Fife Council makes the right buys

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:03:41 +0000

Fife Council has won the Government Opportunities Sustainability Award for piloting a procurement tool that takes into account both the carbon cost of a product and the financial cost of its full life. The tool, dubbed Whole Life Costing + CO2 (WLC+CO2), was developed in partnership with Forum for the Future, and is now used by Fife’s central procurement team.

Fife’s pilot confirms that the tool, in use since early 2009, is simple to operate and covers only verifiable information – making it acceptable under EU rules. It can play a key role in helping the council decide on competing tenders for products and services.

In the words of Keith Grieve, Procurement and Supply Chain Management Team Leader at Fife, the tool “allows you to compare individual products in terms of carbon emissions, and then to apply a value to those emissions which can influence the award of the contract”. He adds that it will be “of great assistance to all organisations trying to reduce their carbon footprint and to green their supply chain”.

Meanwhile, the Forum won the prize for best performing small- and medium-sized enterprise in the Mayor of London’s Green Procurement Code Awards. According to Forum’s Sustainability Advisor, Anna Warrington, the award is “a great way of demonstrating to our partners that we share the challenges they face in sustainable procurement – and that they can be overcome. It makes it clear that the advice we offer is grounded in reality”.

“It’s a simple concept – spending your money on goods which improve people’s quality of life and enhance the environment,” says John Bishop, IT and Administration Manager at the Forum. “But,” he adds, “putting it into practice has its challenges, even for an organisation like us.”

Exclusive interview with Andy Wales, SABMiller

Anna Simpson — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:24:50 +0000

Since 1996, Forum For the Future’s Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development has been training the sustainability leaders of the future. Each issue, we track the career of a Forum alumnus.

Andy Wales Class of: 1998-99
Currently: Global Head of Sustainable Development, SABMiller

Why I chose the MProf?
I had just graduated in Development Studies and English Literature and saw myself working for an international NGO like Oxfam. I did the Masters as a way to sound out how I could make a difference. But I found that, if you really want to change things, business offers one of the most dynamic, focused and practical institutions.

What I learnt
What makes the MProf a pinnacle of course design is the network you can build and access, both through your peers and through the six sectoral placements [in business, government, NGOs and so on]. For me, the placement at Interface Flor really stood out. They had a lot of vision, and were realistic about the challenge they’d set themselves: to be the leading example of industrial ecology. A lot of it was due to the tone set by [its founder] Ray Anderson. He was never shy to ask himself questions that he couldn’t yet answer.

Career to date
If you prove yourself in business, you move quickly. I went to Interface Flor as Sustainability Manager, and then Director, and was there for four years. Then I worked for Severn Trent as Head of Corporate Responsibility, looking at opportunities for renewable energy from organic waste streams. Now, I’m Global Head of Sustainable Development at SABMiller, one of the world’s largest brewers (think Pilsner Urquell, Peroni, Grolsch…). One of the major challenges we face is water scarcity, with global demand expected to exceed supply by 40% in 2030. You can’t have good beer without good water, and so we’re working with WWF, with the German development agency GTZ, and with local governments, smallholder farmers and communities, to ensure the future of the watersheds which are so necessary to our crops. We’ve got programmes running in Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Tanzania, South Africa and the Ukraine.

My next steps
I’ve joined up with two fellow alumni from the Masters course, Matthew Gorman, now Head of SD at BAA, and Dunstan Hope, a Director at Business for Social Responsibility, to write a book called Big Business, Big Responsibilities. It’s going to
be published in June by Palgrave Macmillan. When we met on the course, ten years ago, we were all very hopeful about what we could achieve through business. The nice thing is, we still are.

Advice for future leaders
The most valuable thing I learnt from the MProf is that by working together we can do so much more than if anyone tried to do it on their own. One movement setting out to prove this is the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders. We’re a group of 600 from across the world, with influential roles in business, government

Shrink the economy to stabilise the climate, says Andrew Simms

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:54:23 +0000

Slavish devotion to growth is charting a course for catastrophe, says Andrew Simms.

Ancient mariners sailed in fear of falling over the edge of the world. They needn’t have worried because, back then, there wasn’t one. By contrast, modern economists have confidently plotted the course that will take us there.

If the best assessments of available biocapacity are correct, then the ship of the global economy is already nearly vertical, pointing down and sliding. We are overshooting natural limits; running up ever increasing amounts of ecological debt.

Can we haul back the pendulous ship? Possibly. But, to do so we will have to disregard the compass normally relied upon by our captains of state. Their navigation has one True North: a dogmatic, unswerving devotion to orthodox economic growth.

Ever since the publication nearly four decades ago of Limits To Growth, a report by scientists from MIT working for the Club of Rome, this slavish adherence has been called into question by environmentalists. For years, it was fashionable to dismiss it as an exercise in ‘crying wolf’. Now it seems it was right all along. A recent detailed academic study found a solid correlation between its projections and subsequent actual trends*. Today, senior figures in politics and economics, from Adair Turner to Nicholas Stern, are finally daring to question the growth imperative, at least where rich countries are concerned.

Now new research from nef (the new economics foundation) suggests that a widespread, rapid economic transformation could bring huge benefits, even as the economy itself shrinks in overall size. We need to deliver ‘a great transition’, and to do it before we become locked in to irreversible climatic upheaval. History has precedents for such transitions. Consider Britain and others during the Second World War; or Cuba after the Cold War. Now the challenge is whether we can choose to make the change, even while the brutal reality of catastrophic global warming is still seen as a distant prospect.

“We can cut social and environmental costs, while improving quality of life”

The nef plan for a great transition takes a two-pronged approach: on one hand reducing inequality in the UK to levels found in Denmark, and on the other putting the economy onto a path of rapid decarbonisation. There is growing evidence that more equal societies deliver better outcomes across a whole range of indicators, including environmental ones. Overall, the plan would lead to huge cuts in social and environmental costs, at the same time as improving the quality of life for the majority. The key elements of the Great Transition include:

A Great Revaluing – to make the building of social and environmental value the economy’s core objective, rather than the simple maximisation of GDP growth.
A Great Redistribution – to build a fairer economy that is more efficient at reducing social ills and improving wellbeing. Specifically, we need to redistribute a combination of ownership, in terms of corporate governance and the growth of mutuals (such as co-operatives and social enterprises); of wealth and income through taxation; and of time through the length of the working week.
A Great Rebalancing – to set the market within social and environmental parameters – using price mechanisms and a broader definition of ‘public goods’.
A Great Localisation – reducing ecologically wasteful trade, especially between rich countries, with more goods and services produced closer to their point of consumption.
A Great Reskilling – to support the new green economy.
A Great Economic Irrigation – tackling major distortions arising from land prices and the perverse flow of investment to climate-damaging industries like coal, oil and gas.
A Great Interdependence – re-aligning economic relationships between rich and poor countries to shift away from exploitative patterns of dependence, towards positive co-operation for a smooth transition to a low carbon global economy.

