Let's hear it for the train, for freight as much as for passengers
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
I love trains, always have and I love travelling by train. Mind you, I do not have a driver's license and I do not own a car. So, well, you say, no wonder he is for public transport, for the train and the bus. There is only one major drawback with this in the UK – that is the cost. It is in fact more expensive, and this is stupid, I know, to travel by train, say, from the south of London to Birmingham International, than to fly there by internal airlines from Gatwick, for instance. And it is a lot cheaper by plane; it costs only about a third of the standard return fair to Birmingham. Now this is absolutely ridiculous, I know. But such is the state of affair in the UK and still the govt think that they can get people to use the train again on a more general basis. I do not think so. Not until we get the prices down to a sustainable level where it pays for people to use the train rather than plane or car. This will mean that we need to get the railroads back into either public ownership or into the hands of social entrepreneurs. We also must make the trains run on time, all the time...
Aside from passenger transportation and transit trains have a (much greater) value in the transportation of goods, of freight, from one end of the country to the other, from place to place, as well as across borders even.
It is absolute and utter madness that we have allowed our railroad infrastructure to go to rack and ruin and into total disrepair and that we have closed lines, whether they were small branch lines, as they are always referred to, or also bigger lines. In the world of today where we are being told to reduce the “carbon footprint” the railroads must be brought back into operations. While some sections of track were ripped up and turned into cycle paths (some have and those that are not as yet turned into such but have no rails left on them should either be pronto or have rails place back on them and the trains reinstated) those that still have their track should be refurbished rather speedily and brought back into use and even wood-burning locomotives should be brought back into service to pull trains on the smaller lines. Am I mad, you ask. No, not in the slightest. In fact wood is a renewable resource and could be used – again – to power steam trains. Yes, I do say steam trains.
And why should we bring back all the railroad infrastructure? Well, because transporting things by rail is extremely energy efficient, and efficiency means cheaper goods, heftier bottom lines, and mitigated climate change.
Currently we use diesel fuel or other relatively heavy polluters to power our freight trains, and also for road transport, and diesel means pollution, which in the end is not good for us, our planet and the climate. But the proposition that a diesel train engine, pulling hundreds of freight or passenger cars, could feasibly use a less polluting, carbon neutral fuel like cellulose-based ethanol seems a much more feasible than the concept of putting corn-based fuels in the tanks of Hummers. However, we already have a cellulose-based fuel with which to power the trains that does not even need converting and this is wood. In addition to that fuel pellets could be used, such as those for furnaces nowadays, that are even made from forest residues, saw dust, and such like, and I am even convinced could be made by recycling cardboard.
Another means of transporting freight that we must bring back into use are the inland waterways and the freight “barges”.
First of all, however, aside from getting freight off the roads and back onto the rails we also must do the same as regards to people. While, as we will see in another, forthcoming, article, the miles travelled annually by the public in the United Kingdom has risen to the greatest amount since World War II when troop movements, mostly carried out by train, helped to raise the figure, we must reduce the cost of travel by railroad in Britain. It cannot be that a return flight to Birmingham from London or to Northern Ireland from London is cheaper by far than using the train. This just does not make sense and will never get the public out of the car or the plane and back onto the train. Let's use some sense here.
© M Smith (Veshengro), April 2008
Railroads
Aluminium can recycling – the lack of it
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
The aluminium can recycling rate in the United States, according to statistics, has fallen to just a tad over 51 per cent. The US population throws away 1,500 cans every second.
Yes, you read that right. Each and every second of every minute of every day Americans throw at least fifteen hundred – that is to say one thousand five hundred (1,500) aluminium cans in the trash. And, as said, that is just the population of the United States. Work that one out globally. I actually would hate to even try to do so.
In the 1990’s we actually recycled more of our aluminium cans than we do today; the rate was 60% back then. We are in fact going backwards in terms of recycling rather than forwards. This has to change. The basic material to aluminium, bauxite, is but a finite resource and the production of it is also rather bad to the environment.
The Container Recycling Institute make a very valid point in that “recyclable” does not necessarily equals “recycled”.
Why, though, is the recycling rate actually declining as more and more people are looking to “go green”?
The problem must lie, I am sure, (1) with the consumer who is too laze to actually recycle the can and also (2) with the fact that, once they are in the trash, say in parks and such, they just go into the landfill refuse, period. No attempt is even made to separate the waste, generally.
