Subscribe
Recent Posts
Eyjafjallajoekull and all that
Sustainability in the Service Sector - video
Are you part of the problem...
Book Review: Confessions of a Radical Industrialis...
We're coming over all web 2.0...
Archives
News & Views From the Front Line
Wednesday, 3 December 2008
The myth of the environment and recession...
...is that the environment and sustainability can only be addressed when there is plenty of money about.Let's be blunt - the current economic situation is good for the environment - we are driving less, insulating our houses more, and are likely to buy less tat with which to disappoint our loved ones on Christmas Day. But saving the world shouldn't be about living in poverty.
On a business level, there are two proven ways of surviving an economic downturn. One is to cut unnecessary costs, the other is to innovate.
It constantly staggers me that companies immediately try to cut staff costs. OK, if you have far too many people standing about doing nothing, then you should have already got rid of them. But if you cut your workforce, you cut your ability to respond to the inevitable upturn when the recession ends. The same people see waste and utility costs as a fixed cost of doing business which is complete nonsense. And with the true cost of waste being about 10 times the cost of disposal, there are massive cost savings to be made which will make your business more productive, not less. We found an average of £175k pa savings in 26 businesses in a raft of industries - and you don't have to make redundancy payments for waste.
Turning to innovation - it is well known that markets for green products are expanding fast and, in some - say white goods or baby food - the eco- end of the market dominates the 'conventional' by a factor of 3-4:1. Other sectors will follow, if they get the quality and labelling issues right more than anything else. Is it a surprise that the new electric Mini has just been launched when the big 3 US car companies are staring the grim reaper in the face?
The sustainability agenda does have the scope to help a business through the economic downturn. It's a pity the myth makers don't understand that!
Labels: green products, rant, sustainability, waste minimisation
# posted by Gareth Kane : 16:54
0 Comments
Friday, 15 August 2008
Terra Infirma saves companies £175k each
Until March, Terra Infirma carried out environmental healthchecks on behalf of Envirowise, looking at waste, water and energy. We've just been reviewing the files of the two dozen or so visits we carried out under this scheme - in sectors as diverse as steel stockholding, pharmaceuticals and catering - and the average savings were a whopping £175 000pa.Imagine what that means to a medium sized manufacturing company in these tight financial times - they could keep 4 members of staff on for that money, making them even more competitive as things start to pick up. Makes you think, doesn't it?
Labels: energy efficiency, terra infirma, waste minimisation, water conservation
# posted by Gareth Kane : 08:00
0 Comments
Wednesday, 2 July 2008
A good time to go green
Things have settled down here a little at Terra Infirma Towers after the most busy (and it has to be said lucrative) month in our history. I've said before that with companies feeling the pinch from falling orders and soaring oil prices, this is not a bad time to be offering cost-cutting services. The great thing about cutting material resource use, as opposed to human resources (hate that term), is that it doesn't cut your capacity to deliver products and/or services so as the economy recovers you're not floundering behind.Of course companies can go beyond simply reducing environmental costs and start exploiting environmental business opportunities. Now you might think that this is a risky time to do so, but both the Guardian and the Times are reporting a surge in green investment and I hear the same from contacts in the banking industry.
Just don't think you can stick a green label on a duff product and expect it to succeed. Plenty have tried and failed. And I keep meeting more of them.
Labels: energy efficiency, green business, investment, waste minimisation
# posted by Gareth Kane : 12:26
0 Comments
Monday, 30 June 2008
Weekly Tip #20: with waste, start at the end
This is the latest of a series of tips extracted from the forthcoming Green Business Bible e-book:When carrying out a waste minimisation exercise, focus your attention on the end of the process. This is where your product has most added value - I've seen finished high-value products ranging from furniture through lubricants to pharmaceuticals destroyed after a lot of time and money has been invested in making them, and before they can be sold to customers to realise that value. Packing machines and fork lift drivers are the main culprits...
Labels: tips, waste minimisation
# posted by Gareth Kane : 14:30
0 Comments
Monday, 16 June 2008
Weekly Tip #18: Waste Not, Hand Out Nowt
This is the latest of a series of tips extracted from the forthcoming Green Business Bible e-book:Use overhead projectors and powerpoint at meetings to present data rather than handouts. Make the presentations available on-line instead using an intranet or similar.
Another tip next Monday.
Labels: paper, tips, waste minimisation
# posted by Gareth Kane : 08:22
0 Comments
Friday, 25 April 2008
Packing Up Your Troubles!
Once again this week I was in a high value business looking at how they could cut waste, energy and water costs. Everything was rosy until we got to the packing lines, where bins were filling up with discarded product because of a raft of issues with machinery, packing materials and, possibly, the operators.This is not untypical and wasted product at this point is costing you its sale value. If your turnover is £10m then every 1% of product you lose at the end of your process is costing you about £100kpa - because you are paying to produce it and yet can't sell it.
