Environmental Sustainability and The Castle

Carpet tiles

2011-12-15T02:56:00.000-08:00

We have bought new carpet tiles from a manufacturer who are paying more than lipservice to sustainability.

Interfaceflor are a company who have revolutionised every aspect of their business to reduce their environmental impact. This journey began in 1994 with their chairman Ray Anderson having an epiphany about the environmental and social repercussions of the industrial processes within manufacturing and setting a Mission Zero for Interface.

To achieve Mission Zero, they have set out clear goals in seven key areas:
1. Eliminate wasteEliminating the concept of waste, not just incrementally reducing it.
2. Benign emissionsFocusing on the elimination of waste emissions. Eliminating waste streams that have negative or toxic effects on natural systems.
3. Renewable energyReducing our energy demands while substituting non-renewable sources with renewable ones like solar, wind and landfill gas.
4. Closing the loopRedesigning processes and products so that all resources used can be recovered and reused, closing the technical or natural loop.
5. Resource-efficient transportationTransporting all of our people and products efficiently and with minimal waste and emissions. This includes plant location, logistics and commuting.
6. Sensitising stakeholdersCreating a community within and around InterfaceFLOR that understands the functioning of natural systems and our impact on them.
7. Redesign commerceRedesigning commerce to focus on the delivery of service and value instead of material. Encouraging external organisations to create policies and market incentives.

This ezine about their progress towards environmental sustainability makes an interesting read:
http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/1ee2ab6c#/1ee2ab6c/1

Zero Waste to Landfill- one step closer!

2011-12-15T02:39:00.000-08:00

We're now one step closer to our goal of being zero waste to landfill! Thanks to our new waste contractor Bywaters, we've been able to reduce waste to landfill from one 1100L bin per week to one 240L (household size) bin.

Bywaters, using their state of the art Materials Recovery Facility in Bow are able to collect and stream almost all other waste. Prior to starting our new contract we sent two of our managers to check out the facilities. They were very impressed and satisfied that nearly everything that gets sent to the MRF does indeed get recycled.

You can watch a video of the MRF in action here.
Finger tape and cloth (gaffa) tape seem to be the only sticking point remaining....

Castle Garden Summer 2011

2011-10-06T04:56:00.001-07:00

This summer was our second growing season and this year we had more areas of the garden created, more produce, more flowers, more herbs and more wildlife and people!

Our resident medicinal horticulturalist Quinn, created more amazing herb gardens at the front and planted a lavender hedge. Min our terracing queen, got stuck in on the hill and terraced her way down filling it with bee and human loving herbs and flowers, which she has been maintaining and harvesting from all summer.

In August, we had our first harvest of honey. (about 33 jars which all sold out within a few days!)

Barry, our loyal garden soldier researched, designed, dug and created our pond, which within a few days attracted some of the Castle wildlife.

We had a go at growing hops. We grew 1.5 metre square of wheat and it was scythed, threshed and winnowed, and we got 1.17kg of wheat.

Our young fruit trees and shrubs started to produce a little bit of fruit, and we ate raspberries, strawberries, apricots, apples, pears, plums and figs!

The Castle Cafe team have been harvesting and using green leaf salads, tomatoes, cucumbers, squashes, peppers, onions, garlic, carrot, beetroot, chard, sweetcorn, courguettes, lots and lots of french beans (purple and yellow ones) and herbal teas. There was lots of grass mowing using austrian scythes. We had more castle staff come out to use and work in the garden, turning compost, harvesting, weeding, watering, making bunting and decorations for the garden party. We've been doing some outdoor cooking on our rocket stove and made tempura and chips from garden vegetables. We've also been busy harvesting seeds and herbs to dry for use in the cafe over winter.

All in all it has been a very productive summer and thanks to everyone who took part to make it look even more amazing this year!

Environmental Report 2010

2011-09-14T09:37:00.001-07:00

Each year, we take on the mammoth task of looking at the environmental impact of everything we do - from hosting parties to buying loo roll and everything in between. You can download a copy of our report here. Be warned it's a big piece of work.
If you don't want to go through it all, here are the main points:
- Our carbon footprint has gone down slightly by about 6% to 117.09 tonnes CO2e. This isn't the dramatic decrease we'd hoped for, but we're still laying the groundwork for the big changes to come.
- In 2010 we opened The Castle Shop. This not only has diversified our business and improved the customer experience, but it's also given us a chance to engage with suppliers about sustainability.
- 2010 was also our first full year with the Castle Garden. Highlights include a bountiful summer crop, two beehives, community mini-plots, a huge composter, a swale to filter grey water and lots of digging!
- We've installed electricity monitors on all our circuits so we can see exactly where our electricity is being used.

If you want more- just download the report.

Happy reading,

Audrey

All talk

2011-06-28T07:22:00.001-07:00

Back in April I was asked to go to the annual Innovation for Extremes Conference (Innov-ex) to make a presentation about our journey towards sustainability at The Castle. The conference is held at Lancaster University Business School and was originally set up to promote innovation in the textiles field of outdoor equipment manufacture. However, in the last few years the focus of the conference has shifted to encompass sustainability as well.

You can see my presentation “Committing to sustainability” on their web site http://innovation-for-extremes.net/blog/steve-taylor-castle-climbing-committing-to-sustainability. The whole conference was very interesting. It was great to see what other groundbreaking companies are doing on the sustainability front.

My presentation was very well received and I’ve had a lot of people contact me to find out more. One of them, Sarah Howcroft from Rohantime, asked me to do an interview for her readers and you can see the results here http://rohantime.com/18920/the-greenest-line/
I think the piece is quite a good summary of where we started and how the story has progressed so far.

Spring 2011 in the Castle Garden

2011-06-20T15:00:00.000-07:00

This is our second Spring since the Castle Garden project began, and what a warm welcome it was after such another snowy icy winter. On top of that we have been busy making more and more developments to the garden and trying out new things. The first one being this lovely forced rhubarb. In January we put an empty black bin over the rhubarb plant with a brick to weigh it down. In early March we took the bin off and saw this lovely pink tender rhubarb. You usually find it sold in the shops around this time - the famous forced Yorkshire rhubarb grown in huge forcing sheds. You can only keep forcing them for so long otherwise you really stress the plant. The Castle cafe harvested them and made lovely cakes and crumbles.

