Ethical and Green

BT (British Telecom) is the largest provider of internet and phone lines in the UK.  In 1990 the company made a pledge to optimise environmental management.

Since 1966 BT has reduced its carbon footprint by 58% which is pretty amazing.  Their new target is to achieve an 80% reduction in CO2 production by 2020.  Even better they are to propose a new model to encourage global businesses to follow suit.  Good on BT.

Now I have to admit that I have found customer service at BT slightly wanting but knowing how committed they are to the environment makes it worthwhile.

Other green initiatives the company have are cutting down on paper bills.  If you elect to have your bill online you save £1.25 a month and The Woodland Trust will plant a sapling in a British woodland creation site on your behalf.

BT are also looking to their suppliers to reduce carbon emissions.  They are encouraging suppliers to promote sustainability and reduce impact on the environment.

BT has 18 million customers in 170 countries and therefore they are in a position to make a real difference to the environment.  The company has produced a range of energy efficient phones and by July 2008 more than 90% of their phone range will be energy efficient.  Cost to the customer?  Zero.

For businesses BT has produced a guide to help companies see how they can go green by reducing energy consumption and carbon footprints.

Well done BT- keep up the good work.

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As promised here are the results of the Sunday Times Best Green Companies. The results took into account corporate policies and practices and improvements in environmental performances.  There was also an employee questionnaire that looked at how much employees were involved in decision making and what their attitude was to green issues.  This is interesting because the more involved staff are the more likely they are going to comply and even take ideas home with them.  All in all this has to be good for the environment.

So here is the list:

• J C Atkinson and Son (Manufacturing)
• Carillion (Construction)
• Co-operative Financial Services (Financial Services)
• Pureprint Group (Printing and Publishing)
• Skanska UK (Construction)
• HBOS (Financial Services)
• Loughborough Student’s Union (Education)
• Saint-Gobain Glass UK (Manufacturing)
• MCM Architecture (Architects)
• The National Magazine Company (Media)

This is the question that the Eden Project is trying to answer at it’s Sexy Green Car show on the 23rd-31st May.  I had a look at the site and to be honest I wasn’t finding the cars all that sexy, but then again I’m not the worlds biggest car fan!

The list of cars ranged from Citroen, Ford, Fiat, Honda and surprisingly Lotus!  The Lotus was the one that caught my eye as you don’t expect a sports car to be green.  So what exactly are it’s green credentials?

The Lotus Exige 270E Tri-fuel runs on a mixture of gasoline, bioethanol and methanol.  The company is hoping to introduce the use of sustainable synthetic alcohols as fuels within 15-20 years.  It’s maximum speed is 158mph which is pretty fast.  The all important CO2 output is 100g/km running on E85 bioethanol or zero emissions on sustainable synthetic methanol.  This is less than the Citroen C1 which has emissions of 109g/km.  Well done Lotus!

So what does the car look like?  Well as you can see it doesn’t look any different from a regular Lotus.

We all know that drinking bottled water increases our carbon footprint.  Anyone who wants to try and become carbon neutral should drink tap water but what can we do when we go to restaurants or other public places?

Thankfully Greencare H2O are here to bring an ethical and green solution that is also stylish.  The company produce watercooling and filtering systems to turn average tap water into a tasty drink.  The interesting point about this company is that once the restaurant has it’s water it can put it into a branded bottle which they can then charge the customer for or give it away free.

Greencare H2O have seen their profits rocket over the last year which is great news for the environment.  It also shows that restaurants and other public places are taking environmental issues seriously and trying to reduce their carbon footprints.  Manchester United have got involved and installed the Greencare h2o system.  Trendy restaurant WaterHouse in Shoreditch, London have also installed the system and ask for a £1 donation of you have the water.

So there we have it.  Yet more good news that industries are making an effort to reduce their carbon footprint.

Next week the Sunday Times will reveal it’s Best Green Companies.  We’ll be bringing you information about the top companies after they have published their results.  For the moment we’ll look at what it takes to have been included in the short listings.  The team here at Ethical and Green are really pleased that a national newspaper like the Sunday Times is dedicating time and space to green issues.  They are also showing that big companies are taking green issues seriously.

