What does peak oil mean for you?

As anyone with even a modicum of common sense knows: we are running out of oil. We use it far quicker than it can be replaced. It’s a bit like a bankrupt alcoholic’s wine cellar: the thirst is unquenchable yet, somewhere in the deep recesses of the claret-addled neurons, a tiny voice screams “stop, it’s running out, and you can’t afford any more!”.

Eeny meeny miny moe...

You know the end result: the man drinks himself to oblivion until the cellars lie empty. Yet, in this rather crude analogy is an interesting sliver of hope. Just like the drunk man, we too can’t help but consume from our bountious oil fields. We also can’t replace the oil in them. Yet, once they are gone (or to be accurate, once they have peaked, and the prices sky-rocket) we will have to stop. We will sober up!

Sobriety brings challenges. How will we fill our time once denied our many fun-filled, oil-derived activities? Just think of the sheer amount of what we do that currently depends on oil, even assuming that electricity can be generated without it on a massive scale – which is not a given. This BBC Video shows some of the things made from oil. Highlights include innocuous yet vital things like wire insulation. Just imagine if there was no more plastic to insulate wires. That means no more plugs. No more extension leads. No more house wiring!

If we take it to the extreme then anything plastic is pretty much on its way out. No more iGadgets; no more TVs, mobile phones or computers; no more lipstick! On the plus side it means less plastic waste, which can be hard to get rid of (although kerbside plastics recycling is on the increase and businesses can find a recycling service for their plastic waste on our directory. Sorry, back to the story.

The rather apocalyptic yet brilliantly named website Wolf at the Door makes some thought-provoking predictions about peak oil:

I think it is likely, a hundred years from now, that Homo Sapiens will be living in small communities, supplying most of their needs from the surrounding farmland, rather like medieval Europe.

Personally I am more positive (a tame lion at the door?) as I don’t see an inevitable decline to another stone age. We are infinitely more technically aware in all sorts of ways than we were before oil came along. Also, “peak oil” is not the same as “no oil”. When it becomes scarcer we will need to switch our main oil-derived activities to other fuel sources (or re-think our activities) but there will be some left for the essentials.

The main issue is that we do need to think about and debate the sort of world we want to inhabit once oil does peak, as one thing’s for sure: things will have to change.

Is bottled water really the green choice?

Research conducted on behalf of multi-national companies often carries with it the scent of mistrust. Modern consumers are savvy enough to realise that the parameters of most company-instigated research will have been skewed firmly in the favour of the company paying for the study to be carried out. But is this research always greenwash or can it provide a valuable insight into issues which would otherwise remain uninvestigated?

The devil's in the detail

When I heard on the tweet vine that a recent Nestle funded study shows irrefutably that bottled water is the “greenest” packaged beverage I was sceptical. But scepticism is different from cynicism and I was keen to learn more and discover the truth. Having looked in some detail at the study it appears to have some merit. It’s a peer-reviewed life-cycle analysis (LCA) of various drink options and includes comparisons with other water choices (tap, filtered etc.) as well as other beverage choices (vitamin water, coffee, wine). Ignoring the fact that wine isn’t what most people would consider a viable alternative to water (unless it’s a Friday night of course) the parameters of the research look, to my hugely untrained eye, to be fair. But what about the results?

As you can see from the chart above, bottled water forms a significant proportion of the average US consumer’s beverage consumption. In fact US consumers apparently drink more bottled water than tap water and more “soda” (e.g. cola, lemonade etc.) than anything else. Wow. More soda than water? That’s a lot of fizzy drinks.

Anyway, leaving this health issue aside, the key findings of the report show that the environment would benefit if people switched from soda to bottled water. In fact, if you switch today from your preferred beverage (coffee, wine or whatever) to bottled water you will, on average, reduce your daily “impact” by 9%. Why? Because the non-water elements of soda involve lots of things which contribute to climate change (like growing the sugar, making the chemicals etc.) If you then switched from bottled water to tap water you would see a further decrease in your impact of around 4%.

The conclusion of the report: removing bottled water (i.e. banning it) would be unlikely to result in an environmental improvement. This makes sense because most people would switch to a less environmentally friendly option rather than drink tap water. But it doesn’t remove the fact that we would all be better off drinking more tap water (where clean tap water is available) instead of packaged alternatives. It also doesn’t remove the fact that the waste generated from the packaging of beverages across the world makes up a significant part of our waste streams and that more needs to be done to reduce packaging and complete the circle when it comes to recycling packaging waste.