Measured conservatively, the changes outlined in the Great Transition will avoid £0.4 trillion-£1.3 trillion in environmental costs between now and 2050, and could generate £7.35 trillion of social value. These gains more than compensate for an expected drop in GDP as over-consumption is reduced.

This is a win-win that could not only mend so-called ‘broken Britain’, but help stabilise a chaotic climate system. Together, it offers a policy maker’s holy grail – or rather, perhaps, a golden compass.

*Turner, Graham M (2008), ‘A Comparison of The Limits to Growth with 30 years
of Reality’, Global Environmental Change 18.

Andrew Simms is policy director of nef, and co-author with David Boyle of 'The New Economics: A Bigger Picture' (Earthscan, 2009).

Chic cistern recycles water

Lottie Butler — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:10:40 +0000

Designer toilet epitomises eco-chic with built-in water recycling.

It is not often that a toilet can be described as sleek and stylish, yet Roca’s new all-in-one washbasin and toilet wouldn’t look out of place in a chic hotel. Designed by Gabriele and Oscar Buratti for Roca, the W+W (‘Washbasin and Watercloset’) filters water directly from the basin and uses it to fill the toilet cistern.

An estimated two billion litres of fresh water are flushed down the toilet in UK homes every day. Previous water-efficient designs include the unappealing ‘Save a flush bag’ for the toilet cistern, and the dual flush system, which uses four to six litres of water per flush. By contrast, the elegant, self-contained design of the W+W can cut household water use by up to 25%.

Water management is no longer a stranger to cutting-edge design. Discussions of the emerging global water crisis at the 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos led to the launch of the Aspen Design Challenge, ‘Designing Water’s Future’. Among the 2009 finalists were a sonic sensor water meter which tracks use without touching the pipes, and an interactive water mapping platform for your local area. – Lottie Butler

Time to press the panic button?

Jonathon Porritt — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:44:39 +0000

I’m still reeling from the surreal sight of Lord Whacko Monckton (the climate contrarians’ eccentric of choice), captured on Newsnight last night doing an imitation of Al Gore at a public meeting in Australia. Frightening stuff.

Whenever I see Monckton at work, it reminds me just how desperate people must be to have their doubts and prejudices about climate change affirmed by some public figure – indeed, by any public figure at this stage of the debate.

The politics of climate change in Australia are even worse that they are here in the UK. That may well be, paradoxically, because changes in their own micro-climates over the last 10 years have been so much more visible. And painful. And this has polarised the debate about whether these changes are primarily a consequence of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, or primarily natural climate variability. The end result is that the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, might have to call a general election to break the impasse on his proposals for a carbon-trading scheme.

Could it get that bad here in the UK? Very improbably, but the whole tenor of the debate has deteriorated so badly, so rapidly, that it's now a serious political headache, rather than a minor irritant.

The combination of the ‘climate gate’ fiasco at the University of East Anglia and the growing concerns about the workings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), broader concerns of the whole peer review process (the so-called ‘Gold Standard’ of scientific research), and the utter failure of Copenhagen has transformed the climate debate here in the UK.

Where they were once thought as contrarian outliers, both the Daily Mail and the Daily Express are now thought to be closely aligned with public opinion. Ed Miliband (the Secretary of State in the Dept of Energy and Climate Change) must be in despair.

So should we be pressing the panic button? I think we should. The damage done to the credibility not just of climate science but also of the UK’s entire approach to climate change is already serious – and getting worse. This could be extremely problematic in the run up to the general election.

So if I was Gordon Brown, I would be asking David Cameron and Nick Clegg to issue a joint invitation to Martin Rees, the President of the Royal Society, asking him to convene a high-level Scientific Panel to comment on ‘the state of the science’ two years from the publication of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report at the end of 2007.

Does it still stack up? What should people make of all these recent revelations? Is the Climate Change Act (to which all three political parties have signed up) still based on robust scientific foundations? Can people still have confidence in the way climate science drives climate policy?

Martin Rees would be asked to recruit three or four top scientists (reflecting different shades of opinion), a couple of business people (like James Dyson or Richard Lambert of the CBI), and a couple of scientifically-literate ‘pillars of the community’ in whom the general public has absolute trust. No NGOs, let alone campaigners!

Give them two months. Bang out a short, sharp report written for lay people, not for scientists. Blitz the media. Run a full-page ad in the Mail and Express for weeks on end – instead of today’s highly questionable ‘Act on CO2 ‘ ads.

Overkill? Possibly. It seems ludicrous that what is still by any standards a rock-solid scientific consensus should have to be shored up by such extreme measures. But if we don’t, might we be looking at an Aussie-style meltdown in public opinion in the near term?

If climate change didn’t exist, would we have to invent it?

Martin Wright — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:12:35 +0000

This mischievous thought occurred to me as I was wading through the latest sclerotic surge of climate scepticism – which is fast becoming the press’s default position on the issue. (If the mainstream media really is engaged in a mass conspiracy to boost ‘warmism’, as James Delingpole and his like insist, then it’s doing a pretty lousy job of it...)

In December, it was Climategate and the embarrassing farce that was Copenhagen. Last month we had Glaciergate: the revelation that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had managed to include in one of its reports the wildly unfounded claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt to nothing in the next 25 years.

Proof that climate science is all a wild exaggeration, as some claimed? Actually, no, it was just proof that the most august international bodies can make a complete prat of themselves along with the rest of us.

But next month you can bet there’ll be another shock exposé, as the hounds of scepticism scent blood on the lumbering tracks of the climate consensus, and the media, having decided that global warming is sooo last century, daahlings, cheer them on to the kill.

