STOP PRESS
The Life After Frameworks event has been postponed to avoid clashes with other events in the same area, and is currently rescheduled for the 14th June at the same venue ( Globe, Accrington)
Watch the Club Events page on this site for information on this event and the other events such as
Bidding To Win (7/8 June) and
Innovation (5th July)
Noted in the Guardians Society supplement recently – What Else Can I do –
Specialist recruiter Hays Building Services says
that with The Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) recently established professional register of low carbon consultants, energy or environmental professionals could expect to earn 10% more than colleagues.
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I have referred to carbon offsetting as chocolate teapots in other posts. It is interesting that the vast majority of spam this blog attracts (and is successfully filtered away by wordpress) are offers to offset my personal and business carbons.
(For just £200 a year you can offset your families carbon footprint, another £30 for the car and £104 for that family holiday flight last year. Hmmmm seems like a bargain !)
But now – we can offset water usage through irrigation offsets. It seems the growing trend in offsetting would allow any business to offset all the water used and wasted by supporting irrigation projects around the world. This is good in that it raises awareness in water usage, but surely better to switch to less water consuming technologies and lifestyles (so called low-flow).
For example, waterless urinals in an office can save up to 17,000 gallons of water a year. Whereas one manufacturer claimed in Grist that a waterless urinal may save up to 40,000 gallons per year in a high use airport building.
The debate on offsetting will continue – as has been commented before by others, carbon offsetting has nothing to do with sustainability – but maybe irrigation offsetting needs closer attention?.
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Build affordable eco-homes in designated “green towns”. Gordon Brown pledges to build 200,000 new homes a year, including five new “eco-towns” including up to 100,000 low carbon or carbon neutral homes powered by
locally-generated energy from sustainable sources to be built on
old industrial brownfield sites
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Two publications from the NWDA that should get your attention:
A useful guide from the Business Resource Efficiency & Waste Programme (BREW) in the Northwest.
This booklet will give you the contacts and tools to enable you to access the support that you need to rise to the challenge, help the planet and save your organisation money.
and
The Northwest Climate Change Action Plan sets out a Vision towards 2010 and action plans for our region
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Just catching up on some of the material from the Think07 event.
Tesco publicity material was contained on a USB stick, which contained an informative video explaining there approach to sustainable stores. For an understanding of where the retail clients in the industry are heading take a look at their website thinkonceagain. Their green flagship store is Tesco, Wick, where they claim to have halved the carbon footprint.
To improve air quality in London – which is currently among the worst in Europe – the Mayor has designated Greater London as a Low Emission Zone. As Zero Champion points out:
Ken Livingstone’s attempt to control polluting vehicles from central London could spell crisis for construction traffic. It’s the first such scheme in the UK and the largest planned in the world. As of February 2008 pollution-spewing lorries will face charges of £200 to travel in the Low Emission Zone.
We are seeing local authorities here in the NW now look at construction transport miles seriously – even as a scored procurement issue.
Not too bad though when you consider we don’t need one out of every three construction material lorries on the road anyway – as a recent Defra report hinted
Watch this space…..
club events page updated – plenty happening over the next few weeks !
Dont Risk the Historic Approach
Partnered or negotiated projects are 18-44% more likely to deliver on cost and 7-15% more likely to deliver on time than those adopting historic approaches, according to new analysis by Be1 based on the evidence of the last five years.
This is a now dated report that I came across again recently – but still impressive – the benefits must have improved over the last two years or so – how do your KPIs and performance measures stack up?
A few recent issues have reinforced my view we may be slowly replacing environmental impact with carbon impact. Whilst carbon management is a good focus on our environmental impact, and a relatively easy one to calculate, we still need to keep a balance on our environmental impact.
A good balance is in the triptych from Patrick Geddes – being fit for Planet, for People and Purpose
It is good therefore to see CABE’s report focusing on their ecological footprint as well as their carbon footprint. .
As we see more and more clients looking for evidence of environmental impact management and evidence in procurement, for example on construction transport miles, this report is well worth reading for its background in calculating footprints, in addition to CABE’s own footprint and action plans.
And on a wider, global scale we see reports in the media of the devastation of forestry and food land around the world in a rush to produce bio-fuels for energy or transport including bio-materials for our industry.
Fairsnape 