In conclusion, it may be true that bottled water has less impact across its life-cycle than alternative packaged beverages but it is also about the only drink which most people in developed countries have available, cheaply and with less impact, by simply turning a tap.

For information about recycling plastic bottles in Scotland see here (public) or here (businesses).

Key findings from the study

– Water is the least environmentally damaging beverage option

– Tap water has the lightest footprint, followed by tap water consumed in reusable bottles (if used more than 10 times), and then by bottled water

– Water of all types accounts for 41% of a consumer’s total beverage
consumption, but represents just 12% of a consumer’s climate change impact

– Milk, coffee, beer, wine and juice together comprise 28% of a
consumer’s total beverage consumption, but represent 58% of climate change impact

– Bottled water is the most environmentally responsible packaged drink
choice

– Sports drinks, enhanced waters and soda produce nearly 50% more
carbon dioxide emissions per serving than bottled water

– Juice, beer and milk produce nearly three times as many carbon
dioxide emissions per serving as bottled water

Creating a new language of sustainability

Arguments are useful, but only when resolved. Nothing is achieved in the middle, where bad feelings fester and compromise remains a distant island, invisible over the horizon. Only once agreement is reached, hands shaken and documents signed can the parties relax and begin to plan for their future.

Strange Bedfellows - but they get along.

This is as true in life as it is in business but it is in business that we often find the biggest arguments: those which impact on the wider community. Competition in business does not necessarily make for happy bedfellows and agreement can be extremely hard to reach as self-interest overrides the common good.

Happily we have evidence of a fine example of sharing: the Global Packaging Project (as reported in Packaging News). The project not only involves some of the biggest businesses on our planet but it is also for the purposes of protecting our planet, which is extremely positive. The businesses have got together in Toronto to thrash out the preliminary details of an agreement which will see them use shared language to describe how their packaging affects the environmental sustainability of their business. This is good news, not just for the companies, but also for the rest of us who will no doubt come to understand some of this language and therefore be able to compare the companies’ performance and make informed purchasing decisions. It really is remarkable to think that businesses throughout the world are recognising that the future of their business requires them to share knowledge, reach agreement and utilise new ways of thinking to survive and thrive in the 21st Century. How refreshing.

Let’s hope the agreement can be reached swiftly and the business’s energies can be directed towards making sure they not only use the language, but embody it in the way they operate.

What will change?

Big brands, retailers, manufacturers, suppliers and other organisations are discussing how to describe and define their packaging throughout the supply chain. This will change the terms they use and the way businesses up and down the supply chain have to think about the packaging they use. It will allow companies to measure their suppliers in a consistent, objective way. It will therefore also allow us to measure the businesses and make decisions about where we spend our hard-earned money.

You can find out more about current packaging initiatives on our Positive Package website.

Who’s involved:

Retailers
Asda, Carrefour, Giant Eagle, Hannaford, Harris Teeter, Kroger, Marks & Spencer, Loblaw, Metro, Migros, Pick’n Pay, Royal Ahold, Safeway, Sam’s Club, Sobeys Inc, Supervalu, Target, Tesco Stores, Wal-Mart Canada, Wal-Mart, Wegmans

Manufacturers
Beiersdorf, Campbell, Coca – Cola, Colgate – Palmolive, Conagra Foods, Danone, Fritolay, Freudenberg, General Mills, Inc, Glaxosmithkline, Heineken, Henkel, Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg, Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Kraft Foods, L’oreal, Mars, Mccormick & Company, Inc, Nestle Group, Pepsico, Procter & Gamble, Reckitt-Benckiser, Sara Lee, Sc Johnson, The Jm Smucker Company, Unilever

Packaging Converters & Material, Suppliers
Arcelormittal Packaging, Alcan Packaging, Ball Packaging Europe Holding, Crown Europe, Dow Chemical, Dupont, Exxonmobil Chemical Films, Mwv, Novelis, O-I, Owens Illinois Inc., Sca Packaging, Sealed Air Corporation, Tetra Pak

Organizations
Aim, Canadian Council Of Grocery, Distributors, Europen, Fcpc – Pacc, Flexible Packaging Europe, Fmi, Gma, Gs1 Canada, Gs1 Global Office, Gs1 Us, Igd, Pac, The Consumer Goods Forum, The Sustainability Consortium, The Sustainable Packaging, Coalition, Wrap

Resources
Center For Sustainable Entreprise, Development, Environmental Clarity, Green Blue, Mckinsey, Quantis, Rochester Institute Of Technology, University Of Manchester.

