This summer we plan to carry out an environmental audit and to assess our carbon footprint. We don’t expect this to be a straightforward business as most of the parameters are designed with buildings in mind, not tents. We are very fortunate to be offered some expertise from one of our supporters who works at an environmental consultancy which will be a great help.
When we started Green and Away every aspect of the project was considered from a sustainable angle, from the food, to the toilets, to heating the showers. The criterea has always been that we make the least environmental impact we possibly could. However if you are a prospective organiser looking for a venue, the guidelines for choosing an eco-conference centre ask, amongst other things, to check if grey water is being used to flush toilets. We don’t use grey water for toilets as we have composting toilets not flush ones. This means our water usage is much lower but we are also not causing energy use outside
our conference centre, normally used in disposing of the sewage, and we should have plus marks for producing a compost that can fertilise trees therefore giving a net gain! We don’t use disposable plates, cups and cutlery, we use second hand ones we have bought from a car boot sale thereby lengthening the life of the utensiles and reducing the embodied energy per item per year of use. We wash everything by hand so no electricity is used and we heat the water with solar power when the sun shines or wood if it doesn’t – both carbon neutral systems. We do encourage the use of public transport although country buses are notoriously few and far between. Some conference organisers arrange a mini bus pick up from the station which enables more people to use public transport.
The problem with standards is that they have to have arbitary fixed boundaries around the business. This means that one is not really taking in the cradle to grave impacts of each system in use. For example the embodied energy used in solar panels along with the implications of mining precious minerals could mean that the units are very carbon hungry in their manufacture but very sustainable in producing electricity. So how easy it is to compare solar electricity with a coal-fired power station electricity?
Some years ago, one of the executives of an environmental organisation was taken to task for driving a ‘gas guzzling volvo’ as this did not seem to fit with the image of sustainability he was trying to portray. His answer was that his volvo was over 15 years old and had at least another 10 years of life left in it. If it is run to the end of its life and one takes the embodied energy of manufacture plus fuel used into account, a volvo looks quite sustainable. What is not sustainable is buying a new car every two years and scrapping them when they are only four years old for some relatively minor damage. It is quite a shock walking round a car reclamation pound and seeing how many quite new vehicles are being broken up because they have a pranged wing.
Our culture of replacement over repair and trading up for the next new model is making far more demands on the earth’s resources than is sustainable. We really need to lift our viewpoint from what is immediately in front of us and see our activities in the context of the wider world view. Not everything that looks green is green and not everything that looks consumerist is a problem. Ultimately we need to rethink how and what we use, how we can extend the life of useful things by repairing them.
A brand new Eco-conference centre filled with sustainable gadgets may look attractively green but how can that compare with Green and Away’s recycled, repaired, low tech, low impact approach? We will have to see what our carbon footprint shows us and if this is a meaningful tool for measuring sustainability.