A little while ago I was at the green guardian awards ceremony in Croydon and I was really impressed with one of the groups that were nominated for an award. The Croydon Freecycle group didn’t win the award for Green Group of the year but they had a serious hand in helping other people win nominations and awards. They also highlight the ways in which business and community can work together. At my company, First Impressions, we are very proud of our Environmental performance and we consider ourselves to be right at the cutting edge of environmental development. One key way that we have managed this is through our recycling programme. Our current recycling rate sits at about 85%.

Recycling at this rate is very difficult to sustain. Paper, glass, plastics and metals are all relatively easy to recycle and as a company we can put measures into place to ensure that our staff abide by these principles. However that alone will never get to the kind of high recycling rates that we have been achieving. The reason is that at some time every company has to replace something that cannot easily be recycled – whether its phone handsets that we don’t need any more , desks, pictures that we’ve grown tired of, old ring binders that we no longer need or bigger things like old monitors or PC’s. All of these things can be reused by someone else and all of them are difficult to find a recycling company that will take them as they are, and not break them down. After all reuse comes well above recycle on the waste hierarchy for a reason.

That is when it pays to engage with your local community. At first impressions we dispose of the things that can be reused by engaging with our local free-cycle group. Freecycle is a brilliant group that connects those that want to dispose of goods with those that want them. This has many business benefits but three key ones; firstly, there is the obvious cost savings of not paying someone to recycle your goods; secondly, you get to boost your environmental performance; finally, you get a chance to directly engage with people who have direct experience of your commitment to the environment and who become your ambassadors to their friends and the companies they work for.

But that’s really just the beginning, by engaging with community recycling at this level you are helping to develop a green economy and investing in a group of activists that are going to spread a culture of green consumption and thinking.

To find out more please go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ydon-Freecycle/

Normally when someone gets a speeding ticket, it doesn't make the news, when the speeding ticket is given in Oregon then it shouldn't make the news, not the national news, not the international news and certainly not the pages of the Green Guardian blog news. But when that speeding ticket is given to the "Former Future President of the United States” as Al Gore Jr likes to refer to himself then it does make a bit of a splash - even here. I like Al Gore. I like Al Gore a lot. I liked Al Gore even before he became known as the most important eco campaigner in the world. Sure there was the whole was-he wasn't-he the inspiration of the film Love Story and the 'I invented the internet" quote... By the way the answers appear to be yes and err no. But the presentation of the speeding ticket does go to show that even greenies can be human and it seems to run in the family. Earlier this year his son, (Al Gore the third) was caught speeding in the family Prius. Although the make of the car that the Father was caught in is only referenced as a "rental car" I like to think it was also a Prius.

Why is this important? Well let’s be absolutely clear. There is no way that I am going to say that speeding is OK. The motorcar and its drivers have been responsible for more deaths than any of the world’s worst dictators, more deaths than either of the great wars and of course it has a great deal of responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions. As either of the Gore's will tell you there are things that you can do to reduce the likelihood of hurting anyone else and reducing your emissions in the process. Of course you could cure these problems by getting on a bus, walking or cycling but I am going to assume that some of us are going to need a car at some time so here are some words of wisdom from Friends of the Earth:

1. Don't speed - even in a car like the Prius that reclaims the energy you get from scooting (see footnote) you are going to go through more petrol at high speeds than by driving steadily.

2. Think ahead, just like your driving instructor would have told you for safety reasons, thinking and looking ahead allows you to drive more smoothly and that means that you will be more efficient

3. Drive in a higher gear you will use much less petrol in fifth gear rather than fourth.

4. Maintain your car - If you keep your tyres inflated and your car well maintained this will add a further 3- 10% on your efficiency


Now most eco-groups will also tell you that better than all of the above is to use public transport. For the most part they are right BUT be careful; there is some pretty conclusive evidence that some forms of rail travel are more polluting than even a standard car (if the car is full!). The Pendolino class of train as used by Virgin has a significantly higher emissions use than either other trains OR a fully laden car.