And all of those beverage containers that are not being recycled end up in the landfills. But why landfills?
This, according to the Container Recycling Institute, is because of a combination of our “on-the-go” lifestyle and our communities’ lack of public recycling bins which has left us holding a container, often literally, with nowhere to put it. Thus, with nowhere else left to put it, we throw it in the trash. Personally, I wonder, though, as to whether people would actually separate it from ordinary trash, that is to say, even if “dual stations”, say, would be provided in towns and cities and villages and parks where to put aluminium can separate from other trash as to whether people would actually go to the effort of doing it. I actually doubt this. While many claim to want to go green they seem to be leaving often lots to be desired in that department.
According to E Magazine, we threw away 11 billion cans in the 1970’s, 29 billion a year in the 1980’s, 35 billion a year in the 1990’s, and about 46 billion every year since 2000. This is a lot of aluminium. And this is just the aluminium cans that are thrown away in the United States that are calculated here, so I understand. This is mind blowing. I hate to think how much that would make every year on a global scale for, while the US may be the biggest consumer of aluminium cans for soda and beer other countries do not lag much behind, I am sure, such as countries of Western Europe.
On to of this, what about the steel cans, whether beverage cans such as beer or soda (some of those are still of steel) and food cans. They too could be recycled. But are they?
The Container Recycling Institute, aside from talking about recycling statistics, also talks about the “dirt” behind the aluminum can.
In order to make one ton of cans five tons of caustic waste are produced. Each ton of aluminum cans requires five tons of bauxite ore to be strip-mined, crushed, washed, and refined into alumina before it is smelted, creating about five tons of caustic red mud residue which can seep into surface and groundwater. People and animals have suffered from the effects of bauxite mining in Jamaica, Brazil, Australia, and other tropical areas.
It takes 3% of the world’s electricity to making aluminum cans, and while aluminum companies often cite tremendous savings from recycling aluminum, what they forget to mention is that at the current wasting levels, about 23 billion kilowatt-hours are squandered globally each year through ‘replacement production.’ About 7 kWh are saved per pound (33 cans) recycled. Had the 50 billion trashed cans been recycled, the electricity saved could power 1.3 million American homes. In total, the industry’s annual electricity consumption is almost 300 billion kilowatt-hours, or about 3% of the world’s total electricity consumption.
Aluminum smelting release greenhouse gases and toxic emissions - About 95 million tons of greenhouse gases were produced by the global aluminum industry in 2005. Primary aluminum smelting also generates sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions, which are contributors to smog and acid rain. In 2005, 50.7 billion U.S. cans were wasted, resulting in the emission of 75,000 tons of SOx and Nox.
As a little closing fact, let me just mention that only one year’s worth of all the aluminium cans that are annually put into the trash in America instead of being recycled would provide enough aluminum to make more than eight thousand (8,000) Boeing 747 aircraft. That is a lot of airplanes and a lot of aluminium.
I am sure we can – pun intended – do better and get off our dependency on the aluminium can.
© M Smith (Veshengro), April 2008
Bring back the Glass Bottle!
Forget the plastic bottle and let's hear it for again glass bottles and jars!
By Michael Smith (Veshengro)
I know I have visited this subject more than once already in various of my articles on this journal but, even though I may bore some readers to tears with it by now, I will make the point again.
Maybe we should start a “Return to the Refund Bottle” movement, or such? I am open to suggestions on this.
Water, lemonade, Coca Cola, Pepsi, juice, milk - they all come nowadays, with few exceptions, in plastic single-use-only throw-away bottles, with the majority of them ending up in a landfill rather than a recycling bin. Apparently we are told that you cannot even safely reuse those bottles with water, for instance, as there are chemicals in the plastic that will leach into the water if the bottles are reused. So we have not other option but to throw them away. Even cooking oils and vinegars, as well as table sauces, now come in plastic bottles. But there was a time, not so long ago, when all milk, Coke, fruit juices, water (oh, please do not get me started on bottled water), lemonade, and others came in glass bottles, the majority of which, including beer bottles (which still are glass, in the main) had a deposit on then and us kids used to make good pocket money every week from trundling about the countryside with our little handcarts picking up the bottles that people, despite the deposit charged on them, threw away and bringing them back to the stores and getting the refund money for us. Thanks muchly!
