www.everythingsgonegreen.co.uk

The home-based business, or just working from home, is the green and environmentally-friendly option that many businesses these days can take.

By working from home you can leverage the following advantages:

• Avoiding the daily commute not only removes the stresses of driving and being stuck in traffic, but means:
• less cars on the roads
• less fossil fuel being consumed
• less pollution – less noise pollution, less CO₂ output and cleaner air.
• Workers have complete control over their own environments:
• they can have the light on if needs be and if they do they can choose to use energy-efficient bulbs.
• Computers and lights can be switched off at the end of the day unlike many offices where lights and PCs stay on over night.
• Many businesses still do not have recycling policies – at home you can choose to recycle your own paper by using both sides before eventually putting it in the “blue bin” or shred your own paper for the composter.
• You can choose environmentally-friendly stationery such as re-cycled paper, re-filled printer cartridges.

Working from home is not for everyone: there are many considerations to be taken into account, but the green bonuses are clear.

What happens when your litre of Ecover washing-up liquid runs out? Do you:

1. Climb up into your Chelsea tractor and shoot off to the local Supermarket to grab another bottle
2. Cycle/walk to your friendly neighbourhood shop for another 2 or 3 bottles
3. Sit here and navigate to ecotopia.co.uk and order a 5 litre re-fill

Well, whatever you do, it’s better to grab the 5 litre Ecover re-fill because you can re-fill your 1 litre Ecover washing-up bottle 5 times, save a couple of quid on your purchase and leave the SUV in the garage

It’s the environmentally friendly move, so go green and order the bulk products online – you use less packaging too

Prince Charles, the UK’s “Green Prince”, who has described climate change as the ‘biggest threat to mankind’, will be taking a 7,000-mile round trip to the United States later this month to pick up an environmental award.

The prince has been awarded the Global Environmental Citizen Prize from Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment. He will fly, along with the Duchess of Cornwall and an entourage of 18 officials, to the US to collect his green award.

After Prince Charles was invited to pick up the green award, the Foreign Office built a programme around the ceremony to justify the trip, but has so far made no mention of any plans to offset the carbon emissions of the trip.

The £116,000 UK taxpayer-funded trip, which consists of 14 business-class and 6 club-class seats, takes Charles and his party to New York and Philadelphia on the 27th and 28th January.

Of course with recent anger at the British government’s supposed aims to cut CO₂ emissions and address global warming issues on one hand and yet proceed with an expansionist policy on Britain’s airports on the other, this is yet another high profile case of bad judgement and utter hypocrisy, and not just by the royal himself but by the Foreign Office who oversee this trip.

A spokesperson for Clarence House, the official residence of HRH the Prince of Wales, said the award ceremony was part of a two-day visit, which would highlight environmental issues such as conservation, urban redevelopment and youth regeneration, but not carbon emissions from pointless air trips.

Prince Charles will collect the Global Environmental Citizen Prize from former 2005 winner Al Gore at the Harvard Medical Centre’s award ceremony attended by Mr Gore and Hollywood actress Meryl Streep.

The circumstances of the trip have led one member of the House of Commons’ public accounts committee to call for an investigation into the cost of the trip by public spending watchdog, the National Audit Office (NAO).

Labour MP Ian Davidson said that Prince Charles;

“…Seems to be travelling yet again on an international flight to collect a green award and padding out his programme with other events to justify the expense and extravagance of another foreign journey.

This does not sit well with the green image that the prince is trying to project.”

Joss Garman from Plane Stupid, the aviation environmental campaign group, said:

“Flying to an environmental award ceremony is a bit like turning up to an Oxfam award ceremony in a stretch limo.

Prince Charles may as well be picking up an award for green hypocrisy, especially since he could have used this to highlight the seriousness of climate change by accepting the award via video link up.

Flying is the single most polluting way in which you can travel.”