What’s the point of recycling?

It’s a valid question. Why should we recycle rather than send waste to landfill? Why is the Scottish Government moving towards Zero Waste? Why is landfill tax increasing? What benefits does being low waste offer businesses and households? In short: why bother?

Landfill: materials lost forever.

The answers to all these questions is the same:

1. Landfill is a graveyard: it represents the final destination for materials dumped there. This means that any value in those materials is lost forever and new materials have to be found, some of which are non-renewable so will eventually run out.
2. Landfill requires space, which could be used for other purposes.
3. Landfill produces methane as organic materials decompose. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. Admittedly some landfill sites capture this methane and convert it to energy. Others burn excess methane, which everyone passing by can see in the form of massive plumes of orange fire which pump CO2 into the atmosphere. Organic waste could easily be recycled through anaerobic digestion or composting.
4. Recycling creates value both in terms of the materials and for businesses involved with it. Scotland now has more than 450 recycling services for over 80 different types of material. You can search for them using our Business Recycling Directory.
5. Reducing and reusing waste saves money. All businesses can implement waste management strategies to save costs this way. Recycling can also save money depending on the type and volume of materials involved.
6. Packaging is an important way of protecting goods as they reach you. However unnecessary packaging adds weight and bulk to products which can increase transportation costs. Depending on the materials used it can also add to the waste which ends up in landfill. So recyclable, minimal packaging is best. See our Positive Package campaign for more about how suppliers and retailers are minimising the waste they produce.
7. Landfill increases our use of natural resources. We use trees for paper and oil for plastic. Recycling the paper and plastic reduces the demand for these resources which means it oil will last for longer and fewer trees need to be grown. Less mining is needed for metal, which saves the environmental impact of mining (pollution, energy use).
8. Recycling requires less energy than producing materials from scratch.
9. Clean, local energy-from-waste plants could be a solution for our future heating and energy needs. Energy-from-waste no longer means dirty incineration. It can be achieved through anaerobic digestion of organic waste (no smell as it’s all sealed) which produces methane (again, no smell) which is burned just like natural gas to heat water and create steam – just like a coal-fired power plant. Technology allows for close proximity to homes and business with negligible risk to human health.
10. Landfill sites tend to be big and far away from businesses. Recycling sites can be more local. This reduces the travelling distance of waste and reduces both the fuel and time required to handle the waste.
11. Recycling allows a product to live again. 99.9% of the material in an aluminium can is recovered in the recycling process. Glass can theoretically be recycled forever as it doesn’t wear out during the recycling process.

There are lots of reasons to avoid landfill by recycling and, in Scotland, we have plenty of ways to achieve this: whether through collections or local Recycling Centres. More and more people and businesses are recycling. The real question is, are you?

What does “sustainable” really mean?

I’ve been writing about sustainable development as part of an Environmental Management course (get me!) and have therefore been reading lots of theory about what “sustainable” means, which inspired this post. I know from my work with Waste Aware Scotland that “sustainable” is often bandied around during discussions about the environment or the economy. We hear it so often it has almost become meaningless, a bit like “web 2.0″. But what does “sustainable” mean in an environmental context and why should any of us care?

On a superficial level “sustainable” means “something that can be maintained indefinitely” which is a sadly mechanical way of describing human activity. It misses the deeper significance of our society, in which we try and improve our lives and those of others. This is why “sustainable development” is such an important term; it recognises the limits of our environment yet acknowledges our desire for improvement. Yet it may also be a paradox: how do you always progress within a finite world?