There was also a time, that I can well remember, in my childhood in the 1960's still, when milk was sold loose in the stores; you brought along a small milk churn thing, like a billy can, with a handle, made of metal mostly, and you got the amount of milk you wanted ladled into the billy can, you put the lid on and, after paying for it, took it home to Mum. She then would pasteurize it at home by bringing the milk to the boil. No one ever got sick from it.
When I was a kid everything like that came in reusable glass bottles that were returned to the manufacturer when you were done with the drink. R Whites Lemonade was one we all remember and many of them we collected as children for pocket money. The same held true for Coco Cola bottles and beer bottles. This was before the “ex & hop” era of 250ml and 330ml one-way bottles. The only reasons those were invented was because the breweries and other drinks manufacturers were too lazy to collect the bottles back in from the outlets. Even the Coca Cola (and other those of other Colas) became throw-away bottles, even though they were still glass, Many then, aside from the tin can, switched to the plastic bottles, and enter our current dilemma.
Wouldn’t it be lovey if we could go back to those days, to the days before the plastic and the glass throw-away bottles? The amount of trash that we could keep out of the ground would just be tremendous. But who says we cannot go forward to such a time and, short of reinventing the wheel, bring back the glass bottles and even glass jars, as far as I am concerned, with deposit on them. All that is needed is the will to do it.
Drinks manufacturers, breweries, dairies, etc. who are concerned about the future of this planet should and must take a leaf out of the book of the past and must bring back glass bottling facilities and infrastructure for the recovery of the empties. I think we could all bet that those who are environmentally concious would rather choose their products over others by manufacturers still using plastic bottles or even those who who use the non-returnable glass bottle.
Yes, it would require an initial investment in facilities and the glass bottles themselves, but this would soon be evened out and soon there would be a profit coming from this as glass can be reused again, and again, and again, ad infinitum. All it needs to be is sterilized before each refill.
While the shipping costs of this now, due to glass bottles, slightly heavier product, might be a little more and also the additional costs of recovering the empties from the stores. Then again, in the latter case, a truck delivering full cases of whatever to stores can easily, as it used to be done, pick up the crates of empties and take them back to the depot. The only downside could the the possibility of breakages. And it is not just a possibility; breakages will occur.
To my mind it would be absolutely brilliant to have, once again, all such goods in returnable glass bottles (and jars) that we know will be used again, and again, as long as we return them to the stores. However, should the adults be too lazy to do so I am sure that the kids will once again discover the delights that we had as children of ridding the countryside of such bottles (who also, if in the sunlight in the countryside in summer can become the cause of fires) and making nice money in return for little effort.
Ah, the good old days of childhood and bottle collecting for refund.
We still have beer in bottles but what happens to most of those bottles? They end up in the trash just like the plastic ones do and, in the main, are also not recovered and recycled. Let's get back to deposit on ALL glass bottles, for drinks of all sorts, including milk and beer. Yes, even on spirits bottles, whether whisky, vodka, rum, etc.
There is a German brewery, from the Black Forest, that also supplies the UK market with bottled beer who have empty bottles recovered from every place they supply and ship those bottles back to Germany. If they can do it why should it not be possible to do it locally?
We have been here before, it is not directly rocket science. All it needs, like with so many things, is the will, the political will especially, to do it. However, does it need to start with legislation and companies being “forced” to do the right thing. Could not breweries, dairies and soft drinks manufacturers and even the distilleries, start the schemes up themselves of having again glass bottles (where there is now plastic) and have all bottles return for reuse. Same also for wine. So much wine is being consumed now in the UK and all those bottles either end up in recycling where it needs energy to turn them back into new glass bottles or other glass items or, more often than not, they simply end up in the general trash and in the landfill sites.
Time for a serious think and serious change. Companies, if they'd get their calculators out, should, after the initial outlay of recovering and cleaning the bottles, make a healthy profit rather soon as no new bottles will be needed for a long time to come.
© M Smith (Veshengro), April 2008
London’s Mayor wants to take London off-grid
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Ken Livingstone, seeking re-election as Mayor of London, has told the media that he wants to take the entire city of London, all of it, off-grid. As the world’s most popular, and expensive, city, how London treats the green agenda will set a template for other world capitals, not to mention the rest of the country.
Livingstone said: “We don’t want the normal grid. We want to get everybody off grid.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s nuclear or gas, 65 per cent of energy is wasted in the cooling system.”
