Green Week Exhibition at LCC

Some of the highlights from the evening, the standard was very high.

Final Exhibition

Carbon Dioxide Infographic

What is a carbon footprint?

The term carbon footprint crops up a lot these days. What exactly does it actually mean?

• The Guardian's quick carbon calculator

Footprints carved in wood. Photograph: Reinhard Krause/Reuters

Carbon footprint is a horribly abused phrase, so it's worth spelling out exactly what it means.

When talking about climate change, footprint is a metaphor for the total impact that something has. And carbon is a shorthand for all the different greenhouse gases that contribue to global warming.

The term carbon footprint, therefore, is a shorthand to describe the best estimate that we can get of the full climate change impact of something. That something could be anything – an activity, an item, a lifestyle, a company, a country or even the whole world.

CO2e? What's that?

Man-made climate change, or global warming, is caused by the release of certain types of gas into the atmosphere. The dominant man-made greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide (CO2), which is emitted whenever we burn fossil fuels in homes, factories or power stations. But other greenhouse gases are also important. Methane (CH4), for example, which is emitted mainly by agriculture and landfill sites, is 25 times more potent per kilogram than CO2. Even more potent but emitted in smaller quantities are nitrous oxide (N2O), which is about 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide and released mainly from industrial processes and farming, and refrigerant gases, which are typically several thousand times more potent than CO2.

In the UK, the total impact on the climate breaks down like this: carbon dioxide (86%), methane (7%), nitrous oxide (6%) and refrigerant gases (1%). Given that a single item or activity can cause multiple different greenhouse gases to be emitted, each in different quantities, a carbon footprint if written out in full could get pretty confusing. To avoid this, the convention is to express a carbon footprint in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent or CO2e. This means the total climate change impact of all the greenhouse gases caused by an item or activity rolled into one and expressed in terms of the amount of carbon dioxide that would have the same impact.

Essay by Nathan Jurgenson for the New Inquiry

An interesting essay commenting on the effects of digital information on our lives. 'To spend a moment of boredom without a glowing screen'

The IRL Fetish

By NATHAN JURGENSON

The deep infiltration of digital information into our lives has created a fervor around the supposed corresponding loss of logged-off real life. Each moment is oversaturated with digital potential: Texts, status updates, photos, check-ins, tweets, and emails are just a few taps away or pushed directly to your buzzing and chirping pocket computer — anachronistically still called a “phone.” Count the folks using their devices on the train or bus or walking down the sidewalk or, worse, crossing the street oblivious to drivers who themselves are bouncing back and forth between the road and their digital distractor. Hanging out with friends and family increasingly means also hanging out with their technology. While eating, defecating, or resting in our beds, we are rubbing on our glowing rectangles, seemingly lost within the infostream.

If the hardware has spread virally within physical space, the software is even more insidious. Thoughts, ideas, locations, photos, identities, friendships, memories, politics, and almost everything else are finding their way to social media. The power of “social” is not just a matter of the time we’re spending checking apps, nor is it the data that for-profit media companies are gathering; it’s also that the logic of the sites has burrowed far into our consciousness. Smartphones and their symbiotic social media give us a surfeit of options to tell the truth about who we are and what we are doing, and an audience for it all, reshaping norms around mass exhibitionism and voyeurism. Twitter lips and Instagram eyes: Social media is part of ourselves; the Facebook source code becomes our own code.

Predictably, this intrusion has created a backlash. Critics complain that people, especially young people, have logged on and checked out. Given the addictive appeal of the infostream, the masses have traded real connection for the virtual. They have traded human friends for Facebook friends. Instead of being present at the dinner table, they are lost in their phones. Writer after writer laments the loss of a sense of disconnection, of boredom (now redeemed as a respite from anxious info-cravings), of sensory peace in this age of always-on information, omnipresent illuminated screens, and near-constant self-documentation. 

To read more of this essay -http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-irl-fetish/

Natalie Bhinder

London Underground goes greener by signing up to 10:10 campaign

Liverpool Street, Victoria and Bank among 10 tube stations to cut carbon emissions through energy efficiency measures

Scenes of passengers travelling on the London Underground, the down escalator. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

Ashleigh Searle

Squeezing on to a packed underground train in the morning rush may not be everyone's idea of green living, but the tube has today committed to make 10 of its most high-profile stations greener by cutting their carbon emissions.

London Underground has signed up the 10 stations, plus its headquarters, to the 10:10 climate change campaign which commits them to a 10% cut in carbon emissions over the next 12 months. The stations, including Liverpool Street, Victoria and Bank will reduce energy use by using lighting and escalators more efficiently, for example.

Since launching in September last year, over 70,000 individuals have signed up to the 10:10 campaign, as well as major companies such as Royal Mail and B&Q. Shortly after the election, the coalition government committed central government to a 10% emissions cut.