In practice, of course, the same boring old science which has welded that consensus together hasn’t changed one bit. The global temperature is rising rapidly, and there’s no plausible explanation for it other than greenhouse gases. We can’t say for sure what the effects might be, but since it appears to be on track to take us right out of the comfort zone in which human civilisation has evolved and flourished, then, on balance, we probably ought to do everything we can to cool things down.

And, er, that’s it. Very boring. Go back to your homes, nothing to see here.

Except, what if we’re wrong? What if somehow, against all the weight of accumulated evidence, climate change does indeed prove to be a myth?

Well then, we’d be mad to waste our money and effort on... what, exactly?

Renewable energy? Not such a waste in the light of peak oil and politically vulnerable gas supplies, though, is it?

Energy efficiency? Ditto, with bells on.

Forest conservation? Pretty essential if we’re to stem the crash in biodiversity and reduce floods and soil erosion.

A shift to electric cars, alongside more walking and cycling? Enjoy cleaner, quieter streets, a healthier populace, and reduced pressure on health service budgets...

Technology transfer to the developing world? Managed properly, it could be one of the most effective ways of lifting people out of poverty – not to mention boosting emerging economies.

And so on, and so forth...

Almost all the stuff we need to do to slow global warming is stuff we probably want – and eventually, will need – to do anyway. We might do it a little earlier than otherwise, but if we plan for it, and stick to those plans, we can make the transition that much smoother, and more cost-effective.

So what’s not to like?

Yes, I am being a bit simplistic. Without climate change, we wouldn’t spend billions on unproven technologies like carbon capture and sequestration, and we might pause before rushing into biofuels with quite such forest-felling abandon. But overall, the ‘co benefits’ of robust action to tackle climate change have been vastly understated.

It was neatly summed up by a cartoon doing the rounds at Copenhagen. It shows a climate sceptic pointing in horror at a flipchart listing all the positives of a low-carbon economy:

Consistency key to cosy homes, says EST

Anna Simpson — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:19:47 +0000

Mixed messages on energy efficiency are costing UK householders dear. Clear, consistent advice is called for.

There’s something curiously attractive about measures to save energy in the home. On the one hand, they play to our desire for warmth and comfort, and on the other, to our pride. Who wants to hang on to a poorly insulated home while the neighbours take advantage of the latest offer to give their home the duvet treatment. They invite you round for mulled wine when the work is over. She’s wearing a sleeveless dress and takes you aside to whisper, smugly, that the heating isn’t even on…

And so, perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s no shortage of people looking to make their home more snug, and save money, too.

“Three million people contact us every year for advice on implementing simple domestic solutions,” says Marian Spain, Head of Strategy at the Energy Saving Trust (EST). “And about 20% of those people are talking radical change: microgeneration, solid wall insulation...”

One of the main problems they face, says Spain, is knowing who to trust for advice. “It’s a crowded world, with guidance and implementation packages on offer from supermarkets, construction firms and utilities to local authorities and the third sector.”

Limiting the sources of information would be counter-productive. There’s both room for – and the need for – all of these services, if the UK is to meet its Low Carbon Transition Plan target of reducing household emissions by 29% on 2008 levels by 2020 (see ‘Between four walls’ box, right).

That’s why the EST is backing a UK partnership which, so far, has opened three Sainsbury’s Home Energy Centres, with staff from utility EDF on hand to offer advice on heating and insulation services to shoppers. Other schemes are bringing advice to your door, and tackling whole communities at a time.

But, Spain argues, unless there is a consistent message coming from all sources, homeowners risk going away thinking that it’s all more complicated than they’d hoped.

For the EST, consistency goes beyond agreeing on facts and figures. At the moment, the accessibility of information varies from one local authority to the next, making real savings a sort of postcode lottery, and seasonal deals add confusion to the task of working out how much a job will cost. A first step would be for Government to work with energy companies to make information about the costs and services more transparent.

It’s also vital that the consumer can be certain that they’re going to get what they pay for. This means ensuring new technologies are tried and tested before they are sold, and that the supply chain has the skills to install them. Ideally, any work done on a house would improve its efficiency rating, becoming part and parcel of what builders do – not an optional extra. Local authorities can lead on this by providing training programmes and forming partnerships to target specific communities. EST is already working with over 100 local authorities to get the basic tools and skills in place.

And the ideal set-up? “When we talk about consumers, we’re talking about ourselves,” says Spain. “We get most of our advice from the people around us – our colleagues and friends. So, if those people, and the ones you meet on your daily rounds – the shop assistant, the heating engineer, the builder – are all giving you the same message, you’ll hear it.”

– Anna Simpson

Energy Saving Trust is a Forum for the Future partner.

Roof tiles to cool the planet

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:00:12 +0000

Colour-changing roof tile works with the weather

A roof tile that turns white in the heat of the sun, reflecting its rays back into space, is the latest techno-fix solution for cooling the planet [see ‘Paint it white’, GF73].

Developed by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the ‘thermeleon’ slate incorporates a polymer – similar in structure to hair gel – mixed with water and sandwiched between two layers of plastic. When the weather is cold the slate remains black, but when the sun shines, the polymer/water mix reacts and the slate turns white, reflecting heat and light back out to space.

The MIT team is also working on a paint version of the invention that can be sprayed onto existing slate roofs to create the same effect.

White roofs can cut indoor temperatures by up to 20°C, reducing the need for energy-intensive cooling systems. It’s a smart solution with high-profile advocates. In 2009, Al Gore joined New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a campaign to paint 100,000 square feet of rooftops – part of a plan to cut the city’s emissions by 30%. – Lorna Howarth

Close competition for clean city cars

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:38:03 +0000

A small, sustainable car – and another one – hit the road

A lauded British race car designer and a UK-based car company are touting their design for a sustainable urban car which could revolutionise motor manufacturing. Using efficient materials, Gordon Murray Design and Zytek Automotive will produce a petite vehicle that takes up a fraction of a normal parking space.

Sounds familiar? It should. In June 2009, UK-based RiverSimple unveiled a similar concept, the Mk 1 (see 'Hydrogen city car hits 300mpg and 30g/km CO2', GF73). It’s a low weight, two-seater prototype city car, powered by hydrogen fuel cells and made from carbon composite materials.

Just a few months down the line, the Murray-Zytek partnership has taken the wraps off the T.27 – a low weight, three-seater, electric prototype city car. “Smaller than a Smart,” they claim, “but with more interior space.”