“If we have locally done energy it’s 15 per cent. So immediately, if we could wave a magic wand and all of Britain’s energy was coming from local sources you’d reduce your fossil-fuel consumption by 50 per cent. Just being efficient.” Livingstone says is working with French power company EDF to develop his decentralised strategy.
This is something that Fritz Schumacher advocated in huis book “Small is Beautiful” many decades ago and so has this writer ever since. However, both Schumacher and this write have been laughed at for suggesting such things and power stations were made bigger (and better?) and ended up further and further away from the consumer thus causing great loss in transmission along the overhead and underground power lines. The very reason why the electric power produced is not 240V AC at the power stations but several tens of thousands of volts.
Livingstone is the most senior politician worldwide to specifically endorse the concept of off-grid living, and his words will also have an effect on the ruling Labor Party. We recommend Londoners vote Labor in the May 1st Mayoral election.
Livingstone said the main obstacles to making London an off-grid and zero carbon city was Civil Service hostility, specifically at the Department of Energy, which cannot abode the idea of a decentralised energy policy for London. “People in the Department of Energy have done everything possible to block decentralised power,” he said.
“If I were running the country, tomorrow I’d ban plastic bags, I’d ban incandescent light bulbs,” Livingstone said. As long as he is re-elected another showpiece policy to be introduced next year is free bicycles throughout central London, based on the successful Paris model.
“We face a huge catastrophic climate change. We’re close to the tipping point. Stern says four to two years. I met Dr Pauchari, who is the chair of the IPCC, the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, when I was in India, and he thinks that we are now past the tipping point and you have got to come up with technologies that will mitigate the effects. If that’s true, sometime over the next 10 years we’ll have to rejig the whole of the economy, like we did in the Second World War.”
The Civil Service hostility that Ken Livingstone talks about as regards a decentralised energy policy is not just there for London but for all of the UK. One of the major obstacles also, I my view, to people being permitted to generate power locally, such as farming estates, Gypsy sites, and even small villages. They cannot hack anything that they have no control over. Not that the Labour party is any different with the nanny state they have created ever since they have been in power. Mr. Livingstone should know that full well and he also knows that this so-called Labour Party of today no longer bears any resemblance to the real true Labour Party of Keir Hardy, Dr. Salter and Fenner Brockway. This is no longer a party for the working people; it is the party of control, of nannying the people, of “we know what's best for you” and, I am afraid, it would appear that Mr. Livingstone is also cut from the same cloth, as he would like to ban outright this and that and the other.
In the same way as the Eco-Towns where, unlike it is with their counterparts in Germany, such as Freiburg, where it is a voluntary choice of people not to own a car, certain residents will be told that they will not be allowed to own a car. This all under the same attitude of this Labour government; it is all for our best, they say.
© M Smith (Veshengro), April 2008
Amsterdam Chooses Bicycle as Unique Selling Point
AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands – Amsterdam, the world’s number one cycling city with some 60% of all trips in the city centre made by bicycle, wants to turn into the world’s centre of expertise on sustainable mobility. A program to reach that goal was launched on Tuesday 1st April.
Amsterdam City Council and various Amsterdam businesses and organizations have joined together in a platform for sustainable mobility: Amsterdam Cycling to Sustainability. A declaration of intent was signed on April 1st, which, hopfully is no April Fools, by Councillor Tjeerd Herrema and the initiators Jos Louwman of MacBike and Pascal van den Noort from Vélo Mondial. Prominent Amsterdam businesses and organizations such as the RAI association, JCDecaux, the Amsterdam Innovation Motor, the Fietsfabriek and Mister Green, also signed the declaration of intent.
Sustainable mobility will ensure that Amsterdam maintains its accessibility and quality of life. Amsterdam is on the right path. Bicycles are widely used in the city and there are all sorts of positive initiatives in the field of sustainable mobility. There is, however, a lot still to be done which is why the Amsterdam City Council and various Amsterdam businesses and organizations are working together to promote sustainable mobility in Amsterdam.
The aim of the initiative is to support and develop projects in which all sorts of sustainable mobility can be stimulated. In addition the platform would like to promote Amsterdam internationally as a sustainably mobile city. The bicycle has been chosen as Amsterdam’s unique selling point. Furthermore the platform aims to set up an Amsterdam centre of expertise on sustainable mobility, together with other expert bodies in Amsterdam.
