now.” The challenge, he argues, is to open people’s minds to different ways of thinking about the subject. Which is why Entec’s flood specialists recently got together to brainstorm the thorny issue, alongside ecologists, engineers and business strategists. The resulting discussions, which have been pulled together with news, opinion and resources in an open forum at www.entecuk.com/frm, make interesting reading. Ideas include not only how to work with floods to avoid the horror of ruined homes and infrastructure but how to reconnect people, in a more positive way, with what is a natural phenomenon. One contributor suggested designing public spaces with cascading pools or fountains that would operate only during times of excess water: “Flood alleviation becomes a treat, a transitory feature that is appreciated while it’s there.” Another points out that “Oxford’s development grew around the historic water meadows. When these flood and freeze in winter, people [would] go iceskating… The flood was looked forward to.” “Floods are a natural process,” reminds Finlinson. In essence, they are seasonal fluctuations in water flow that we should allow for. Floodplains are part of a river’s ‘living space’, providing important drainage areas and wildlife habitats.
36 Green Futures April 2009
A seasonal treat?
He’s encouraged that an assumption against new building on flood plains was central to last year’s Pitt Review of the handling of the 2007 floods. The publication’s 92 proposals included closer ties between weather forecasters and flood emergency services, and an end to the humble sandbag. There’s no sign yet of flood-powered fountains being built around the country, but new projects are at least taking the suggestions on board – and some even include ‘flooding’ and ‘fun’ (or leisure) in the same sentence. For example, Entec is involved in a scheme in Cornwall to create green corridors on exmining land, which would absorb floodwater more effectively than pipes, and double up as nature areas and playing fields. “Most of the time, people would see these corridors as open spaces that they could use for leisure,” Finlinson says. If planners accept the surface water management proposal, drawn up in collaboration with the local authority, future developers would be bound by the scheme. This mirrors plans for a 120-metre-wide ‘blue belt’ on the flood plain of the River Derwent in Derby, which will protect homes and businesses, and create access to the river. It has been put forward by the Environment Agency as a more sensible solution than simply replacing the river’s ageing flood defences.
Finlinson says there’s no doubt that attitudes towards flooding are changing. “Just five years ago, if you talked to many local authority planners you’d be told that drains were something the drainage department did. Now it’s much higher on their agenda.” What needs to happen next, he says, is to engage with the public. He’d like to see neighbourhoods prepared for the worst – not just those that have suffered flooding in the past but places where this may be a future challenge. “You need to be honest with people,” Finlinson says. “You have to make them aware of the water courses where they live and the risks involved, and say: ‘Occasionally, there’ll be more water than these drains can take. But we can cope with this – this is manageable.’” He stresses that the discourse must not revolve only around risks but opportunities too: “We need to think of flooding as something that society can live with – and that can even be a good thing.” – Julian Rollins
Entec UK is a Forum for the Future partner. www.entecuk.com
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Photo: Shutterstock/Stephen Strathdee
R
equiring householders
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Forum update What’s in the tea leaves? Exports of tea and fresh flowers are key to Kenya’s economy – but can they ever be sustainable?
Photos: Finlays
It’s 2023. Kenya’s population is headed for 60 million, with 100 people disputing each square kilometre of land. It’s not known when the next rain will fall, and exhausted soils mean meagre harvests. This hard-hitting scenario is one of the tools that tea and flower multinational Finlays has used to plan for a sustainable future. It has committed to an ambitious set of goals to prepare for risks and to maximise opportunities over the next 15 years, by promoting environmental recovery and resilience, and becoming carbon neutral.
Finlays is one of the world’s largest tea-trading companies. It has been working in Kenya since the 1930s – taking advantage of the rainfall in Kericho, 2,000 metres above sea level in the Western Highlands – and now produces over 23 million kg of tea every year in Kenya alone, alongside 92 hectares of flower farms. But if Finlays is to maintain this level of productivity in the future, it will have to face up to a series of challenges. Kenya is already experiencing water scarcity and struggling with social unrest caused by competition for resources and a growing number of ecological refugees. The Mau Forest used to be the country’s principal watershed, with flow
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throughout the year, but now there is only water when it rains, limiting the supply for irrigation and hydropower, not to mention drinking water. “Our business model is particularly vulnerable,” admits Simon Large, Commercial Director of Finlays, “because of our extensive reliance on Kenyan resources – the people, land and water. The eco and social systems we work with are increasingly fragile.” It was early in 2008, when social tensions escalated into a violent crisis, that Finlays commissioned Forum for the Future to help it develop a strategy with sustainability at its core. The starting point was a set of compelling scenarios projecting the social, political and ecological challenges of today 15 years into the future. A ‘Walking the tightrope’ scenario envisaged a politically stable Kenya pursuing a free-market and enjoying high economic growth, but struggling to accommodate a mushrooming population with natural resources under ever-increasing strain. In another scenario, ‘Hanging on’, businesses were acting for short-term gain against a backdrop of tribal conflict. “A company like Finlays can’t afford to underestimate the immediacy of climate change,” said James Goodman, Head of Futures at Forum for the Future, “but their commitment to sustainability was consistent throughout the company. We never felt that our advice was being taken less than seriously.” Finlays has already begun its journey towards a net zero impact, minimising water waste and actively maintaining the health of the soil. They are also planning to strengthen relationships with the local community by creating more opportunities for employment and developing partnerships with smallholders. No one can foresee the company’s future, but, says Large, “sustainability is now an unchallenged part of it”. – Anna Simpson
New partners Since the last issue of Green Futures, O2, Sony Ericsson, Groundwork and the Food and Drink Federation have joined Forum for the Future as partners.
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>
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Smart clothing, future fashion
Richard Hardyment is Senior Strategic Adviser at Forum for the Future
W
hat are you wearing
right now? Now, no peeking at the label, do you know what it’s made of, who manufactured it and where? And how do you think your answers might be different in 15 years’ time? I’ve asked these questions around Forum’s office, and the last one in particular completely throws people. Of course, no one can predict the future. The dramatic shifts during the current recession show how knotty interactions create bewildering uncertainty. But they also demonstrate the need to think ahead. As futurists, our job is to find ways to manage uncertainty. We use tools like scenarios, visions and trend spotting to explore the alternatives and raise awareness of long-term issues. Fashion Futures is aiming to do just that for clothing. Supported by Levi Strauss & Co, we’re exploring various possible worlds for the global apparel industry in 2025.
Tomorrow’s leaders Since 1996, Forum for the Future’s Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development has been training the sustainability leaders of the future. We track the career of a Forum alumnus.
