John Lewis' Green Windows

People keep asking "Will the environment suffer in the recession?" John Lewis obviously don't think so.

Weekly Tip #17: Buy holes, not drills

Slightly obscure title*, but it refers to the fact that when you buy a drill, what you are actually after is the holes it will produce, not the drill itself.

So, instead of buying a DVD, rent it instead or watch it on pay-per-view. Likewise with music and iTunes (or equivalent) or the radio**. Join a carclub rather than buying a car, use a nappy service rather than buying nappies and join your local library. All of these examples will give you the end result to desire without all the physical gubbins to go with it.


* I vaguely remember having a Ken Dodd annual as a kid where the Diddymen were selling holes in the ground. Surreal thing to throw at a young child's developing mind.

** Ever since I was given a DAB radio and got into BBC 6Music, I've stopped buying so much music in any form as that channel seems to fit my tastes down to a tee.

Greetings from Cologne

Finally got the hotel internet access to work, so here are my first impressions of Cologne. Coming here by train (Eurostar to Brussels, express train to Cologne passing some impressive wind farms en route) was great, but the boy managed to pick up gastro-enteritis the morning we left so our enjoyment was curtailed by some top puking. He's now shared it with the rest of the family...

The big thing is cycling. There are bikes everywhere and shops even put cycle stands out on the pavement for their customers. There are some colosal cycle paths, loads of crossings and many of the one-way streets around our hotel are two-way for bikes (without any extra markings, just signs).

Apart from that, I was a little surprised that the green produce thing isn't more prevalent. I had to go to the Bio-markt for eco-friendly disposable nappies, but couldn't get them in any highstreet store. There are marginally more organic products around than in the UK, but not much.

I'll keep my eyes peeled for more.

Carpet Bombing the Green Message

Have you noticed that most radio DJs now can't tell any sort of witty anecdote without saying "Not doing my carbon footprint much good, but..." somewhere in their spiel? So is the eco-message going truly mainstream?

Well, this might sound like the start of a joke, but on Monday we walked into a carpet shop in Ashington, Northumberland (you can't get much more northern England, either in geography or attitude - they have ferret races there, I kid you not) to ask about, you guessed it, carpets. We mentioned we wanted something eco-friendly and were completely blown away by the response. Bob the friendly carpet salesman took us through every carpet option, describing the various materials used, where they were sourced from and the energy and recyclability issues relating to each. It was a bravura performance - exhaustive and somewhat exhausting - and pretty much on the button in terms of technical content.

Unfortunately we couldn't afford the most green option, but are getting a British Wool carpet with a non-PVC but synthetic backing. The underlay is made of recycled tyre rubber and natural fibres.

But I was most impressed with Bob - an unheralded green hero!

Bag Yourself Some Loot

Post-Hindmarsh-I'm-not-a-plastic-bag-hoohah (criminally under-reported by yours truly), my friends at HippyShopper.com are running a poll on plastic bag use. Some lucky participant will win £50 of fairtrade jewelry, so why not give it a go?

To enter follow the link...

Guide to Eco-products Pt4 - "no stuff, just services"

This is the last in my series on what makes a product eco-friendly - but we're going to stop thinking about products and look at the service they provide instead. For example:

- we don't need books, we want the information they hold, so we could borrow a book from a library or read it on-line.
- we don't need CDs, we want music, so we could download it instead and keep it in electronic format on an MP3 player.
- we don't need a central heating system, we just need to be warm, so we could improve the insulation of our house instead.

So we could buy 'services' rather than 'products' - join a book/music/DVD library, subscribe to pay per view movies and on-line magazines, join a car club and/or use a nappy laundry service. The industries that supplies these services are then encouraged to use less stuff in doing it to keep their costs down, rather than trying and sell us more and more stuff to make profit.

With the broadband revolution and better technologies we are already seeing a big shift to moving information around electronically (well you're reading this), so we'll be spending more of our money on subscriptions rather than materials. But there is one big drawback to this - most of us like 'stuff' for its aesthetic value or for the kudos it gives us. Being a member of a car club will not appeal to those who want to polish a Cosmocharged Tottymagnet 3.8 GTi on their driveway on a Sunday morning. Me, I like reading a real paper in the morning (and a full sized one - don't get me started on the recent shift of quality papers to a tabloid size), a house full of books, and the big drawback of iTunes to a music obsessive is that you don't get proper sleevenotes. And that's bad.

A Good (Easter) Egg

If you want to buy someone an Easter Egg this year, go for Sainsbury's according to Oxfordshire County Council. According to the Beeb, the council reviewed the amount of packaging on a range of eggs and found that the big supermakets' offering had only 16% packaging by weight compared to 47% for a Nestle egg. Excessive packaging is actually illegal in the UK, although there have been very few prosecutions - mostly for computer software being sent out in huge crates.

And on that note, have a good Easter!

One for the Ladies!

OK, so I've got absolutely no personal experience of this one, and never will have, but three women I know swear by the 'mooncup' as an alternative to disposable sanitary towels and tampons. None of these women are ardent eco-warrior/tree hugging types, rather they find the cup much more practical. You simply insert it, go rollerblading/windsurfing etc (as menstruating women do according to Bodyform), remove it, wash it and repeat until done when you put it away til next month. At £18.99 the manufacturer claims it will pay for itself in 6 months and will last for several years.

Before you ask, I haven't seen a detailed life cycle assessment of this product verses the hundreds of disposables it will replace, but I would expect it to be many times better by any measure you care to choose.

That's my boy!