Both RiverSimple and Gordon Murray emphasised their efforts to reduce the carbon embedded in auto manufacturing, and to produce a low impact vehicle suitable to city dwellers. But here, the twin concepts begin to differ.

RiverSimple sees city transport as an excellent candidate for a product service approach. Drivers would lease the Mk 1, giving the car a longer, more productive lifetime, and affording RiverSimple a steady income stream not based on continuous mass sales.

Gordon Murray and Zytek, on the other hand, want to streamline manufacturing, making car factories around a fifth the conventional size, and then lease the T.27 technology for local mass production.

If investment is an indication of the concept’s marketplace success, Gordon Murray Design and Zytek Automotive are well-placed. They have received £4.5 million from the Technology Strategy Board to develop four prototypes over a 16-month period. Gordon Murray will supply the manufacturing process, dubbed iStream, and the chassis design, while Zytek contributes its electric drive train technology.

But will the cars become commonplace? According to Forum for the Future’s Rupert Fausset, car owners aren’t yet convinced that alternative vehicles meet their transport, let alone aspirational, needs. It may take a mainstream electric version like the forthcoming Nissan Leaf to create an alternative city car category. – April Streeter

Unleashing brands as agents of transformative change

Sally Uren — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:03:50 +0000

Consumer brands have the power to create huge change, helping millions of customers lead better, more sustainable lives.

A growing number of big businesses are making sustainability a core part of their brand, (we’ve looked at the business reasons behind this in a previous piece) and this is hugely encouraging to anyone concerned with our planet’s future.

Generally speaking, consumers don’t particularly trust governments. You only need to flick through public opinion polls asking who people trust to see that politicians tend to do quite badly, and in the UK, in the wake of the expenses scandal, trust in politicians is probably at an all time low. So, governments exhorting the general public to do their bit to save our ailing planet will only ever have limited success.

But, generally speaking, consumers do trust brands. Whether we like it or not, there is often an emotional attachment to our favourite brands, although often at a sub-conscious level. The power of that consumer/brand love-in is proved by the massive waves of disapproval when a brand gets things wrong, from using child labour in sweat shops (think back to Nike), to charging more for underwear for, ahem, the fuller figure (M&S has almost recovered from this blip in its otherwise savvy reading of its customers).

And the need to shift towards more sustainable patterns of consumption is urgent. We are running perilously low on resources. We have to cut carbon out of our daily lives, and soon. In order to meet the scale of the challenge, we need to muster every tactic possible to move from our high-carbon, resource-intensive lifestyles to low-carbon loveliness. Now is not the time to get precious about the morality of deploying business and brands to help provide the solutions to our current crisis.

So, just how can the humble brand communicate the sustainability agenda in such a way that encourages more sustainable behaviours, from how a product is used, to what the consumer does with it at the end of its life?

At this point it’s worth remembering that when it comes to green and sustainability issues, the average consumer is confused and disempowered. He or she is also very clear that business needs to do its bit – there needs to be a clear compact between the brand and the consumer – based on ‘I will if you will’. Finally, most people want simple actions, not a menu of complicated and often contradictory choices.

Which means that when it comes to communicating sustainability, brands must remember that labels have their limits. It is estimated that most of us take an average 45 seconds to make choices when we’re buying our everyday necessities, and a proliferation of sustainability labels, be they fair trade, red tractors or carbon labels, may influence the purchase, but won’t lead to any changes in behaviour.
Simple messages are needed to cut through the clamour of labels. The Ariel ‘Turn to 30oC’ is perhaps one of the most successful pieces of brand communication on this agenda – a very clear message encouraging the customer to do something very simple. It won’t save the planet on its own – but millions of people turning to 30 oC just might help.

Motivating consumers as a group – convincing them that their own simple actions can make a difference - is a key to successful sustainability communications. Unilever’s relatively new ‘Clean Planet Plan’, currently promoted here in the UK through its Persil brand, has the power of collective action at its heart, trumpeting the strapline, ‘lots of small actions = a big difference’.

Two final tips for effective consumer communications. The first is something the green movement has got horribly wrong in the past, and might be one reason public support for green issues has taken so long to muster. Make people feel good. Urging consumers to do their bit by scaring them and painting a more sustainable world as the equivalent of living in a cave with a candle, weirdly enough, doesn’t tend to make people want to change. You stand much more chance of success by showing the links between using less energy and saving money, or recycling products and saving beautiful countryside from being used as a waste dump.

Finally, tell your customers about the success of your efforts. In celebrating the successes of Plan A, M&S is able to share a whole range of facts, from the money it has been able to give to charities to the thousands and thousands of recycled coat hangers. Generally, this all helps to show that the M&S/consumer compact is making a difference.

We live in interesting times, and brands are definitely getting better at helping the consumer do the right thing. But, so far, only a small handful have dared enter the ultimate hard-core sustainability territory, where the penny has dropped that actually, sustainability might just being about selling less stuff. Reducing impacts in the product use phase does make a difference, but not if the absolute numbers of people using those products keeps going up.

For now, innovation still has a big role to play in giving us truly sustainable products and services, but that is only part of the answer. The other part is quite straightforward - we simply need to consume less stuff.

An edited version of this article appeared in the Guardian Sustainable Business section.

Green skyscrapers reach new heights

George Wigmore — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:32:37 +0000

Design for efficient, self-sufficient skyscrapers reaches new heights

Rising up through the thick Guangzhou smog is the Pearl River Tower. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the curvilinear edifice sets out to prove that one can be very big and very green – yet beautiful, too. Due for completion in 2010, the Tower is expected to be the world’s most efficient super-building, and hopes are high that it will lead the way for more ultra-sustainable skyscrapers.

The Pearl River Tower boasts an array of green technology, including a greywater recycling system, and 3,000m2 of photovoltaic (PV) panels. Its concave façades increase the wind speed through four vertical axis turbines – each with a capacity of 10,000kWh per year on two of the building’s 71 floors. Combined, these micro-generation features will provide an estimated 3% of the building’s annual energy needs.

But this is not the only green giant of the construction world. Rivals include Dubai’s Lighthouse Tower. In terms of energy generation, the Lighthouse will have 4,000 PV panels and three large 225kW wind turbines which, alongside other green features, will help it become a LEED platinum-rated building when opened in 2010.

