BYOB – Bring your own bag?

When did you become aware that single use plastic bags were a really bad idea? Or rather, when did you act on that and first start taking your own bags to the supermarket? I can’t remember when I made that individual lifestyle change – more than 10 years ago, I think, but less than 15. In fact it may be less, probably the action was strongly influenced by the free sturdy bags offered at the launch of the scan-it-yourself service at my local supermarket.

However long ago we first started doing this, it has become the norm for most people – a study concluded during 2016 shows that on average 9 out of 10 people now regularly take their own bags to the supermarket (Study by researchers at Cardiff University), which explains why it has been estimated that 6 billion fewer plastic bags have been issued in the UK in 2016 compared to 2014.

 Campaigns about plastic bag usage started picking up momentum around 2008. The major supermarkets made voluntary commitments to reduce usage, and achieved a 26% reduction in 2008 compared to 2007 (see letsrecycle.com)/. The government launched “Get a bag habit” in 2009 on the back of this. Not, to me, a memorable campaign. Nor an effective one – despite the promising start in 2008, over the next four years, plastic bag usage started to increase again, and by 2011 over 8 billion bags were issued in the UK.

So, clearly time for a new campaign – and “Break the Bag Habit” was launched by a consortium of Surfers Against Sewage, the Campaign to Protect Rural England, the Marine Conservation Society and Keep Britain Tidy. But this time the campaign had a different aim – its target was to persuade the government to introduce a levy on plastic bags. You would have thought this was pushing against an open door – after all, Ireland had introduced a levy as far back as 2002, and usage had dropped dramatically as a result. The 2008 Climate Change Act included a provision allowing the government to introduce a charge, so legislation already existed. Negative voices persisted though – plastic bags were highly visible, but were they really such a significant part of the litter problem? Didn’t it mean that consumers would buy thicker plastic liners for their bins instead of using the thinner carrier bags, thereby increasing the amount of plastic sent to landfill? Or switch to paper bags, less environmentally friendly for single use compared to reusing plastic ones (www.allaboutbags.ca/irelandandlitter.html)?

However, slowly opposition to the levy was overcome – Wales introduced the charge in 2011, Scotland followed in 2014, and England finally adopted the levy in October 2015. Which explains the dramatic drop in usage already referred to. And as the study referred to above shows, it has become the norm for people to take their own bags. The levy itself, at 5p per bag, is not in itself a deterrent, but what it has done is announce that it is not ‘acceptable’ behaviour. Even my CEO, chatting in the lift, announced with pride that he takes his own bags to the supermarket. It has become what people do.

So it’s interesting to reflect what this means about communication campaigns. An initial success, but reversion back to previous behaviours over time, reflecting the need for campaigns to step up in order to maintain momentum. Much more success when the target was getting the government to do something – there was a definite target to hit rather than a slow burning continuous effort to change behaviour. What made the real difference to behaviour was the formal levy – voluntary schemes only got so far, regulation was needed to signpost the necessary change. And the regulation itself was smart – it did not impose a prohibitive penalty, but instead was used to signal that there was a problem and behaviour needed to change. I think this means that communication campaigns therefore need to recognize that to achieve a long term impact, they are only one weapon in the arsenal – if smart, targeted, well designed and well received they can be effective, but for long term change may need to be backed up by other measures.

 

 

 

Green Team ninjas

In a previous post I set out a personal challenge to introduce a ‘Green team’ into my office to see whether we could become more sustainability-minded. The purpose was essentially two-fold: make some positive changes to our efficiency and resource use, and also fly the flag on sustainability to raise awareness with my co-workers. Six months’ on – how am I doing?

I started by asking for volunteers to join the initiative, thinking it best to involve people who were already keen. I was astounded by the response – in an office of 100 people, I had 15 volunteers, from a broad spread of levels / disciplines. Our first meeting revealed a strong desire on their part to have a voice in how the office looks and feels – going beyond purely ‘green’ ideas, to the impressions created for visitors and the overall ambience for staff. There was general consensus on the need, and possibility, to reduce printing and increase recycling, and willingness to promote this, alongside more generally improving the work environment.

So the most immediate impact of the Green Team was to instigate a clear out and tidy up of piles of paper and boxes that had been sitting around – with new plants brought in to improve air quality (and also stop the piles of paper accumulating again).

