Environmental

Woodland Burial Parks situated in the north London suburb of Epping Forrest offer a green alternative to burial. Plots are available in circular groups around selected trees amongst the quiet tranquility of a mature English Woodland. Coupled with the notion of putting back what we take out, the Parks offer a very natural and pure concept, almost the way nature intended. The concept goes further than just good conservation, they also offer local schools, communities and other interested organizations educational programs. To cap everything off…only wooden memorials are permitted, no fake marble headstones here!

Their website reads:

Our promise is to provide service and burial options that surpass all the desires and the expectations of the bereaved. We adopt an enlightened approach to changing attitudes towards conventional practices, while at the same time retaining absolute respect for the culture, traditions and the environment within which we operate.

Woodland Burial Parks

Contributed by Pete Serjeant

Green Marketing Manifesto author John Grant responds to our post about whether organic and vegan food is environmental. He says:

It’s a bit of an odd statement - what is ‘global warming potential’?… That is nothing to do with the central issues of animal welfare, use of antibiotics and feed additives such as arsenic. Carbon here is a side issue. There are 850 million chicken raised in britain a year; an average of about 14 per person per year. So on average the difference is just under 30kg of carbon dioxide vs your 11 tonne annual footprint.

greenormal: There’s more to life than CO2

Related PSFK Articles
Is Organic Environmental?

An article on the BBC’s Radio 4 site by Tom Heap suggests that ‘good’ food alternatives such as organic or vegetarian could have a bigger environmental impact that having a diet of pork and chicken:

Peter Bradnock of the British Poultry Council says: “Organic poultry meat has about 45% more global warming potential than indoor-reared poultry meat. “If you’re rearing outside, then the bird is using a little more of its feed to keep itself warm, or simply to keep itself cool in hot climates.”.

There is a further hiccup with the vegetarian option: most of those who avoid meat source their protein from dairy foods.

And dairy animals pump out gases and gobble up supplementary feed just like the rest.
If you are avoiding meat for climate reasons, you should be shunning dairy too.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Meat in a low-carbon world

A study by WRAP of 2,138 UK households suggests that Britons dump £9bn of avoidable waste each year - a high percentage of which was food. 60% of dumped food is untouched and and at least £1bn worth of food wasted in the UK is still “in date”. Some key findings:

• Bakery goods made up 19%, by weight, of all avoidable food waste. Vegetables contributed 18%.
• Meat and fish also made up a large proportion - 18% - of the total money wasted on food.
• 5,500 whole chickens were thrown away each day in the UK.
• “Mixed foods” like ready meals made up 21% of the total cost of waste, with 440,000 thrown away each day.
• The two most significantly wasted foods were potatoes and bread.
• 1.3m unopened yoghurt pots are disposed every day

WRAP’S Report

[viaBBC NEWS]

Westminster council has placed a dozen JuicePoint recharging posts for electric vehicles. Drivers of electric cars can pay an annual fee of £75 and pull up to any of the street posts. These posts are in addition to 48 charging points already found in the council’s parking lots.

A recent report by the councils suggests the following cars and vans can use the points already - or very soon:

• G-Wiz
• Mega City
• Electric SmartCar
• Modec
• Faraday
• Mega van
• Piaggio Porter
• Toyota Amberjac
• Cleanova
• Think City Car
• Ford Think
• Citroen Berlingo

EcoMark from Westminster Council

Gothamist points to an article that looks at how cityslickers who are turning their city into farmland. We wrote about Hipster Farmers who were leaving the city to set up farms, but the Times looks at the growth of allotments and the redevelopment of vacant lots into arable land:

John Ameroso, a Cornell Cooperative Extension agent who has worked with local farmers and gardeners for 32 years, said that when he first suggested urban farm stands in the early 1990s, city environmental officials dismissed the idea. “ ‘Oh, you could never grow enough stuff with the urban markets,’ ” he said he was told. ‘ “That can’t be done. You have to have farmers.’ ”

But local officials have come around.

Holly Leicht, an associate assistant commissioner at the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, helped provide two half-acre parcels of city land last year. One became Hands and Hearts and the other is in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn.

