www.everythingsgonegreen.co.uk

Recent high temperatures this summer have meant an increase in use of air conditioning in the High Street according to Make It Cheaper, the business price comparison service.

The recommended operating temperature for turning on the air con is 24°C — as advised on the Carbon Trust’s website — and a third of retailers have been switching on their equipment below this figure, wasting energy to cool down shoppers. Furthermore, off all the stores monitored during the experiment, which took place on a sweltering July shopping day, only one store store kept its doors closed to prevent the cool air escaping!

Using thermal imaging equipment to record the temperatures at shop entrances in Oxford Street, London, the Make It Cheaper team braved 28.4°C temperatures to record the habits of the high street retailers. The research shows that the high street is effectively wasting millions of pounds by squandering energy. Turning on the air con to make shoppers “more comfortable” and then leaving the doors open is akin to leaving the fridge door open (and we all know the fridge works ever harder to stay cold as the cool air escapes)

Jonathan Elliott, the Managing Director of Make It Cheaper, said:

“Shopkeepers in New York get fined $400 by the City Council if they have their doors open with the air con on because it burns so much more energy to cool a shop than it does to keep it warm. This can only be a taste of things to come when the government’s CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme kicks in over here and forces retailers to re-think how they use energy in their stores. There are simple things that staff can do now, however, such as to challenge head office policy, set the thermostat higher, turn off some of the lights and tweak the automatic doors to close more frequently. It is common sense, saves money as well as energy and is everybody’s responsibility.”

The Carbon Trust says that the retail sector emits over 5 million tonnes of CO2 a year and that energy savings of 20% are possible – that’s a saving of more than £300 million!

Key findings include:

• A third of stores operated below 24°C, against advice on the  which recommends their air conditioning doesn’t operate below this temperature
• Whilst there was a difference of as much as eight degrees between outside and inside temperatures, just one store – Debenhams – kept its doors closed to prevent the cool air escaping and the warm air entering
• At 20.1 degrees Celsius and a huge 8.3 degrees cooler at the door than the outside temperature, Next was the worst offender
• Boots, River Island and Ann Harvey did not fare much better, at 21.1, 21.6 and 22.4 degrees respectively. Boots at least had automatic doors, though these were recorded as open almost all the time due to the high volume of traffic into and out of the store

According to figures from The Carbon Trust, the retail sector is responsible for over five million tonnes of CO₂ emissions per year. It is estimated that energy savings of up to 20% – equivalent to more than £300m – are possible across the sector. Make It Cheaper say that by switching energy suppliers alone can reduce costs to businesses by as much as 50% and energy efficient measures, such as being frugal with the air conditioning can reduce bills by a further 10-30%.

High Street Coldest Shops League Table:

The experiment took in to consideration a number of factors in measuring the efficiency of the air conditioning in the high street retailers’ premises and took into account factors such as outside air temperature, the shop entrance temperature and whether the doors were efficiently kept closed, left wide open or if they were automatic doors (The sort that slide open as you walk past )

Environmental disasters are currently at the forefront of world news with the BP gulf oil catastrophe in particular dominating the headlines over the last few months. In response,  explore.org, the non-profit multi-media organization, has teamed up with HATCH to champion the selfless acts of others through a short film award at this year’s HATCHfest Bozeman film festival.

The explore/HATCH Award presented by explore.org will be given to the filmmaker who best tells the story of a remarkable individual’s actions in response to a devastating environmental event.

Winner of the explore/HATCH award will be flown to HATCHfest Bozeman September 22-25 in a full expenses-paid trip and be presented with a Canon HD SLR camera package from explore.org’s founder, Charles Annenberg Weingarten, and HATCH.

If you’re interested in submitting your film then please visit http://explore.org/about/explorehatch_award/ for full details. The deadline for filmaker submissions is August 25th. Good Luck!

If, like us, you’re one of those households with a TV, satellite receiver, games console and other devices plugged in to one socket on the wall, you’ll have probably noticed how inconvenient it can be trying to save energy by constantly trying to plug/unplug/switch off all the time. We want to switch off all the devices that we don’t need but reaching the gang socket behind the TV stand can often be really awkward.