The Forest Garden
We spent all winter clearing the ground, for the forest garden and at the beginning of March we finally got in all the trees! We planted 1 mulberry, 2 sweet chestnuts, 6 hazels (our nuttery, 3 apple trees, 2 pear, 2 cherry and 2 plum trees, and we already started to interplant with some nitrogen fixers such as eleagnus (which produces edible berries) Siberian Pea tree, some herbs rhubarb, berries and flowers. We also planted a raspberry row and a mini vineyard for some future wine making. This garden will be an ongoing project and will develop and evolve over the next few seasons with more shrubs, flowers herbs, along with the constant mulching and battling with the bind weed and brambles!

Our Apricot tree
This is the second year of the Apricot tree we are growing by the south facing wall at the back. It's one of the first trees to blossom, plus it's amazing to see a few weeks later fruit forming! Other trees we are experimenting with to benefit from this warm area, are a couple of fig trees, grape vines and a kiwi.

Our bees swarming
Our bees swarmed this year from both hives. This was very exciting to see! Swarming is what they naturally do every year when their colony gets bigger. The old queen stays in the hive and the new queen goes out with some of the worker bees to go out to look for a new home. (several thousand of them!) This is when the beekeeper would come to catch the swarm and house them in a new hive. The bees attached themselves to a branch in our Indian bean tree. (they do this while the scout bees are out looking for their new home). Swarming is not too much to be afraid of as the bees are not as defensive at this time. They don't have their brood or honey to protect. The first swarm went into a new hive here and the second one was collected by my friend Sean at Organiclea, who practices natural beekeeping and uses Warre hives.
We will be getting our own Warre hive and a Top bar hive, which have been hand made with the help of two Castle staff, Kerry Simmons and Rosa Gonzalez who are working with Tom Trimmins. We will be demonstrating and learning about natural beekeeping methods. More to come about this soon! More info about it on the biobees website and Natural beekeeping Trust .

Castle Staff and the Garden
Leah who works in the office in accounts has been growing microgreens and sprouted seeds. She has sprouting towers, microgreens all spread out all over the shelves and on the windowsills in the office. She spends most of her time here sitting at the desk and working on the computer, and I'm amazed at what she can produce from her desk! It goes to the cafe on a weekly basis, which is just a few metres outside the office door.
In March, when the staff had a full day workshop day, the last hour and half was spent doing a garden activity. Potato boxes made from parts of climbing wall inside - made on our staff workshop day, since then James from the shop - our potato monitor - watering and earthing them up! Two of the session stafff Justin and Rachel sowed some wheat as part of The Real Bread Campaign's "bake your lawn" . Rosa from the shop has been keeping on top of watering during the very dry period we had and our new receptionist Christina, has come out to help, and is our tomato pinching out monitor. Min's terraced bee garden and herb garden is starting to look amazing, and the summer will see most of the flowers in a beautiful full bloom!
The cafe staff have been getting involved too picking salads, drying herbs and Kip got stuck in helping Barry with the big pond dig.

What next in the garden?
This summer we hope to be harvesting more from our new cafe plots, watch our new forest garden grow, harvest some fruit, create a wildlife pond, make new seating areas and outdoor exercise areas, create more wildflower areas, and have a garden party and enjoy the produce!

Fancy owning a slice of a community farm?

2011-05-31T04:10:00.000-07:00

We've just pledged to buy a share in a new community farm in South London. Have a look at what they're trying to do here: http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=bd146b8b8f2d241f66bb818f7&id=8f162655f5

They can only go ahead and buy the land if they get enough people who can pledge £1,500 for a share in the farm. If you fancy getting involved let them know quickly. They don't have much time to make a bid!

The Garden Project

2011-04-04T08:18:00.000-07:00

2011-03-21T07:17:00.000-07:00

In 2010 The Castle signed up to the Mayor of London's Green Procurement Code in a further bid to commit ourselves to reducing the effects of our activities on the environment.

About the MGPC
"The combined purchasing power of London based companies has huge potential to positively tackle the capital's waste problem, reduce carbon emissions and contribute to the Mayor of London's target of cutting the capital's carbon emissions by 60% by 2025".

The Mayor of London's Green Procurement Code is a support service providing practical advice and online resources to help embed green purchasing into all aspects of an organisation, including sourcing green products.

MGPC Achievements
Since October 2007 members of the Green Procurement Code have spent over £742 million on green products and diverted 191,131 tonnes of waste from landfill. This represents a saving of 78,863 tonnes of CO2 emissions. Our signatories also make a valuable contribution to the green economy - reported purchases from over 680 suppliers have supported more than 1300 jobs.

Why Buy Green?

To help the environment
Help combat climate change - even one small office can emit three to five tonnes of carbon dioxide a year
Conserve natural resources
Create markets for recycled materials - recycling becomes a redundant exercise if the markets for recycled products do not exist
Send less rubbish to landfill sites - landfill sites, nationally, are responsible for emitting over 700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.
Reduce costs - energy efficient appliances are cheaper to run and water efficient products offer ongoing cost savings on water bills.
Businesses will find waste costs rising as dependence on landfill increasingly attracts financial penalties and the costs of regulation and waste disposal are passed to waste producers.

Progress Review
We were asked to produce evidence of our green procurement through the completion of an online self-assessment tool. As this task fell to me, I was relatively lucky (and relieved) to have a lot of the information at my fingertips as it had already been collated for the 2009 Environmental Report.
Once this was completed we then just had the audit to get through and a couple of weeks wait to find out how well we'd done in carrying out the 'green' procedures we'd put in place.

Results
I'm pleased to say we were awarded GOLD in recognition for all our hard work in the last few years! And we are hoping to continue to build on this success in 2011 with a number of plans in the pipeline which we'll let you know about in due course.

Winter 2011 in the Garden...

2011-03-10T09:50:00.000-08:00

We had a much colder and snowier winter than we had expected, and we've done a little bit of hibernating over winter, (we even ended up having our mulled wine for winter solstice indoors!) However it was a very productive hibernation, with lots of plans made for other areas of the garden - more fruit trees (start of the forest garden), more vegetable beds and of course shrubberies!