New build isn’t always necessary to take these concepts forward. In 2007, the 1960s CIS Tower in Manchester was brought up to date, with the installation of over 7,000 PV panels on the façade and 24 wind turbines on the roof. These features enable the tower to generate 180,000 kWh per year, or 10% of its energy needs.

While these features undoubtedly make a difference to a building’s eco-credentials, says Martin Hunt, Head of Built Environment at Forum for the Future, “any designer or builder professing to be green needs to back up their claims with hard facts, or it’s only so much eco-bling”.

And for any building, renewable energy generation is only part of the picture. Other considerations include the whole life of any construction, transport issues, and internal management.

As Hunt puts it: “a green building is only as green as its users”.

– George Wigmore

Biogas: from bad smells to big bucks

Roger East — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

After years in the wilderness, biogas is set to play a major role in powering the future.

Andrew Needham, Operations Director of BIOGEN, is looking bullish. His anaerobic digestion (AD) plants in Ludlow (Shropshire) and the Bedfordshire village of Milton Ernest are among only a handful in Britain, but he has plans for 100 more. When he first looked into AD, it was to turn nutrient-rich waste into good fertiliser. He wasn’t expecting to become a leading player in the UK’s infant – but rapidly growing – biogas industry.

For farm-based businesses like BIOGEN, AD is a natural winner. Rather than being a problem to be disposed of, the slurry from cattle becomes a valuable ingredient. And the ‘digestate’ solids which are left over at the end of the process make good fertiliser for the fields.

But it won’t just be farms getting in on the act, says Entec consultant Dave Auty. Thanks to a number of key policy shifts, he is expecting to see many more ambitious minds turn to AD.

First, there’s the sheer amount of food which UK producers, retailers and households throw away each year. The food industry is under increasing pressure to meet waste reduction targets, and landfill tax – set to reach £72 per tonne by 2013 – should spur further cuts. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is keen to see AD become an established solution for municipal food waste, and local authorities also have recycling targets to meet. And with the rising cost of fuel and carbon, biogas could become an attractive alternative.

What Needham has also spotted is the potential for AD to tap various income streams. There’s the immediate gain of substantial ‘gate fees’ for every tonne of waste food taken out of the hands of local authorities. The digestate can be sold as fertiliser or for landscape restoration. And the methane produced by the AD has a number of buyers. It can be burned in domestic appliances, liquified to make vehicle fuel, or used in centralised heating and power (CHP) applications to generate ‘green’ electricity – as Ecotricity is doing [see below]. And power from AD wins double renewable energy certificates (ROCs) when sold on to providers to boost their portfolio.

National Grid is also advocating investment in distribution infrastructure, and forthcoming incentives for heat from renewable sources can only make it more attractive.

With such money-making potential, everyone’s looking to get involved. The water industry is already re-evaluating sewage sludge as a resource rather than a problem. More familiarity with the technology could make it a no-brainer for some large-scale food processors, who could recycle their organic waste and power the premises in a neat loop. Retail majors such as Sainsbury’s are sounding out possibilities, says Auty, and Marks and Spencer is offering to buy electricity from any farm-based AD plants.

But the biggest opportunities depend on a good tie-in with appropriate council waste collection routines. Modern AD requires significant capital, so investors will want secure waste contracts in place for the longer term. They’ll also want the right sort of organic waste. Experience argues for separating leftovers from kitchens and catering services, which are ideal for AD, from garden greenery, which is not.

If Britain’s AD industry grows to £5 billion in the next ten years, as Entec’s Terry Brownhill believes it can, its new trade association and best practice website (www.adbiogas.co.uk) will be busy indeed. Expertise will be at a premium not only in waste logistics, but in planning and environmental assessment: a proposed digester in the neighbourhood is likely to arouse (largely unfounded) local concern over everything from bad smells and vermin to lorry traffic, explosive gases and air pollution. And there’ll be a need for training to ensure the process is managed safely and successfully. Timing and temperature are critical, and digestate quality needs to be up to scratch with new product protocols in place.

Get all this right, Brownhill says, and you’ve got a winner. It’s really about “taking something bad and turning it into something good” – the perfect recipe for a green new deal.

– Roger East

Entec UK is a Forum for the Future partner.

Second life for EV batteries

Roger East — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:59:01 +0000

EV economics strengthened by battery re-use deal

After the prototypes and the pioneers, the practicalities of electric vehicles (EVs) are up for attention. Nissan has found a second life for their lithium-ion batteries, by selling them on to Japanese trading company Sumitomo for use in the renewable energy sector.

With a near 100% performance needed for their in-car role, huge banks of batteries are discarded from EVs as they pass their prime. But their value can be exploited for a further ten or even 20 years, as load-levellers for the grid. They could store wind power at night, for instance, when less of it is needed, and release it at times of peak demand.

The resale deal makes economic sense of the business model which Nissan plans to use, starting with its LEAF ZEV (zero-emission vehicle) - pictured right. The batteries are the most expensive element of the car, but purchasers would lease rather than buy. With the partnership in place, Nissan can afford to keep the monthly lease low in cost, knowing that they’ll get a high residual value for them from Sumitomo at the end of the road.

For Nissan’s Chief Operating Officer, Toshiyuki Shiga, this is “the final piece of the jigsaw for viable mainstream EVs” – and, he claims, a world first.

Nissan is even touting the batteries as “CO2 negative”, with their second life renewables-support role helping to take carbon out of the system. And perhaps EV owners who go in for microgeneration can get this virtuous circuit going with the batteries still in their car.
– Roger East

Paint your business green with sustainable innovation

Chris Sherwin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:48:30 +0000

Innovation is famously described as one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration – great ideas are rarely enough, the challenge is to execute them.

Sustainable innovation can be a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating process. Our latest report Paint the Town Green has been more than three years in the making but what a story we have to tell.

The report is about a multi-year innovation collaboration which set the goal of creating sustainable paint systems, and about the new products, services and processes which came out of it. It explains how to conduct innovation driven by environmental and social responsibility and why it makes good business sense.

Its not that I’m especially excited by paint – though I must confess to a soft spot after working on it for so long. Essentially the report shows how to use sustainability as a new lens to reinvent and rethink every aspect of our life. If we can do this with paint, imagine what you can do with cars, mobile phones, homes and holidays.

The three-year project set out to study the entire lifecycle of paint – from raw materials through to manufacturing, use and disposal - to find ways to make it more sustainable. It brought together ICI Paints AkzoNobel, a manufacturer and supplier, construction group Carillion, a major user of paint, and Forum for the Future.

