Having never mentioned them at all in 10 months of blogging, I find myself mentioning B&Q 2 days in a row! The diy experts (clever enough to have bought the url diy.com) have followed up their partnership with the Mayor of London to distribute free low energy lightbulbs by announcing that they will be ordering no more patio heaters, and will stop selling them once their current stock has been sold.

I first wrote about patio heaters in June last year, and about how they have become the rage as smokers are forced outside pubs during all weathers, and need to keep warm. The problem with them is simple - they burn gas, at a huge rate, generating huge amounts of CO2 emissions - the best statistic given is that a patio heater consumes enough energy in an hour to make 400 cups of tea! This is one very unethical fashion item.

Unfortunately, however, there are still 20,000 patio heaters in B&Q stores to be sold - that’s 8 millions cups of tea per hour worth of emissions that will soon be pumped into the atmosphere by pubs and people determined to have drinks outside in midwinter! So, whilst I fully applaud B&Q’s initiative, I have a small suggestion: add 10@ to the price, and use this markup to invest in renewable energy, offsets, solar heating for B&Q stores, or any other solution that will balance out the additional emissions to be generated over the next 5 years.

The concept of using less paper has been around for a long time, it’s just the reasoning behind it and the importance of this reasoning that has evolved. In the beginning it was ‘protect the rain forests, use less paper’, but for most people the rain forests were the cradle of life, rather than the CO2 absorbers they are known as today. People certainly did not connect using too much paper with dramatic changes in our future lifestyles.

Funnily enough, however, I get the feeling that we worry less about using paper today than we did 10 years ago - it’s certainly the case in the very wasteful office I am currently working in. Maybe we feel that recycling has solved the problem. Maybe we have the impression that the ‘paperless office’ is reality, and that, because we send hardly any faxes and letters but use emails instead nowadays, we are using less paper. Maybe we think that enough trees are being planted elsewhere to compensate for those that are cut down to make paper.

Only it’s not as simple as that. Demand for paper continues to increase, so we are cutting down more and more trees. The manufacture of paper also uses water, chemicals and energy. On average, only 50% of paper used is likely to be recycled, and huge amounts still end up in landfills or even being incinerated. Paper is bad for the environment.

What’s more, the famous ‘paperless office’ is, in my experience, a myth. Email is such an easy form of communication, that we send more and more of them…… and then we PRINT THEM OUT! We produce beautiful powerpoint presentations that look great on screen and then we PRINT THEM OUT IN BLACK AND WHITE! Our screens are bigger and better, but to check our documents we PRINT THEM OUT! In many countries, the law still requires HARD COPIES of invoices. We continue to generate reams and reams of paper in a totally inefficient and unnecessary manner.

And at home, its not much better. Junk mail….. need I say more? Bank statements, credit card bills, phone bills, utilities bills, KITCHEN ROLL (sorry, I’m in a mood for capital letters today), useless receipts, product instructions in 10 languages taking up 10 times the paper.

Maybe it is possible to find a way to produce all the paper we need combining new and recycled paper, whilst maintaining the number of trees globally, although I doubt it. But is that the point? If we’re not producing CO2 by killing trees, we’re doing so by producing paper, burning paper, or letting it decompose. It all counts.

And with a little effort, just a little effort, we can make a dent in this problem, both at home and at work. At home this will save us time and money. At work it will make our businesses more profitable. In all cases it will reduce CO2 and save energy.

Here are my tips for using less paper - there are of course many variations:

At work

1. Only print if you really need to. Just ask yourself the question each time you think about printing a document.
2. If you need to print, why not print on both sides of each sheet of paper? Most printers have this function nowadays.
3. If you are printing a word document for internal use, why not print two pages on each page? Again most modern printers have this function.
4. If you are printing a powerpoint presntation for internal use / review, print several slides per page. Up to 6 is in general perfectly readable.
5. If you have a pda that you synchronise with your pc and the screen is big enough, why not take the email or document with you and view it on your pda when you go to that meeting?
6. Recycle all office paper. Step one is reusing paper internally if only one side has been printed on. Step two is ensuring that paper is kept and collected for recycling.
7. If your suppliers / clients are willing to work this way, ask to send and receive invoices by email. Same with contracts, although you may need a signed copy somewhere along the line.

At Home

1. Don’t buy and don’t use kitchen roll. It’s so easy, it’s so available, it gets used for everything and nothing, lasts no time, and goes in the bin so gets sent to landfill or incineration. Use soap and a sponge. It’s more hygenic anyway.
2. Join the mail preference service and opt out of receiving junk mail. No more 0% credit card offers!
3. Bank online and ask to stop receiving paper statements. You still have access to all the information you need, but you don’t receive several pieces of paper each month that you probably don’t read anyway. What’s more taking this action contributes to a whole chain of CO2 reduction: the bank buys less paper, and does not use energy to print the statement. The mail service does not use energy in delivering the letter. You don’t even have to send the paper for recycling or worse, you don’t have to put it in the wrong bin and send it for incineration or burning where it generates yet more CO2.
4. Same goes for phone bills. You can now receive this information by email. If credit card companies don’t do it, they should.
5. Recycle all the paper you don’t need. Everyone has a recycling service now, but it’s amazing how much paper still goes in the wrong bin.
6. When you buy a new electrical product, take all unnecessary instructions and put them straight into the recycling bin.
7. If you have a choice, ask NOT to receive a receipt unless you need one.