Sustainable development as we understand it today was defined first by the Bruntland Commission in their 1987 “Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development.” This report suggested that sustainable development is development (generally understood to mean “improvement in quality of life”) which “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

It’s a useful definition as it shows that sustainability is about the long term (which of course it has to be) but it does beg the question of what are the “needs” of our present generation? Furthermore can you consider everyone in the world as one generation with the same needs? Clearly not. The Bruntland Commision’s definition cannot be (and perhaps was not meant to be) applied globally as the “needs of the present” differs greatly depending on who you are. My needs may be very different from Roman Abramovich’s needs or, indeed a Kalahari bushman’s needs. Who decides what our needs are anyway? Do they change as we develop? If you could strip away everything then all we theoretically need is a regular supply of porridge, the odd orange, clean water and a tent. But I suspect most of us wouldn’t consider it “development” if the UK government said “your needs are met”, plonked us in a big field full of teepees and asked us to peel oranges.

Do we need a global definition of sustainability or is it feasible to focus on a local level and simply say “what I do mustn’t impact on my children’s ability to do the same”? The problem with the latter is that we end up ignoring the impact of our activities on the wider environment. We run the risk of isolating ourselves and assuming that, because our well hasn’t run dry, it never will, so long as we only take from it what we need to survive. We forget that the well has a source, and the source might be a groundwater, and the level of the groundwater might be just about to fall dramatically as it gets drained by a local farming co-operative to irrigate their crops. For our activities to become truly sustainable we have to look outside our borders and consider the activities of everyone in the world. But how can we possibly define sustainability so broadly as to encompass everyone? How can we know what our impact is on a global basis? How can we be sure that everyone complies?

During my gap year in 1997 I lived in rural Kenya for four months, getting water from a well and putting my rubbish in a nearby hole in the ground. Incidentally our toilet was also a big hole in the ground. Was my life there truly sustainable? Not really: the hole in the ground (for the rubbish) was filling up and eventually we would have had to dig another one but with limited space we would have eventually run out of room. In one sense it was a sustainable lifestyle: having to physically drag water up from a well using a pulley meant that we recognised it as a scarce resource and used it sparingly. In another sense it was far from sustainable: no one can say that putting all your rubbish in a hole in your garden is a long term waste strategy. But if even the people of rural Africa are not living sustainably can there even be such a thing as a sustainable lifestyle? Could it be a pipe-dream? Certainly in the UK we are a long (loooong) way from achieving it.

Most of us recognise the absence of sustainability more readily than its presence, which might be because it is so hard to know when we have found it (or because it doesn’t exist). For example we know instinctively when we see (or do) something which could not be continued indefinitely (or done by everyone on the planet). Take driving. We know that oil will run out, that driving pollutes and we can be fairly certain that it contributes to a warming planet. Yet we, as a society, continue to support road use. And well we might. We wouldn’t get anywhere (literally) if roads were suddenly replaced with orchards. Although we might make some very nice cider. So we have a conundrum. Our needs will not be met if we stop driving, yet we cannot meet the needs of future generations if we carry on.

We see similar contradictions across many aspects of modern living, from shopping for luxuries to cooking more food than we can eat. We all know in our hearts that we are extremely lucky to be able to do these things (on top of being extremely lucky to have been born onto a planet which sustains life). We know that if every country on Earth lived as we did there wouldn’t be enough raw materials to make the luxuries or enough food to eat. Equally we know that future generations won’t be so lucky as luxuries don’t last forever and population growth in the world will reduce the amount of food available. Yet we don’t stop buying. We continue to waste food. We don’t recycle everything.

It looks bleak but there is a small bright spot on the horizon (or is it a smudge on the lens?): we are improving. Slowly but surely we are recycling more, using less energy and on a strategic level our Government is looking for ways to improve the infrastructure to allow for more renewable energy and to process more types of waste locally for recycling.

There might well be a way of meeting our needs (improving our quality of life) without unduly affecting the ability of others to do the same both around the world and in the future. There might be a template of a sustainable life which we can map onto our society. The funny thing is, we have no choice. We have to find a way of making this happen. Sustainability requires us to consider the long term impact of our actions because failure to do this will mean that our life will disappear. That doesn’t mean humans will die out, which would take some kind of apocalypse. What it means is that the marginal areas of the world will become inhabitable. Oil will no longer be available. Alternative forms of energy may not provide the amount of energy required to sustain such a large number of people on the planet. So the population will shrink. As it does so the strain on resource will also shrink. Eventually we will reach an equilibrium.

