My eco-renovated flat is available for rent (Apr12)
Eco-renovated flat – Main room – Jan12 I bought my flat, near Portobello Road, in 1986, with my sister. We shared it for the first couple of years, before she got married and moved out. We re-painted and re-carpeted it throughout but didn’t do much more than that. The kitchen was quite dated even […]
Why aren’t restaurants more sustainable? (Oct11)
Bluefin tuna is one of the most endangered species on the planet but it’s still being served in London restaurants. Monkfish is not very sustainable either – if it’s on the menu, ask the restaurant about their sustainable fish policies The Hive Beach Cafe in Burton Bradstock is one of the first […]
National Trust – Forever for Everyone Sustainable Business Workshop (Jul11)
What a brilliant slogan – Forever For Everyone. I was one of two outside speakers at the National Trust’s sustainability workshop, which was looking at how to make this slogan mean something across the whole organisation. Whilst the Trust has superb examples of sustainability in practice, they’re looking at what they might do across the whole […]
Newcastle University MBA Sustainability Challenge (Jun11)
Procter & Gamble recommended me for the inaugural public lecture at Newcastle University’s Sustainable Business Week, where MBA Business students from Scotland and Northern took part in a competition. The central theme was about the role of consumers in greening business. The students had to respond to a question posed by P&G – ‘How can our company influence […]
Futerra Sustainability Communications (Jun11)
I went to give a presentation to the team at Futerra. It made me reflect on the early years of SustainAbility – the organisations are remarkably similar. And the most surprising similarity of all was that we both came up with the same core objectives. When we set up SustainAbility, in the late 1980s, John Elkington and I described these as […]
EDF Energy – Somerset Green Schools (Jun11)
There were five finalists in ¶EDF’s Somerset Green Schools Challenge. And prize money of £15,000 to be shared depending on what the judges considered to be the best project. Crispin School from Street were well deserved winners of £10,000 – they’d really thought about the issues and had them costed out too. Fellow ‘dragons’ or judges […]
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.
The Secret Life of Stuff (Jan11)
Julie Hill thought I’d be uncomfortable with her view that we’ve had enough of green consumerism, where people are left to choose to be green or not. What we want, she says, is more ‘choice editing’. That effectively means that businesses and retailers only offer products that have a minimal environmental impact or are deemed to […]
Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan (Nov10)
There was a lot of talk about de-coupling. But they weren’t referring to what people get up to in laybys. It was a Unilever inspired session on sustainable consumption, which I watched as a webcast. De-coupling in this case was all about ‘green growth’ – whether it’s possible for a company to both increase profits […]
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.
Expert advisory panel on detergents (Fabric & Homecare) 2007-2010
The first meeting of the Fabric & Homecare expert advisory committee took place in March 2007, at a splendid location outside of Brussels. The idea is to provide an external perspective and help identify emerging environmental trends. Although the focus is on detergents and cleaning products, we have had presentations from other sectors within P&G, […]
Yarlington Housing (Mar10)
I was the key note speaker at the Yarlington Housing Annual meeting, held in Yeovil, which is close to where I live. The organisation had a number of sustainability initiatives but hadn’t yet managed to fully integrate the principles into their housing developments.