I'd also like to take this opportunity to welcome the wonderful Min to the garden team, she bravely joined us just at the start of winter. Min had a taste of some garden work last summer being the first to take up the paid staff work hours in the garden. (She spent a lot of time working reception indoors) She took to the outdoors naturally, and after her return from her trip to New Zealand, she jumped at the opportunity to come and work in the garden two days a week helping develop and communicate the project as well as muck in and do lots of other practical jobs in the garden. She is currently working on the challenging steep terrain in front of the bees designing and developing the bee garden, and is also creating a mini terraced herb/edible flower garden behind the hives - all creatively using thrown away materials, unwanted wood and even empty wine bottles! She has been a great help over winter keeping all the garden team warm every volunteer day, by keeping a bonfire alight, thank you Min! Watch this space for more news from her.

Wassail ... and Cider drinking
We ended up have a great winter celebration despite the cold and snow and had a workday and wassail in February with the biggest and fiercest bonfire we've had so far. It was such a windy day, all the messy woodpile disappeared in one night, along with half of our home made cider made last year during the Castle Hackney scrumping weekend!) We had new Castle climber volunteers turn up during the day who helped dig big holes in the heavy clay soil for the fruit and nut trees which will go in on 12th March. Our regular volunteers Barry and Tom were there as usual helping us and keeping us entertained. Barry's famous BBQ and his culinary delights and Tom, leading us in a wassail poem and setting off a firework!We had a great reggae style Wassail song this year by Twelvie and Kerry of the The Fellows (cover of the Barrington Levey song "black roses" words changed to "apple tree in my garden.. you got to keep and care for it, you got to wassail it..

Signs of spring...... last October we sown lots of bulbs in the garden, here they are making appearances!

Tapwater.org

2011-02-28T07:33:00.000-08:00

We are now a filling station for Tapwater.org!

Who or what is tapwater.org? Tapwater.org is an organisation that encourages local businesses to join the tap water revolution and become free filling stations. Their website http://www.tapwater.org/ can point you in the direction of the closest station in your area.

So what is a filling station you may ask? A filling station is a cafe, shop, pub....or climbing wall.....who provides tap water for free. Any member of the public can come in to the centre (or any filling station) with a re-useable bottle and fill it with tap water at no charge.

As the Castle already has drinking water facilities on site in the shape of our water fountains dotted around the centre, it was very easy for us to just join up and we're more than happy to provide both our customers and the general public with free tap water. And we got a free sticker!

What's the point? In an age where buying bottled water has become the culture, maybe it's time to start asking ourselves why. Why do we feel the need to buy a product which is essentially free in every home? We've been brainwashed (excuse the pun) into thinking tap water tastes bad, is full of impurities and is not good for us. Amazing then to find out a lot of bottled water comes from the same source......

If you have a minute or two to spare, please take a look at 'The Story of Bottled Water'....it's quite an eye opener! http://storyofstuff.org/bottledwater/

We can all reduce both our spending and carbon footprint by switching to tap water and by creating these filling stations we can hopefully encourage people to take advantage of this free service and stop buying bottled water.

We all love a fact or two...so here you go!

Did you know?

Bottled water costs 500 times more than tap water
1 in 5 people are too embarrassed to ask for tap water in a restaurant
The average person drinks 37.6 litres of bottled water a year
2.7 million tonnes of plastic are used to bottle water each year
22 million tonnes of bottled water are transferred from country to country each year
3 our of 4 plastic water bottles are still not recycled
Bottled water has a carbon footprint up to 300 times higher than tap water

Autumn in the Garden

2010-12-09T06:27:00.000-08:00

We started the Autumn season with a bulb planting day. With the help of one of the Castle's new members of staff, Claire Lee. We took the advantage of of the last of the sunny warm October days and planted bluebells, snowdrops, crocuses, wild garlic and wild daffodils under the big trees in the garden. We'll hopefully see some lovely colourful flowers pop up from next Spring! These early flowers will certainly keep the bees happy.

We also had the pleasure seeing these lovely jerusalem artichoke flowers which were in full flower all October! We harvested plenty of them at the end of November, some given to volunteers and the rest to the Castle cafe. Sam and Giusi, made great use of them and served them up roasted with potatoes and rosemary.

Around this time of year, while working around the garden we found ourselves unintentionally finding hibernating wildlife, so we made sure to make an range of habitats, such as our "sleazy bug hotels", "lacewing hotel" and a "habitat mansion" made with pallets stacked on top of each other, inspired by the London Wildlife Trust.

The Stumpery

One of my favourite habitats to create is the Victorian inspired "stumpery". (To carry on the theme of the castle being originally Victorian building and grounds). We have lots of dead tree stumps with roots, and old logs from when we had the sycamores pulled out. We half buried them in the ground and planted ferns, woodland plants and bulbs around them. We hope to attract some stag beetles! Other Victoiran features to look out for in our garden is the "figgery", "shrubbery" and the "mushroomery"

On our early November workday some young climbers came out and helped make our "lacewing hotels" out of used plastic bottles.

The Swale

Barry leading the way with our swale on the hill! Of course it took him no time to complete, with the help of a few extra strong hands.

We have nearly completed the swale. This part of the project is led by the CEO of the Castle, Steve Taylor. This swale is basically a ditch dug along the contours of the hill at the back of the castle, and it's purpose is for water from the mens changing rooms, (from the sinks and showers) to run through it and adding extra infiltration into the soil. We will be planting lots of trees and shrubs in the mounds in front of the swale. We hope to get this planted and started by the start of Spring next year, so watch this space!

Our November bonfire celebration

Tom Trimmins and his wickerman, which he later was set alight in the HUGE bonfire, along with all our effigies....

winter vegetables from the mini plotters and wild mushrooms found in the garden.

NEXT in the garden - we'll be battling it out through the icy cold winter planning, preparing, creating the new forest garden area, and we'll be having a Winter solstice celebration with a bonfire on the 19th December, click here for details.

Castle Apple and Pear Scrumping weekend

2010-10-21T11:22:00.000-07:00

On weekend of the 9th and 10th October, as part of the 10:10 global action on climate change we decided to do an apple themed event and we joined in with the local team hackney harvest to go round the local area to pick apples and pears that would usually go to waste. The hackney harvest team started the project this year, a there is so much fruit going to waste from local fruit trees which are mainly in people's back gardens and also many in public places. Some of the trees are really big, and difficult to harvest from, and sometimes the tree owners they end up with such an abundance of fruit that it is too much to deal with, or they don't even pick them at all and see the dropping fruit as a nuisance.