I've seen this in a whole raft of industries - food, pharmaceuticals, lubricants and interiors to name but a few.
And it makes me cross, so stop it!
Labels: packing, waste minimisation
# posted by Gareth Kane : 08:36
0 Comments
Wednesday, 16 April 2008
Don't be blinded by recycling!
Once again recently I was proudly told by a factory manager "We don't have a waste problem - we recycle 95% of it - isn't that fantastic?". Recycling is great, but your fantastic achievement may be hiding waste reduction opportunities.Taking a manufacturing business as an example, there are three types of waste:
1. Unavoidable process waste - waste that is intrinsic to your business. If you produce, say, chocolate flavouring from cocoa beans, then you will have cocoa residues left over no matter what. This should be recycled where possible and, if you are really clever, you can adjust your process to maximise its value for recycling/reuse.
2. Avoidable process waste - for example, offcuts, packaging of materials/components, solvents etc. Here you have a choice - eradication, recycling or normal disposal. Soaring landfill taxes are starting to rule out the latter for all but 'difficult materials', so you effectively have a choice of whether to reduce or recycle - that largely comes down to practicalities and economics.
3. Off-spec product (or components) - this is the worst kind of waste as you have added value to it only to throw it away. This waste should be terminated with extreme prejudice - particularly towards the end of your process where the value lost is the highest - I've seen far too many horror shows of good product being sprayed across factory floors by packing machines or careless forklift drivers.
I once heard waste described as "stuff you buy that you can't sell" - a brilliant summation of the economic driver to reduce waste.
Labels: recycling, waste, waste minimisation
# posted by Gareth Kane : 08:34
0 Comments
Friday, 22 February 2008
Back(casting) to the Future
On Tuesday I took the role as facilitator for the Durham Waste Awareness Partnership annual creative day. The Partnership consists of waste officers from Durham District and County Councils. It was felt that previous creative days had started getting repetitive, so they wanted someone to come in and shake it up a bit. Enter Terra Infirma.I decided to do a bit of backcasting, that is, designing an idealised future and working out how to get there. This contrasts with the normal approach of forecasting where you start from the current situation and try and think of things that will improve it. The advantages of backcasting are:
- it frees the mind to think the unthinkable;
- you don't focus on current barriers;
- it is participative;
and, not least,
- it is good fun.
The process is:
1. Decide the endpoint you want to achieve: in this case, zero residual waste in wheelie bins.
2. Draw up a number of future scenarios which demonstrate this future: in this case we looked at two households, both time poor, but one cash rich and one cash poor. For each we did two scenarios - one where the household consumed roughly the same stuff as today but did things better (like recycling) and one where we could radically change their consumption patterns.
3. Think up clever ideas of how to achieve those scenarios.
The day was a success - we did come up with a (small) number of things that no-one had considered before, plus a huge raft of stuff that some councils were doing and could be applied to members of the Partnership.
If I could go back and change one thing I would have been stricter on following the backcasting process 'rules'. There was a tendency to fall back into the habit of forecasting when we got to stage 3.
Overall, feedback from the attendees was very positive and they really enjoyed the opportunity to think differently - hopefully they can take some of that back to their jobs even when they're back in the world of full e-mail in-boxes, voicemails and intrays.
Labels: backcasting, facilitation, facilitator, waste minimisation
# posted by Gareth Kane : 09:49
0 Comments
Monday, 15 October 2007
A Trillion Pages of Waste A Day
Despite having spent ten years working in the environment and sustainability field, the sheer volume of our consumption of natural resources still has the capacity to leave me speechless. And it happened again yesterday as I read the Sundays. The Observer had a piece on the world's consumption of printer paper - 2.5 and 2.8 trillion worldwide of which 45% is binned within the day - a cool trillion pages of unwanted e-mails, cover sheets, drafts, accidental prints etc. Of course the economic cost of this is not just disposal, but the whole cost of ordering, purchase cost, storage, distribution, loading the printer, maintaining the printer (more printing = more wear & tear), emptying the bins and then finally disposal.Some solutions to this are easy - use 2-sided (duplex) printing, don't print cover sheets (you should really know what paper is yours) and don't print e-mails unless there is a commercial/legal imperative etc. I also find, provided your eyesight is OK, drafts and some large documents can be printed 2 pages to each side of A4 - so you get 4 'pages' to one piece of paper. The main difficulty I have is I still like to scribble over draft reports with a red pen, so I now try to restrict myself to printing a draft every other time I get the urge to!
In the wider organisation, information, directories etc can be stored on an intranet, inessential handouts can be banned from meetings and individual departments can be given paper/printing cost reduction targets.
Unfortunately, despite this, we seem further from the 'paperless office' than where we were 32 years ago when the term was coined.
Labels: paper, printing, waste, waste minimisation
# posted by Gareth Kane : 10:23
1 Comments
A highly accessible, practical guide to those who want to introduce sustainability into their business or organization quickly and effectively.