These are all things that are easy to do, so why not avoid being forced to make much larger concessions in the future, and take action today. I promise it won’t change our day to day lives, but it might help change our future.

A recent article in the Guardian on UK Banks and their attempts to reduce their Carbon Footprints has got me thinking.

One of the ways to reduce our personal CO2 emissions that is attracting more and more attention, is to avoid buying food that has been transported inefficiently from far away, or that has been over-packaged. There is now pressure for supermarkets to provide details on the carbon footprint of a particular producet to help us decide whether or not to purchase it on environmental grounds.

But shouldn’t such information be part of our criteria for every purchase choice we make?

Wouldn’t we prefer to purchase a low-emissions PC from a PC manufacturer that itself has a low carbon footprint, or is at least making active efforts to reduce it? Wouldn’t it be nice to know that the mobile phone company we have chosen generates lower emissions than its competitors? For that matter, how much CO2 does the current government, or each of the political parties generate, and what are they doing to reduce emissions?

As we all know, the Internet is used more and more as a research tool for a huge percentage of purchase decisions, and is often where we make our purchases too. I therefore did a quick ’surfing survey’, and visited a range of sites to see how up front they are about their carbon footprint. I visited the sites for: Lloyds TSB, HSBC, NatWest, Barclays, The Labour Party, The Conservative Party, The Liberal Democrats, Sainsburys, Tesco, Morrisons, Marks & Spencer, Dixons, Ikea, Orange, Vodafone and O2.

Out of all of these sites, only Tesco, Sainsburys and O2 (on their .com site) mention the Environment on their home pages. HSBC is actively promoting their ‘Greener way to bank’ at the moment - it is not possible to know how permanent this link is.

If I was looking to make a purchase decision based on green credentials, I found I would have to look quite hard to find the necessary information, often hidden in the ‘Company’ or ‘Corporate Responsibility’ sections, rather a pity when you consider how hard Marks & Spencer is for instance working to reduce their Carbon footprint. No-one mentions carbon emissions or carbon footprints on their home page, although in the case of Tesco, maybe this is a good idea as they estimate that their UK direct emissions represent 0.3% of total UK emissions!!

I think it’s time to get the ball rolling on an on-line approach for all retailers and suppliers, in fact why not for all web sites? To help us to make an educated purchase decision based on the carbon footprint of a potential supplier, all web sites should have a ‘carbon footprint’ link from their home page to a page that shows their carbon footprint for the last year and details the efforts they are making or have made to reduce their CO2 emissions. I know that the Carbon Trust has set up an accreditation scheme for businesses - a special badge or banner should be provided to be placed on the home pages of accredited sites, especially those that have achieved zero emissions.

In fact, why not take this one step further? The inclusion of this ‘carbon footprint’ page should be included in the W3C recommendations, and, as they wield such power, why can’t Google suggest prioritising sites with a carbon footprint page over those without in their search results?

OK, I’m sure that today there aren’t that many people who worry about a supplier’s energy efficiency before making a purchase. But they should. And if they did, if everyone did, then these same suppliers would make a greater effort to reduce their CO2 emissions. It just could work…

I have just got back from holiday in sunny Ibiza and yes, I flew, but it is only the second flight I have taken this year, and I have done my best by investing further in my preferred carbon replacement scheme - Cool Earth.

Anyway, whilst there I had the opportunity to meet the boss of a large Swiss bank, and we got talking about Reduce Your CO2 and all things to do with cutting our emissions. As you might expect, he is a very wealthy and powerful man, so I was surprised when he told me the following story:

He recently met a friend who told him he was involved in providing consulting services to companies on how to reduce their CO2 emissions. He asked his friend to advise him on what actions his bank should take on a global basis  to reduce their emissions. His friend advised him, as a friend, to forget the whole thing, saying that it was hugely expensive and a complete waste of time and money!

He then asked his friend what he could do to reduce the CO2 emissions generated by his new villa in Ibiza, for instance how he could use solar energy to heat his pool and to power the lights he has all over his garden. Again the advice was that it was not worth the time or money.

Forgive me for being simplistic, but here is a man with money to burn, who wants to cause less harm to the environment, being advised by someone whose business it is to help such people (and I’m supposing turn a profit), not to bother at all.

I hope this is a one-off, but it does worry me. No one should be discourage from doing whatever they can to use less electricity, and no business should be discouraged from putting into practice simple solutions that, if adopted by everyone, would make a huge difference to the speed with which we can have a genuine effect on global CO2 emissions.