For more: www.iamsterdam.com
How the world wastes $100 Billion per year
The worldwide consumption of bottled water reached 154 billion liters in 2004, up 57 percent from the 98 billion liters used five years earlier.
Even in areas where tap water is safe to drink, such as Western Europe (well, in most parts of Western Europe it is safe) and the USA and Canada, demand for bottled water is increasing year by year. This demand, aside from producing unnecessary garbage and consuming vast quantities of energy, also puts a strain on the water resources. We must not forget that also some bottled water is nothing but repackaged tap water that may (or may not) have been going trough a filtering and in some cases a reverse osmosis process. Although in the industrial world bottled water is often no healthier than tap water, it can cost up to 10,000 times more. At as much as $2.50 per liter, bottled water costs much more than does gasoline in the USA and even more than gasoline, aka petrol does in Britain. We must be mad, literally mad to do this.
The United States is the world’s leading consumer of bottled water, with Americans drinking 26 billion liters in 2004, or approximately one 8-ounce glass per person every day. Mexico has the second highest consumption, at 18 billion liters. China and Brazil follow, at close to 12 billion liters each. Ranking fifth and sixth in consumption are Italy and Germany, using just over 10 billion liters of bottled water each. While, maybe, one can understand Mexicans drinking bottled water for I, certainly, would not want to trust the tap water in say Mexico or Brazil, unless I would filter it first, to have countries of the what was once called First World do this, and especially countries such as the USA, the UK (with one of the finest tap waters in the world) and Germany is absolute and utter madness.
Some of the largest increases in bottled water consumption have occurred in developing countries. Of the top 15 per capita consumers of bottled water, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and Mexico have the fastest growth rates, with consumption per person increasing by 44–50 percent between 1999 and 2004. While the rates per capita in India and China are not as high, total consumption in these populous countries has risen very fast indeed – tripling in India and more than doubling in China in that five-year period. And there is great potential for further growth. If everyone in China drank 100 8-ounce glasses of bottled water a year (slightly more than one fourth the amount consumed by the average American in 2004), China would go through some 31 billion liters of bottled water, quickly becoming the world’s leading consumer.
In contrast to tap water, which is distributed through an energy-efficient infrastructure, transporting bottled water long distances involves burning massive quantities of fossil fuels. Nearly a quarter of all bottled water crosses national borders to reach consumers, transported by boat, train, and truck. In 2004, for example, Nord Water of Finland bottled and shipped 1.4 million bottles of Finnish tap water 4,300 kilometers (2,700 miles) from its bottling plant in Helsinki to Saudi Arabia. Please note: this is tap water that is being shipped in bottles to the Arabian Peninsular. Who ever has heard of such stupidity.
Saudi Arabia can afford to import the water it needs, but bottled water is not just sold to water-scarce countries. While some 94 percent of the bottled water sold in the United States is produced domestically, Americans also import water shipped some 9,000 kilometers from Fiji and other faraway places to satisfy the demand for chic and exotic bottled water.
Fossil fuels are also used in the packaging of water. The most commonly used plastic for making water bottles is polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is derived from crude oil. Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water requires more than 17 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel more than 1 million U.S. cars for a year. Around the world some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year.
After the water has been consumed, the plastic bottle must be disposed of. According to the Container Recycling Institute, 86 percent of plastic water bottles used in the United States become garbage or litter. Incinerating used bottles produces toxic byproducts such as chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals. Buried water bottles can take up to 1,000 years to “biodegrade” which, in this case, and in the case of all oil-based plastics, is really an incorrect term as those bottles do not biodegrade but just slowly break down in soil while leaching harmful chemicals into the soil and the groundwater. Almost 40 percent of the PET bottles that were deposited for recycling in the United States in 2004 were actually exported, sometimes to as far away as China- adding to the resources used by this product.
In addition to the strains bottled water puts on our ecosystem through its production and transport, the rapid growth in this industry means that water extraction is concentrated in communities where bottling plants are located. For example, water shortages near beverage bottling plants have been reported in Texas and in the Great Lakes region of North America, and not to mention the plants of Coca cola as far afield as India. Farmers, fishermen, and others who depend on water for their livelihoods, suffer from the concentrated water extraction when water tables drop quickly. Plant life too suffers as does aquatic life. Where the water tables drop below a certain depth trees can no longer reach the moisture and mature trees that no longer have the ability to extend their roots deeper and deeper to follow the water table that is dropping become distressed and in the end die.