Anybody watching the local BBC or ITV news in the North East of England today would have seen my little boy Harry modelling real nappies for Grow Up Green at Newcastle College. Actually he wee'd on the merchandise - bad behaviour not even Naomi Campbell could match.

This was a great event and I'm sure it will do a lot of good for getting the "reusables are better" message across.

Guide to Eco-products Pt2 - "eco-efficiency"

At the end of last year I promised some posts on what makes a product 'green' - see the summary here.

The first way a product can be green I mentioned was "using less stuff". The technical term for this is 'eco-efficiency' - the amount of use we can get out of each unit of natural resource. For example, if you buy a more fuel efficient car, you will get more miles (the use you want) out of each gallon (the natural resource required). Other examples of efficient products include efficient lightbulbs, lightweight packaging and multi-function products.

The main problem with eco-efficiency is that it requires reciprocal eco-friendly behaviour from the man (or woman) in the highstreet. I've mentioned the rebound effect before - if you save money by being efficient, an then go and blow your windfall on eco-nasties you might as well not have bothered. Another type of rebound is in the use of the product itself. If you leave your house at night and look back and notice you've left the bedroom light on, then you are much less likely to go back and switch it off if you've got an efficient bulb in.

Another problem is just sheer materialism. My mobile is a phone, PDA, camera and MP3 player all in one tiny box, which sounds wonderfully efficient, but I already had a digital camera and an MP3 player, so I haven't actually reduced the amount of resources I have consumed, no matter how hard I try to persuade myself I've done a good thing.

The same is true with longlife products - yes, they are eco-friendly if you use them for their entire lifespan, but many products get binned because we fancy a new model, rather than because they break. Again, mobile phones are a great example of this with people upgrading several times a year - I used my last one for four years (despite people openly laughing at it towards the end), but when the battery went on the blink, I upgraded rather than repairing.

I did some research on this once and came to the conclusion that we have to increase the eco-efficiency of our lives massively before we get even moderate reductions in our eco-footprints. Or we need to earn less money...

So, eco-efficiency isn't everything it's cracked up to be we'll have to look at other solutions in Parts 3 & 4 of this series.

A (mini CFL) Spotlight on Lighting Innovation

I've blogged before on different types of compact fluorescent bulb. Well I finally got my hands on some of these little 7W beauties (left and illuminated in the centre) made by Megaman which replace 40W mini-spots (right). That's less than 18% of the energy if you don't leave them on longer "'cos they're efficient".

What is really amazing (OK, if you're sad like me) is how far the technology has progressed. Only a couple of years ago, compact fluorescents were huge, ugly and ungainly because of the size of the 'ballast' required to light the bulb in the first place. Now the ballast can be squeezed elegantly into the slender neck of the bulb and these smaller bulbs can be replaced like for like.

If only someone could come up with a dim-able energy efficient bulb...

Book Review: ReadyMade by Berger & Hawthorne

I came across this book in the Baltic Art Gallery shop when looking for a birthday present for my art-loving partner and it is brilliant. The title is a reference to the Ready Made/Found Art movement triggered by Marcel Duchamp's infamous signed urinal.
The book combines art and ecology to make some beautiful products (mainly furniture) from stuff we everyday folks throw away. While the text is in a strongly left-field-american-self-empowerment style, the project ideas are brilliant, the sections on materials are excellent and the bonkers "This is Not a Project" bits are intriguing - a history of Heavy Metal? Fear of Flying Courses? How to make an Art House Film? It's all here - and all very nicely laid out.
My favourite project idea is the 'Eames Style Drawer Unit' - a bookcase made out of three drawers and four aluminium angles. But the CD case wall mural comes a close second.
If you want to do some of your own recycling, want a house full of stylish eco-friendly furnishings, and can handle a cordless drill, then this book is for you. If you want something to leave in the downstairs loo to impress your friends, then it will do that job too. Highly recommended.

And in the Green Corner...

Following the outbreak of green grocer wars, I thought you might like to see the stats on the two main contenders.

You can read Sir Terry-of-Tesco's speech on the theme of “Green Grocer? Tesco, Carbon and the Consumer" here. You may have noticed the company's ads in the press today promising 50% off CFLs permanently...

The details of M&S's "Plan A" can be seen here.

Both very comprehensive IMHO - let's hope it all comes to fruition.

Watts The Matter?

Labels matter.

Since energy labels were put on white goods, the market share of 'A-rated' white goods rose from 0% in 1996/97 to 74% in 2005/06. It is clear that the punters want the best rating and the manufacturers see it as a selling point. It's a pity we don't have them on all electrical items as it is a nightmare trying to get sensible information out of retailers or manufacturers. Try asking in your local Curry's which HD Ready mega-TV is the most energy efficient and you'll get a blank (or blanker) look.

Fortunately, the SUST-IT website can help you choose between different products on the grounds of their energy consumption (hat-tip to The Green Guy for that one). You'll see that the variations can be quite pronounced - some of the rules of thumb I had went right out of the window.

On a slightly different, but related, note, I've been standing back a little from the debate on the usefulness of the B&Q roof-mounted wind turbine. Apart from whether or not it will pull the gable end off your house, the main point of contention has been how much energy you can actually get out of it. Various estimates have ranged from 10-25% of the claimed 1000 units per year, but the Centre for Alternative Technology's Slate Magazine claims the actual figure is as low as 5%, or enough to run a one bar electric fire for 50 hours. Apparently the problem is not the turbine itself, but the close proximity of a pitched roof, which is the last thing you need for a nice clean air flow. Solar Photovoltaic panels will give you more energy, won't wreck your house and won't give your neighbours so much to tut about.