www.everythingsgonegreen.co.uk

Just a little snippet for you, but an extremely important one…

We’re currently reading John Fagan’s excellent green handbook Managing4Good, a “guide to responsible and sustainable business” and we stumbled across this nugget of information in the quotation at the foot of page 27. In a case study of communications company BT the text in the illustration reads:

BT plc believes that the reputation it has gained as a result of its Corporate Responsibility activities is maintaining and building its market share in a competitive market. It estimates that corporate (social) responsibility accounts for over 25% of image and reputation impact on customer satisfaction.

Wow!

Let’s just highlight the important bit of that snippet shall we?

…corporate (social) responsibility accounts for over 25% of image and reputation impact on customer satisfaction.

So there you go, folks, having a socially responsible and sustainable business is a winner with customers and accounts for a quarter of your image and reputation.

Thanks for the headsup to is4profit, the business advice website, who pointed out John Fagan’s book.

Why buy organic? What is organic? Why isn’t everything organic if it’s so much better? Why is organic more expensive?

If you know the answers to these questions then you’ll be happy to see this wonderful little movie from The Soil Association. If you have friends that need convincing that organic food is actually better than intensively farmed food then, again, you’ll like this.

We like the “public service broadcast” style because, in essence, it is a public service to understand and remind people why organic food is better for the food itself, us, the consumer, and the land and for nature.

(In particular we like the Jack Drummond tone of the film, but that’s another story, especially as we’re reading The Vitamin Murders at the moment. Green book review coming soon)

And if you like this film feel free to pass it on

Whilst many PCs have energy-saving modes there’s clearly room for improvement in these days of high energy prices and greater green awareness. That’s where Edison comes in.

Edison is a handy program from software vendor Verdiem that monitors and controls your home PC’s energy consumption. You can set the energy-saving modes for when you work from your PC and for non-work times, so if you work on your laptop from 9:30am to 5:30pm, just program these times into Edison.

By default Edison turns off the display, powers down the hard-drive and suspends the computer after 15 minutes in work mode, allowing you to work without power-management interruptions. Non-work mode turns off the display and powers down your PC’s hard-drive after 5 minutes and suspends the computer after 10 minutes, although this is all configurable from Edison’s power management panel.

Edison also shows you how much CO₂ and money you’re saving by powering down although, for us Brits, this feature is in U.S. dollars. And at $0.089 per kWh I’m not sure whether Americans get a better rate than us, although you can set the rate. (Use xe.com to convert dollars to your local currency)

Tip of the day to prevent flies in your compost bin: wrap all your old kitchen scraps in a sheet or two of old newspaper before dropping them in your compost bin. This should keep flies from laying their eggs on the organic waste.

This follows the prinicple of mixing “green” and “brown” waste, so a really good layer of shredded paper will do the trick but not so well as wrapping old fruit and veg in newspaper.

Also keep the lid on and make sure there are no gaps into the bin.

Did you know?

To power an ordinary 100-watt light bulb for half an hour you’d have to cycle for 40 minutes.
To power the equivalent energy-efficient light-bulb that puts out the same light but is only 21-watts, you’d have to cycle for just 8 minutes.