Archive for the 'sustainability' Category

Recycling rubbish – shouldn’t we be responsible for our waste?

Published on April 8, 2010 in Recycling, environmental, green and sustainability. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Recycling rubbish – shouldn’t we be responsible for our waste?

Should we interfere with rubbish collection?  Should we pay according to the amount of packing/food waste we generate?  Shouldn’t we be rewarded for composting, sorting and recycling? The Guardian’s Society blog’s is amused by the Daily Mail’s take on our right to generate as much landfill and methane as we want.  At a recent talk by Agrivert on what they’ve done for Oxfordshire County Council they seem to be succeeding – not sure of how much effort OCC put into educating households to help.  The blog’s below…

Putting out the rubbish is controversial Society Guardian 8/4/10

For the majority of residents the most direct contact they have with their local councils occurs when their wheelie bin is emptied. And the removal of their paper, plastic and glass for recycling. Or the carrying away of their ’sloop buckets’ of compostable food waste. It would appear that if there’s a subject guaranteed to get middle England’s goat it’s any attempt to interfere with the Briton’s right to rubbish. Whether it’s the reduced frequency of the collection, the shrinking size of the bin or the extra effort required to separate the rubbish. Today the Daily Mail indignantly claims new targets “mean families will be expected to generate less waste and recycle more”. It goes on to triumphantly report that the government has been forced to back down on plans to make “slop buckets” compulsory in every home. Aside from the environmental arguments – a debate about the seriousness of climate change is something well-covered in why are so many councils failing to win over residents to a less wasteful system? Which authorities have managed to galvanise their householders and driven up recycling? Which messages work?

Green procurement set to become the norm

Published on March 16, 2010 in carbon footprint, environmental, environmental solution, green and sustainability. Closed Tags: , .

Green procurement set to become the norm

Food for thought – good news for those producing sustainable solutions

Experts reveal public and private sector procurement professionals are increasingly willing to demand suppliers fall into line with green best practices by James Murray, BusinessGreen, 16 Mar 2010

Suppliers to the public and private sector will see their competitiveness diminish over the next few years if they fail to provide customers with information on their carbon footprint and evidence that they are improving their environmental sustainability.

That is the stark warning from a group of procurement experts speaking at a roundtable event hosted yesterday by the Carbon Trust Standard, who predicted that the number of organisations adopting demanding sustainable procurement criteria will only increase.
The trend is particularly apparent within the public sector, where the launch 18 months ago of a Centre of Expertise in Sustainable Procurement within the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) has led to an overhaul of government procurement policies.

“Two years ago we were failing [with regards to sustainable procurement] and we were severely criticised for that,” revealed Fiona Ross, director of the new Centre of Expertise. “Now we are completely transformed and on track to exceed our sustainable procurement targets.”

Ross said that sustainable procurement had become a key component of civil service procurement training courses and revealed the government is working with its key suppliers to develop a voluntary charter that will commit them to embracing best practices surrounding the carbon resource efficiency of their products, as well as their youth employment policies and support for smaller businesses within their supply chain.

The OGC is also working with the Carbon Disclosure Project initiative to co-ordinate carbon information requests for public sector suppliers to ensure they only receive one request for carbon data from government, rather than the same request for numerous departments.

Ross said that suppliers would increasingly have to meet minimum sustainability standards to secure government business, noting that Defra’s new Government Buying Standards were already ensuring that public sector bodies purchase products that have secured a “green tick” of approval from the department.

Similar trends are apparent in the private sector, where retail giants such as Wal-Mart and Tesco have made high-profile commitments to cut carbon emissions across their supply chain and environmental criteria are an increasingly common feature of tender documents.

Brian Pembroke, quality and supplier development manager at paint manufacturer AkzoNobel, said the company had a sustainable supplier policy in place and that the procurement team’s success was measured in part on how many suppliers it can get to sign up to that policy. He added that such an approach was increasingly becoming the norm across the industry.

“We are seeing a repeat of what happened with quality assurance, where companies started off with an aspiration to improve quality and now have very controlled and organised processes for managing quality assurance,” he said.

There is little excuse for suppliers not to measure their carbon emissions and embrace efforts to curb them, according to Helen Alder, product development specialist for the Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply (CIPS), who argued that almost all the environmental measures being requested by corporate and public sector procurement teams delivered either an immediate or short-term payback for the supplier, primarily through the energy bill savings that are associated with cutting carbon.

Sustainable procurement policies have in the past been hampered by what Jeremy Willis, head of procurement at PricewaterhouseCoopers, described as a difficulty in knowing whether to trust suppliers’ competing environmental claims.

However, he noted that the emergence of credible new environmental standards in recent years such as the Carbon Trust Standard, which requires firms to measure and reduce their carbon footprint year on year, was making it easier for companies to ensure their suppliers are making good on environmental pledges.

He added that there was an increasingly robust case for suppliers to embrace the environmental best practices that their largest customers are calling for. “Suppliers can now get the accreditation that their customers want and if they are doing it properly, they are taking cost out of their business as well,” he said.

How innovative design could revolutionise our domestic carbon footprint

Published on March 15, 2010 in carbon footprint, climate change, eco-design, environmental, environmental solution, green and sustainability. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Clever ideas on Low Carbon Economy.com – but will manufacturers act?

Household products could save 8m worth of carbon with simple redesign

15/03/2010 09:18:02
Manufacturers could save around eight million tonnes of carbon each year through using better eco-design principles, according to a newly-published eight-year study into the carbon footprints of over 2,000 consumer products.

Testing and certification specialist Bureau Veritas found that manufacturers could substantially reduce the emissions from five staple household products – the kettle, mobile phone, fridge, laptop – by simply modifying the production process and taking on better ‘eco-design’ principles.

It calculated up to 60 percent of a company’s carbon footprint could be cut by addressing the environmental impact of the supply chain and production method.

Xavier Vital of Bureau Veritas said: “While consumers are making huge efforts to recycle and buy responsibly, many companies are still making and selling products that could easily have their environmental impact reduced considerably, but have yet to take the necessary steps to support the efforts of their customers.”

In addition, the specialist called for the inclusion of ‘embedded carbon’ into the government’s forthcoming Carbon Reduction Commitment, which will come into place on April 1st.

A recent study from researchers at the Carnegie Institute of Science found that the EU is ‘exporting’ as much as a third of its carbon emissions from the consumption of goods to developing countries, such as India and China.

http://tinyurl.com/co7jqq