That’s where the excellent Energenie Automatic AV Standby Shutdown, a standby power saver, comes in – This device looks just like a 5-way gang socket extension except for the excellent energy-saving features: You plug the extension in place of your old one and first plug the satellite receiver in to the “always on” socket. Then the other devices, such as our TV, Wii Fit, DVD Player and amplifier are plugged in to the remaining sockets.

Next, you switch the gang extension on via the big green button and then place the infra-red sensor in a place where it will pick up a remote signal from one of your infra-red remote control handsets – we chose the TV’s handset.

Once the extension has been “trained” you can now use the TV remote control to operate the Energenie power saving extension. Leaving the device on, it recognises when power is being consumed by your TV, games console etc and when there is minimal energy use and it recognises all devices as in standby… it switches the gang extension off and saves you power.

We’ve been really impressed by the Energenie standby power saver – Once you switch the TV off at night the other devices are quick to follow and within 30 seconds your electrical items are all switched off with only the “always on” satellite receiver in standby.

We’re thinking of getting one of these for our PC setup too so that we can have our PC and printers off but keep the broadband cable modem on.

With 4 controlled sockets, an always on socket and a 1.5m cable this remote-operated power saving device will also reduce fire risk and save you money too.  If you want one now (and we recommend it to any green household) then go to Amazon to get your Energenie automatic AV standby shutdown device.

So we’ve had Google Chrome, Google Buzz, Google Wave, Google Labs, Google Docs, Google Mail and now Google Wind Farms.

OK, not really, that last one we made up, but it might as well be real seeing as Google, the search giant, has invested $38.8 million in a wind farm (approximately £25.3 million). Apparently this is the first time that Google has made a “direct investment in a utility-scale renewable energy project”.

It also seems that Google has taken a long time to act in directly investing in clean energy since we reported, way back in 2007, on Google’s Renewable Energy Goal. Back then the philanthropic arm of the behemoth, Google.org, was talking up its RE<C project: Renewable Energy cheaper than Coal.

Now considering the carbon footprint of a Google search, which was quoted as being a wild stab between 0.2g and 7g for every search, it’s about time Big G did something to clean up its own act. Back in January 2009 there were an estimated 200 million searches daily on the Internet, so if that was all on Google we can only estimate between 40,000 and  1.4 million metric tonnes of carbon emitted daily in the process of  powering the machines that power search.

So this investment by Google, albeit late, is very welcome. The wind farm, developed by Next era Energy Resources is purported to develop  around 169.5 megawatts of power or enough to power 55,000 homes (Is that American homes or British homes? Remember that per capita electricity consumption in the US is around 1460 watts per person when compared to 667 watts per person in the UK  but is an almighty 3152 watts per person in Iceland whilst the world average consumption is 297 watts per person. Source. But that’s a whole topic for discussion on another day)

We’d be interested if anybody’s done the maths to work out just how many Google rack servers this wind farm in North Carolina will power, so if you have any idea we’d be really pleased to hear from you.

Whilst listening to a Radio 4 podcast on the lack of lending by banks to SMEs, I came across the story of a firm called 2K Manufacturing. The broadcast was about the firm’s difficulty in securing a loan from a major UK bank in order to expand the production of their Ecosheet product; It was this Ecosheet that really caught my attention.

2K Manufacturing’s Ecosheet is an environmentally-friendly alternative to plywood. By using low-grade post-consumer waste plastic products 2K are not only keeping this waste from the incinerator or land-fill but also reducing the need for imported plywood.

Mainly used in building & construction, hoarding etc Ecosheet has many other advantages over plywood:

• Generally lighter than plywood
• As strong as plywood
• Similar cost to plywood
• Ecosheet is impervious to rain & damp so it can be stored outdoors, weathers really well and can be jet-washed!
• It is made in standard sizes
• Both sides of Ecosheet are “A” faces (whereas plywood has just one)
• Ecosheet can be recycled at the end of its own useful life
• Ergo it is a totally sustainable solution

Just take a look at Ecosheet around the refurbishment of Marks & Spencer in Stall Street, Bath; The hoardings have been vinyl-wrapped with graphics but the installation is totally weatherproof and sustainable.

So builders, construction firms, civil engineers etc… It’s well worth checking out the green alternative to plywood. I hope the big DIY and builders merchants start stocking this product too – it keeps low-grade plastic waste out of land-fill and the incinerator, it stops trees from being cut to supply demand for plywood and it is good for the environment and 2K Manufacturing, a UK small business.