Studies show that consumers associate bottled water with healthy living. But bottled water is not guaranteed to be any healthier than tap water. In fact, roughly 40 percent of bottled water begins as tap water; and many non-tap bottled water, e.g. “spring” water contains much higher concentrations of harmful substances than tap water would ever allowed to have. The stringent rules that apply for tap water as to hygiene and such do not apply to “spring” water in bottles. Oops!
As I have just indicated it is a fact that, in a number of places, including Europe and the United States, there are more regulations governing the quality of tap water than bottled water. Water quality standards in the USA, set by the Environmental Protection Agency for tap water, for instance, are more stringent than the standards set by Food and Drug Administration for bottled water, and the same applies for the UK and other European countries, for instance. So, which one is better – bottled or tap? No contest, I think.
There is no question that clean, affordable drinking water is essential to the health of our global community. But bottled water is not the answer in the developed world, nor does it solve problems for the 1.1 billion people who lack a secure water supply. Improving and expanding existing water treatment and sanitation systems is more likely to provide safe and sustainable sources of water over the long term. In villages, rainwater harvesting and digging new wells can create more affordable sources of water. And when we talk “affordable” drinking water for the third world, for instance, I doubt that bottled water would come anywhere near the “affordable” label.
Considering how much money we waste worldwide on bottled water, the greatest hoax ever pulled off, the “inventors” of the “bottled water”, much of which, as far as I can ascertain, is nothing but repackaged tap water, must be laughing all the way to the bank and must really think that the entire world has gone mad. In fact, it would indeed seem that many people have done just that, gone mad. Who in their right mind would spend such an amount of money annually on water in plastic bottles. When bottled water is more expensive than other drinks, as it is in many places, then we do have a problem.
The world spends $100 billion on bottled water every year. Strangely enough, this water does not get to the millions of sick and dying people who do not have access to clean drinking water.
To bring potable water to the entire world would cost around $30 billion...less than half of the amount that people who have access to clean drinking water spend on bottles of the stuff every year.
I am honestly very angry about this, and I haven't even gotten going as to the environmental problems proper as yet. In fact, I'm not going to...I'm just going to leave it there...
by Michael Smith (Veshengro) © April 2008
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City firms create smallest carbon footprint
Sectors such as banking, finance and insurance have the smallest carbon footprint per pound of wealth generated in the UK, according to an analysis of Government statistics published March 20, 2008 by the base business forum.
The research, which analyses the individual environmental footprint of workers in different industrial sectors, as well as how much revenue each sector generates per tonne of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, shows that workers in financial services firms are leading the way in minimising their impacts on the environment. Each financial services worker can be held accountable for just 1.2 tonnes of GHG per year (with the sector creating over £40000 of wealth per tonne emitted), as opposed to those in the construction industry who represent nearly 9 tonnes (with wealth of just over £6000 per tonne created), and those in the energy sector who account for an enormous 1127 tonnes of emissions.
The research also shows:
· The worst performing sectors were in electricity, gas and water supply, and agriculture
· The greenest region in the country is Greater London, whilst the North East – with its industrial legacy – still has room for improvement in terms of reducing its carbon footprint.
This research has been published by base – a new business forum set up specifically to provide practical information to companies about how they can capitalise on the drive to sustainability. Bringing together companies from every sector, from all parts of the supply chain, it will examine the critical role that environmental considerations will play in how we do business in the 21st century.
Base’s Chairman, sustainability expert Tom Burke, said:
“Understanding how we manage and adapt to climate change is going to be critical to how we do business in future. The most successful companies from now on will be those that place climate change on a par with operational, market and financial risks, and those that adopt a positive, pragmatic and inventive attitude to developing green products and services. There is still much to be done and all sectors need to continually look to improve their performance.”
Speaking on behalf of Barclays Commercial, one of base’s founding partners, Richard French, Director, Marketing and Online Channel, said:
“We have always believed there is a strong link between business sustainability and business success, and are delighted that this research has proved how far our own sector has gone to minimise its environmental footprint. At Barclays, we are carbon neutral, and have our own Climate Action Programme to further reduce our impact. We are looking forward to engaging with leading thinkers on sustainability at base to explore how we can share our experiences with other businesses in this space in the future.”
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