I was at an event the other week where a keynote speaker put up a picture of an ancient Landrover and said "This is my car. I'm eco-friendly as the emissions from vehicle production are much higher than those in use, so keeping it on the road is the right thing to do!"

"Rubbish" thought I (or words to that effect). But I gave him the benefit of the doubt and looked up some published stats, and as you can see the use phase comes to 80% and the manufacture 18%.

Toyota Gasoline Vehicle CO2 Emissions:

Driving 72%
Fuel production 8%
Vehicle production 6%
Material production 12%
Others 2%

But everybody knows this - who on earth told him the opposite?

Another one...

In May's ENDS Report, a Rosi Fieldson is quoted as saying "The more technologies that are put into a home, the higher the embodied carbon [ie that required to produce materials, components and build the house] becomes. Currently embodied energy is 15% of energy used over the building's life time .... In a zero carbon home this would rise to 80-90%."

Well either Dr Fieldson has been misquoted or she needs to go back to primary school to sort out her maths. It's a percentage! If you cut one part of the pie, the percentage taken by the other must go up because the two parts must add up to 100!

Strictly speaking the embodied energy of a zero carbon home should be 100% of lifetime energy, because the usage (non-renewable) energy is 0%. But it doesn't tell you whether the amount of embodied energy goes up or down...

I think I'm going to go and lie down in a darkened room...

Labels: energy, fun, life cycle assessment, rant

DRAM, or Device for the Remediation and Attenuation of Multiple pollutants, is a project at Aberdeen University and uses, yes, whisky by-products to remediate contaminated soil.

How many late nights in the bar it took to dream that one up is not mentioned.

Labels: fun, remediation

The small print that people put under their e-mail signature has always baffled me. If you did get an e-mail by accident that by some miracle would be juicy enough for you to want to read it, never mind keep it, would you be put off by being told not to by the authoritarian instructions at the bottom?

Well, what's really amusing me at the minute is the dozen or so exhortations I receive daily not to print this e-mail unless it's really necessary. Let's be clear, if it is not important enough to print, I ain't going to print it whether or not the sender asks me not to. What do they take me for, some kind of idiot? And if I WAS dumb enough to print off every message I receive, I don't think a little message at the bottom would make a damn bit of difference.

So why do it? I think it's a "I'm much greener than yeeew!" statement - trying subliminally to get some environmental kudos without actually having to do anything other than type a few words. Well, they'll have to work harder than that to impress me.

And how long before some smart-alec points out that the extra joules required to send those additional bits of information could power a lightbulb for 32 nano-seconds?

Labels: fun, green marketing

Yesterday I was presenting an award to Best Environmental Project as part of the Newcastle Evening Chronicle's Go Green Campaign. It was a v. flash occasion with swirling, strobing lights and pumping music to introduce each finalist.

Which song did the DJ blast out for one of the entrants for Best Company?

Britney Spears' "Toxic".

I bet they loved that!

Labels: fun