Here are a few of the innovations:

Dulux Ecosense, a new range of eco-paint with half the carbon and water footprint of the standard paint sold two years ago and 40 per cent less waste.
Improved cans which use less plastic and are easier to clean and recycle.
A recycling scheme in which vehicles delivering paint to Dulux Decorator Centres bring back used cans.
Envirowash - a mobile brush and roller cleaning station for building sites: instead of pouring contaminated water down the drains it is captured for reuse with the paint residue filtered out.
Manufacturing improvements that save millions of litres of water used in cleaning production equipment by using it to make new paint.

We also developed new tools for the project like our Streamlined Lifecycle Assessment (SLCA) method and Environmental Impact Analyser – a tool to measure the key impacts of a proposed new formulation and compare them against an existing product. This was the key which allowed ICI Paints AkzoNobel to develop both Ecosense and Ecosure trade paint, which won Green Product of the year in the Green Business Awards 2009.

Paint the Town Green marks a unique point in Forum’s innovation work. Some years ago we resolved to only work on practical innovation projects and not write any reports. We caved in on this project, but that’s only because we’re convinced there’s a great story we want to share with others. We hope it provides the one per cent inspiration you’ve been looking for.

A step closer to sustainable financial markets?

Alice Chapple — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:04:57 +0000

President Barack Obama has shaken up the banks with his plans for radical reform just as they seemed to be settling back into their cosy business-as-usual ways, but it’s just a small step in the right direction.

No doubt the banks will respond with warnings over the coming days, weeks and months that regulation of their activities or their remuneration policies would hurt us more than it does them - by damaging our pensions and the tax take. If we want the financial system to deliver a sustainable future, we should be prepared to pick those arguments apart.

Obama wants to see the banks where you and I put our money prohibited from engaging in certain risky activities, which can make a lot of money in the short term but which can put the their entire finances at risk over a longer time-frame. He singles out hedge funds, private equity and proprietary trading.

He is right to try (however difficult it may be) to distinguish between the ‘oil’ that makes the system run smoothly - basic banking services - and the speculative ‘cogs’ that put the system at risk and only create short-term returns for the finance sector itself.

But the principle could be taken further. The finance sector's short-term perspective on money-making stores up all sorts of other long-term risks for us as tax-payers and future pensioners, by overlooking factors which will have a major impact on our economies like climate change and the depletion of scarce resources like clean water, fertile soils and forests. Unless our financial system takes these risks into account, and begins to value these assets better, the system will collapse and our 'wealth' will collapse with it. This needs to be part of the conversation.

The discussions on financial reform provide an opportunity to shine a light on the sector's activities. Which parts deliver value for shareholders and the wider public in a stable and sustainable way and are required for the system to run smoothly? Which only serve to create short-term returns for the finance sector itself?

If we can have an open debate of this kind, we may emerge with a financial system that manages risk, values the things that matter and provides capital to the activities that can deliver a sustainable future.

Read more about Forum for the Future’s work to create a sustainable financial system.

Investigating the business case for sustainability: seven steps that could make you millions

David Bent — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:33:27 +0000

Good environmental management has saved telecoms group BT more than $700 million. It used clear-eyed analysis and fundamental financial tools to identify the business case for sustainability. Here are steps you can apply yourself.

Finding the business case is the ‘holy grail’ of sustainability professionals, a goal which sometimes seems impossibly hard, and yet there are actually many different business cases for sustainability projects, change programmes and initiatives.

In previous posts I gave Six Lessons on Finding the Business Case for Sustainability Initiatives and Four Tips on Getting Buy-In from Finance. This final post goes into the technical part – seven steps to investigate the business case.

I’ll illustrate with the work Forum for the Future did with BT, which helped the telecoms group save $720 million (£442 million) in operating costs over five years.

1. Identify what you’re investigating and why. Obvious, but you’ll be surprised how poorly people define boundaries. Are you looking at the sustainability drivers for the whole organisation or only a particular project or initiative? Are you looking at the worth of an entire change programme, or do you want to add sustainability-related criteria into a decision-making process like capital expenditure budgeting? Make sure you know your scope.

You should also be clear why you are investigating. How will you use the results? What is the change you’re trying to stimulate?

BT was interested in identifying the financial benefits of good environmental practice for reporting and marketing. Crucially, they narrowed that down further to some particulars: transport, energy and teleconference working practices.

2. Prioritise value drivers. Shareholder value – the value of the company to its owners – is driven by certain factors: turnover growth; margin growth; reduced capital expenditure; risk reduction; duration of competitive advantage; reduced tax rate; and reduced cost of capital. Identify which of these is key to your investigation.

For BT the value driver was clear: margin growth.

3. Identify the relevant business cases. Each value driver may have a number of different possible business cases - we’ve compiled a list of 17 pathways from sustainability to shareholder value (see here). Do get in touch if we’ve missed out any.

The crucial thing is to identify the causality: how does A lead to B lead to C, and so on to an ultimate financial impact? It is this assumed pathway that you will be testing.

BT found that each piece of environmental good practice creates a different causal chain creating value. For instance, increasing the number of home-workers has two key effects: firstly, less office use cuts office costs; secondly, home workers use some of the time they’re not travelling to do more work, effectively improving productivity. Both outcomes also reduced net greenhouse gas emissions.

4. Choose the financial technique. Each type of business case will need an appropriate financial technique (more on this at the end). The key is to find a technique that is credible to your internal audience, usually the finance function. Wherever possible, use the same method they do.

In the BT example, measuring cost savings is a management accounting question. The issue is how long can you claim them? We assumed changes five years previously had become normal practice, and so have a five-year rolling gap (i.e. effectively we compared the costs in 2008 with 2003).

5. Do the financial analysis. With luck you’ll get the finance function to do it for you. BT identified total savings of £442m ($720m) from the five years to 2009. You can see more here.

6. Use your findings in the business. You identified why you were investigating in step one. Now you have the results, use them.

BT has used its results in different ways. It has disclosed them, as part of communicating to stakeholders and shareholders the value of sustainability. It has used them to build awareness of the business case for sustainability across the business. Most importantly, they have been a powerful tool in marketing BT services such as teleworking. The results say: we do this ourselves, and this is how much we’ve saved.