Thanks to the inspiration from projects such as the scrumping project in Walthamstow - who started this idea a few years ago, and abundance project in sheffield. This is a great way to get this fruit put to good use in the local community. The fruit gets picked (with permission from the owners!) some fruit going back to the owners, and the rest is distributed to community groups as fruit or as juice, desserts, chutneys, jams and cider!

Getting climbers up the trees!

As a first year trial, I thought it would be a great idea to get some Castle climbers involved, using their skills and strength to climb tall fruit trees to shake the high branches which wouldn't usually be reached! We went to a back garden of someone I know on Allerton Road (a friend who I happen to pass while he was picking up his growing commmunities veg bag from the Castle pick up point). He told me he had a huge pear tree completely covered in fruit. We went there in full force, couple of climbers up the tree, and it was raining pears! Think we ended up with about 80kg of pears! And that is from one tree!
The next day, I borrowed an apple press, and we spent the day pressing the fruit into juice, making apple fritters, and playing some apple games, and we even sang a song, thanks to Robert Malies who turned up with his guitar and made up a song for us to sing along to! (you can here it here) It was lovely and sunny, and some of the Sunday climbers who came to climb with their children, kept on finding them out in the garden with us helping us press juice, trying the apple fritters and trying the apple bobbing! Some of the juice was drunk by us all, then some sold in the Castle cafe, some made into apple cakes (thanks to Sam in the cafe) and some, (well most of it) is fermenting somewhere in the castle, slowing turning into cider! To be drunk on after a very hard cold workday in the garden.

Next year, there is definitely potential to get tons more fruit! After chatting to a few locals about their big fruit trees,it seems they are more than happy to let us in their back gardens to climb and harvest their unwanted fruit. See more photos here

Sustainability Policy - v2.0

2010-09-21T08:46:00.001-07:00

Well, it's not the most fun or glamorous job, but a key part of a proper environmental management system is to take a step back and review the general policy and aims. Why are we doing this? What exactly are we trying to do?

So version 2.0 of our Sustainability Policy has been proposed, debated and finally approved. You can download a copy of our new policy here. Below I've also listed some of the changes we've made and why we've made them.

1. Changing the title from 'Environmental Policy' to 'Sustainability Policy'. This is more accurate because our policy is based on the business being sustainable in an economic, social and, of course, ecological sense.

2. Including the shop. We've taken over the management of the climbing shop at The Castle (formerly Urban Rock) and we will be holding the shop to the same high standards that we have for the rest of the centre. There's a lot of research yet to be done in the way of reducing environmental impact in the climbing industry, but we've opened up this dialogue with our suppliers and we're excited to hear that many of them are already waking up and making changes to the way they do business, the materials they use and the waste the produce.

3. Revising our water policy. Our first policy stated that we wanted to be 'water neutral'. What does this mean? Well, we weren't sure either. Of course, we want to reduce water consumption, but we also don't want to have to use up more energy to keep harvested rainwater to a drinking standard. We commissioned a paper on this subject from our environmental consultant - Es Tresider- and he laid out some facts for us. We'd need to treat and ciruclate water every 24 hours for it to be adequate for drinking and washing. Weighing this up against the relative efficiency of the mains water system, we concluded that it would be more reasonable for us to reformulate our water aims. So, we're going to come off the mains water for the garden and use rainwater collected from the roofs and greywater from the centre. With the rest of the centre, our focus will remain to reduce our water consumption. To this end, we have put in waterless urinals and we will be building composting toilets in the next 2-5 years.

4. Developing a garden based on permaculture principles to grow food for the cafe. Those of you following our Sustainability Blog will probably be surprised to find out that the garden - undoubtedly one of our biggest projects- wasn't even mentioned in our original Environmental Policy! We couldn't leave it out, so it's there- loud and proud- in version 2. Although we are still limited by our lack of a proper kitchen, but our Cafe Manager, Thomas, has delighted with roasted potatoes, salads, gratins and all kinds of other treats fresh from the garden.

5. The final change is that the Statement of Intent is signed by all of our Core Management Team in addition to the Board of Directors- showing real commitment from the top to making this happen.

Hope you'll find this inspiring, interesting or even intriguing!

Best Regards,

Audrey Seguy
Managing Director

Castle Garden Summer 2010

2010-09-16T04:24:00.000-07:00

What a great summer we've had in the Castle Garden. Despite the drought in July, then the sudden amount of rain in August, food and flowers have been growing in many exposed as well as hidden corners of the garden!

The Castle staff and volunteers have been great in keeping on top of the watering. The volutneers have been also really helpful in constantly pulling out the vigourous weeds growing around the new small hedge plants and fruit plants, helping in giving the poor young things a chance to establish in their first year, and not

In the garden over summer, the jobs are mainly weeding and harvesting, but on top of this we've made sure to relax, have a few celebration bbq's and enjoy the lovely the garden has produced.

The Castle Cafe have been serving up lots of fresh mixed leaf salad. They've been harvesting every other day. They have not had buy any all summer. This goes for the cucumbers as well. (I over planted and we've had a healthy glut!)

They've been making the most of other goodies from the garden too, and included them in some great seasonal specialities. Roast courguettes, steamed cavolo nero in toasted sandwiches, french bean salad, grated beetroot and carrot salad and recenty some roast potatoes and squashes. The mixed leaf salads have been enjoyed by many staff and customers, which included a mix of herbs and edible flowers. Also, there have been some very lovely fresh herb tea infusions, such as mint, lemonvebena, lemon balm and fennel.

One of the best harvests has been the compost. We recently sieved our first compost from all the waste that has come out of the Castle in the past year, and it looks like lovely stuff. This will be used for mulching all those new fruit trees and bushes we planted in the first year.

The Castle Quid

The Castle's own currency! (our own Local Exchange Trading System!) This is offered to volutneers who have helped us in the garden. Each session they come and do, they can earn a Castle quid, (they are specially marked screw on smears!) which can be exchanged for a free climb, or a course, depending on how many they earn. After this full year of activity I have awarded about 55 credits. Some of the volunteers have never climbed before are now able to book onto a free beginners course.

the fig tree in its first year started to show some fruit, but we won't probably get some until next year

Growing Communities micro site has done really well in it's first season! Since June, there has been up to 70 kilos of salad harvested! All sold to restaurants on Stoke Newington Church Street. If you've been to the Fat Cat Cafe, Alistairs or the Three Crowns, you may have sampled some. This October, this site will be going into organic conversion through the Soil Association.