So sustainability is coming whether we like it or not. But does that mean we should do nothing and wait for change to be forced upon us? Of course not! There are many things we can do to manage that change and ensure a soft, rather than crash, landing. Whilst there are many things we cannot affect (which can be frustrating) there are also lots of things we can. Most of those involve our own actions and behaviour because, as individuals, we have the right to decide whether to seize the opportunities available to us. You can get involved at a local level by doing the basics: reduce, reuse, recycle. All you can really do is manage your own household and business waste sustainably and trust that others are doing the same. If you find it difficult to have trust then please remember: we see the stats every month and people and businesses are recycling more in Scotland every single day. Fact.

It is probably most commonly used as part of the term “sustainable development”, which, in itself,

When do you wish you’d said something?

In a room full of people yesterday something shocking happened. During the final question and answer session of a conference on the Scottish Government’s Climate Change Bill one of the delegates asked the panel whether the initial carbon reduction target for Scotland was realistic. What followed was either incredibly depressing or hugely motivating depending on how you look at it.

The panel member asked the room for a show of hands: who thinks Scotland is in a position to meet its target of a 42% reduction in carbon emissions by 2020?

No hands. Not a single person put up their hand.

How many people are undecided?

Again, none.

How many people think we definitely won’t meet the targets.

A room full of hands.

Now bear in mind this wasn’t a room full of capitalist bankers. These were “green businesses” at an event for Green Business Fife in Dunfermline. From construction companies through to consultants not a single business, having heard a whole range of environmental information during the morning’s event, was convinced that the targets could be met.

On the drive home I began to think about what had happened. Was this our own mini Copenhagen? Were the Chinese involved? Then I felt annoyed with myself. I should have stuck up my hand in support of the targets. I didn’t because I’m not a business in Fife and was there as a partner organisation rather than an active participant – which sounds a bit lame now! Had I possessed the foresight and speed of thought necessary to pick up a mic and speak to the room I might have said this:

I have two points to make about this show of hands:

First point: a decade ago hardly anyone in Scotland recycled their waste. The kerbside collection infrastructure of recyclables simply didn’t exist. Yet in the ten years since then we have seen people throughout the country recycle and compost more and more of their waste each year and, now, almost 40% of our waste avoids landfill. This target was, just like the 42%, put in place by the Scottish Government. How did we achieve it? One: we improved the infrastructure. Two: Waste Aware Scotland worked with all 32 local authorities to communicate messages to households letting them know what could be recycled and how to do it. It became part of people’s normal behaviour to recycle rather than throw things away. There’s still a long way to go before we can call Scotland a zero waste country but we are in a much stronger position than many people thought we could be.

Second point: If you asked businesses in this room to reduce their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010 most would find it pretty easy. If you did a bit of staff training here and a changed a few processes there you could almost certainly reduce your carbon output by 10% this year without much difficulty. Then imagine it’s the end of 2010 and someone comes up to you and asks for another 10% reduction in 2011. Again, this wouldn’t be impossible. You could just expand and improve the training and initiatives already in place for 2010. More training, more tweaking. You could get there.

Now add to this the fact that the Scottish Government is committed to decarbonising the electricity supply to homes and businesses in Scotland through carbon capture & storage; local small-scale combined heat and power plants; energy from waste; micro-renewables feeding back to the grid; expanded hydro, wind, wave and tidal powers. With all this we can safely presume (I believe) that, even without individual change by households and businesses, our energy use will be less carbon intensive as a result of greener energy supplies. Let’s speculate conservatively and say this will reduce the total carbon output of Scotland by 10%.

Add these two together and you have a relatively “bankable” 30% reduction. Is it beyond the wit of man to extend this by a further 12% over the course of 10 years?

I freely admit that some people in the room would have had a few “yes buts” and “no buts” to say in response to this. But I would challenge anyone to give me a really good reason why it can’t be done. Yesterday showed me that the biggest problem we face isn’t an economic crisis: it’s a confidence crisis.

Environmental Management and Waste

Environmental management provides the means to achieve humankind’s ambitions in a way that also allows our long term survival. Through it we learn both about the environment and our effect on it. We can then put in place policies, regulations, laws and guidance relating to society’s activities. It really is a vital part of our future as, without effective environmental management, businesses and society would be unable to address the challenges we face as we move into a low-carbon era. We would have no tools with which to measure our impact, no means of working out what we can and can’t do and, perhaps worst of all, no means by which to communicate this to the people who most need the information. It would be like trying to win the Premier League without a manager or trying to build a flatpack wardrobe without a manual.

