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Here are some of the things I've been up
to.
Click on the links in the table to find out
more.
And have a look at news for previous years by clicking
on the hats.
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NATIONAL TRUST - SUSTAINABLE
BUSINESS WORKSHOP
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What a brilliant slogan -
Forever For Everyone. I was
one of two outside speakers at the National Trust's
sustainability workshop, which was looking at how
to make this slogan mean something across the whole
organisation. Whilst the Trust has
superb examples of sustainability in practice,
they're looking at what they might do across the
whole organisation. And hopefully take a
lead!
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INTERFACE CARPETS -
TOMORROW'S NATURAL BUSINESS
(Jul11)
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Ray Anderson, CEO of
Interface Carpets radically changed his
approach to business in 1994, after reading The
Ecology of Commerce by Paul
Hawkens. I went to a workshop at
Interface hosted by Andy Middleton from Tyf. Entitled 'Tomorrow's
Natural Business', the workshop aimed to show how
biomimicry could be used as a template for creating
organisations fit for a different
future.
Adnan's Brewery was a great case
study.
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PROCTER & GAMBLE
BABY CARE ADVISORY GROUP (Jun11)
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I've sat on P&G's Expert Advisory
Panel for Babycare since is started a few years
ago. The fourth meeting was held in June in
Geneva and had several new participants.
Most interesting to me was the new focus of looking at
nappies and baby care in developing countries.
Also the innovations that are coming through.
Please
click here for link to the fact sheet I've
written comparing re-usables and disposables.
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NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY MBA
SUSTAINABILITY CHALLENGE (Jun11)
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As part of Newcastle University's
Sustainable Business Week, MBA Business students
from Scotland and Nothern took part in a competition
sponsosored by Procter & Gamble. The students had
to make a presentation on how they'd respond to a live
issue faced by an organisation. The question posed by
P&G was 'How can our company influence consumers
worldwide to adopt sustainable practices in using our
products?'. The judges, including myself, Peter
White from Procter & Gamble and
Gareth Kane from Terra Firma were unanimous in
awarding the prize to the team from Lancaster
University. I followed this with a speech to a public
audience Challenging Consumers to Green
Business.
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PROJECT DIRT - TIMBERLAND EARTHKEEPER'S
COMPETITION (Jun11)
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It's the second year of the Timberland
Earthkeepers competition for community projects - and I've
been a judge both times. From bee-keeping to fruit growing,
from river cleaning to local markets, the over-riding theme is that
lots of people are involved on a voluntary basis. Project Dirt pull it all
together but also work throughout the year encouraging and
promoting these sort of projects.
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FUTERRA SUSTAINABILITY COMMUNICATIONS
(Jun11)
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I went to give a presentation to the team at
Futerra. It made
me reflect on the early years of SustainAbility - the
organisations are remarkably similar. And the most surprising
similarity of all was that we both came up with the same core
objectives. When we set up SustainAbility, in the
late 1980s, John Elkington and I described these as
'Making Money, Making a Difference, and Enjoying ourselves whilst we
were doing it'. We agreed that like a three-legged stool - if
any one of these didn't work, the whole ship floundered.
At Futerra they have been more succinct with their goals of 'Joy,
Impact and Profit'.
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OGILVY EARTH (Apr11)
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OgilvyEarth, O&M’s global sustainability practice, has
been named one of the world’s top agencies offering “genuine expertise in
sustainability communications,” I've started working with them on an
ad hoc basis. The first project was with Ogivly Earth US with
advice on Siemens.
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BECOMING A SUPERHOME (Apr11)
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I'm trying to make my flat a SuperHome - a network of exemplar, old dwellings
which have undergone an energy-efficiency retrofit. This means I have to
improve its energy efficiency by over 60%. I've had the initial
assessment done to show the starting point. It looks like I'll be close
to the mark when it's finished but I may be let down by my windows, which are
not so easy to double glaze - see blog on this. Superhomes are
aiming to create a network of homes that are local and publicly accessible,
within 15 minutes, to nearly everyone in the country.
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GEO MISSION - ENVIRONMENTAL SPONSORSHIP
(Apr11)
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I first met Pen
Hadow when we were fellow judges for Morgan Stanley's Great Britons
2004. Since then Pen has been on a few more polar expeditions and more
recently he's set up Geo Mission -
a company promoting environmental sponsorship. I gave an interview for
their magazine about why companies should be 'doing more good, rather than less
bad'.
Click here for link.
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WASTE
WATCH BIG GREEN SOCIETY CONFERENCE (Mar11)
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| I'm chairing a morning session looking at the role of government, business and
education in promoting the Big Society. |
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THE E-WASTE
CAMPAIGN
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I'm working with Melinda
Watson from the Raw Foundation to set
up an E-Waste campaign.
The WEEE man, whose head is in the photo on the left illustrates the amount of waste one
person will throw away in a lifetime. WEEE stands for Waste Electrical and Electronic
Equipment. But the WEEE man was made about a decade ago, so if another one
was built today, he'd be a lot bigger. An average 21 year old in 2003 would
produce 3.3 tonnes of WEEE in their lifetime. But someone born in 2003 would generate
nearly three times that amount - 8 tonnes.