Clothing is ripe for some futures thinking. There are thorny issues like water and pesticide use in cotton fields; massive challenges over worker conditions and wages in production; and lengthy supply chains that criss-cross the world and navigate tit-for-tat protectionism. And there’s the small matter of consumer power: a cool trillion dollars worldwide is spent on clothes by consumers, whose demands change faster than the models’ outfits on a catwalk. But it’s actually what we do next – the wearing, washing, drying, ironing and disposal – that creates the most environmental damage. Society’s fascination with ‘fast fashion’ is emerging as a hot topic. Critics argue that this high-turnover industry is fundamentally unsustainable: cheap and cheerful goods are worn one day and binned the next. But how might behavioural changes or new technologies create a different future? The current recession shows how consumer attitudes can change. Take the newborn fascination for repairing clothes and shoes rather than buying new ones; or the high street shoppers now wrestling each other for that last vintage print dress in the charity shop. It’s suddenly very cool to look like you’re wearing your grandparent’s party outfit – and maybe not just because fashion trends go round in circles. Is there something else emerging, something transparently ethical about shunning fashionable fads during a recession?
Joe Short Class of: 1996-7 Currently: Director, Dynamic Demand Why I chose the MProf It was the first of its kind. The placements offered a privileged sort of ‘grand tour of British society’, a chance to learn more about the response of all the different parts of the machine to sustainability. ‘Leadership’ sounded cheesy to me, but really it means the seeds that cause change. Things my Masters taught me I learned how specialised the world is. I realised that we’re not going to turn everybody into sustainability enthusiasts – and that it would be inappropriate, because people are already enthusiastic about what they do. Instead, we have to build sustainability into the core.
38 Green Futures April 2009
This could be one possible picture for fashion in 2025. Instead of bling, boasts and blandness we’d turn to durable, dependable and different. Thrifty ‘make do and mend’, customisable repair in the home and localised production in communities would be all the rage. But a recession need not be the only route to more sustainable fashion. Instead, can we imagine another world where technology allows us to rapidly and regularly change our appearance while avoiding the worst environmental impacts? Scientists are working on ‘smart clothing’ that could allow you to alter the pattern or colour of your T-shirt depending on the temperature, how you feel or even on a message from your favourite designer in Milan. So you could change your look without changing the item. Others are pioneering nano-tech clothing that selfcleans while you wear it – saving the cash and carbon soaked up by energy-intensive washing. We simply don’t know what clothing will look like in 2025. That’s why it’s important to consider alternatives. If a newly resurgent fashion industry continues to grow, then the business success stories of tomorrow could come from inspiring innovations. Or if we really are seeing a values shift and a newfound consumer curiosity, then perhaps something you’re wearing now could become the next family heirloom.
In a sense, sustainability isn’t a subject: it’s a challenge. There are seven billion people on the planet, all making decisions and organising themselves in different ways. The challenge is to get them to listen. Change doesn’t happen because it makes sense. It happens because someone champions it and makes it sound fun. Career to date After the Masters I did five years in campaign communications at Friends of the Earth and then an MSc at the Centre for Renewable Energy Systems Technology (CREST). I felt I needed to reconnect with the core sciences I’d first learnt at university – with everything from aerodynamics to the national grid. Then I got a grant from Esmée Fairbairn to set up the NGO Dynamic Demand. My emphasis was on promoting
demand control technologies that can manage and stabilise the electricity network. We started in a windowless office in Stoke Newington five years ago, but things have come a long way since then. In January, Gordon Brown referred to dynamic demand as one of six points in a low-carbon recovery plan! What I plan to do next I’m done with campaigns for the moment: I’m going into business. I’ve formed a company called Demand Logic, to implement dynamic demand in large building systems. Advice for future leaders Be humble and ask silly questions. You can’t assume that there are good reasons for the way things are done. Often there aren’t. Interview by Anna Simpson.
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When councils get clever… Innovative approach helps local authorities connect with their citizens – and save money too “The public sector is not conventionally thought of as a hotbed for innovation,” admits Peter Madden, Chief Executive of Forum for the Future. But a new collaboration between Forum and global design consultancy IDEO could change all that. They have launched a radically different method of finding out what people actually need in the way of local services – and how best to deliver them. At its heart is something called the ‘i-team’, a joint Forum/IDEO taskforce who spend days observing, interviewing and getting to know people in the community. By doing so, they can make sure they understand the real-life experiences which councils influence through their choice of service provision – or lack of it. Kirklees Council, for example, wanted to encourage community centre users to change their behaviour in order to reduce energy use. Rather than simply embark on formulaic exhortations to save carbon or money, council officials instead spent time with two people who had themselves succeeded in making dramatic lifestyle changes: a recovering alcoholic and a successful slimmer. In St Helens, council workers keen to engage teenagers in an ‘underground’ green movement, interviewed “everyone from Brownies to Goths” in
order to make sure they really understood where teenagers in their own backyard were coming from, rather than simply devise strategies on the basis of generalised assumptions and data from elsewhere. “It’s about co-creating services in which citizens are part of the process as opposed to just the market,” says IDEO’s sustainable innovation guru John Thackara. The technique is often used among businesses to develop marketable products and services, but has rarely been tried in the public sector. Lateral thinking is key, explains Sue Siddall, Head of IDEO London. Brainstorming sessions helped council employees ask the right questions in the first place. The knack, she says, is not to ask yourself ‘How can we solve climate change?’ but to narrow it down to a more manageable question like ‘How can we get teenagers involved in tackling climate change?’ That was the concrete challenge that St Helens Council set itself. The result was an edgy project in which secret messages hidden in barcodes were stuck in opportune places like school corridors, and the message ‘decoded’ by teenagers using their mobile phones. At Suffolk Council, meanwhile, the i-team training helped employees focus on one simple way to reduce emissions in the area: curbing social workers’ business mileage.