The Red Hook farm began in 2003 when the Parks Department gave the youth group Added Value permission to use an abandoned three-acre asphalt ball field. The group started with two raised beds, built a hoop house where it could start seeds, then laid down an acre of compost two feet deep on top of the asphalt. Last year the young farmers sold more than $25,000 in goods.

Urban agriculture has been an even larger undertaking in other cities, particularly those with weaker real estate markets and a declining population.

NY Times

Within the sustainability arena, energy use and carbon emissions have been in the spotlight for a long time, however the next big trend to hit the agenda is an increasing focus on water. Already most companies’ CSR reports will have a section pointing to their policies or stance on water issues, but in the future you will rarely be able to open your newspaper without seeing some reference to water matters.

So far, water has not been quantified in the same way as carbon, or indeed received anywhere near the same amount of media attention as CO2, but the prediction is that you will soon see people measuring their ‘hydro’ footprint and thinking about the environmental impact of water use. Some investors have even suggested that water will eventually be commoditised and traded as a futures contract in the same way as oil or sugar.

The United Nations estimates that a worrying 1.1 billion people lack access to safe water and that by 2050 that figure will double to more than two billion. Countries like China are already facing an imminent water crisis. The country has long suffered from alternating periods of severe flooding and drought, which combined with high pollution levels and unrealistic policies on water management, means that demand significantly outweighs supply and they simply don’t have the resources to cope.

The water issue should provide a whole new world of opportunities for technology firms and investors. The problem is that water-saving initiatives are expensive to implement, in everything from the treatment of contaminated water supplies to efficient irrigation methods. For consumers, it may also be costly if the added financial burden has to be passed on. However the cost of not taking action will be much higher if we wait until further down the line.
Read the rest of this entry »

Kolektib - a Manila-based consultancy - is organizing its first “Wicked Problems Mindstorm” on May 17th. Rather than grappling with a specific client task or discussing a certain business-related theme, this event will deal with problem solving for the public community. The mindstorm will be open to the public and will be very collaborative in nature. Open source non-profit consulting if you will. This is what’s written on Kolektib’s invitation:

Wicked Problems - They are persistent problems that plague our local communities: Trash cans that no one seems to want to use. Steel flyover railings that are stolen in the night. Bunches of ugly black power and telephone cables. Stray cats. Let’s choose one. Let’s talk about it. And let’s find realistic, actionable and innovative solutions. Join the first Kolektib Mindstorm.

A little background on that bit about steel railing theft: the market for scrap metal is booming in Manila since China can’t seem to get enough of it. With perpetually high income inequality (a majority are at the wrong end of it) and now a struggling economy due to high food prices to boot, many have resorted to stealing public property metal like street signs, manhole covers and steel highway railings for badly needed extra earnings.

Urban Outfitters new fourth brand, Terrain debuted last week near Philadelphia. UO has a pretty solid foundation to start the new brand on. The company purchased popular local garden center J. Franklin Styer Nurseries and will retain staff from that business. In fact the transition will carry through to the name as the store will officially be known as ‘Terrain at Styer’s.

This new venture expands UO’s reach from traditional retailer into the service sector. Terrain will offer garden design consultation services and building services. Within the store there is a cafe that offers a menu of fresh locally sourced food that will change with the seasons.

Ohjoy.com took a tour just after the opening and have posted a full gallery of photos on flickr. It’s quite obvious that UO leveraged it’s strength of visual merchandising in displaying the plants and product. Even the shopping bags and Terrain collateral are beautifully executed.

While it may seem that the mainstream promotion of eco-consciousness is the motivation behind UO creation of Terrain, it’s actually a different shade of green. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that nationally, Americans spend $34 billion on plants, flowers, mowers and garden equipment, according to Bruce Butterfield, organization research director for the National Gardening Association, a nonprofit group for home gardeners. The landscape design, construction and maintenance market is $45 billion, he said. The garden center retail landscape is fairly polarized between local mom and pop nursery’s on one end and big box retailers like Home Depot on the other. UO looks to position terrain somewhere in between and hopes to become for gardening centers what West Elm and CB2 have done to furniture shopping.