Firstly a businesses environmental management policies, environmental training and internal consultation, energy consumption, waste products and recycling were assessed.  Scores from this section accounted for 70% of the final ranking.

Secondly an employee survey was sent out to get their perspective on how their company was doing.  Responses counted for 30% of the final score.  The survey was a rating scale ranging from ’strongly agree’ to ’strongly disagree’ and included statements such as ‘my boss encourages me to think about energy saving‘ and ‘my workplace is too warm when the weather is cold.’  The survey was devised in conjunction with Bureau Veritas, an international firm of environmental consultants and Munro Global, a data analysis company.

Unfortunately only 88 companies registered for the competition as some where unable to provide the data required.  Also the company did not look at the greenest businesses in the country but how committed a company and it’s employees are to making a difference with the environment. If it were solely a list of the greenest companies, the top would be those focussing on renewable energy and so on therefore making the results somewhat unfair.

It will be very interesting to see which companies have made it on to the list.  We’ll also be looking at innovative ways companies are going green and of there are any tips we can take into our households.  It will also be interesting to see the impact this list will have on businesses not included or who did not enter the competition.  Will more companies apply for next year?  Will the environment and climate change come higher up on companies agenda as a result of such publicity?  Only time will tell….

So, stop by next week for the analysis of The Sunday Times Best Green Companies.

If you were to ask your average UK citizen which word they associate with black most would say cab.  There are around 20,000 licensed black cabs on London roads with the first engine powered cab being introduced on 1903.  However, the black cab is set to have a makeover and become green by 2009.  Fear not though- this is not a physical colour change, more a change in environmental credentials.

The traditional black cab is made by Manganese Bronze who are teaming up with the specialist electric car designers Tanfield.  Black cabs already have good green credentials such as lasting 20 years and having a higher mileage rate of diesel engines compared to petrol.  However, by introducing an electric version (and therefore zero emissions) of the TX4 their carbon footprint will be drastically cut.

The new green cab will be able to run for at least 100 miles on one charge.  It is estimated by the Licenced Taxi Drivers Association that the average cabbie runs up around 120 and 150 miles a day.  So the electric car may just last a whole day.  How easy it will be to re-charge the cab is still to be seen.  According to the makers the battery takes six hours to charge from flat with a fast charge of 25% in one hour.  Better not forget to plug the cab in at night then……..

It’s not just the environment who will benefit from the introduction of the new cabs.  By running on electricity the cab will have running costs of just 4p per mile compared to 9.3p on diesel.  The downside is that the new car will cost more than the standard version which currently stands at around £37000.

If the launch is successful Manganese Bronze have plans to try the same in China through a joint venture with Shanghai LTI.  So there we have it.  Another company going green and helping reduce CO2 emissions in London.

The latest company to jump onto the green bandwagon is the BBC.  The BBC are targeting the niche of ethical fashion.  Recently ethical fashion has become a hot term amongst fashion designers and those who consider themselves to be trendy.

These days it’s not enough to wear the right clothes- the clothes have to be ethical and green.  Stella Macartney has launched an ethical fashion range and the pages of Cosmopolitan and the like are full of ethical fashion tips.

The magazine Thread, launched by the BBC commissioned research that found that 31% of people between 16-30 years old wanted to buy more ethical fashion.  They found that as yet people are unsure where to turn to find what’s hot and what’s not.

This puts pressure on fashion retailers to provide information about how their clothes have been produced and where the materials come from.  At the top of the list of what people are most concerned about was the working conditions of the people making the clothes.  This was followed by organic labelling, the use of chemicals, how to recycle the clothes and the energy used in producing them.  

Soon then we could see how large an items carbon footprint is!  Will this put companies off having their clothes made on the other side of the world?  Only time will tell….

We’ll bring you more about ethical fashion telling you where are the best places to buy clothes and more about how they are produced.  We’ll look at the best and worst retailers of ethical fashion and see if it’s affordable.

Good luck to the BBC and Thread.  We hope that they’ll be able to bring more people to ethical fashion and wider ethical issues.

Whilst writing these posts it seems that we are going full circle.  Hundreds of years ago each country was responsible for growing it’s own food and making its own products, be these clothes or toys.  These days most things we use seem to be made in a foreign country.  If we do go full circle and only use the resources on our small island this will have an effect on the economy.  As yet we don’t know if this is good or bad but it will help the environment.