Madden says it’s not surprising that few councils have ever attempted such a unique design process – they are shy of taking on new ideas for fear of public failure. “People don’t like government getting it wrong, because it’s taxpayers’ money. We’re much less forgiving than we might be with businesses or entrepreneurs.” But he stresses that innovation will be essential as councils face a “triple crunch” of budget cuts, rising public expectations and evertighter climate change targets. “The only way to deal with this is to be cleverer.” Being cleverer can be fun too. Workers who took part said they relished the space and time to rethink what they do. Kirklees’s Heidi Smith came away realising that they should not “preach” solutions, but “pitch” them. But perhaps her biggest ‘takeaway’ was: “We are a lot more creative than we thought!” – Hannah Bullock Forum for the Future is inviting the rest of the UK’s councils to get involved in i-team 2.0. Please contact Fiona Bennie for more information: 020 7324 3626; f.bennie@forumforthefuture.org www.forumforthefuture.org/the-i-team
...and smart finance cuts carbon Sun’s up in Huddersfield: Kirklees Council lights the way
Initiative helps councils meet targets in tough times As public sector funding feels the squeeze, how can we make the money go further? The answer, according to Forum for the Future, lies in spending it on projects that are going to generate revenue in return. Forum has launched Climate Finance to help the public sector find clever ways of funding carbon-cutting projects, and says there’s a whole host of inspiring examples out there. Take the Kirklees Council RE-Charge programme. Through the £3 million scheme, homeowners can get loans to install microgeneration technology such as ground source heat pumps, solar panels or biomass boilers. No upfront cost on what can be expensive devices, but no repayments either, because the money is returned only when the property is sold. The initiative has had around 400 applications since its launch last August, and hopes to help about 330 homes in the first three years. “Councils like these are under major pressure to deliver on carbon targets with limited resources,” explains Peter Madden, Chief Executive of
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Forum for the Future. “Yet smart, efficient finance is vastly underused as a lever for turning off the carbon tap.” He adds: “Saving carbon saves money, and the public sector should be reusing that money again and again to save more carbon.” He points to the example of Woking, where the Borough Council has established Thameswey Energy, a company which runs public-private joint ventures to tackle climate change and has launched the UK’s first private wire CHP/absorption cooling district energy system. Essentially, this consists of a network of pipes and cables which run from small power plants to local social housing, businesses and council buildings, carrying heating, cooling and electricity. Ray Morgan, the council’s Chief Executive, says the business model works because the council “accepted that, in innovation there is risk”. He points out that “long-term solutions are more likely to be secured by taking those measured risks – and learning from any mistakes – than by avoiding them completely”. Climate Finance is drawing on expertise from organisations such as Thameswey, along with RBS Eco-Markets, the Carbon Trust, and the Co-operative Bank, to catalyse more of this smart thinking in the public sector. – Hannah Bullock Forum for the Future is currently recruiting organisations such as local councils, NHS Trusts, RDAs and central government to join Climate Finance. They must be able to provide match funding to develop a pilot finance initiative in their own area. Contact Gemma Adams for more information: g.adams@forumforthefuture.org www.forumforthefuture.org/climate-finance
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Forum for the Future works in partnership with over 100 leading organisations, mainly from the public and private sectors, to find practical ways to deliver a sustainable future. For more information, visit www.forumforthefuture.org
AkzoNobel Elizabeth Stokes, 01928 511695
Devon County Council Pauline Warner, 01392 383012
Lancashire County Council Debbie King, 01772 534195
Alliance Boots Andrew Jenkins, 0115 968 6766
Duchy Originals Tim Appelton, 020 8831 6800
Land Rover Jaguar Cars Julian Whitehead, 01926 649646
Apetito Mark Lovett, 01225 753636
Ecotricity Matt Thomas, 01453 756111
Leeds City Council Tom Knowland, 0113 395 0643
Arup Chris Trott, 020 7636 1531
Ecover Belgium NV Mick Bremans, +32 3 309 2500
London Borough of Croydon Peter McDonald, 020 8726 6000
Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy Jane Howarth, 020 7410 7023
EDF Energy David Ferguson, 07875 119978
Middlesbrough Council Bob King, 01642 728233
Atkins Helene Vergereau, 0113 205 1242
Energy Saving Trust Paula Owen, 020 7654 2411
Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) info@msc.org
Aviva Investors Zoe Collier, 020 7809 6000
Entec UK Ltd Francesco Corsi, 0191 272 6128
Marks & Spencer Rowland Hill, 020 8718 6885
BAA Matthew Gorman, 020 7243 1264
Eurostar Louisa Bell, 020 7922 2442
Merrill Lynch Matt Hale, 020 7996 2054
Balfour Beatty Jonathan Garrett, 020 7216 6837
Fife Council Neil Gateley, 08451 555555
Minoan Group www.minoangroup.com
BCME Bill Duncan, bill.duncan@advizors.eu
Finlays Michael Pennant-Jones, 020 7802 3239
The National Trust Mike Collins, 01793 817708
Birmingham City Council Sandy Taylor, 0121 303 1111
Firmenich SA Neil McFarlane, +41 2 27 802 435
The Natural Step International Louise Bielenstein, +46 8 789 29 00
BP Christine Dewey, 020 7496 4000
FirstGroup Terri Vogt, 07799 885171
Network Rail www.networkrail.co.uk
BT Environment Unit, 0800 731 2403
Food and Drink Federation Julian Hunt, 020 7420 7125
North West Regional Development Agency Allan Openshaw, 01925 400380
Cadbury Alison Ward, 01895 615568
Friends Provident Sandra Prida, 08452 683135
O2 Simon Davis, Simon.Davis@O2.com
Cafédirect Zachary Dominitz, 020 7490 9631
Groundwork Fiona Taylor 0121 237 5815 www.groundwork.org.uk
PepsiCo Steve John, 0118 903 2730
Calor Paul Blacklock, 01926 318 773 Capgemini James Robey, 0870 904 5761 Cargill Europe Fiona Cubitt, 01932 861916 Carillion Louise Rhydderch, 01902 316258 Camarthenshire Country Council www.carmarthenshire.gov.uk CDC Group Shonaid Jemmett-Page, 020 7963 4700 Cheltenham Borough Council Carol Rabbette, 01242 774928 City of London Emma Bara, 020 7332 1431 Commission for Rural Communities Paul Pennycook, 01242 534056 www.ruralcommunities.gov.uk
GSH Group Robert Greenfield, 01782 200400 Guardian News and Media Jo Confino, jo.confino@guardian.co.uk Halcrow Group Andrew Kluth, 020 7602 7282 Highways Agency Lisa Scott, 020 7153 4749 IGD Dr James Northen, 01923 851919 InterfaceFLOR Ramon Arratia, 020 7490 3960 Isle of Wight Jim Fawcett, jim.fawcett@iow.gov.uk John Laing plc David Micciche, 020 7901 3200 John Lewis Partnership Gemma Lacey, 020 7592 4412
The Co-operative Group Chris Sherlock, 0161 827 6209
Johnson Matthey Sean Axon, 020 7269 8400
Cornwall County Council Anthony Weight, 01872 322633
JT Group John Pontin, 01275 373393
Corus Stephen Blaylock, 01244 89 2713
Kingfisher Christina Allen, 020 7644 1142 Kraft Foods Jonathan Horrell, 01242 236101
40 Green Futures April 2009
Powys County Council Heather Delonnette, 01597 827481 Pret A Manger Nicki Fisher, 020 7827 8888 PRUPIM Siobhán Hewitt-Devine, 020 7548 6729 Pureprint Group Yvette Dear, 01825 768811 Rail Safety and Standards Board Joanna Gilligan, 020 7904 7655 Royal Dutch Shell Elfrida Hughes, +31 61 097 4798 RSA Paul Pritchard, 020 7337 5712 Royal Mail Group Martin Blake, 01252 528 681 RWE npower Anita Longley, 01793 892716 Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Caroline Miller, 020 7695 3078 S.C Johnson Chris Lambert, 01784 484100 Scottish and Newcastle UK Richard Heathcote, 01432 345277
Skanska Tanya Barnes, 01923 423906 Greg Chant-Hall, 01923 423614 Skandia Jo Gilbey, 01703 334411 Sony Ericsson www.sonyericsson.com South West Tourism Neil Warren, 01392 353234 Tesco Ruth Girardet, 01992 644 053 The Tetley Group Sara Howe, 020 8338 4590 Tetra Pak Richard Hands 0870 442 6623 Thames Water Utilities Darren Towers, 0118 373 9063 TJX Europe Jo Murphy, 01923 473089 Time Warner Katherine McQuaid, www.timewarner.com/corp Transport for London Jeanette Baartman, 020 7126 3432 Triodos Bank James Niven, 0117 980 9721 TUI Travel Jane Ashton, 01293 645911 Unilever UK Helen Fenwick, 01372 945000 Value Wales www.buy4wales.co.uk Virgin Atlantic Airways www.virgin-atlantic.com VisitBritain Jason Freezer, 020 8563 3180 Vodafone Group Chris Burgess, 01635 677932 Warburtons Sarah Miskell, 01204 556600 Welsh Assembly Government Simon Bilsborough, 029 2046 8669 Wessex Water Dan Green, 01225 526000 Willmott Dixon George Martin, 01932 584700 Wm Morrison Supermarkets Gillian Hall, gillian.hall@morrisonsplc.co.uk Wrexham County Council Michael Cantwell, 01978 292255 WWF-UK Dax Lovegrove, 01483 412395 Yorkshire Forward Mike Smith, 0113 394 9741
Severn Trent Kathryn Barker, 0121 722 4314
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Partner viewpoint
Looking good on paper Printing is big business – a £14 billion industry with a carbon footprint to match. But a new service could see the sector getting a much better handle on its climate impact.