7. Learn and embed. Finally, what have you learnt about investigating this business case? How will you do it differently next time? Do you need to set up an information management system to collect the data automatically? How can you embed the results in regular decision-making? What do the results mean for sustainability in the company more generally?

This is the last of three blogs which relate to the Forum’s work on Better Decisions, Real Value . We’ve nearly finished piloting various techniques with our partners. By the end of April we hope to have a tool which takes people through the steps above, including directing them to the appropriate financial technique. If you are interested in seeing a draft, or have suggestions please do get in touch with me on d.bent@forumforthefuture.org.

This article was originally published on GreenBiz.com.

This is the third of three blogs looking at the business case for sustainability. The other blogs are: How to Build a Business Case for Sustainability: Four Tips on Getting Buy-In from Finance and Six Key Lessons on Mapping Out a Business Case for Sustainability Initiatives

Ordinary business has to wake up, says John Griffin, CEO Addison Lee

Anna Simpson — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:00:35 +0000

We don’t sit here worrying about the environmentFor Addison Lee, it’s always been about the commercial benefits – more than the green agenda. We made the company more efficient, and as a result, its carbon footprint kept shrinking. It was a series of steps, starting with simple things like fitting windows with high insulation ratings. Our ‘green’ action plan said to put better windows on the first floor, but the cost benefits were so clear that we did the whole building.

Investment has already paid offWe have over 2,500 cars on the road, but we use very sophisticated GPS technology to plan their routes so that they never have to travel more than half a mile between jobs. It’s halved their average journey distance. There’s a ‘going home’ button that the drivers press, and the allocator pulls up a job along the way so that their car is never empty. It’s reduced dead (non-income-generating) mileage by 17.6%.

Efficiency has meant we laughed our way through the recession We are up 9% on this week last year, which is a great position to be in when the industry as a whole is in recession. The average company in our sector is 20% down, so we must be doing something right. In just one year, we’ve saved £185,000 through energy efficiency measures. It pays.

It’s no secret that contractors are looking for green credentials…And I think companies ignore this at their peril. Our turnover is around £175 million a year, and as much as half of that is through contracts. There’s a lot of competition around, and businesses are more inclined to offer contracts to companies with a strong green agenda, a real plan.

We’re growing, but our footprint isn’t We log our carbon for the whole company, and so if we double in size, we track our emissions as doubling in size. But in fact, we are growing as a company – more cars, more passengers, more turnover – and our emissions are still falling. We’ve cut our carbon emissions by 30% on our 2002 baseline, the year we began our green policies and practices, and we have a target to reach 60% by 2025.

Ordinary business has to wake upYou have to get people with ordinary businesses, not eco businesses, to understand their responsibility to the planet. And you do this by telling them that if you find the right balance between commerce and sustainability, it will pay! The balance we’ve found is a really good one. But we can’t green the cab industry on our own: everybody’s got to be on board.

John Griffin was in conversation with Anna Simpson.

Messages from the future

James Goodman — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:50:14 +0000

What do new types of plastic, a recession-proof solar boom in California and resurgent UK regional accents have in common? Or high-street butchers, energy rationing and the emergence of a ‘recession generation’?

They could all be ‘weak signals’ from the future – signs of what may be to come. If you’re into sustainable development and planning for the future, then weak signals are important.

For example, a couple of years ago we noticed that the Australian Outback had been closed to protect tourists from the extreme heat. This struck us as something that could become more common in the future as the climate changes, and that could have a big impact on the tourism industry. So we built the idea into one of our Tourism 2023 scenarios which are helping the tourism industry plan for its future.

Some weak signals may be a harbinger of precisely nothing. Some may reappear years or even decades later. But others may grow progressively stronger, and even become part of a mainstream trend that plays a significant role in defining the future. They may hold implications for your organisation, your community – or even you personally.

We’ve been tracking weak signals for a couple of years, and now we’re making them public. Click here to have a look, or follow the beautifully designed ‘weak signals’ link on the right hand side of our home page.

You can learn about the obesity plateau in the USA, a 100% solar town in Uruguay, the phenomenon of bee-rustling, remote-control gardens and much more. Reading about these weak signals might just challenge some of your assumptions about what the future holds.

The blog is updated regularly so we hope you’ll find something new each time you check in. Please tell us what you think. Are we uncovering new trends? What could they mean for the prospects of a sustainable future?

By the way, you can read more about what weak signals are and how we use them, along with plenty of examples, in Hugh Knowles’s article for Green Futures.

Could radical work spaces mean the end of the office?

Hannah Bullock — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 11:31:12 +0000

From London to Brussels to Mumbai, people are paying for a place in a new kind of space. Jonathan Robinson, founder of the Hub, tells Hannah Bullock why.

“If the likes of McKinsey have built a global office infrastructure and talent pool of hundreds of thousands of people, why can’t those working at the edge of a new sustainable economy enjoy the same thing?” asks Jonathan Robinson. “Together, they would kick some arse.”

Robinson made the first step towards proving this possible in 2005, when, along with three friends, he founded the Hub, an international network of spaces where social and environmental innovators can work, meet and share ideas.

What set the young anthropology graduate off on this mission was his disappointment at the university careers fair, where a rather “feckless” charity offering stood in complete contrast to the corporate milk round. Yet neither, he felt, seemed to offer anything for those who had enterprising ideas for change in the world, but who lacked the resources, guts or experience to start out on their own.

iPhone in hand, MacBook in the other, Robinson himself is a perfect example of the motivated, mobile working entrepreneurs he hoped to interest in his idea. And he recognised the smart business move in inviting thousands of other talented individuals to join his ‘club’. As he puts it, the company “wouldn’t own or even pay for them; indeed, they would pay us”.

Today 3,000 entrepreneurs, policy-makers, freelance professionals and corporate executives do indeed pay to be part of this growing network of Hubs. Their monthly membership fee of between £10 and £300 (or the equivalent in each local economy) buys them access to hot desks, wifi and expertise at one of 15 serviced business-cum-social innovation centres around the world.

The Hubs’ USP (‘unique selling point’), says Robinson, is the way they use “the power of physical space to provoke and inspire”. In Islington, north London, the Hub is a refurbished warehouse with exposed brick and a wood-chip boiler; in Brussels, it’s a converted chocolate factory; in Mumbai, a high-rise building overlooking the Arabian Sea. Inside, each is designed to encourage interaction, with open plan areas, curvaceous shared desks, cushion-strewn chill-out corners and a cosy kitchen.

