www.everythingsgonegreen.co.uk

Ever since we heard about the Freecycle concept a couple of years back we’ve been meaning to join our local Freecycle group. But with modern life being so ridiculously busy we never got round to joining up and it ended up on the back burner for a while.

So in a recent moment of lifehacking, getting the house in order, freecycling came up again. Amidst a ton of households items that could make a reasonable bob or two on eBay there are some other items that could certainly go to a good home locally and Freecycle is just the place.

“Alright” you say “You’ve mentioned Freecycle a few times now, but what exactly is it?” Good question.

The basic premise is simple; don’t throw perfectly good things away, recycle them, give them away for free. Hence Freecycle.

Looking into the history of the Freecycle movement it started in Tucson, Arizona, back in 2003, the brainchild of Deron Beal who worked for a non-profit recycling company. Deron was so incensed at the amount of perfectly decent things that people threw away that he started to try and find homes for the stuff, and that’s how the freecycle movement started.

We know just how he feels; at our own local tip there have been full sets of alloy wheels for a Mini, a great big Carlsboro amp and perfectly decent looking bikes just slung away because people can’t fix things or simply don’t want them any more.

So freecycle is the answer, keeping perfectly usable stuff out of landfills.

Go to freecycle and search for your local group and join up via the Yahoo groups. Our own local group is Farnborough & Aldershot with 4573 members. Worldwide there are 4529 freecycle groups with nearly 5 and a half million members!

Time to have a root around the loft…

On my drive home from work I saw three cars for sale. They were all 4×4s!

Now strike me down with high petrol prices if I’m wrong, but that’s gotta be a sign!

Britain’s unelected leader (at least, unelected by the people in a democratic general election), Prime Minister Gordon Brown, is apparently the only head of government at an oil summit in Jeddha at the moment, discussing with the Saudi King Abdullah the future of oil.

His primary topic of discussion, according to the BBC, is the price of oil. For a government that imposes the highest fuel taxes in Europe and possibly the world, you’d think Brown wouldn’t be so concerned about the price of oil. Afterall, back in February this year accountants Grant Thornton reported that the current high oil prices could net the treasury an additional £300 million every month, enough to cut the price of fuel by 7p a litre.

So why, when the government could be trousering such great rewards from high oil prices, would they want the cost of oil to come down? Apparently Brown is discussing methods to stabilise oil prices. Again we’re wondering why. OK, British motorists get screwed enough as it is and the prices going up at the pump are causing outrage in some quarters. It’s OK if you live just 3 miles from work and you can take the bike, but for many that’s not always an option; what about the truck drivers who transport our food?

Fluctuations and increases in oil prices are certainly a cause for concern but in the grand scheme of things it’s not as bad, proportionately, as it is in the US where we noted they are more susceptible to oil price rises. In America gas prices have doubled in 2 years whereas they have doubled in the UK over 10 years.

But anyway, Gordon Brown supposedly has 4 points to discuss with King Abdullah;

1. 1. Stabilise the market to avoid volatility in oil prices
2. 2. Exploit the world’s current oil reserves to their full extent
3. 3. Accelerate the switch to alternative energy
4. 4. Get oil states to invest in alternative energy

So point 1: How on earth can this be done when there are traders speculating on the price of oil and it’s a finite resource? Oil will run out some time soon so the price will go up. Upping oil production adds supply and helps prices come down, but when Saudi Arabia promises to increase oil flow by 200,000 barrels a day in July you have to remember that when the US consumes over 20 million barrels a day, that’s just 1% of their great thirst. Plus increased oil extraction simply accelerates us toward the day when the oil runs out…

Point 2: I’m sure oil companies are trying to milk their wells as much as they can but the cost of tapping the most inaccessible reserves comes at a cost that eats into the oil companies’ profits. Like spoiled spouses the oil companies wish to maintain the lifestyles to which they have become accustomed, so nothing less than being filthy rich will do.

Point 3: Yes. Please. Switch to green energy a bit quicker please. Not nuclear though, thank you, nuclear energy is nasty scary stuff and nuclear waste is nastier and scarier. Why not go further with the wind power we could exploit in this country or solar in the sunny countries?

Point 4: Now that’s a big concern. Yes, further investment in green energy would be great but ultimately we’d be relying on foreign investment. Why can’t we invest in renewables ourselves? Where did all the profit from taxing British petrol go? Is it subsidising some other project like useless politicians or pointless wars in other countries?

It’s not just us here at Everything’s Gone Green who wonder what on earth Gordon Brown is doing having a cosy chat about oil. Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrat party accused the man with the personality bypass of “living in cloud cuckoo land”!

Our comedy Chancellor, Alistair Darling, did actually support the fact that we do need to reduce our dependency on oil in the long term but endorsed the extremely short-sighted idea of producing more oil to reduce prices.

Britain needs to clamp down on energy waste and invest all the savings in making us a self-sufficient nation without nuclear fission. We also need to drive less, drive better, drive more fuel-efficiently, save energy… damn, why aren’t us greens in power and not the idiots who are there now?

In my day job I’ve just signed a deal to have a web server to be hosted by rackspace here in the UK. The decision to go with this hosting company was purely a technical & commercial one but upon signing the contract I asked my account manager over at rackspace just where our server was physically located.

To my pleasant surprise he informed me that my new server is situated in a brand new data centre on the Slough Trading Estate in Berkshire that had been open for just 4 days. The new data centre is actually a refurbished warehouse (good use of recycling to start with) and its energy is supplied by a paper waste and wood-chip burning plant. The bio-mass power station will provide not only electricity for the new energy-efficient data centre but also hot water too.

