No Fence Farming in Romania (May23)
We cycled for over 100 miles and didn’t go through a gate. The Transylvanian landscape was without fences, hedges, or ditches. Travelling by train across Europe to get to Romania the lack of fences signalled an entirely different type of farming. In this case, there were huge ploughed fields or monoculture crops stretching into […]
Is the EU’s Single-Use Plastics (SUP) Directive better for the environment (Feb21)
No. I don’t think it is – at least not all of it. Mid 2021 the EU is planning to introduce the Single-Use Plastics Directive. The key objective appears to be moving business and consumers away from single-use plastics and towards re-usable solutions. On the surface of it, this sounds like a good environmental move. After all, using […]
EU WEEE Regulation is Bonkers (Jan12)
For anyone that doesn’t know, ‘WEEE’ stands for ‘Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment’ – it covers pretty well all products with a battery or a plug. Although it doesn’t actually cover batteries – there’s separate legislation for them, which isn’t very good either. I can’t claim to fully understand how the system works but here’s […]
European Soaps & Detergent Industry Association (Jun08)
“Yourspeech was well appreciated. It was good to have some challenging views.” AISE – European Soaps & Detergent Industry Association, June 2008
EU Bureacratic nightmare… (May07)
It’s been a long time since I’ve done any work for the EU. I hope it will be even longer before I do it again. Having agreed to speak at a conference on ‘Climate Change and Civil Society’ in Brussels, I felt I couldn’t back out. But the administration required to claim back the modicum […]
Luxembourg Finance Industry conference (Mar07)
Luxembourg seemed to be one big building site. From the moment I arrived at the station I was stepping through rubble, being diverted around construction workers and looking at gaping holes in the ground. On my brief tour in the town centre I was also struck by the apparent fecundity of Luxembourg citizens as there […]
A week away (Mar07)
When I say I’m going to be out of the office this week, people assume I’ll be on holiday. Actually this couldn’t be further from the truth. – I’m spending Monday in Brussels advising Procter & Gamble – they have asked me to sit on an Environmental Advisory Panel relating to their cleaning and detergents […]