Archive

As a qualified engineer, the good old British taxpayer spent a small fortune teaching me how to make things, but not a penny teaching me how to unmake things. I can only assume that the vast majority of my engineers of my generation and earlier are in the same boat – the topic of disassembly […]

As many commentators have pointed out, the irony needle went off the dial this week when the UK Minister of State for Energy and Clean Growth, Claire Perry, went to the Climate Change Committee with a request for advice on a zero carbon policy path, yet approved the start of fracking for shale gas in Lancashire. […]

Regular readers will know I’m a big fan of using the 80:20 Rule for Sustainability. The rule encourages us to cut through the noise and focus on the smallest number of actions which will have biggest impact on our future (in fact, I wrote a book about it, an it’s in the top 3,000,000 best-selling […]

I cannot recall a single television programme in my lifetime which has had a bigger impact on public discourse than Blue Planet II (Cathy Come Home was 5 years before I was born). As I’ve commented before, we have a wonderful opportunity to engage with the public and business to make a big leap forward […]

Mrs K picked up this 2015 book by Cambridge Judge Business School academics Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu for me on the way home from a recent business trip. I’ve been looking for some inspiration in Sustainability thinking, so I got stuck in. Frugal Innovation as a concept emerged from the Appropriate Technology movement and, more […]

I love it when serious Sustainability issues hit the mainstream and yesterday’s public shaming of Pringles and Lucozade Sport for difficult-to-recycle packaging across mainstream media channels really hit the button. What brought my initial excitement down was the begrudging response from the companies (quoted from The Guardian): A Pringles spokesman said: “We take our responsibilities to […]

I had a meeting earlier with a Sustainability Manager earlier this week who is busy drafting a Sustainability Strategy for his company. His waste goal was “zero non-hazardous waste” and I mused that in the last ten years such a once-impossible target has become pretty much standard – which is a brilliant achievement by the Sustainability community. But what […]

I needed an example of user influence on a building’s carbon emissions for my CIBSE talk on Tuesday night. I had a nagging feeling that the lofty goals of the BedZed zero-emission development in South London had been compromised by user behaviour and, after a bit of digging, found a study which suggested the difference […]

Yesterday I was facilitating a workshop for the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Durham University. The purpose was to find ways to further embed Sustainability issues (social, environmental and economic) into the syllabus. I entered the room with a touch of manflu and no little trepidation – academics can be a tough audience as they, […]

I’m down in North East London for a couple of days learning about the ‘mini-Holland’ project in Walthamstow – a substantial investment in making suburban streets cycle/walking/people friendly. I’m here with my local councillor hat on, but I thought some of you would be interested in both the design concepts and some of the change […]