Perhaps Al knew that as he was driving across Oregon, I like to think he was testing how efficient the hire car could be compared to the one in his garage but more likely: he is just as human as the rest of us and probably in more of a hurry than most.



References/ Resources

Al Gore Bio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore and controversies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ae_controversies and driving ticket http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/938_gore19.html and his Inconvenient Youth (http://www.ioltechnology.co.zaiSectionId=2891 )

Green Driving Tips http://www.tripnet.org/GreenDrivingTips.PDF

Train or Car: Times Online Rail industry admits that it’s often greener for families to travel by car (http://travel.timesonline.co.uicle2067255.ece )

Channel 4 FactCheck: is the train still greenest? (http://www.channel4.com/news/aest/641792#fold )


Note:

Scooting: One way of boosting your fuel efficiency in a Prius is to accelerate towards the crest of the hill and then use a combination of the hybrid battery and momentum to travel relatively long distances without engaging the petrol drive.

I have a new arrival in my family - a baby boy just 7 weeks old and as with all new arrivals the tendency is to review not just how the baby is going to change you but how you want to change to be a better person. At the same time this week my wife, who is Gujarati (well she’s from Wallington actually but you know what I mean) has introduced me to a new word – Khet-kh eh . This is pronounced ‘cut’ as in knife and keh? as in Manuel from Faulty Towers. Between us we cannot think of the English equivalent of the word but it is one of my Mother-in-Laws favorites.



It describes that sinking feeling that you get when you have made a total botch of doing something, causing waste and then regretting it afterwards. My wife’s favorite example is when you forget to turn the lights off at night and are faced with an electircity bill that is higher than it needed to be. Be careful how you use this term though ; I described to my mother in law the experience of forgetting about my sons shoes in the garden and waking up to find a fox had chewed them to be told ‘yes sometimes it’s khet-khe, but sometimes its just stupidity ’.



I think it tells a lot about a culture to find that there is a specific word that describes this feeling. I lived in India for a time and I still cannot decide where I feel more at home, among the mountains of India or the highlands of my native Scotland, because they have many things in common. Both countries have strongly defined rural identities that are alien to the metropolitan centres and my upbringing was one that valued keeping things for a long time and finding new uses for worn out things. On the streets of India, from Srinagar to Mumbai, Jaisalmer to Colcutta there is often dirt on the streets but there is not the same litter you find here. If it is not picked up you can be sure it is utterly worthless, cans, paper, bottletops, buttons, old pens, all find a place, a new use.



My parents and grandparents were the same, I am sure I am not the only man that has walked into his fathers shed and wondered just what he was going to do with the tin boxes of half rusted screws and washers or the piles of miscellaneous wood (none of them would ever find there way to the most hallowed position in his tool-box – the stirring stick but all would be used for something). Nor do I think that I was the only child in 1980 to be cursed with an elder cousin’s disgustingly patched hand-me-down flares while all the cool kids were wedged into impossibly tight stretch jeans.



Perhaps that feeling of shame is the reason that my generation and younger have encouraged a culture where only the new and the shiny is completely acceptable, where the regret is not for waste but of not being able to consume more. I think that is why we have placed such an emphasis on recycling, I think that even the greenest of us have moments where we secretly want the guilty pleasure of ripping the tags off brand new clothes (so long as we recycle them afterwards).



So here is the point. We have come to a point where we understand the point of reducing consumption of energy, we may even soon come to understand the importance of reducing consumption of other goods, we have even started to come to terms with the need to recycle; but until we realise that we need to reuse what we already have or to value buying things that are in second-hand shops rather than just recycling the old and replacing with new then we are just wasting our time and our money. Our parents knew this, and a little over a billion Indians have a word for it so I think its high time we fell in love with reusing – I just hope those flares are a bit more fashionable in 2020 when my son should just be the right size for them…