The best thing Charles can do is to cancel the trip, save the British taxpayers some money, stay at one of his luxury homes to broadcast his comments live to the ceremony via the Internet and then contribute some his own great fortune, around £116,000 will do, to a carbon neutral cause, maybe even donating that wealth to support The Woodland Trust.

Marks & Sparks, our recently refreshed & successful retailer, today announced plans to become carbon neutral in 5 years. M&S plans to spend £200million by 2012 to become one of Britain’s greenest retailers.

And that’s good news, because green consumers will love Marks & Spencer if they succeed, it will be good news for the environment & British life and hopefully it will spur other retailers on to also go green.

Stuart Rose, the chief executive of Marks & Spencer, has called the initiative ‘Plan A’ because there is no Plan B. And with a successful business thinking like that, it’s a most welcome development.

Becoming carbon neutral means M&S will be achieving the equivalent of removing 100,000 cars from British roads.

A quick run-down of M&S’s green & eco ideas looks like this:

• Stop sending waste to landfill sites by 2012
• Improve energy efficiency by 25%
• Power all stores using renewable energy
• Trial the use of energy from food waste (anaerobic digestion)
• Double the amount of locally-sourced food over the next 12 months
• Reduce the amount of food imported by air
• Use biofuels for its delivery trucks
• Reduce packaging by 25%
• Sell polyester clothing made from recycled bottles
• Increase the amount of fairtrade cotton goods

Jonathan Porritt, founder of Forum for the Future, advised M&S in their venture and said it set a new benchmark for green standards in business & retail.

Mr Barroso’s Commission will have to sell its ideas to EU leaders

This just in from the BBC

The European Commission is due to demand a new “industrial revolution” when it unveils a wide-ranging set of proposals on energy and climate issues.

The EU’s civil service wants more investment in renewable energy, arguing that the old fuels have a political as well as clear environmental cost.

The need has been given greater urgency by Russia’s oil row with Belarus, which has hit EU states Germany and Poland.

The report is expected to demand 20% of energy comes from renewables by 2020.

Without such investment and energy efficiency measures, the report predicts that EU energy imports will rise from 50% of consumption to 65% by 2030, requiring increased reliance on potentially unpredictable sources.

EU – emissions and energy

While the report remains neutral on the issue of nuclear power, it does warn that any significant reduction – as planned by some EU states – will make the other objective of cutting greenhouse gas harder.

It is anticipated that the commission will call for a 20% reduction in such gas emissions by 2020.

The report is also due to include measures to open up the EU’s energy market, enabling the bloc’s 500m citizens to buy their gas or electricity from anywhere in Europe.

Analysts anticipate these are likely to cause some controversy.

The package of measures will have to be approved by European governments before it can come into force.

The launch will come at 1230 local time in Brussels (1130 GMT) at the end of a meeting of commissioners from the various European directorates.

Road block

In recent years the EU has been the most powerful political voice urging targets on reducing greenhouse gas emissions beyond the current Kyoto period, which expires in 2012.

But at the latest UN climate meeting its attempts to get new targets debated met with failure. The Commission is now likely to urge that all developed countries across the world adopt a goal of cuts in the order of 30% by 2020.

Critics say that demand is unfair because people in India and China pollute a fraction as much as individuals as those in the West.

The EU’s principle tool for achieving cuts within the union itself would be an enhanced Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS).

But that only affects businesses, leaving emissions from road transport and domestic heat and power unaffected.

A voluntary agreement under which car manufacturers promised to increase the efficiency of their products has not produced the results which the Commission wanted, and it may now propose a mandatory regime.

On the business side, the Commission is likely to propose an enhanced “unbundling” of energy supply across the continent in a bid to increase competition.

In the last three years it has raided the offices of energy firms it believed were operating uncompetitively, and warned 17 member states for failing to implement competition legislation; but it is poised now to go further.

New measures could also include breaking up the ownership of energy businesses to avoid conflicts of interest.

It may propose that companies generating electricity and distributing it would not be permitted to have owners in common; gas production companies would be divorced from pipeline operators.

Ministers are likely to debate the Commission’s proposals in March.