I
f they look hard enough,
shoppers can see the carbon footprint of a packet of Walkers crisps, a carton of Tropicana or a Tesco light bulb. When it comes to print buyers, who are organising the production of thousands of annual reports or millions of campaign fliers, it hasn’t been so easy to work out their impact. Not until March, at least, when the British Printing Industries Federation (BPIF) launched a special carbon calculator to measure the footprint of a one-off print job as well as the annual figure for a printing company. It’s the first such tool designed for a specific sector that uses the official principles of the Carbon Trust’s PAS 2050. Richard Owers, Director of Beacon Press, which became the UK’s first carbon-neutral printing organisation back in 2002, is excited by this new initiative: “Print and paper production generates significant amounts of carbon, but today there are good opportunities to reduce this carbon footprint on a wide scale.” He was part of the working group instrumental in progressing the idea
Photo: Getty/Ken Whitmore
Paper weight: a light product, but a seriously heavy industry
and believes a product’s footprint could eventually become part of a print buyer’s daily decision-making. The level of detail in the tool is pretty impressive, including data on processes upstream of the printing itself. In all, the footprint covers the manufacture and distribution of the paper (pulping, running the paper-making machines), the print site itself (energy and vehicle use, internal transportation, associated business miles and other consumables used in the print process), waste management, and retail (transportation to the retail site and in-store energy use). “We’ve tried to do a full lifecycle of the printing process,” explains the BPIF’s Liam Gardner. “But it’s massively complex when you try to calculate the impact from cradle to grave,” he admits. For instance, if you’re looking at inks and solvents, do you calculate the energy needed to extract the oil in the first place, he asks. “So we’ve focused on getting the basics right,” he explains. So far, several printers – including the Pureprint Group, which incorporates Beacon
Press – have taken part in the testing stage. While the results aren’t yet public, Gardner says it’s already clear that paper production is proving the most carbon-intensive element of the printing process. Paper can account for anything from 50% to 90% of the emissions of a printed product. The figure is particularly sensitive to the specifics of production, such as where the fibre was obtained, whether it is virgin or recycled, how far it was transported, how fuel-efficient the vehicles are, how much energy was used at the mill, and what type of energy... The calculator has had keen interest from major paper manufacturers since its launch, including industry giant UPM-Kymenne, who have provided data (verified by the Carbon Neutral Company) on 38 paper brands. Owers says it’s a huge leap forward from a year ago, when there was “virtually no published data on paper”. “If there’s one area where we want better and better reporting of carbon footprinting, it is paper – because it’s such a big part of the total.” He points to the fact that the carbon footprint of seven million tonnes of graphic papers (printed paper, as opposed to packaging, and including newsprint) used in 2007 stood at over 6.7 million tonnes – a pretty hefty ratio. One of the strengths of the initiative is the way it is already getting key players in the sector discussing environmental issues, explains Gardner. “Through the tool, we want to push the message up the supply chain, and get printers talking to their customers and suppliers.” Within the last year, Owers says, environmental printing has “changed from being a niche product to a mainstream business choice,” and this latest BPIF initiative could well further the trend. “Because there is now an industry standard for calculating carbon footprints, customers can request this information before they place their order. It may only be 10% of the purchasing decision, but if it features as one of the purchasing criteria then buyers can drive real carbon reduction in the supply chain.” – Claire Baylis
Beacon Press is a Forum for the Future partner. www.beaconpress.co.uk
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Partner viewpoint
Sit down for change As part of the MSC’s tenth anniversary celebrations, it’s uniting businesses in a global seafood lunch on 30 September. Seafood suppliers, retailers, restaurants, NGOs and community groups are all invited to participate in the joint effort to promote sustainable, MSC-certified seafood to consumers as one of the best solutions they have to address overfishing. For more ideas on how to take part, visit www.msc.org/10
Ten-year tick list ✓ Fisheries in the MSC programme: 41, producing more than five million tonnes ✓ Under assessment: more than 100 fisheries ✓ At ‘pre-assessment’ stage (still confidential): about 45 more
As the Marine Stewardship Council marks its tenth anniversary, have we tipped the scales for sustainable fish?