We've been making the most out of old climbing rope and even old shoes - they make great hanging flower features! The rope has been perfect as a support for the tomatoes and a trellis for climbing plants.

It's been great watching the bees at work!

they love the cucumber flowers, borage and the big sunflower!

The castle garden party in June around the cafe plots

One year on...

This project started under a year ago, and am amazed at what has been achieved with such limited time. I am very happy to see what can happen when you bring lots of enthusiatic and strong people together! Autumn is now on its way and there are more plans to develop the garden further. A new forest garden with fruit and nut trees and fruit bushes planted, more vegetable plots, more flowers, planting on the hill, earth ovens and more...

A big thank you to Susie Norris for taking lots of nice pictures! To see more of them see her flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/squeezemonkey/sets/72157623545015791/

The castle garden project in Hackney Citizen

2010-08-10T15:23:00.000-07:00

See this link for a nice article in the Hackney Citizen, written by Eloise Horsfield, who also climbs here.

Climbers for the garden, (Hackney Citizen, 8th August 2010)

Environmental Report for 2009

2010-07-02T00:44:00.000-07:00

Following up on the runaway success of our Environmental Report 2008, the team and I have come up with the sequel... the Environmental Report 2009! You can download it here Annual Environmental Report 2009. To summarise we were directly responsible for 125.07 tonnes of CO2e. That’s not that much better than the previous year (136.79 tonnes CO2e) but that’s because the carbon footprint only tells a small part of the story. So much else has happened in 2009 including major changes to our Cafe supply chain, the start of our garden, our own eco-build (Training Room 3) and lots and lots of research into water, waste, passive heating/ventilation, climbing holds, recyclable paper and so much more.

If you have any questions about this, just send me an email: Audrey@castle-climbing.co.uk

Office chairs

2010-06-18T03:56:00.000-07:00

We need some new office chairs so I researched 'eco' chairs - I found a company called Steelcase who manufacture operator, manager and boardroom chairs to a high environmental standard.

See http://www.steelcase.co.uk/en/company/environment/pages/overview.aspx

Then I located a company who refurbish these chairs second hand (being good quality they can take some refurbishing). So we will get a few of these and see how they work out.

The bees have arrived!!!!

2010-06-11T10:36:00.000-07:00

I'm terribly excited- our first hive is now buzzing with bees. Ian, our expert beekeeper delivered the swarm this morning. They seem to have settled in fairly well. In the first few days we expect some activity as the bees will be getting to know their new home. They will be using landmarks and the sun to orientate themselves. We'll be getting another hive within a few weeks and we'll be letting them settle in the first year. Next year, Ian will be running beekeeping courses here at The Castle and we can expect our first Castle honey harvest!

Castle Garden Spring 2010

2010-06-09T15:42:00.000-07:00

A very happy Kerry finishing building the mini plots and one of the neighbours being the first in March to plant out her veggies

After a harsh winter and some confusing cold days then hot days in the Spring, the castle garden has been a surge of activity.

Springtime apple blossoms on the trees we planted in February. the transformation always amazes me, especially when they start off looking like bare twigs.

As well as the plants and wildlife, people come alive and get busy too! The garden is really starting to take shape and Spring has really transformed things. It was really worth the garden team's hard work over winter and it's been great to see a lot of green emerging from all the fruit trees and bushes we planted in February. Hopefully we will at least get some raspberries and strawberries this year. (whoever spots them first!) The fruit trees and rhubarb will we hope to harvest next year after another year's growth.

We kicked started this season with the Spring Equinox. We had a weekend workday, with showers of course, and we planted a new hedgerow along the front near the roadside of the castle. Thanks to Nick our medicinal herbalist, who chose lots of native English hedgerow bushes, shrubs and trees, which will not only shelter us from the noise pollution from the road, but provide a great habitat for wildlife, and interesting things for us to harvest – Hazel, crab apple, silver birch, elder, hawthorn and blackthorn, and sneaked in some others we are trying out such as goji berries and cherry plum trees. The day ended in a celebration with a bonfire, cider and a few equinox songs and spring detoxes.

Nick giving providing us with a medicinal dose of cider to help us plant the hedge

A few more workdays in April saw us planting up more vegetables for the Castle and a variety of herbs on the hill, and I'm also making the most of some of the south facing walls by planting an apricot, figs, grape vines and a kiwi (which will climb a trellis made out of climbing rope) We hope to get a great variety of climbing fruits to go with the theme of the place. I even found some types of strawberries with interesting names. There’s the climbing “mount everest” strawberries and the tumbleberries, I got in especially for Tumble the Castle’s maintenance manager, who’s been a great help.

Green woodworking with Tom Trimmins

We’ve also made use of lots of free giveaways from the neighbouring construction site, wood for raised beds, steel toe cap wellies, and a smokers shelter made into a greenhouse. Thanks to Tom Trimmins, our latest garden team member who's a great carpenter and woodworker. He fitted it out with lots of shelves. Watch out for any green woodworking workshops he’ll facilitate. So far he's had us making mallets, spoons and plant labels with the sycamore wood from the garden.

We’ve been making the most of the lovely young fresh nettles. The café using them fresh and drying them to make nettle tea and I’ve started to make nettle feed for the garden. It's a great free source of nitrogen for the plants. A homemade feed from it is easily made by collecting nettles, putting them in a porous bag and leaving it in a big container of water (like a giant tea bag) Leave it for 20-30 days, and dilute it with water and water around and on your plants. A warning however, this is rather smelly.

The Castle's own veg plots have done really well with the salads. The café having already had at least 7 or 8 generous harvests. This hot weather has been bringing on a really fast growth! They’ve had a lovely mix of red orach, coriander, bronze arrow, green salad bowl, rocket, and land cress as well as the odd radish which don't make it to the cafe.

Starting from May, the staff have been offered some paid working hours to help out in the garden. Two staff members have already come out so far, and expect to see some more, helping outside with the weeding, seed sowing, harvesting, digging, building, and of course enjoying the sun and rain.