We had already brought in ‘follow-me’ printing a couple of years ago – where documents are sent to the printer, but only printed out when you physically arrive and enter your personal code. Brought in as a security measure originally, but has the added benefit that printing is reduced because it doesn’t get forgotten and reprinted. We’ve added to that, by setting everything to automatically print double-sided, and, in an entirely unrelated move, reduced the number of printers from 6 to 4, and moved them to one room (from two). This has increased the distance for the average member of staff to walk to the printer – so guess what? People are printing out less than they used to….

A strong case has been made for us to go ‘paper-lite’ (as part of our journey towards paperless), and trials are ongoing with new technology for the massive board and committee packs  which have historically been produced every month. It was a great boost when the CEO used the new technology to put his questions on virtual post-its within the papers rather than sending a separate email. Printing usage is down by around 25% compared to the first six months of last year.

Recycling bins have been introduced around the office, although these have had mixed results – WHY is it so hard for people to grasp what goes where? We’ve put up several helpful signs (“I’m a banana skin – please put me with my friend the apple core in the food waste”) – but it is still a work in progress…..

Other changes and improvements are planned  – we are extending and refitting our office space (I’m hoping to persuade management that we should go for a SKA sustainability rating on the refit), giving us an opportunity to look at energy usage and efficiency and further reduce dependence on paper storage. I am planning to take away everyone’s personal bins, so everything needs to go to the recycling points, but don’t tell anyone that just yet…….

Time to dish the dirt on carbon

So, seriously bright minds have analysed future scenarios, and clearly advised that in order to have any chance of keeping below a 2 degree temperature increase (which other seriously bright minds have concluded gives humanity the best chance of continuing to exist in ‘relative’ comfort), we need to make dramatic changes to our relationship with fossil-burning fuels. Increase resource-efficiency, transition to a low carbon economy, and do it fast (see ‘Recklessly slow or rapid transition to a low carbon economy? Time to decide’ by Romany, Rydge and Stern).

In fact, Romany, Rydge and Stern point to some optimistic signs that policy makers are grasping the issue, and that technology and innovation can provide ‘dynamic and attractive’ solutions in a manner that has the potential to achieve ‘equitable access to sustainable development’, albeit that the pace of change is too slow.

But my question is – how did we get landed with the term ‘low carbon’ to describe this next great industrial revolution? I realise it is technically accurate, but we humans associate ‘low’ as inferior, less exciting, less desirable – like ‘low fat’ it suggests that we are giving up something bad for us that we crave. Only a fraction of people get kicks out of giving up things – most of us need to be persuaded by the benefits, and are still tempted to lapse when feeling weak-willed.

Surely, as part of getting us to adopt new measures fast, we need better marketing, a far better sell on why we should be pushing for this. We’ve already seen how technologies such as nuclear energy (and GM foods) have been seriously set back by poor communication of advantages and an inability to overcome popular, fearful sentiment. Studies have shown how much of a difference it can make to popular opinion to change the description – I’ve been dipping into Oliver Payne’s brilliantly thought-provoking book ‘Inspiring Sustainable Behaviour: 19 ways to ask for change’. He describes the amazing difference in support between asking people to agree to a carbon offset scheme, and asking them to agree to a carbon tax, despite the financial impacts being the same.

We need some seriously good creative minds now to come up with the advertising campaign of the century – how to move the popular opinion on from ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ to excitement about and participation in the transition. Why not start with repackaging high carbon as dirty and dangerous. It’s like switching the perception of smoking away from its ‘50s glamorous image by showing hard-hitting images of diseased and cancerous lungs – let’s have some messaging around the negative health aspects of our high carbon lifestyles. Then we need to see the alternatives not as a hair shirt, comfort-denying ‘worthy’ alternative, but as clean, dynamic, efficient, modern, exciting –whatever emotion will best sell the majority on a vital change that we all need to buy into. Elon Musk did it with the Tesla – sold as a fabulous car to drive first and foremost, with the extra advantage of being electric. And his vision of the future, with Teslas, the hyperloop, stored solar power, is hugely dynamic and exciting, and very far from a backward, second-rate option. Let’s move beyond the fossil fuel era – let’s get excited about the new energy age.

Time to Spring clean / green?

 

Daffodils in my garden

If you are like me, your spirits lift in the springtime: the days are getting longer, spring flowers and new leaves are appearing in the garden, birds are singing (well, next-door’s chickens are certainly making their presence felt, anyway) – it’s a time for fresh thinking and new beginnings.

So, I’ve decided it’s time to “spring green’ my workplace. CISL (Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership) has asked me to set myself a personal leadership challenge for the next 12 months, and I’m going to use this as the prompt I’ve needed to establish a Green Team in the office.