Even the communities that use Hubs are ‘designed’, giving the place a certain cachet. Robinson’s team ‘seeds’ these in each location by headhunting 30 or so founding members: professionals who can bring the unusual mix of skills that are needed to cross-fertilise ideas. Specially trained Hub ‘hosts’ act as catalysts, bringing members together for workshops on challenges, such as raising seed capital or entering a foreign market. Convening peers in a supportive network to critique ideas early on, is essential, says Robinson, when three out of five UK businesses fail within the first three years.

So far, the Hub has fostered more than 1,500 ethical enterprises. Success stories include Lightweight Medical, a company which designs healthcare products that reduce waste, and Onzo, the smart metering outfit that started off as a “maverick one-and-a-half person venture”, and now employs 100 staff, with sales of £10 million.

Robinson’s careful “condition-setting”, as he calls it, is not only good for start-ups; it’s also key to his own business model. The congenial atmosphere, the hot desking, the late-night opening hours are all special ingredients in driving value from Hub properties.

“It borrows from the best of an office, a café, a theatre, an events space…”

“We pack people in with high density and use the space effectively at different times of the day,” he explains. A Hub’s layout accommodates one person every 50 square feet: three times the density of an average office. And, because its design cleverly “borrows from the best of an office, a café, a theatre, an events space”, local Hub hosts can hire them out for film screenings, talks or classes. The buildings “serve one function at breakfast, another function over lunch, or dinner…”

On average, Hubs bring in three times more revenue per square foot than conventional rent-a-desk outfits (£100 per year in the UK). But are they actually making money? The most successful among them have 25% profit margins, but they do have higher base costs than ‘rent-a-desk’ competitors.

Each Hub needs £200,000-£500,000 to get up and running – a sum which prospective local Hub operators must raise upfront. This covers training hosts and creating the founding membership community, initial rental deposits (all Hubs are rented properties), and a fee to the central company, known as Hub World.

The business model might sound like a conventional franchise, with Hubs around the world paying a fee and a slice of their revenue to its founding fathers. But Robinson insists that, as fluffy as it may sound, the set up is more of a partnership. Those who operate individual Hubs have voting rights in the way the company is run, rather than simply paying to use the company identity, and will eventually receive a share of the central profit – once this starts to materialise.

Taken together, the global turnover of all 15 stands at £2.5 million, while Hub World itself has an annual revenue of £500,000. Overall, the business’s growth capital still relies heavily on small investments from over 100 individuals around the world.

“If they were investing in anything, it was our determination”

At least today’s potential backers can see living, breathing examples of the Hub concept – unlike when Robinson and his mates made the first sell back in 2002. “I’m not sure if they ever ‘got it’,” he says of the investors who put up the £200,000 needed to do up that first derelict building in Islington. The four did, however, manage to convince 12 “friends of friends”, along with social investment fund Venturesome to part with the cash. “If they were investing in anything”, says Robinson, “it was in our determination.”

With a target of opening 200 Hubs in total, 68 of them by 2013, there’s some serious fundraising still to be done. Robinson thinks he may have found the answer in a multi- million pound green property fund that he’s scoping in partnership with a major ethical bank. It’s a prime example of ‘crowd-sourced investment’. The company is looking to its 3,000 ethically minded members, and the 40,000 guests who visit Hubs worldwide on a regular basis, to buy the first bonds, which start at a manageable £100. Administered by the bank but clearly earmarked as Hub bonds, the idea is that investors will receive interest on debt repayments. The money will go into the eco-refurbishment of future Hubs around the world.

Robinson’s plans for expansion also include some risky-sounding locations, such as Kabul and Gaza. He believes the model could work there, after seeing an inspirational ‘peace hub’ in Mostar, at the height of the Bosnian civil war. There, a bakery brought together a refreshing mix of UN diplomats, activists, Serbs and Croats. “In war zones,” he says, “there’s no shortage of people who want to engage in rebuilding their countries. But there is a huge lack of infrastructure – and a tendency for large American companies to come in and mess it all up!”

The ambition’s clearly there to take on the big guys. Robinson’s keen to develop Hubs beyond just cleverly designed spaces for innovation and enterprise, into a network that can draw on the expertise of its diverse, inter-disciplinary global membership to solve all sorts of problems. He talks of it as “a globally connected multi-local infrastructure for change”.

Here, though, even fans sound a note of warning. “It’s definitely a compelling idea,” comments the Work Foundation’s Associate Director, Stephen Overell. “But whether you can have an ‘anti-organisation’ organisation is an interesting question. Can people coming together to run different projects work together in a cohesive way without a framework?”

Fair comment, perhaps – but if Robinson had followed conventional thinking, he certainly wouldn’t be where he is today.

“Our aspiration in the coming years,” he says with a flourish, “is that the Obama administration doesn’t phone McKinsey for help on solving climate change, it phones the Hub.”

And perhaps his audacity will take him halfway there.

Hannah Bullock is Campaigns and Communications Manager at the Eden Project.

Intelligent lighting for darker skies

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:03:13 +0000

Heat-sensitive lampposts shine as and when needed

Prototype street lighting technology which will both improve the quality of night skies in urban areas, and cut electricity use, is raising high hopes among campaigners against light pollution.

The technology has been successfully tested in Toulouse, France, where the new lampposts have been installed over a 500 metre section of pavement. The ubiquitous computing (‘ubicomp’) lights are equipped with sensors that detect heat from human bodies. The heat causes the strength of the light to double for ten seconds – returning to a standard ‘dim’ mode when nobody is around. As a result, the night sky will be darker, and the energy consumption of night lighting cut by around 50%.

Alexandre Marciel, Deputy Mayor of Toulouse, is proud of the technology, developed by the Toulouse Highways Department. “Wherever there is a significant urban density, this could make a big difference,” he says.

There is growing awareness that unrestricted street lighting is not only a drain on energy resources, but can interfere with the migration patterns of birds, insects and mammals. John Meacham, from the Campaign For Dark Skies, called the technology “a splendid improvement, and a positive contribution to reducing our carbon emissions”, adding that “all city council lighting engineers should know about this”.

But street lighting is just a beginning for ubicomp solutions. Perhaps the nights are numbered for ever-bright shops and offices, too. – Lorna Howarth