But Environmental Management is also a bit like Subbuteo: it’s easy enough to dip into but incredibly difficult to master. You don’t need a pre-frontal cortex the size of Manhattan to understand the basic principles: use less, waste less. But getting to the point where you can accurately state the correct course of action in any given situation? That takes ages. It also takes copious amounts of energy, dedication and, yes, an enormous brain. Fortunately most of us aren’t burdened with huge brainpower and therefore don’t have to deal with things like existential angst or logarithmic equations. We are instead lucky enough to exist in a state of blissful ignorance, plodding gently through life and carrying out our work dutifully without need to question its deeper meaning.

But how can we, the befuddled majority, master the complexities of environmental management sufficiently to make a difference to the world? How can we access the deeper truths for long enough to change our actions and feel confident that we are protecting the planet for our children?

Take carbon. We generally understand that reducing our use of carbon is both inevitable (carbon fuels will run out) and important (continuing to use them until they run out may cause irreversible warming). Yet the process of working out which activities are most carbon-intensive and, even more difficult, comparing very different activities in a meaningful way is incredibly challenging. For example: holidays. How can you know whether it is better to:

1. fly to Spain and spend your time lying on a beach, eating locally caught fish and cycling around your small fishing village to collect your seasonal shopping in the morning or
2. get a train to Salzberg and spend your time eating and drinking in an International hotel chain which gets its food from all over the world and getting taxis around the place?

How can we even start to compare these two holidays? Should we even bother?

Carbon footprinting is a complex subject requiring a large brain. Just look at this list of conversion factors from DEFRA to see how many calculations are required to work out the carbon consumed by a business. Fortunately the calculations themselves have already been done: it’s only the conversions that the business has to carry out. This “footprint calculator” is one example of how the kind of knowledge involved with environmental management has become more accessible. There are carbon footprint calculators all over the internet and many are simple to use. Unfortunately none yet offer holiday comparisons in any meaningful way.

So that’s carbon. What about waste? What can the environmental management boffins teach us about waste and how can we know the best thing to do with our waste? Interestingly enough, waste has its own secret, shadowy world just like carbon. From the calorific value of residual municipal waste to the current market price of materials there are behind-the-scene calculations going on around the clock. Fortunately for us it matters little to the end user (business or household). All we need to remember are three key things:

1. Landfill is bad.

Landfill is a dead zone for materials that could otherwise have remained in use. Landfill generates methane, only some of which is recovered (have you ever seen the massive yellow flames next to m0st landfill sites? That’s methane being burned off, producing CO2 – which is considered the lesser of two evils).

2. Reduce, reuse and recycle (in that order).

Reducing waste eliminates the need to find a disposal option and reduces the materials being used in the first place. This saves you time and money. Reusing waste also avoids disp0sal. Recycling allows a material to live again.

3. Listen to your mother.

She’s probably right.

This final point is optional by the way.

So, can the environmental management of waste really be summed up in two short points and one piece of nonsense? Actually, yes it can but to implement these points and actually make a difference to the waste we produce in Scotland will take another kind of intelligence altogether: the intelligence to realise that we all have to get involved and that only together can we make Scotland a zero waste society.

What’s your 2010 business waste resolution?

The new year provides opportunities for us all to make a new start. After the festive period, during which we should have been able to relax and reflect, we hopefully arrived back to work this week energised, motivated and ready to face the challenges of the year ahead. This counts for senior management as much as junior staff and, as such, January is a good time for people within all levels of a business to think about the direction of the business and what we want to achieve in the year ahead.

Materials + Waste = Double-Edged Sword.

One recurring issue, which puts almost constant pressure on the bottom line, is that of business waste. Not only does your business or organisation have to pay for any materials entering the workplace, it also has to pay for the disposal of the packaging and excess materials. It’s a double-edged sword which can be effectively blunted by reducing the materials entering your business thereby automatically eliminating the need for a disposal option.

No business needs to be told that buying and disposing of excess materials costs money and eats into profits. It’s basic common sense that if you pay for something, don’t use it and then have to pay for someone else to collect it you might be spending more than you need. However the excess isn’t always apparent without further investigation. Do you know where your excess is?

