Yesterday I interviewed Glen Bennett, founder and MD of EAE Ltd, a Scottish leaflet marketing business. This video, made by young people as part of a wider project, shows some of the achievements he has made on his objective of making the company zero carbon.

What the video doesn’t show is the trials and tribulations Glen went through. The wind turbine took them 2½ years to get installed – they had to work with 22 different organisations to do it. Many were clearly not up to the job – one planner asked what ‘kWh’ stood for, another tried to kill the project at the last minute for (unnecessary) noise testing.

Then, as soon as it was installed, EAE were hit with a business rate increase as the turbine counted as a business improvement! That levy has now been removed, but only after Glen ran a media campaign to point out the stupidity of the situation. Excess electricity from the turbine is simply dumped onto the grid for free as the current set up for charging would cost more than it would generate.

Why is this not easier? Why should pioneers like Glen have to go through the modern day equivalent of the 12 tasks of Hercules to cut his company’s carbon footprint? The recent Government strategies will lower some of these bureaucratic barriers, but Glen’s story shows that it ain’t always easy being green.