Green Futures Articles

Ambitious plans for Sheffield and its local economy, drawn up by the city’s experimental urban regeneration company Sheffield One, have been launched as the Sheffield Masterplan. At the heart of this project is the eyecatching £15 million Millennium Galleries, which will aim to make as much use of natural light as possible through transluscent glass blocks that will bounce light throughout the building.

Sheffield One; www.sheffield1.com

The surfeit of green glass in the recycling chain could find its way on to our roads - not as a safety hazard, but as a new road-building material. Mixed in a 30:70 ratio with crushed limestone aggregate then coated with bitumen, it becomes ‘glasphalt’. The proud invention of RMC Aggregates, glasphalt has just won a Quality in Construction award, and RMC believes its potential use could be enough to account for almost all of the country’s waste green glass - at the rate of around one million bottles per mile.

RMC, 01527 575777

Recycled glass is also being turned into exterior cladding tiles by the Finnish firm Innolasi. 07714 096833; mailto:glynn.skerratt@abr.fi

The organic boom has sparked a sunburst of new businesses eager to exploit the growing market. But if they are to reap the potential, they need some serious funding. And that’s where Triodos Bank's new venture capital fund comes in. Susan Jenkins explains.

Just as entrepreneurs have responded to the rapidly growing market for organic foods and environmentally friendly products and services, financial institutions are now beginning to realise the opportunity to invest capital in these potentially huge growth areas.

The recently launched Triodos Venture Capital Fund (TVCF) is one of the first venture funds aimed purely at expanding businesses active in organic processing and retailing, renewable energy, and the environmental technology sectors. With a fund of euro 50 million, the plan is to invest in approximately 20 enterprises - mainly in the UK, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany and to deliver market-level returns to institutional investors.

Putting its toe in the water, if not exactly taking the plunge, the UK government has now made a commitment to support the expansion of photovoltaic (PV) solar power. It is welcome news for the nascent PV industry in this country, which had been lamenting the lost opportunity for just this kind of funding for a market-building programme.

The initial promise of a 2,000-roof demonstration programme was tucked away in a Department of Trade and Industry White Paper on enterprise, skills and training. This still fell a long way short of the policies in place in Germany and Japan, which specify target numbers for solar roofs (100,000 by 2003, in the German case, and 70,000 by 2004 in Japan). DTI funding for the programme amounted to just £10 million over three years, although it was described as just the first phase of what was intended to become an ambitious market stimulation programme over the next 10 years. That immediately became more credible when Prime Minister Tony Blair promised in his latest ‘green speech’ an extra £100 million of funding for renewable energy technologies over the next three years.