Min enjoying the sunshine while she's weeding the castle veg beds

The Growing Communities Microsite

We’ve finally finished all the beds, and with the help of some very strong volunteers, managed to shift 9 tons of compost into them. We've been planting all Spring

and had our first harvest the other day - nearly 6 kilos of lettuce to be sold locally via Growing Communities.

Next in the garden, is our second annual garden party and the arrival of our bee hives.I’ll be there at the garden party, potting up seeds in various containers. Come sow a seed and take it away - as part of the One Pot Pledge campaign

Finally to add, we've had some press coverage - see: The Evening Standard

Also a nice big article in the Stoke Newington Gazette on the 3rd June. BBC Radio 4 Farming Today is covering the progress of the Garden over the next 2 years. For those early risers listen out for the odd programme. It's been on 3 times already!

Hope to see you at the Garden Party!

Plotting the Revolution

2010-05-13T03:02:00.000-07:00

Plotting the revolution!
As part of the sustainability drive The Castle has undertaken, a section of the garden has been given over to 15 community mini plots.
The plots, measuring roughly 1 x 3 meters are to be used by the Castle community to learn how to organically grow their own food. Our community so far comprises of people living near The Castle (our neighbours Bea and Ethel), our staff (Sophie and Ray); and of course our customers (those who signed up to volunteer in the garden). Everyone who took a plot has been asked to take a ‘hands on’ approach and get stuck in from the beginning. This involved lots of digging and weeding and also a lot of mattock work (Just ask Barry). The idea is for people that don’t have a space available to them to grow elsewhere, can use their plots here with help and advice on hand from Ida doing the occasional growing workshop and of course each other!
Almost everyone has ‘moved in’ to their plot and begun working out how to stop the pesky snails and slugs from chomping at their little seedlings.
We still have a way to go until we complete the area, we need a water source, a composting bay and need to decide what we will do with the concrete area in the middle and a fence needs to go up. We also need to decide what communal plants we would like to grow as well.
We have three plots going to community projects, so far, Paola from Sustain is having one, Transition town the second and the third is possibly going to be a herb bed.
If you have any ideas for our third bed or would like to get involved helping to make the compost bay etc please email kerry@castle-climbing.co.uk

Wood for the Trees

2010-03-31T02:10:00.000-07:00

Actually, wood for the veggies...

Morgan Est, who are a construction company operating out of the Thames Water compound are packng up after several years work. In order to meet their CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) targets they have offered us some of the materials they have used on their site.

So, you will start to see raised beds and various structures made from 2 x 9 inch planks, a smoking shelter turned into a mini green house and old cable reals turned into cafe and garden tables, amoungst other things.

Another way of gaining reused materials if you are in need is by going to www.BuilderScrap.com
They are a site put together to minimise waste from the construction industry.

Cheers, Ray

Castle garden project January & February 2010

2010-03-10T15:16:00.000-08:00

Wet, cold, snow, wind, sleet, ice, wet and yet more snow …and the very odd dryer sunny but cold days. But still, over this harsh winter there has been so much activity in the Castle grounds.

I started in the Autumn, with the Castle garden and being on this food growing project from the on set has brought me to be outside more than I have ever done over winter, and I really felt its harshness more than ever. Also the heavy soil doesn't half sticks to your boots, you end up walking with several kilos on each foot! Our hardcore garden team were out there with the mattocks and spades slipping over in their muddied heavy boots. I can’t recommend highly enough a paint scraper tool to scrape off your tools and boots at the end of the day!

Through doing this work, you can really begin to appreciate the work of all small scale farmers who produce vegetables on a commercial scale. These guys are out every week all year round no matter the weather, harvesting, preparing the earth. Even if some do use machinery, there is still a lot of harvesting by hand in the coldest wettest muddiest conditions.

Back at the Castle, we have had such a productive two months, a lot of activity has been going on with various elements of the garden. The mini plots project headed up by one of the Castle senior managers, Kerry Simmons is bringing together staff and neighbours to create mini plots so they can have a go at gardening their own veg, and will be creating a community growing club out of it.

mini plotters - castle staff and local neighbours

digging and preparing the garden for the veg plots

We had a consultation with the immediate neighbours about the project, which has been a great way to make contact and get to know some of them. A few of them have come to help out in the garden and have even signed up for a mini plot. Plus the good news, is the project was awarded a Capital Growth small grant to contribute to their tools and materials!

Over January and February a lot of work was carried out, - even during the snowy icy times - on the west side wall facing Green Lanes, which is now the "fruity wall", we finished the clearing, digging holes for fruit tress (yes even in the snow) and on Feb 6^th we had a very successful and enjoyable work day, planted 8 fruit trees and about 30 fruit shrubs which finished in a wassail to wish a good harvest.

We were blessed with a dry, sunny day and up to 40 people showed up to help in the garden! Castle staff, members, neighbours, local community, my own work friends, colleagues and family came to help to support and work in the garden as well as celebrate, drink cider, enjoy a bonfire and bbq. We then had a special wassail song (to ward off evil spirits) performed to us by two castle members and their two guitars. The night finished up with us all joining hands and performing a spiral dance around the garden singing wassail songs to wish a good harvest for the fruit tree and bring good wishes to us and the garden.

This area now has all their fruit trees and bushes planted, they look like bare twigs, but in a year or two we’ll hopefully see and harvest the fruits! We planted three apple trees, two plum and two pear against the wall to be espaliered. We also planted raspberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants, gooseberries, loganberries, Japanese wineberries, rhubarb and strawberries. In the style of a forest garden we’ll later interplant the area more with ground cover plants, (the herbaceous layer) with useful edible plants, as companion plants for the fruit, and to suppress the weeds a mixture of herbs, flowers, such as wild garlic, marigolds, thyme, lemon balm, comfrey,

before and after, planted with fruit and then mulched. In time it will hopefully
be transform back to be green with fruits and herbs!

Sheet Mulching

This area originally had lots of invasive plants such as ivy, bramble, and the fact that it’s clay soil . We did some sheet mulching To help improve the soil structure and fertility, suppress weeds, and hold in moisture (clay soil goes very dry and crackly over summer) and keep in some kind of warmth (clay takes longer to warm up in the Spring) – Also to give the young fruit plants the best chance and start in life in the conditions they are in!

We mulched the area using a layering sheet mulch technique advised by many gardeners/permaculturalists – layer of manure, layers of sheets of cardboard, another layer of organic matter – mixture of compost (including composted waste from the castle) or leafmould, and then straw on top.

