Julia Hailes MBE

Sustainability Pioneer

Green Mobile Company Lives and Dies – C Mobile (Jun11)

C Mobile promised a greener approach to using your mobile phone.  Their idea was to give a proportion of their profits to community renewable energy projects, to minimise waste, offer re-conditioned hand-sets and recycle phones wherever possible.  Unfortunately they both launched and folded in 2010 and 2011 – they weren’t able to keep up with the big […]

P & G 4th Expert Baby Care Advisory Group (Jun11)

I’ve sat on P&G’s Expert Advisory Panel for Babycare since is started a few years ago.  The fourth meeting was held in June in Geneva and had several new participants.   Most interesting to me was the new focus of looking at nappies and baby care in developing countries.  Also the innovations that are coming through.  […]

Oglivy Earth (Apr11)

OgilvyEarth, O&M’s global sustainability practice, has been named one of the world’s top agencies offering “genuine expertise in sustainability communications,”  I’ve started working with them on an ad hoc basis.  The first project was with Ogivly Earth US with advice on Siemens.

P&G Leaflet on Disposable Nappies (Jan11)

One of the most difficult eco-decisions I’ve had to make is whether to use cloth or disposable nappies.  I chose disposables.  Given that I’m a big campaigner on reducing waste, this might seem surprising.  But my view was that the environmental differences between the two products were not so great – and disposables performed better.  […]

Confessions of a Radical Industrialist (Jan 11)

I’ve just finished reading Ray Anderson’s Confessions of a Radical Industrialist.  It’s the inspirational story of how Ray turned his billion dollar company around to become one of the leading green corporations in the world.  In 1994, when he had what he describes as an ‘epiphany’, he says that Interface was a company ‘so oil intensive you […]

Eco-Sheets – Using Recycled Plastics (Jan11)

In January 2011 I took my son Connor (far right in picture) to see the Eco Sheet factory.  Melinda Watson from the Raw Foundation came too (pictured far left) – and Amanda Barry-Hirst from Greenhouse PR.  Omer Kutluoglu, one of the founders showed us around.   They’re making brilliant use of recycled mixed plastics – turning them into […]

Second Nature Partnership – Advisory Board (Nov10)

South Africans, Charles Perry and Mark Griffiths, co-founded this partnership in 2009.  The philosophy is to make sustainability ‘second nature’.   I’ve worked with them on a few projects and in 2010 they set up an advisory board, which I agreed to sit on.

Citrus Talk (Jul10)

“Many thanks for the brilliant presentation you gave yesterday at Citrus.  You’ll be glad to know that it was the subject of much debate for most of the night – from shock at the waste within both the Armed Forces and the NHS to great debate on exactly whether we get buried, cremated or resomated….”   […]

Judging M&S your green idea competition (May10)

The £100,000 winning prize will need to be spent on greening an organisation of your choice, such as a school or a charity.  The Your Green Idea competition was launched alongside M&S‘s announcement that it aims to become the world’s most sustainable retailer by 2015.  I’ve been asked to be a judge alongside M&S Chairman, Sir Stuart […]