C
EO Rupert Howes
certainly thinks so. “We’ve reached a tipping point in our efforts to meet the world’s ‘biggest challenge after climate change’,” he says, gearing up for a year of worldwide events, including a Global Sustainability Seafood Lunch. At the root of the MSC was a beguilingly simple idea: to use the market to reward best fishing practices. The approach was to define a standard for the sustainable management of the world’s fisheries and reward those fisheries that met that standard – for example, by sticking to scientifically agreed limits and reducing ‘bycatch’ (everything that gets fished up alongside what you are specifically trying to catch). Then it would encourage consumers to buy their products, identifiable by the MSC’s logo: ‘the fish with the tick’. The first fisheries entered MSC assessment in 1999. In the early days, however, few in the industry or the NGOs gave much credence to the proposition of addressing unsustainable fishing practices via a market-based programme. Nor did they believe that the MSC, an independent organisation spawned from a collaboration between WWF, the world’s largest conservation organisation, and industry
42 Green Futures April 2009
giant Unilever, would have the muscle to drive it forward. So what went right? Warming to his ‘tipping point’ theme, Howes tells how sticking to the vision has paid off. In the past three years, he says, “both the number of fisheries in the MSC programme and the number of labelled products have quadrupled”. We’re not just talking tiny niche markets, either, we’re talking 8% to 9% of the global wild edible seafood harvest – that’s over five million tonnes of certified sustainable seafood each year. The MSC works ‘from boat to plate’ engaging fisheries, processors, retailers and, increasingly, foodservice and restaurants. With more supplies of MSC-certified seafood available, the organisation is now stepping up efforts to raise consumer awareness – hence the worldwide Global Sustainability Seafood Lunch this September [see box]. So far, says Howes, the MSC has attracted a lot of what are generally viewed as the best managed fisheries in the world. Not that it has been plain sailing for all of them to qualify. The South Georgia Patagonian toothfish (a.k.a. Chilean sea bass) fishery, for instance, only won certification after investing in measures ranging from adding observers on boats and
✓ Market spread: 42 countries ✓ Examples in UK market: Birds Eye Omega 3 Fish Fingers, Young’s Smoked Alaska Salmon, Pret a Manger’s MSC Really Wild Salmon sandwich, Sainsbury’s Kids’ Fish Pie
banning transhipment of catch from boat to boat, to closing the fishery for part of the year, and weighting their long lines to prevent seabird bycatch. Now that the MSC is becoming increasingly accepted as a way of ensuring sustainable fishing, Howes is looking forward to casting its net wider, raising awareness with more fisheries – including those in developing countries – and improving their ability to meet MSC standards. Perhaps, too, there will be help from national governments. The Dutch, he notes, have put forward u1 million to fund MSC certification, with the retail sector firmly on board. As the momentum grows, Howes is excited about what could be achieved in the next ten years. “If we could get 20% of global fisheries in the programme, that could change the terms of trade in seafood forever – where sustainability is at the heart of buyers’ decisions around the world, and can’t be ignored.” – Chris Alden
Marine Stewardship Council is a Forum for the Future partner. www.msc.org
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Photo: Michael Cockerham
Good catch
✓ Number of labelled products: around 2,300
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Comment
The Knowledge:
Richard Gillies Director of Plan A at M&S
“We are asking people to step into the unknown” Gillies: in search of a fixed cost for carbon
after kilometre of fluorescent strip lights, but this one was carefully designed to use natural lighting. It’s just so much more pleasant for human beings – not to mention the fact that it halves your energy bill.
You have to risk failure
t all started with an Actimel bottle
I
I was throwing that tiny little thing into the recycling bin one morning as I drove to work – and I missed, so had to get out of the car, in the rain, and pick it up. Later I was at work signing off M&S’s electricity bill, and it suddenly dawned on me that I was putting much more effort into recycling a small plastic bottle than I was procuring a year’s supply of electricity! And it struck me – I wasn’t applying the same set of values at work as I was at home.
M&S brought you Lycra, now anaerobic digestion We introduced Lycra to the masses in the 80s, came up with machinewashable suits, sandwiches in little triangles... It was all about taking a risk. Similarly, a lot of the things we’re doing for Plan A [the company’s environmental transformation] aren’t proven – that’s what makes my role so exciting. It’s about going out and seeing how solutions can be applied from one part of our supply chain to another. For example you could be visiting a juice factory, so you ask where all the pulp goes – then you start looking at turning it into energy through anaerobic digestion, and then how you can do this with animal slurry on farms, too...
The lingerie factory moved me The highlight of last year was visiting one of our suppliers’ eco-factories in Sri Lanka – producing lingerie. Usually, these places have kilometre
Plan A is a change plan – and if you read the management guides, the majority of them fail. We are asking people to step into the unknown. But the beauty of this subject matter is that people like it. We have a tremendous level of support amongst our staff, who ultimately are the ones that make it happen – whether it’s recycling hangers and switching off lights, or promoting organic clothing. And I’ve been hugely enthused by the commitment of a lot of our suppliers – waste contractors, hauliers, the farms and factories… even despite the current pressures of the trading environment and exchange rates. We’ve just about passed the tipping point: it really has become ‘business as usual’ for this organisation.
We’ve got to make ethical shopping recessionproof We’ve found that shoppers are still happy to make ethical choices, but more are falling into the ‘only if you make it easy for me’ category. There’s a slight softening of the ‘I’m prepared to pay loads to be green’ category. So, while products with a price premium, such as fairtrade and organic, are an important part of the mix, we’ve got to move to a point where we can offer mass-market products with sustainable credentials.
I wouldn’t want Gordon Brown’s job Getting more than half a step ahead of the customer makes you very unpopular: we know they won’t come with us; they’ll go to one of our competitors. The job of government is to get one or two steps ahead of its ‘customers’, the electorate, to change the system – and that is tough and unpopular. The government has made some bold steps, nevertheless. We’re very pleased about the Climate Change Act, because that sets some parameters for us, and in business we need a degree of certainty. What we need next is a fixed cost for carbon… Richard Gillies, Director of Plan A at M&S, was in conversation with Hannah Bullock.
Sri Lankan eco-factory: natural light on lingerie
www.greenfutures.org.uk
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LOOKING AFTER THINGS IS IN OUR NATURE For more than 29 years Ecover has been
A sister factory in France
a pioneer in the development of effective,
was built and opened in 2007
ecological cleaning products. We offer a
to help Ecover keep up with the
complete home cleaning range that is
demand for our products. So a big
spectacularly powerful and supremely
thanks from the new factory to
ecological. Ecover continues to develop
everyone who’s been using Ecover all
innovative products with ecology at the
these years.
core of every decision we take.
ECOVER’S ECOLOGICAL FACTORIES
DON’T FORGET TO REFILL Due to popular demand, Ecover re-launched
A key area for reducing the impact of
an efficient
cleaning products is during their
new Refill
manufacture, so in 1992 Ecover opened the
System earlier
world’s first energy efficient Ecological
this year.
Factory in Belgium. It’s constructed mainly
Offering an
from recycled and recyclable materials and
easy way to
has its own water purification system.
reduce, re-use and recycle, the service is simple. Just take your empty Ecover bottle into your local store and well, refill. You can refill Ecover Washing Up Liquid, All Purpose Cleaner, Fabric Softener and Laundry Liquid. On average, bottles can be refilled up to fifty times - so one Laundry
WORKING WITH WATERAID In 2008 Ecover launched a three year partnership with WaterAid to fund project work in rural Ethiopia. The project will provide long term, sustainable access to water, hygiene education and sanitation for nearly 15,000 people across 11 villages. Only 22% of Ethiopia’s population have access to safe water and so 17 out of 100 children die before they are 5 years old. Access to safe water and sanitation enables people to take their first steps out of poverty. That is what Ecover is determined to give.