Growing Communities

Part of the garden, has been offered for a growing communities microsite, a small urban market garden to grow organic salads, herbs and fruits for their local box scheme. This area of the garden, has been worked on every Tuesday. We had the hard work of digging up brambles and bindweed from the clay soil and removing the sycamore trees (which was actually done by Steve the CEO of the castle, Ray one of the Castle senior managers and our garden team volunteer Barry who is a human machine). They rented a winch and pulled out most of the trees in that area! The area is ready to dig up, lay raised beds and hopefully by the end of April we’ll be planting the first seedlings of organic salads which by June will end up in the local box scheme.

The castle also started as a drop off point for their box scheme, and at least 20 local people – including some castle staff are now pick up from the Castle. Its exciting to think that some of the salads that will be included in the bags this summer will have been grown at the Castle!

What’s coming next?

Spring is on it’s way, which brings about a very busy, sowing planting time and warmer weather!
The mini plotters have been hard at work – their second work day was on 6^th March, and the areas are now clear and ready to have their beds made.
Next big work day for the grounds, is 20^th March to celebrate Spring Equinox. We’ll be planting a hedgerow at the front by the roadside - the medicinal arboretum- designed by our resident medical horticulturalist Nick Quinn. It's mainly native hedgerow shrubs and trees, such as hazel, silver birth, hawthorn, blackthorn, elder, holly as well as some non native berry fruits, and if the weather is ok, we’ll have another bonfire!

Lovely orange crocuses appearing from the Castle grounds.

This is the local fox who comes to visit from time to time

new training room - an eco build project

2010-02-10T03:13:00.000-08:00

We have built a new training room in the centre. As this is first chance we have had to build something from scratch since we have implemented our environmental policy we have spent quite a lot of time and effort in sourcing suitable environmentally friendly methods to do the build.

This is a breakdown of the features of the new room:

• We have opted for timber instead of steel for the supporting structure and staircase. All timber is FSC. No MDF.
• Plasterboard containing recycled gypsum was sourced although we couldn't get 100% recycled. • Insulation: We reviewed several types of natural insulation including wool, hemp, recycled newspaper but we settled on Steicoflex which is made from wood fibre (FSC).
• We used non-PVC wiring.
• We have fitted an under floor heating system because it will work well with low energy heating systems like ground source heat pumps. This is a low temp water system. Pipes are PEXpipe (cross linked polyehtelene with oxygen barrier), manifold and pump by IPPEC Ltd. http://www.ippec.co.uk/
• In terms of waste the main commitment has been using a skip company that recycles 99% of building waste although some off cuts of timber have gone to staff and customers as fuel for wood burning stoves.
• Carpet: reclaimed carpet tiles from Fuller Gray Carpets http://www.fullergraycarpettiles.com/
• Paint:
Walls: ECOS solvent free environmentally friendly paint http://www.ecospaints.com/
Woodwork: reuse of otherwise wasted paint from existing stores.
• Lights: 2 LED panels by SMD 600 x 600 panel. Power 33W colour 5500K
• GU10 fittings with LED bulbs: Trialled Exergi 4W cool white, this was too cool so we have ordered an equivalent 4 W warm white from Excled- It also has 3 Cree LEDs
• Natural Ventilation system with stack effect.
• Re used old doors.
• Used old sink and fittings for the pantry.
• We are using natural lino for the pantry floor.

Eco-Cube

2010-02-10T01:39:00.000-08:00

We have popped a small blue cube into each of the urinals.

Besides giving our male climbers something to aim for, these small blue cubes allow us to operate water free urinals. This saves us 648 litres per day, which is a staggering 235,425 litres per year.

How can a small blue cube make this happen? It is made up of pro-biotic microbes which compete with nasty bacteria for food and effectively starve them out. So, that makes us guilty of bacteriocide as we kill of zillions of the little blighters. Well, we did that before with the use of chemicals. We now use no chemicals in the cleaning process.

Water and chemical free.

It is a large change with very little outlay or effort.

Annual Enviromental Report - 2008

2010-01-20T04:06:00.000-08:00

Well if you're looking for some riveting reading this weekend, I can't do better than recommend our Annual Enviromental Report. This covers the period between January and December 2008 and will act as the baseline year for us to measure our improvements from. It took a little while to put together because we've had to do a lot of research about the methodology and we've tried to format it so that it will work consistently with future reports.

The short story is that we were directly responsible for 136.79 tonnes of CO2e. Rubbish. That's nearly 50 return flights to Australia. That would take 137 trees one century to absorb. Most of it is due to the electricity and heating we used. We're working on that.

We're monitoring all of our circuits to find out where this electricity is being used. We're considering ways of running the Cafe using less energy. We're looking at how we can modify the building so that the heating and ventilation can be done without too much power. We're going to change over all of our lighting to low-energy lighting and we'll probably repaint the walls and floor tiles so that we need less light. So that's what's on the cards for 2010.

Audrey

Annual Environmental Report 2008

Ethical Banking

2010-01-13T09:00:00.000-08:00

“What’s banking got to do with sustainability and why are ethical banks better?”

Good question! Well, banks make money out of borrowing money from some people and lending it to others at a profit.

Now, the concept of banks borrowing money may seem strange, what they do after all is normally lend it to people as an overdraft or personal loan or to a company as a business loan. However, opening up an account with a bank which has cash in it, whether it’s a current account or a savings account, is the bank borrowing money from you. The banks then take this money and lend it to other people. Some of this lending may seem good, like letting you have an overdraft or letting us invest in the Castle, but if they lend it to someone who uses it to make money but who is damaging the environment in the process, then you’re funding the damage!

By not asking what the bank is going to use your money for, you have implicitly agreed to their using it for whatever purpose they see fit. If you generally owe money to your bank then the profits they earn from the interest they charge could also be used to fund activities you don’t agree with. So, whether you invest your hard-earned cash in a bank account or one of the financial products the banks peddle, or pay them interest on the money you borrow, then you could be funding some fairly unpleasant activities.

The same is true of insurance companies.
“But I’m just paying for a service. What’s wrong with that?”