We’ve done quite a few green initiatives already – as a financial services business, our direct impacts are office usage and business travel. Over the past few years, we’ve installed video conferencing to reduce business travel, initiatives to reduce the amount of printing, measures to switch off computers at night, sensors to do the same for lighting, and successfully phased out paper cups. However, these have been piecemeal, and we haven’t monitored the impact.

I want to put together a Green Team to think further about our footprint, and have a coherent strategy for us to tread lightly in our operations. As an organisation, we should care about the environment, even if we have more limited environmental impacts as a service company than a producer or retailer has.

And more than this; I have a hunch that getting people to think about green efficiency measures in the workplace and educating them about impacts will raise their awareness more generally, and, who knows, change their environmental behaviour across other areas of their lives as well.

So, I’m off to see if I can get some volunteers to join me. We’ll see how it goes…..

Was Scrooge really just a Super-Green?

 

Experts predict a record amount of waste this Christmas, with 15million presents being sent straight to landfill in the UK alone, according to a report in The Times last week. And that’s before you add in the discarded paper and packaging (enough wrapping paper to go round the equator nine times, if The Guardian is to be believed) and to say nothing of the thrown-away food. I feel uncomfortably queasy about this festivity-induced waste and its associated environmental impact, not to mention its financial cost.

So is the answer to turn into Scrooge and declare “Bah, humbug” to Christmas? Scrooge in his original incarnation had an undeniably low eco-footprint in his non-participation with the festive season. The difficulty is, of course, that the outward trappings of Christmas, the gifts, the feasting, are the accepted way in which we show our love to those we care about. An elaborate ritual of shopping and wrapping, taking both time and thought, is a statement about the importance of a person in our lives, quite aside from the monetary value of the gift. Giving someone cash feels unsatisfactory because it hasn’t enabled that demonstration of individual care and thought to be made. (Even though giving cash is undoubtedly more useful, as the recipient will then get something that they want or need!) So we find ourselves trapped in the frenzy of Black Friday sales, and only 22 more shopping days to Christmas, and ever more persuasive adverts and exhortations to pile up the presents and make this ‘the best Christmas ever’, with no thought about the impact on our planet of producing all this stuff, and then throwing it away again.

So, how do we go about reclaiming a festivity that’s now become bound up with conspicuous consumption and excess? Telling your family that presents will be eco-frugal is only going to work if you all feel the same way (and in my experience that’s probably not the case, at least across generations) – there’s such a risk that where you mean “I’m worried about the impact on the planet of all this stuff” they just hear “You don’t matter enough to me for me to spend money on you”. I love the story of the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, who discovered that Christmas is found to be in the heart, and not “bought from a store”, but we’ve been conditioned all our lives to equate generosity with love, and even the Grinch gave all the presents back at the end of the story.

But it’s surely not impossible to cut down on the madness and return to a simpler time. Our family and three others have come together every December for the past 10 years to celebrate a “Fake Christmas” (all the trimmings but just not on Christmas Day). With 8 adults and 10 children, the first year was a veritable orgy of present giving and unwrapping frenzy, to say nothing of the frazzledom of those who had to buy and wrap. So we decreed that we would do a Secret Santa, with a strict price limit, so everyone would get one present only, and only that year’s organiser would know who had bought for whom. When it comes to present unwrapping time (always after lunch), the oldest starts first and presents are opened in strict age order. By the time the youngest has had her turn, everyone is completely gifted out, but no-one feels left out. It’s not Scrooge, but it’s not excessive either, and everyone gets to enjoy the pleasure of giving and the contentment of being on the receiving end of a thoughtful gift (and it’s all the more thoughtful for being the only one).

So, that’s one set of people sorted, but what am I buying for everyone else this year, to avoid that feeling of queasiness?

Spoiler alert – if you think you might be on my present-giving list, do not read on…….

The adults will be getting tickets or experiences – tea for two, a trip to the theatre, perhaps even a jive dance lesson. The teenagers will be treated to a shopping trip to choose the clothes they actually want (and encouraged to buy responsibly sourced things which will last, at least until grown out of). The children will get things with longevity, not flash-in-the-pan gimmicks that won’t be played with beyond Christmas. Everyone will get some photographs of cheerful times spent together this past year, put together with love. And hopefully I’ll have the warm glow of giving gifts that delight but which don’t cost the planet – and I won’t be taking much used paper and packaging to the recycling centre in January!

Happy holidays to you all

Green Owl