Big UK companies form eco-IT group

Some jolly big names in the business world sent us some blurb  on how they met in London last week to talk about the environmental problems of IT.

Lloyds TSB, the John Lewis Partnership, Sony UK, the British Medical Association, E.ON UK, CQS and the biggest name of all - the University of Cumbria - came together in a bid to form a few plans around sustainability.

Sponsor Logicalis says the meet was led by environmental charity, the Global Action Plan.

The group will question political, industry, technology, and expert witnesses and have the power to commission independent research into specific areas of concern such as the Data Centre, Information Growth, and Legislation.

In the press release, Trewin Restorick (pictured), director of Global Action Plan and chair of the Environmental IT Leadership Team said:

“Currently, the advice available to IT Directors and CIOs comes from technology vendors. Although the intentions are good, the advice can be sometimes confusing and contradictory. This green IT team will provide a forum to review vendors’ advice and government policy, cutting through the techy and political jargon to give practical advice for creating a sustainable IT structure. The team will help peers put carbon reduction policies into practice and greatly reduce their environmental impact.” …

Renewable energy costs per square metre

This fascinating article in The Guardian compares the average power per square metre that different types of renewable energies produce. It turns out that dams are rubbish (and the piece rubbishes China’s Three Gorges dam project) in terms of the space they consume–and many renewable energies seem to need vast tracts of land to produce enough power.

 Power compared

Dams
Hydroelectric energy is the least efficient way of using land to produce power. One square metre on average produces 0.1 watts.

Biofuels
A generator burning biomass requires crops from 250,000 hectares to match the electricity output of a nuclear power station.

Wind energy
Wind farms generate around 1.2 watts for every square metre of land.

Solar power
Photovoltaic cells covering an area of 150,000 square kilometres would be needed to meet US electricity needs for a year. To power New York city would take 12,000 square kilometres, about the size of Connecticut.

All this is the same kind of argument that Greenbang made recently, after hearing about the “world’s biggest solar farm”.

Sainsbury’s gives thumbs up to plastic wine bottles

Not long after we heard about wine coming in either boxes or bags, UK grocery chain Sainsbury’s says it’s going to start selling wine in plastic bottles, as part of a trial.

UK consumers buy around one billion bottles of wine every year, using around half-a-million tonnes of glass. Reducing the weight of wine packaging to 54g (2oz) by using plastic bottles could reduce carbon emissions by around 90,000 tonnes, according to the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap), which is involved in the trial.

“That’s equivalent to taking 28,000 cars off the road for a year,” said a Wrap spokeswoman.

Wrap will assess how successfully the plastic bottles can be recycled and will measure the environmental impact of the scheme.

It doesn’t appear to affect the price though: a 75cl plastic bottle of sauvignon blanc will cost £4.99. One wonders what the French will make of all this…

GE credit card: spend $9,000 to go carbon neutral

GE has launched a new credit card that allocates 1% of all your spending onto carbon offsetting projects (or 1/2 a percent for those skinflints who still want some cash back).

According to the site’s calculations, spending $750 a month — just $9,000 a year, which is what some people pay to wash their car, as it happens — would effectively offset the 10 metric tons of direct emissions that GE reckons the average American is responsible for.

All this makes Greenbang wonder what the average European or Asian would have to spend, in order to offset their emissions? $500 a month? $200 a month?

Anyway, it sounds like a nice project. Although, as this comment points out, it does create an incentive for people to spend more in the first place, which boosts emissions anyway.

Where’s Beijing’s blue sky gone?

CHINA WATCH

This is the morning view from an office today. Horrible huh? Maybe the window is as dirty as the air；)
…

GE’s green sales top $12bn

An interesting story on the NY Times about GE’s overall Ecomagination transition under the helm of boss Jeffrey Immelt.

The Ecomagination line now features 45 products with $12 billion in sales. Although skeptics might look upon Ecomagination as the latest version of corporate “greenwashing,” it has impressed socially conscious investors with memories of Mr. Welch.

“G.E. used to be stuck in the past,” says Bennett Freeman, senior vice president for social research and policy at the Calvert Group, an investment company. “But the effect of G.E. and Ecomagination is huge. When G.E. commits to renewable energy, the argument is over in corporate America.”

Mr. Immelt and Ms. Bolsinger say that the point of Ecomagination isn’t to save the planet but to make money.

Brit boffin designs killer TV packaging

Brilliant Brit designer Tom Ballhatchet has devised an innovative way of reusing the masses of superfluous packaging that comes with new TVs–rather than just binning it, reuse it as a stand. The pictures say it all, really. What a lad.

USB batteries charge ahead

It’s not just plastic bags that are wasteful and bad for the environment. Apparently more than 15 billion batteries are made and thrown away each year – equivalent to a column of batteries to the moon and back.

Moixa Energy’s USBCELL Rechargeable Batteries, are aiming to reduce battery waste through being re-usable hundreds of times.

The batteries have an embedded USB port and charge circuitry, so can also be recharged anywhere there’s a USB port.

Moixa Energy CEO - Simon Daniel says: “It is simply nonsensical for the world to produce and throw away the equivalent of a column of batteries to the moon and back every year. Add to this the 10 billion mostly inefficient AC/DC converters which power modern home and portable devices, often thrown away in a year, and you have a totally unsustainable and poorly designed approach to modern life.

USBCELL has been commended as a finalist for the Design Week best product design of 2006.

Carbon market to reach $1 trillion by 2017

As companies ramp up the sale of credits on international carbon markets — including the Chicago Climate Exchange and European Climate Exchange — experts reckon the global carbon market could reach an enormous $1 trillion over the next decade–as this article points out:

Managing emissions is one of the fastest-growing segments in financial services, and companies are scrambling for talent. Their goal: a slice of a market now worth about $30 billion, but which could grow to $1 trillion within a decade.

“Carbon will be the world’s biggest commodity market, and it could become the world’s biggest market overall,” said [Louis] Redshaw, the head of environmental markets at Barclays Capital.

Will climate change kill business?

Failure to innovate will be disasterous for business, says Chris Bowden, CEO, of energy price and  risk management Utilyx…

“It is now widely accepted among the scientific, political and business community that global warming is a real problem with potentially devastating consequences.

The problem is not and should not be the sole responsibility of our elected representatives and international bodies.  Forward-thinking business leaders have already recognised the need for a more sustainable approach. Mervyn Davies, chief executive of Standard Chartered Bank and a director of Tesco has said, “You won’t survive in business if you are not environmentally responsible.”

In James Murdoch’s view, “Corporations should be involved in the climate change debate… Tackling risk in one’s business strategy is what business leaders are supposed to do.”

As Stern pointed out, Sir Nicholas Stern’s report into climate change, published in late 2006,combating climate change could become a major growth industry, generating around £20 billion of business globally by 2050.  Nonetheless, many see only the prospect of green taxes and an enormous money sink.

But although there are likely to be a combination of taxes, targets and incentives in the future, investing in measures that reduce carbon emissions can result in significant financial dividends and competitive advantage.

The real question, therefore, is not, “Shall we do something?” but “What shall we do?”

Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all policy that is equally applicable to all organisations.  But addressing climate change doesn’t necessarily require a leap into the unknown or an inordinate amount of risk: biomass technology has been with us for over ten years, for example, solar-powered heating and wind-generation for 20.  None now require as much capital investment as in the past and are all are tried and tested.

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Greenbang tracks the explosion of the environmental industry, reporting on news of green innovation and thought leadership.

We blog on this rather than the environmental problems of the world because we are interested in the answers to climate change.