Solving this problem is potentially easier than it seems but does require buy-in from senior management. This is because they need to facilitate the work of others as the business attempts to discover which materials enter the workplace and how much waste each produces. It might be in the form of packaging, which for some industries (such as retail) creates large volumes of easily recyclable waste such as cardboard and plastic wrapping. It might be in the form of byproduct, which occurs once a material has been used for its intended purpose but where not all the materials can be used. In an office environment this might include the metal coil round the top of a notebook. In manufacturing it could be anything from heavy metals to prawn shells.

Once you have an idea of the materials you purchase and what proportion of them and their packaging ends up as waste and how much this costs you can calculate your baseline which you can then use to measure progress. It will also show which materials to prioritise, which may not be the ones you expect. For example you might find that packaging disposal costs for a material used in only small quantities is disproportionately high, especially if it is packaged in a material that can’t be easily recycled such as polystyrene.

If packaging forms a large part of your waste costs then there are various ways to minimise this:

• Order materials which you know have minimal packaging, or order in bulk if you have storage available.
• Write, phone or email all your suppliers and make them aware of your initiative. Ask them to minimise packaging.
• Return or reuse cardboard boxes where possible within the workplace. Ask staff if they can use them (for home removals etc.)
• Return wooden pallets.
• If possible switch from single-use to reusable packaging (as shown in these case studies).

If packaging is less of a problem than byproduct, it might be worth looking at potential uses for the byproduct. Our partner organisation, NISP, are experts in finding uses for “waste streams” within other businesses. These synergies help to reduce waste costs significantly. To contact NISP please visit their website.

If you have one waste resolution this year we recommend you make it “reduce, reuse and recycle”. If you want more advice on how to do this our website may be useful.

Christmas Time

This post is for employees within businesses who might be taking some time off over the Christmas period. I hope it proves useful.

What is Christmas? For children it’s a time of magic and mystery with special stories, songs and food which imbue a warm, safe feeling on long winter nights. For some it’s a time to put aside the everyday routine of life and come together with friends and family to reflect and share. For others it’s bound up in religious celebration. Whoever you are and whatever your reason for celebrating Christmas there are many things you will probably find yourself doing more than usual over the next four weeks as we approach the end of another decade.

Some potential Christmas activities

Eating, drinking, meeting people, watching films, seeing your family, relaxing, taking time off work, travelling, going on wintery walks, feeling bloated, cursing the oven, celebrating, reflecting, nursing a sore head, reading to children, putting a tree up, sending cards, receiving cards, wrapping gifts, shopping, feeling all warm and fuzzy as you hear the sounds of carol singers in the distance, lighting fires, listening to music, using the internet, cooking, making mulled wine, writing lists, buying magazines, getting to know your butcher, trying to work out how to sit twelve people round a table built for eight, calling people on the phone, texting, emailing, instant messaging, social networking, feeling overwhelmed by the number of ways people can get in touch with you, feeling poor, using credit cards, worrying about money, hoping for a bright new year, wondering why no one has invented a way to wrap presents without getting sellotape all over the furniture, thinking about those less fortunate in countries where Christmas means being hot and hungry, giving to charity, buying a santa hat, working out what to wear at the work Christmas party, going to the pub, buying gloves, bringing decorations down from the attic/wardrobe, stringing up cards and watching them fall down again, tying tinsel round the cat’s collar, getting small gifts for stockings, hoping that crazy uncle Fred doesn’t drink too much again, wearing slippers, having long baths, cracking nuts, watching snow fall, building snowmen with humorous appendages, jumping for joy when you hear school is closed for the day, considering emmigration as a real possibility, being unable to remember the name of people you bump into at parties, trying to restrain yourself when it comes to food and drink consumption, feeling fat and guilty, getting annoyed in queues but not doing anything when someone clearly queue jumps, ice-skating (aka bum-skating), feeling magical as you look at Christmas lights in the city, enjoying the warmth of another as you settle down for a cosy night in, eating leftovers, getting all tangled with wires as you try to have a family game round the games console, remembering why other family members don’t play games consoles, playing Monopoly, watching as your little Sister storms upstairs because she couldn’t afford Park Lane, pulling crackers, wearing silly hats, thinking about making bread/cranberry sauce and then buying it from M&S as usual, ordering a massive bird and wondering how to cook it so it doesn’t go all dry, polishing the champagne flutes and realising you only have three left after the last New Year’s eve party, putting a santa hat on the dog, wearing wellies unnecessarily to collect logs from the garden, filling the room with smoke as you realise wet logs don’t burn well, trying spiced flavours of tea and remembering why you normally drink regular, thinking about how Grandma will cope, worrying about getting older, taking multivitamins to fend off seasonal flu, getting ill on Christmas Eve just in time to miss all the fun, highlighting the best programmes in the Radio Times, finding your highlights crossed out by other members of the family who prefer stupid films, renting Christmassy DVDs, eating mixed nuts and raisins, trying to counteract all the nuts with satsumas, eating seafood at breakfast, arguing about when to open presents, leaving the cooking to Mum, stretching your foot out on Christmas morning and feeling the excitement as it hits something, tearing off the wrapping as you discover what Santa brought, playing with new things, snoozing on the sofa, going to church, singing and finally wanting to do it all again in a year’s time.

