Demos Project : Greening Up Demos

Office Composting - The Reality

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 14:42:03 -0100

We've had our Bokashi Composter in the office for almost a fortnight now, and (whilst not wanting to tempt fate) I've been very impressed with the results.

It takes nearly all types of food waste (though admittedly this office only seems to produce coffee grinds and tea bags, with the odd citrus rind thrown in when staff feel their vitamin intake is lacking) - but most importantly, doesn't smell.

We have to drain liquid off it using its nifty little tap every few days, but even that is of use as a plant fertiliser and failing that keeps the drains clean and free of bacteria if emptied down them.

Once full the bin needs to be sealed and left to 'pickle' for two weeks - we have two bins on rotation - and then the contents can be added to any compost heap or simply dug straight into soil.

This would appear to be the only hurdle to the system, that though great for use indoors, you still need a garden destination for the contents. I am going to try and make friends with the park attendants of Southwark in the next few weeks.

Our Carbon Footprint

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 16:07:52 -0100

As promised a while back on the Greening Up Demos page of the website, we've attempted to work out how many tonnes of CO₂our flights in 2006 will produce.

This involved inputting individually every work flight taken by Demos members of staff into the Carbon Neutral website's Carbon Calculator - not a light (nor particularly fun) task, and many thanks to Liam Harvey for taking this on.

So, (drum roll please) by the end of 2006 we can expect to have generated 70 tonnes of CO₂ through our flying activities. Considering that last month alone saw researchers in America, Zimbabwe and China for the Cultural Diplomacy, Nanodialogues and Atlas of Ideas projects respectively, I'm not hugely surprised by this total - and would be interested to see how it compares with that of other organisations.

Now - the next stage is to offset these emissions, and we're looking at a variety of ways to do this, and would appreciate all suggestions ... expect more postings to follow on the matter.

More Green Ideas

grahame@grahamebroadbelt.com ( Grahame Broadbelt ) — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 17:30:18 -0100

Just seen an email from colleagues at City and Guilds which ends, not with the usual legal guff but with a useful line which says 'stop, do you really need to print this email'. A simple reminder that we are getting through a mountain of paper in this office and that anything we can do to slow down our paper burn rate would be good. ( from BlogPosts )

Recyclebank

duncan.oleary@demos.co.uk ( Duncan O'Leary ) — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 11:53:16 -0100

I’ve just come across what looks like a brilliant recycling scheme in the US. It’s called RecycleBank and it works like this:

1. Each house gets a recycling container with a barcode on it, that allows the recycling truck to identify what your household in recycling
2. The amount your home recycles is translated into RecycleBank Dollars (paid for by the council through the savings they make on landfill sites)
3. You can spend your RecycleBank dollars at any of the 100 participating stores as and when you accumulate them
4. The more you recycle, the more Recycle dollars you get

Genius. Has anyone has heard of similarly creative ideas/projects in the UK? If so I’d love to hear about them – seeing as the comments are still not working, drop me an email and I’ll post them up if you’d like me to...

Update: Nick Temple at the School for Social Entrepeneurs spotted this last week.

...and Andy Polaine says: "Interesting idea and I'm all for people recycling more, but the problem in the UK is that you can't recycle that much. Here in Germany you can recycle almost all your packaging, even plastic bags and cellophane and polystyrene. That makes a big difference as we all see when we put our 'Gelber Sacs' out once a week and see just how much household packaging waste there is. This, incidentally, is a separate recycling operation from paper (also recycled) and bottles (most of which have 'pfand' or a deposit which means they're re-used for a very long time instead of recycled).

Would paying for people recycling make it more expensive to recycle and the resulting goods more expensive though? Re-using the material is crucial to the process otherwise it's just a feel-good factor.
Recycling tends to be down-cycling anyway (things becoming lower grade goods) which just slows down the journey to the landfill by one or two stops. Working out what to do with the material or upcycling is the key (as the authors of Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough and Michael Braungart, explain)"