Today the team here at Ethical and Green discovered that screwcaps on wine bottles have a larger carbon foortprint than the traditional cork ones.   The reason the wine industry had to move away from cork was due to a worldwide shortage in cork and therefore it was not sustainable to continue using it.  Most producers have now switched to screwcaps and some admit that they did not look into the carbon footprint before jumping aboard the revolution.

Some figures

 The French closure company Oneo Bouchage has calculated that producing screwcaps gives off in excess of 10.6kg of CO2 per tonne compared to only 2.5kg tonnes of CO2 when producing corks.  This then is a huge difference.

The composite DIAM produces 4.3Kg of CO2 per tonne.

So what to do?

This is clearly going to be an issue for the wine industry.  Once official regualtions come into play regarding reducing a companies carbon footprint they will have to look more carefully into packaging.  Who knows in the future we may all drink wine from cartons?!

For the consumer all we can do at this stage is keep recycling our wine bottles and the screwtops.  We’ll keep you posted if we learn any more about how the wine industry is dealing with this issue.

We’ve been looking at how companies are doing their best to ‘go green.’  Today we’ll look at what measures the NHS are taking to become carbon neutral and reduce their carbon footprint.

The NHS is the largest employer in the UK and the third largest in the world!  As you can imagine then it has a huge number of employees, has millions of visitors to its premises a year and has a vast number of properties.  Some statistics we found estimate that the NHS has 1 million patient contacts every 36 hours!! With this in mind how are the NHS stepping up to the challenge of reducing their carbon emissions?

The think tank NEF (the new economics foundation) has written a report entitled ‘Taking the temperature: towards an NHS response to global warming.’  Whilst looking at how to reduce carbon emissions the report also looks at how a warmer climate and freak weather conditions, will affect the health of the population.  The NHS must reach the targets set by the UK Energy white paper to reduce emissions by 20% by 2010 and by 60% by 2050.

Here are some statistics on the NHS carbon footprint as provided by the NHS Confederation:

• The NHS emits 1 million tonnes of carbon a year
• The NHS energy bills cost £400 million per year
• 5% of all UK emissions from road journeys can be attributed to NHS related journeys
• A total of 25 billion kilometers were travelled by those visiting, using or working for the NHS
• One in every 100 tonnes of domestic waste in the UK comes from the NHS

Going green and making your business carbon neutral has, over the last few years, come high up on people’s agenda.  Consumers are now looking at how green or carbon neutral a business is before deciding wether or not to use them.  That coupled with government and worldwide directives to reduce carbon emissions means that there is big business in carbon offsets.  In fact, such is the importance of going carbon neutral that KPMG actually has a Carbon Advisory Team!

According to Adrian Wilcox of KPMG’s Carbon Advisory Team many businesses have rushed into offsetting their carbon emissions before looking at how to reduce them.  As a result it is estimated that between 2008 and 2010 the carbon offsetting industry will grow to in excess of 60 billion euros!  Instead of rushing into carbon offsetting companies should look at how to reduce carbon emissions and therefore have a smaller carbon footprint.

We have already looked at how we can reduce our carbon footprint in the home so how can businesses do this?  Well there are a number of ways.  One of the most simple ways is to educate your staff in how to reduce carbon emissions by turning appliances off at the wall instead of leaving them on standby, switching off lights and only boiling the water you need when making a drink.  And lets not forget the three Rs- reduce, reuse and recycle!

On a larger scale businesses should look into switching to renewable energy sources such as solar power.  When purchasing electrical appliances businesses should be mindful as to their energy efficiency.

Some companies are encouraging working from home and doing conference calls thus cutting down on the travel that staff do as part of their work.  In the same vein, sourcing supplies from local suppliers can reduce your carbon footprint.

Obviously carbon offsetting is a great idea but in order to be as effective as possible reducing the carbon footprint should also be at the top of the agenda.  Carbon offsetting schemes include the planting of trees and investing in renewable energy research in the developing world.

Are you a business trying to become carbon neutral and reduce your carbon footprint?  If so get in touch and let us know what you are doing.  Alternatively maybe you have some suggestions.  Feel free to leave a comment.