FIND OUT MORE AND PICK UP A FREE WATERCARE PACK Follow the links from www.ecover.com - you can find the full story and regular progress updates about Ecover’s work with WaterAid in Ethiopia - and apply for a free watercare pack, which has lots of information about saving water in your home, plus a free
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Liquid bottle could last an average family three years, saving 49 plastic bottles and preserving the resources that are used to Above: Ecover’s First Ecological Factor y in Belgium is positioned to save energy on lighting by making the best use of natural light throughout the day.
3508 green futures.indd 1
make them. To find your nearest stockist visit www.ecover.com
POWERED BY NATURE
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Partner viewpoint
A sunny outlook for ethical banking: Triodos customers Southern Solar
The phoenix of finance Some of the world’s biggest banks are facing meltdown. So, can their sustainable cousins rise from the ashes?
T
following the credit crunch have propelled sustainable banking into the limelight. Until the shock of the financial crisis, their progress had been steady, even unremarkable, against the headline-grabbing growth of the leading mainstream banks. But today, the figures are pretty impressive. The ten best-known sustainable banks in the developed world alone have assets of around $30 billion – and rising. Focusing on financing environmental projects, social entrepreneurship and community businesses, these banks include names such as Triodos in the UK, ShoreBank in the US, and the BRAC Group, a Bangladeshi microfinance institution with millions of customers in Bangladesh, Tanzania and Afghanistan, among other places. So what’s their secret, and what should the financial industry learn from them? Here are three key ingredients of success:
TH WATERAID
ed a three year
erAid to fund project The project will
tainable access to on and sanitation for
across 11 villages. Only
ulation have access to
out of 100 children die s old. Access to safe
nables people to take poverty. That is what
to give.
RE AND PICK UP RCARE PACK
www.ecover.com
story and regular
ut Ecover’s work with
- and apply for a free has lots of information
Photo: Southern Solar
your home, plus a free
BY NATURE
he tumultuous months
1. Values-driven banks focus on the relationship with customers By highlighting their interdependence, the bank enjoys committed depositors who understand what their money is used for, and borrowers who feel supported by it. For example, Triodos customers know that their deposits are funding projects such as solar companies in Bristol, affordable housing in London and organic farms in Gloucestershire – from which the wider community benefit. The loss of this vital bond in conventional banking has led to catastrophic consequences for the markets and millions of people connected to them. Rather than build their business on the back of real relationships, many banks invested in packaged and
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31/3/09 16:00:12
repackaged sub-prime mortgages and sold them to the market. This meant the buyer had no idea what to do if borrowers, who were completely disconnected from them, failed to pay interest or missed repayments. 2. They know their shareholders Banks that are ‘listed’, and therefore work with anonymous shareholders, have to fight the perception of being weak as stock prices drop. The damage that can be done by anxious depositors transferring their money quickly via the internet is all too clear. Ethical banks often choose not to be listed, or they deliberately follow clear, strong codes for socially responsible shareholding, so depositors know exactly what they’re letting themselves in for. Because the value of these banks is determined by the quality of their loan portfolios – grounded in real companies and the people who run them, rather than the market – this prevents speculation. 3. They are about core banking Banks provide a public service: money, especially savings, is fundamental to the way we live our lives – just like clean drinking water, electricity, healthcare and education. But many are diversifying into potentially lucrative, less transparent products, such as insurance and investment banking. Those that were not prepared to invest in these riskier leveraged financial products have actually fared much better. At the height of the crisis, Triodos increased its deposit base by 15% in just two months. And overall, while many mainstream banks are worth only a fraction of their value a year ago, Triodos grew by 25% in 2008. People who were once sceptical about smaller banks now understand
that staying close to the real economy – through tangible projects such as renewable energy or community schemes – is safer than being involved in global markets. A really thorough regulatory framework would ensure all banks only work in savings, loans and transactions – returning to the core business they came from and know best. Only by applying these sustainability principles will mainstream banks make the margins they need to deliver healthy, effective and key banking services. Because, despite the financial crisis, the world isn’t short of money: we just have to make better use of it. Dr Bevis Watts is Head of Business Banking at Triodos Bank.
t Triodos Bank we have witnessed the crisis close up, avoided its worst impacts, and prospered despite it. We’ve proved that our core business works, and we want to share the learning. In March we held the inaugural meeting of the Global Alliance for Banking on Values. This is a new group of 11 of the world’s biggest and best sustainable banks. It aims to develop new ways of working, build organisations better suited to long-term sustainable thinking, and establish new forms of ownership and economic co-operation.
A
Triodos Bank is a Forum for the Future partner. www.triodos.co.uk
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City shifters How on earth should we begin greening our metropolises? By asking the right questions, says The Natural Step. the Mayor of Madison, state capital of Wisconsin, US, has a favourite ‘nuts and bolts’ story about sustainability. We could start by asking the right questions. “We have this huge converted factory, where we store all our 240 buses overnight,” he explains. “There’s a small part of the building where we fuel them up – and, for the comfort of our employees, we’d been keeping that warm.” What the council hadn’t registered was that they were unnecessarily heating the bus storage area as well. So in 2007 they bought a door – which cost $70,000, but would pay for itself, through energy savings, in two years. Like many green solutions, the Madison bus garage door seems so obvious – but, according to Cieslewicz, it didn’t come about by chance. “It was such a simple answer,” he says. “But you don’t get the right answers unless you ask the right questions.” What got Madison asking those questions in the first place was its engagement with The Natural Step (TNS) in a radical ‘change process’ to guide it towards the goal of ‘sustainability’ – and help it become one of the first Eco-Municipalities in North America. TNS’s ‘municipal sustainability planning’ is different from your average city-level strategic plan, explains John Purkis of TNS Canada, in that it doesn’t only involve municipal officials. Key to the process is setting up a dozen or so task forces with representation from local government, business and members of the public, who work to “create descriptions of success for anything from the waste water system to the transport system”. Another central element is ‘backcasting’, the unique approach TNS has been using successfully with businesses and organisations alike for the last 20 years. Through this, people visualise what their community would be like if it were truly sustainable, and then plan the steps to make that vision a reality. The beauty of the process, explains Stanley Nyoni of TNS in Stockholm, is that it can be applied to societies anywhere in the world. “When we do backcasting in Sweden or Kenya,” he says, “the result is almost always the same. We agree at some level on what a sustainable society would be: what kind of energy, what kind of agricultural systems… I find that powerful in terms of bringing consensus.”
46 Green Futures April 2009
So far, the Eco-Municipality movement has mobilised about 100 towns and cities, not only in North America but also in Europe and even in Africa. Take Olds, Alberta, for example. The prairie town in the west of Canada has adopted a Municipal Strategic Plan that will have a trickle-down effect into existing plans on transportation, land use, economic development, etc. One of the goals to come out of the process is to minimise water use. Blazing a trail in Madison, Wisconsin
Initiatives include a project encouraging residents to garden with native prairie plants that need less irrigation, and a scheme to replace all water meters in town with automatic smart meters. Olds has also installed photovoltaic panels on the roof of its local aquatic centre, to heat the swimming pool. Most importantly, though, engaging with TNS has meant that business and community leaders within the town now have a common understanding of what sustainability is, and are working together to implement the new plan.