With all this activity there is bound to be some waste. Whether it be from the food we cook or the presents we give. Our website offers some hints and tips on how to combat some of this waste on a special Christmas hints and tips page.

We also have a Waste Aware Advent Calendar with daily tips including:

1. Avoid Christmas food and gifts with excess packaging. Buy food, such as fruit and vegetables, loose. Try to buy packaging that you can recycle locally.
2. Refuse any clothes hangers that you don’t need when you buy new clothes. Some stores may be able to reuse or recycle their old hangers.
3. Choose reusable glasses, crockery and cutlery for parties, instead of disposable alternatives that generate more waste.
4. Use a compost bin or food waste digester to compost your green waste, such as fruit and vegetable peelings, at home.
5. Choose mechanical toys as Christmas presents to reduce waste from batteries. Find charity and toy shops in your telephone directory or online.
6. Choose ‘low’ or ‘no’ waste presents such as gift vouchers and gift experiences as alternatives to large, packaged presents.
7. Hire party accessories, such as drinking glasses, instead of buying brand new. Find hire companies in your telephone directory or online.

The fallacy of “the individual”

A recent opinion poll by BBC Wales showed that a rather large 52% of people think “whatever is done by individuals will make no difference to climate change whilst other countries are using fossil fuels.”

What difference can one person make?

As it happens, these people are quite right. Individuals will not and cannot make any difference to climate change, regardless of whether or not other countries are using fossil fuels. Neither will individuals make any difference to the amount of waste sent to landfill. Each of the 5 million people in Scotland sends an average of 1.5 tonnes to landfill every year year, which results in a combined total of 7.37 million tonnes. Statistically, there is very little difference between “7.37 million tonnes” and “7.37 million tonnes minus 1.5 tonnes“. In fact you would need to use many more than two decimal places to even see a different number.

It’s perfectly natural to think that, because your actions make no noticeable difference to the national or global picture, nothing you do matters very much. Indeed, in some ways this is factually true. After all, it ultimately won’t make any meaningful difference to Scotland or the climate whether you, as an individual, throw all your waste in black bags. You are just a miniscule dot on the statistical landscape.

Clearly, our cumulative actions matter. Scotland as a whole has increased the percentage of waste we compost or recycle to almost 40%. How could we have achieved this without individual actions? Quite obviously we couldn’t. So it seems we have a problem with our perspective. We find it difficult to reconcile the fact that our actions by themselves are insignificant with the fact that they don’t exist in isolation. We consider our actions separately from other peoples’ but we cannot reasonably separate any part of ourselves from society any more than we can separate a fish from its bowl. We are society. The dichotomy between our private and public life causes us to act selfishly through innocent negligence. We forget the part we play because once we enter our own domain we cease to be actively involved in the world around us. We put black bags out for the bin man instead of separating our kerbside waste because we forget that our black bags are everyone’s black bags. We forget to recycle from every room in the house and put paper from our home office into the bin because we don’t think about all the other people doing exactly the same thing. Thousands or even millions of us (perhaps billions globally) recycle less than we could because of a simple human trait: insularity.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. As John Donne wrote in the 16th century.

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

John Donne, Meditation XVII

English clergyman & poet (1572 – 1631)

We are all individuals, yet we are none. I’ll leave you with this quote from the 14th Dalai Lama:

If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.