Melinda and I are concerned about the amount of electrical waste we all produce, from
mobile phones to washing machines or from hair dryers to printers. We're also worried
about what happens to it. A very small proportion of workable equipment is
re-used and even the stuff we think is being recycled will often end up on land-fill sites,
sometimes on the other side of the world.
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ARTICLES FOR THE
FINCIAL TIMES
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I've started writing for FT House & Home. My first article, co-written with
Fiona Harvey in March 2011 was about Feed in Tariffs - click
here for link. The second one was on Eco-technologies at home - Electric
Green . It was published in June 2011.
Future articles will include one on eco-renovating my London flat.
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CHILLING FACTS
III
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The Environmental Investigation (EIA) Campaign on
supermarket refrigeration launched it's
third report on 29th March 2011. Click here for
link to Chilling Facts
website. I've been involved in this campaign from it's
beginning in 2008 and am one of the judges. We've ranked
supermarkets on how well they're doing to reduce the climate change
impacts of their refrigeration. And this year, we're covering
air conditioning too.
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P&G LEAFLET ON DISPOSABLE
NAPPIES
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One of the most difficult eco-decisions I've had to
make is whether to use cloth or disposable nappies. I chose
disposables. Given that I'm a big campaigner on reducing
waste, this might seem surprising. But my view was that the
environmental differences between the two products were not so
great - and disposables performed better. And over the last
12 years, since my youngest child was born, there have been a
significant reduction in materials used in nappies - see Pampers Active
Fit. Procter & Gamble, who make Pampers,
asked me to write a leaflet on the issue, giving my views on this
controversial issue. Click her for link to pdf of
leaflet.
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ECO-SHEETS - USING RECYCLED PLASTICS
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In January 2011 I took my son Connor (far right in picture) to see the Eco Sheet
factory. Melinda Watson from the Raw Foundation came too (pictured far left) - and
Amanda Barry-Hirst from Greenhouse PR. Omer Kutluoglu, one of the
founders showed us around. They're making brilliant use of recycled mixed plastics
- turning them into fascia boards for the building industry. The plastic boards are
long-lasting and infinitely recyclable - they're replacing plywood, which may come from
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GREEN MOBILE COMPANY LIVES AND DIES -
C-MOBILE
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C Mobile promised a greener approach to using
your mobile phone. Their idea was to give a proportion of their profits to community
renewable energy projects, to minimise waste, offer re-conditioned hand-sets and recycle
phones wherever possible. Unfortunately they both launched and folded in 2010 and
2011 - they weren't able to keep up with the big mobile phone players.
But in the short time they existed, they showed how much more this industry could and
should be doing.
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CONFESSIONS OF A RADICAL
INDUSTRIALIST
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I've just finished reading Ray Anderson's Confessions
of a Radical Industrialist. It's the inspirational story of how
Ray turned his billion dollar company around to become one of the leading
green corporations in the world. In 1994, when he had what he
describes as an 'epiphany', he says that Interface was a company 'so oil
intensive you could think of it as an extension of the petrochemical
industry'. Since then they set on a course to 'Mission Zero'
and between 1996 and 2009, when the book was written, the carbon intensity
of Interface has decreased by 82%, whilst profits doubled. I'd
recommend the book to anyone interested in how companies can do more than
tinker at the edges - this is not just business as usual but a bit
greener.
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THE SECRET LIFE
OF STUFF
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Julie
Hill thought I'd be uncomfortable with her view that we've had enough of green
consumerism, where people are left to choose to be green or not. What we want, she says,
is more 'choice editing'. That effectively means that businesses and retailers only offer
products that have a minimal environmental impact or are deemed to be sustainable.
Actually, I think she's right.
The Secret
Life of Stuff looks at the true cost of 'stuff' and how much of it we
consume. By 2020, she points out, the world will be using double the amount of stuff used
in 1980. Eek!
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ECO-RENOVATING LONDON FLAT
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I've started eco-renovating my London flat. It's been rented out since
1995 but needs sprucing up. I've employed architect Jerry Tate , who specialises in bringing
'buildings and nature closer together'. In this case it means lots of insulation,
inspirational energy and water-saving ideas and including as much recycled materials as
possible. I'll be up-dating my web-page on Eco-renovation as things progress.
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SECOND NATURE PARTNERSHIP - ADVISORY
BOARD
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South Africans, Charles Perry and Mark Griffiths,
co-founded this partnership in 2009. The philosophy is to make
sustainability 'second nature'. I've worked with them on a few
projects and in 2010 they set up an advisory board, which I agreed to sit
on.
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LASER
VISION
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It's brilliant - I'm over the moon! I now have 20:20 vision again.
I had the surgery just before Christmas. It was totally painless - although a little
frightening. But I was completely confident in the surgeon - Dr. Dan
Reinstein from the London Vision
Clinic which he set up. Find out more from my Blog.
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