“To tackle complicated problems, we need an over-arching perspective that uses a systems approach,” stresses Purkis. “Systems-thinking creates understanding of the connections in the system – that if we change one part of the system, another part is affected.” Collaboration is also central to progress in Machakos, Kenya. The major rural centre, with a population of around 150,000, is partnering the Swedish Eco-municipality Robertsfors, a small town of 2,000, to create an action plan of its own. The partnership is slated to last four to five years, and has begun with ‘processleader training’ sessions held in both towns to familiarise participants with how to actually shape an Eco-Municipality. Initial projects in Machakos include a tree-planting programme, which has already seen 28,000 trees planted and is aiming for 100,000 by June, and an experimental organic farm to engage residents in ‘urban agriculture’ by using kitchen waste as compost for vegetable growing. Purkis emphasises how important it is to support municipal governments in shaping the future – because, ultimately, “communities are on the front line of the sustainability challenge. They are where the impacts of poor air and water quality, climate change and diminishing natural resources are felt. They are where people live, work and play. They are where quality of life and health improves or declines.” – Chris Alden
The Natural Step International is a Forum for the Future Partner. www.naturalstep.org
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Photo: TNS
D
ave Cieslewicz,
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Comment
American Eye As car sales continue to fall, Polly Ghazi asks whether manufacturers are on the road to oblivion or transformation.
G
“ ”
Illustration: Andrew Baker
If US cars averaged 35mpg, it would save half the oil currently imported from the Persian Gulf
www.greenfutures.org.uk
iven the dire straits of
Detroit’s main industry, the Motor City’s annual car show in January lacked much of its usual glitz and glamour. But for environmentalists, the North American International Auto Show was a late Christmas present. Hybrid after hybrid was showcased, along with several electric vehicle prototypes, as Ford, General Motors and Chrysler vied to display newly minted environmental credentials, while Honda and Toyota competed for top dog status in the growing green car market. All five companies paraded plug-in hybrids and pure electric vehicles in development, and claimed they would bring the technologies to market in 2010-2012. Toyota unveiled its third-generation Prius, slated to achieve 72.4 combined mpg; Ford presented its imminent Fusion and Taurus hybrids, and plans for a 2011 electric vehicle that will cover 100 miles on a single charge. Not to be outdone, General Motors announced it would build a new plant in Michigan in 2009 to make lithium ion batteries to power its much-vaunted Chevy Volt, that can run for up to 40 miles on its electric engine alone. Alternative fuel technologies, however, will not come cheap. General Motors, for example, plans to spend more than $1 billion to bring the plug-in Volt to showrooms. Hybrids are also expensive, and with US gas prices now far below the $4 a gallon highs of last summer, sales of the Toyota Prius (down 28% on January 2008) and its cousins are stalling. All of which begs the question: will America’s big three carmakers be able to stay afloat long enough to invest in, and mass manufacture, the fuel efficient cars they believe will turn their businesses around? “Somebody is the walking dead out there,” Finbar O’Neill, President of vehicle forecasting company J.D. Power, told Reuters during the motor show, adding that the precipitous drop in total US car sales to 13.2 million in 2008 from 16.1 million in 2007 was the equivalent of “one or two car companies” in lost volume. With continuing falls in sales predicted for 2009, carmakers are keenly aware that they are walking a tightrope between reinvention and oblivion. In December 2008 the Bush administration approved $17.4 billion in short-term loans for GM and Chrysler, but both they and Ford have said they are likely to need more federal help. This assistance, under the Obama administration, is likely to be tied to fuel efficiency standards for all petrol cars. The new president has already indicated that he will issue new mileage standards for 2011 model year vehicles. He has also directed the US Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider its decision to reject proposals by a dozen states, led by California, to impose CO2 emissions standards on vehicle exhausts. And
carmakers may actually welcome the regulation. They may even – Henry Ford would be rolling in his grave – welcome government intervention in raising petrol prices to boost sales of their expensive new fuel-efficient vehicles. “Far be it for me to be the first auto executive to call for a gas tax,” Robert Lutz, General Motors Vice Chairman recently commented to the New York Times. “But right now, [with low gas prices] it’s like fighting obesity by requiring clothing manufacturers to make nothing but small sizes.” So where does this leave environmentalists? Should they be praying for the Big Three’s demise or for their successful transformation? Given that cars are around to stay and that the mighty US economy will eventually recover, the general view seems to be that vehicle manufacturers must be forced to continue down this road until it’s too late – and too costly – to turn back.
“Without California standards and without federal standards, there’s a real danger of Detroit falling back into their old gas-guzzling ways,” Roland Hwang of the Natural Resources Defense Council told the Associated Press. The Union of Concerned Scientists agrees, and is concentrating its efforts on backing up government fuel efficiency plans with user-friendly analysis. A new report, for example, demonstrates that a 35mpg average for US cars by 2020 is not just technically feasible but will create jobs and, by the same year, save more than 1.1 million barrels of oil per day. This is about half of what the United States currently imports from the Persian Gulf. Polly Ghazi is US correspondent for Green Futures and writer/editor for the World Resources Institute.
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Comment
JonathonPorritt “Maybe we’ll look back on the collapse in the global economy as precisely the shock we so desperately needed.”