Howard Collins, London Underground's chief operating officer, said: "Despite the Tube being one of the most environmentally friendly ways to travel in London, more can still be done to help protect the environment. Signing up to 10:10 is just one of the ways in which London Underground is changing the way we operate, helping to make London a greener and more pleasant place to live."

The underground has already cut emissions by 5,500 tonnes in the last three years by measures such as installing energy efficient lighting and fitting the Northern Line's control centre with a "green" energy efficient roof.

The 10:10 pledge means extra changes at some of the largest on the network - Bank, Liverpool Street, Moorgate, Earls Court, Holborn, Charing Cross, Green Park, Knightsbridge, Hyde Park Corner and Victoria. Each station will have an environment champion who along with overseeing the progress of the campaign will also encourage staff to sign up to 10:10 and make the changes in their own lives.

The underground will implement a range of energy-saving initiatives including switching off escalators during non-peak times and turning off unnecessary lighting. In total, the measures should save around £70,000 and over 500 tonnes of CO2 per year. Overall, the tube network is responsible for around 640,000 tonnes of CO2 annually.

Another measure being deployed on the network is regenerative breaking, which feeds electric power back into the electricity supply that would otherwise be lost as the trains slow down. This provides a 25% saving of electricity and will be introduced to more services during the campaign. London Underground also has a long-term aim to source at least 30% of its electricity from low and zero carbon sources of electricity.

"The London Underground is a crucial part of life in London," said campaign director Eugenie Harvey. "Ferrying millions of people around the city every day. We're so happy to have them on board – reducing carbon emissions is, literally, as everyday as catching the Tube."

• This article originally stated that London Underground would make £700,000 of savings. This has been corrected to £70,000.

Natalie Bhinder

Festivals going green?

Festivals like Glastonbury and Leeds need to curb their carbon emissions

They may promote green values, but summer music gatherings are often the biggest culprits in terms of carbon emissions and waste

One of the many tents left abandoned on a litter-strewn Worthy Farm following the 2009 Glastonbury Festival. Photograph: Martin Godwin

For an event that usually takes place in a field, the average festival is far from a green affair. Emissions from travel to and from the sites, the mounds of litter and those diesel-guzzling on-site generators mean that, while a lot of major festivals promote a green ethos in principle, their actual carbon footprints tell a different story.

Oxford university researchers have analysed the environmental impact of 500 UK festivals and found that, combined, they emit around 84,000 tonnes of CO2 a year. Research from campaign group A Greener Festival shows that the green issue is a high priority for some music fans, with 48% of respondents saying they would pay more for greener events and 36% stating that green issues were an important factor when buying a ticket. So what are festivals doing to respond to this demand?

The experts are in unanimous agreement when assessing which part of a festival has the biggest impact on the environment: transport. According to Julie's Bicycle, an organisation set up to help the music industry reduce its carbon footprint, moving people to and from festivals contributes 68% of the festival sector's total emissions – around 45,000 tonnes.

In response to this, lift-sharing initiatives such as the Glastonbury Car Share Schemehave been set up across most of the major festivals. Latitude places a strong emphasis on sustainable travel by offering people who lift-share the chance to win a VIP upgrade. However, it is clear that festivals still need to do more to make public transport to the sites widely available, and to encourage people to use it.

A major headache for the big festivals is the question of how to deal with the major side-effect of having a party with a 100,000-strong guest list – namely, the heaps of litter. Most provide recycling facilities on-site that make it easy for people to separate their rubbish. Interestingly, Festival Republic – responsible for promoting Glastonbury, Reading and Latitude – tailors its wast-management schemes to different audiences, so that younger crowds like those seen at Reading and Leeds are offered incentives to dispose of rubbish properly in the form of beer and money. Forty nine per cent of the rubbish at Glastonbury was recycled last year through the use of clearly labelled recycling facilities. Even so, an army of litter pickers is deployed every year for a week following the festival to clean up after messy guests, proving that there is still much to be done.

A growing trend among some festivals is clean energy generation. The Croissant Neuf Summer Party in Wales runs entirely on power from renewable sources, but larger festivals will struggle to generate enough electricity to power themselves in this way.

One thing is for sure: there is a world of difference between possessing good green intentions and having the resources and organisation to put them into practice – especially for the larger gatherings. Ben Challis, from A Greener Festival, says: "We have noticed that the smaller festivals are better for dealing with environmental concerns but the big festivals do have a lot to consider. A proposal to put recycling bins everywhere could clash with health and safety or crowd regulations, for example."

In 2009, Bestival and the Isle of Wight were the only big UK festivals to receive an "outstanding" award from A Greener Festival for their commitments to reducing their impact on the environment. Let's hope that more of the big festivals can clean up their acts this year.

Love your tent is a campaign created by Eco-Action Partnership in association with A Greener Festival and the Isle of Wight Festival.

The campaign is designed to bond people with their portable homes and encourage them to reuse instead of discarding them. Left behind tents causes a huge problem for many festivals each year – not to mention the environmental impact.

Natalie Bhinder