Rackspace have also used natural cooling as part of their setup by using outside air when the temperatures drop below 13°C which isn’t so much genius as common sense really. Other energy-efficient savings have been made by using the latest low-voltage AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon servers and small form factor hard drives.

By default I’d also been signed up to their carbon neutral hosting scheme where a tree will be planted to offset the carbon emissions of our server. Delving further into the issue rackspace have been planting 200-300 trees a month since they started their carbon neutral scheme with the International Tree Foundation back in 2006.

Beyond carbon offsets, energy-efficiency and green energy rackspace use only paper from sustainable sources and they recycle all their aluminium cans, paper, cardboard and plastic with their local council and a company called PaperRound. In 2006 they recycled 2,130 kg paper and 185 kg cans and plastic bottles; that’s the equivalent of saving 25 trees and 10,900 kWh of energy. Rackspace also use only environmentally friendly cleaning products.

Doug Loewe, the MD of rackspace EMEA, is quoted as saying:

“Rackspace is committed to being energy efficient and making a real and positive difference to the environment. We also recognise that customers are increasingly looking for suppliers who can help them meet their own environment-related goals.”

And that isn’t bullshit from what we’ve seen, so how good a company are rackspace aye?

After making the switch to our new green electricity provider earlier in the week we received confirmation that the change from Southern Electric to ecotricity has already been made

We’ve just submitted our meter reading online through the ecotricity website, so now all we have to do is sit back and enjoy the fact that we’re actually contributing to investment in renewable energy, chiefly windfarms.

So forget the big players like e.on and edf energy; go green, buy British and sign up to ecotricity. If you sign up through via uSwitch.com you’ll get a £40 discount voucher to spend at Virgin Wines (although we’d actually be saving £40 if we didn’t buy the wine in the first place!)

I stumbled across this extraordinary story in The Times yesterday as I trawled the Internet in my day job…

Scientists in Silicon Valley have genetically engineered bacteria to produce “renewable petroleum”.

Because petroleum is apparently just a few molecular stages away from the fatty acids excreted by yeast or E.Coli the scientists have found it easy to genetically modify the bacteria to excrete a by-product close to petrol.

Using what they call in the biofuels industry foodstock, the bacteria consume agricultural waste, basically anything that can be broken down into sugars. Avoiding corn crops that are usually food for humans is key to this process as the biofuels industry has been criticised for diverting crops from poorer people to fuel rich people’s vehicles [re: the tortilla riots in Mexico] Wheat straw, wood chips and sugar cane are expected to be used.

This whole process is not commerically viable yet but the company behind the science expects to make a demo plant operational within the next year and a commercial processing plant online by 2010.

Replacing petrol with “petrol” is rather cool but people still need to reduce their dependence on oil anyway.

It’s been a long time coming but yesterday we switched our home electricity provider to ecotricity.

After thinking long and hard about the pros & cons and debating is ecotricity really that green we switched from our old provider, Southern Electric, to our new green energy generator.

The debate was this: ecotricity still provides energy from non-renewable sources as detailed in the energywatch fuel mix disclosure data (up to March 2007). It also provides the largest proportion of nuclear energy than the other big players and hence creates the greatest proportion of nuclear waste. The actual gross figures are something we are unable to find right now.

However, after discussing this ecotricity are the energy supplier that are investing the greatest amount into renewable energy, £25 million in 2007. Considering the other energy providers are bigger players and probably have more cashflow this is an admirable amount of investment. The other energy companies would do well to follow their lead (and also you’d expect them to exceed this)

After comparing our current energy usage through uSwitch.com we found that there were cheaper energy providers and ones with great ratings in customer service (there wasn’t enough data for ecotricity) but the investment in green energy that we’ve read so much about was what clinched the deal. Compared to our current billing ecotricity were only 5p per quarter more expensive than our current provider.

What’s more, if we ever get round to generating our own energy ecotricity pay customers for feeding power back into the grid.

We’ll get a call in the next few days about finalising the switch to our new energy provider so we’ll let you know how it goes

It was only a couple of weeks back when we reported on the speculation about the end of the road for the SUV. Today GM announced the closure of 4 truck & SUV plants in Canada, Mexico and the US. (Oshawa, Ontario, Canada; Moraine, Ohio; Janesville, Wisconsin; and Toluca in Mexico.)

GM, the world’s largest car manufacturer, is quoted as saying the sudden move is

“to aggressively respond to growing demand for fuel-efficient vehicles and to economic and market challenges in North America”

Now this may be seen as a victory for the green movement, this killing off the production of SUVs, but we have a couple of questions:

1. Why aren’t GM swapping production for the fuel-efficient vehicles they say they want to make?
2. How many jobs are on the line and again why aren’t GM safeguarding workers by swapping production from the SUV to small cars?

The job loss figures amount to about 2,900 jobs in Oshawa, about 2,800 in Janesville, about 2,400 in Moraine and about 250 in Toluca, according to GM spokesman Tom Wilkinson.

In this day and age isn’t it time for companies to lose their blunt aggression? We like strength and leadership from companies but all out aggression is pretty tasteless. The loss of jobs and the failure to switch production seems ruthlessly short-sighted, even though making SUVs is being killed off for the long term. We don’t get it.

Further to this all GM is considering what to do with its Hummer brand. That’s laughable. They should have thought about that a few years back when the going was “good”. Now they’re left with a lame duck product that has always been hated by anyone with a brain (FUH2.com) and loved by those whose wallets are deeper than their egos.