I
t’s now 18 months since
the global economy started on its downhill slide. On 7 August 2007, the banks simply stopped lending to each other when they realised they knew nothing about each other’s real credit-worthiness. We know a lot more now, and it’s been getting worse ever since, despite trillions of dollars having been made available to bail banks out, nationalise them, force them into mergers and so on. Meanwhile, the soul-searching and blame-laying are in full swing. Who should really carry the can for such a cataclysmic collapse? Countless books have already been written, wise-after-the-event pundits are still having a field day, and lawsuits are pending. From a sustainability perspective, there have already been some dramatic consequences. Around the world, governments have introduced recovery packages including massive outlays on energy efficiency, renewable energy, ‘smart grids’ and environmental technologies of every kind. The sums involved in Green New Deals are staggering. At last count (according to HSBC’s report A Climate for Recovery), they amount to around $430 billion – around 15% of the total spend on all recovery packages. NGOs are quite rightly worried that the other 85% is still in the business of promoting carbon-intensive, earth-trashing investments... But even so, it’s more than the $400 billion which Lord Stern suggested earlier in the year would need to be spent annually to achieve the dramatic cuts in emissions that governments are theoretically signed up to. It’s very unlikely that more than a fraction of this last surge in investment would have been forthcoming if it were not for the collapse of the global economy. But beyond that, it’s difficult to detect any serious comparisons being made between the collapse in capital markets and the impending collapse in the global environment. There’s been little commentary on the critical linkages between the credit crunch, the climate crunch and the impending resource crunch (around oil, food, precious metals and so on). Take one example: debt. Governments the world over have been fuelling the engine of growth-at-all-costs with increased debt. Discourage savings; promote consumption through the availability of credit of every
48 Green Futures April 2009
kind. Live for today by living on tick. Levels of personal debt have gone through the roof, with the active encouragement of politicians. The UK is one of the most indebted nations in the world. In the US, David Walker, the former Comptroller General, has calculated that the national debt now amounts to the equivalent of $175,000 for every US citizen. As our debts to banks and others have built up, so have our debts to Nature – in terms of the unsustainable depletion of natural resources, measured by the loss of top-soil, forests, fresh water and biodiversity. Some time ago, the New Economics Foundation launched Ecological Debt Day, to mark the point in the calendar year at which society ‘exceeds’ the total volume of resources available to us annually. In 2008, their report demonstrated, we went into ‘overshoot’ on 23 September. In 2005, it was 2 October. In 1995, 21 November. And in 1986, 22 December. The direction of travel is crystal clear, as are the moral consequences: this kind of deficit consumption is, in effect, drawing down on the capital entitlements of future generations. This is exactly the kind of analysis we’ve developed in Forum for the Future’s latest publication, Living Within Our Means. The shock to the system from the near-collapse of our global banking industry has been traumatic – and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Even so, that’s nothing compared to the near-imminent collapse of the ecological systems on which we depend – particularly a stable climate. It seems strange to say this now, but maybe we’ll look back on the collapse in the global economy and recognise it as precisely the shock we so desperately needed. Not another climateinduced shock (although they will be coming thick and fast) but an economic shock that compelled us to look much harder at the period of frenzied excess we’ve been living through. And to seize hold of that moment to advance some different ideas – on regulation, on reform of the Bretton Woods Institutions, on economic growth, on low-carbon innovation, and on getting ourselves out of this mess by laying the foundations for a very different kind of economy. Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future and Chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission. www.forumforthefuture.org www.jonathonporritt.com
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Comment
Green Futures in denial? I’m concerned that Green Futures is giving off an aura of denial. I constantly read in it that the [credit] crunch is good news for the environment because it will force people to cut waste and to consider alternatives, both to our lifestyles and to the ethical stance of our society. Jonathon Porritt, we are told, is optimistic, and you have a piece on a new green deal [GF71, p21]. But in the papers I read that plummeting oil prices are putting wind farms in jeopardy; that new gas-fired power stations are being built; and that nuclear is back on the agenda in the UK, Germany and Sweden. A survey of insurance risk conducted at the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation (CSFI) showed that climate change and pollution have paled into insignificance. Green Futures needs to ‘get real’. The recession is bad news for the environment; there are no two ways about it. The collapse in commodity and energy prices removes any pressure to husband resources, the sharp drop in carbon contracts makes nonsense of CO2 targets, and the EU’s carbon trading scheme is a shambles. Such setbacks will take years to correct. The real challenge facing Green Futures – and Forum for the Future – is to recognise this reality and devise strategies to deal with it. David Lascelles, CSFI
Martin Wright responds: Yes, I agree that the recession is making it extraordinarily tough for many renewable energy projects to get finance – and that tumbling oil prices hardly help them make their case. And I’d echo some of your other points as well – although I’d suggest that the “shambles” in the EU’s carbon trading scheme comfortably pre-dates the recession and will, sadly, probably outlast it. I don’t agree that the recession has blown climate change completely off the radar, however. Public concern over it seems to be surprisingly resilient – even if it’s not triggering anything like the level of action required. I’d hope our articles demonstrate that we’re not in denial on these matters. To give one example, we specifically addressed the implications for renewables of the tumbling oil price in a couple of pieces in GF71 [p6].
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Join the debate at www.greenfutures.org.uk Don’t keep your thoughts to yourself! Our website receives hundreds of thousands of hits from visitors around the world. Reach them by posting a comment on any article in Green Futures, or respond to points others have made. Or just email us at letters@greenfutures.org.uk (Letters may be edited for publication.)
Overall, I’m not at all convinced that the recession – in the sense that it spells the end of the fairyland boom we’re all waking up from – will be unmitigated “bad news for the environment”. It may be very tough now, and for a few years to come, but might it not have been a whole lot tougher had we simply carried on ‘business as usual’, burning a hole in the planet’s life support system, along with our pockets, as we swept along to Armageddon? Discuss!
Upping the friction In ‘Ramping up the watts’ [this issue, p19], you seem to forget that energy must come from somewhere! On a downhill section it can come from gravity, but on the flat or uphill it can only come from the vehicle’s engine. Surely Innowattech’s technologies make the cars less fuel-efficient? That’s why trains run on hard tracks with solid wheels to reduce friction – these schemes increase it! Osbert Lancaster, Footprint Consulting
Innowattech responds: The generators we’ve produced have similar elastic qualities as asphalt. The energy they capture is the mechanical energy that vehicles waste through making ever so slightly visible dents in the asphalt as they travel over it. The generators do not slow down the vehicle or influence its fuel consumption; nor do they affect the road quality. Yael Greenberg No.71 Janu ary 2009
In india’s green horizon s
Asia’s un likely
cleantec h star
• Crunch Plus: time for a green • Britain’s new deal leading • Jonathon cities of light Porritt gets optim istic www.gree nfutures.or g.uk
letters@greenfutures.org.uk
Letters
Refurb for skills as well as stock The pilot refurb projects planned as part of Refit West [GF71, p39] will be useful, but someone, somewhere needs to timetable how the workforce is going to be upskilled, how long this will take and how best practice information is going to be properly communicated. I am also concerned about the initial focus on social housing stock. Private landlords have no interest in upgrading their housing, and so getting them to do so will need a legal requirement, fully covered by loans. Sue Everett
Competition challenge I would like to challenge the assumption of Forum for the Future’s Climate Change Challenge [this issue, pp30-32] that the only ways to reduce emissions are technical solutions embodied in marketable products or services. It’s the unrestrained market that produced the climate crisis in the first place. This competition distracts from the work of groups and thinkers that are actually putting forward innovative policy solutions to encourage the market to work within ecological limits. Nick B
Time to act local In ‘Crunch time for a green new deal’, Martin Wright lists a whole range of initiatives designed to boost a green recovery. Support for initiatives within the Transition Movement – born in Totnes – would be a good start. When Dairy Crest closed its five-acre site near the town’s station with the loss of 164 jobs, the local community responded with a proposal to replace the dairy with a zero carbon development, combining energy-efficient homes, employment, leisure, education and biodiversity. Named the Atmos Project, after Brunel’s visionary ‘atmospheric railway’, it includes plans for rainwaterharvesting, solar thermal and photovoltaic energy, and a hydroelectric scheme on the River Dart. Brunel had the money, but his ideas were ahead of technology at the time. Today, the technology exists – so will the government back up fine words with the money to make it happen? Chris Bird, Atmos Project
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