The thing is that insurance companies don’t generally make much money out of the insurance premiums you pay, they actually make money by investing the premiums you pay to them until they have to make a payout. They have to be sitting on a big pot of cash in order to underwrite your risk and they use that cash in the same way a bank does, without telling you but, implicitly, with your permission. So, you don’t just need an ethical bank, you need an ethical insurance company as well.

“Yeah, well my bank’s got an ethical policy that looks pretty good to me”.
They all do and they keep going on about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) but have you checked what that actually means? Do they actually commit to restricting their lending beyond what the law requires or do they just plant a few trees to offset their emissions? Most don’t and it’s a sad fact that pollution and conflict are great money earners.

Exploiting natural resources but not taking any responsibility for the mess that creates is an easy way of making money. So is making and selling weapons to people who’ve run out of ideas about how to resolve their differences. Considering animal welfare when developing commercial products is expensive as well as tedious, so ignoring that can of worms can also add to a company’s bottom line. The list goes on but making a real commitment to a sustainable future isn’t likely to be a quick way to make money even if it does make sense, and a profit, in the long run.

“They’re all as bad as each other. Ethical policies are just a load of greenwash.”
Not true! Some banks and insurance companies do make a genuine commitment. They won’t lend money to organisations that take part in activities that don’t fit their criteria.
Most ethical banks are either mutual societies or co-operatives. In some ethical banks the investors decide who they will lend money to and others have a board of trustees who guide the decisions based on the declared aims of the society. They will have a vetting procedure that checks out prospective borrowers to make sure their intentions are genuine. There are ethical insurance companies that do the same. They may not always offer market-leading rates but they’re still pretty good value for money if you consider the extra work they’re doing on behalf of your conscience.

“So, how do I find these ethical bankers?”

It’s really not too hard. There are several organisations run as mutuals or co-operatives. They may have different aims such as supporting local causes or providing funds for developing counties. You can pick the organisation that shares your values. You’ll want to know that your money is secure and many ethical banks are supported by the governments guarantee scheme. If you run a business, like we do, then the government scheme won’t help. You need a bank that has a solid capital base. Some of these organisations are insurers as well so they can service all your needs.

“What’s The Castle doing?”
As a limited company we have a duty to act responsibly towards our shareholders who, after all, have invested in the business so far. We’ve looked at the options and found that the Co-operative Bank is the only ethical bank who provide a solid ethical policy (http://www.goodwithmoney.co.uk/ethical-banking/) and can meet our business banking needs. If you only want a private bank account then you have a wider choice.

To be honest, we’ve only made a partial commitment because moving business banking arrangements is a lot of hassle. Most of our daily transactions still go through our mainstream bank. However, we’re saving up for the next big exciting development at The Castle. We figure if anyone’s going to benefit from that spare cash while we’re waiting to spend it then we would rather the Co-op to decide who that is, so we’re opening a deposit account with them.

As for insurance, The Castle is an unusual business, and not many insurers will get involved with what we do. We’re members of the Activities Industry Mutual Society which provides insurance for businesses like ours. This is a mutual society and is owned by its members so we have a say in how the society’s funds are invested. We intend to use our voice as members to persuade the society to invest their funds in an ethical way too. If you insure through a similar organisation then you can do the same.

So back to my original question “What’s banking got to do with sustainability and why are ethical banks better?” Well everything really. It’s easy to feel powerless as an individual dabbling in a vast global financial web that seems set to gobble up the world. The global economy pervades every facet of our lives from food to transport to energy to money. “Surely only governments can influence those things.” Don’t believe it! You are not helpless. Thirty years ago virtually all soaps and cosmetics were tested on animals, but because people made a fuss and then chose to buy products not tested on animals, many of these products now proudly claim “Not Tested on Animals”. You can make a difference and you vote every time you put your hand in your pocket and buy something. You choose what happens to your money. Don’t waste that choice. You can’t do it all at once but make your choices one at a time and make them count. Be part of the solution not part of the problem!

Castle Garden - November and December 2009

2009-12-11T11:21:00.000-08:00

Since October, I have been busy in the garden and busy gardening people! i.e. gathering and enthusing a great volunteer team to help clear the area at the side to get ready to plant fruit trees, fruit bushes and other useful edibles!

We started the month off with a new selection of tools. They certainly don't look as they do now in the picture! We've battled against, rain, wind and very heavy clay soil, we broke 3 forks, I can't stress enough; you get what you pay for!

Our favourite tool to hit through clay soil and dig out established deep rooted shrubs is a mattock. One of our champion volunteers Barry, (castle climber and 30 years building experience) has been showing me how to use one. Very physical and very satisfying tool. I like it!

We've been working most Fridays and some weekend days. We've been developing a good team of volunteers, with a great variety of skills - including: Nick the medicinal horticulturalist, (he'll make sure we get the best herbs for cafe teas, and herbs to help climbers!) Matthew the ecologist (he's been helping me survey the wildlife on site), Paola the architect and Lisa the interior designer (they've been helping designing the walled fruit garden), Olaf the landscape architect and my mentor, Rachel the project manager, and several garden volunteers from Growing Communities (the lovely Chiqui, Robin, Sophie and Stewart from bikefix to name a few). Other enthusiasts and castle staff and members have also come along to give their time and strength, including Audrey the MD, Steve the CEO, Ray, Kerry and Olli. This project is a huge job, and we need all the help we can get!

The area at the side is now cleared and holes have been dug out ready for planting fruit trees next January. The next work day is Sat Jan 23rd 2010. After planting the fruit trees, we'll have a celebratory bonfire, hot cider and do a kind of "wassail" to celebrate and hope for a good harvest from the fruit. I'm off now to India for 3 weeks, to help volunteer on a permaculture food garden project in the Himalayas. See you in the new year!

Here's Audrey collecting about a ton of leaves to make leaf mould!

This very friendly robin has been following me around the garden for the past 3 weeks. They love it when you clear the ground! They come to see what goodies there are to eat in the soil. We have also found many frogs and toads, we'll make sure to create new habitats for them.

Environmental Policy Interviews - Episode Six

2009-11-16T02:58:00.000-08:00

Dean Plant, head instructor at the Castle has some views to share with us on the environmental policy.

Environmental Policy Interviews - Episode Five

2009-11-05T03:11:00.000-08:00

Ray Eckermann, Designer at The Castle shares his views on the environmental policy.

Environmental Awards...the results

2009-11-03T04:23:00.000-08:00

I'll put up a more detailed report on our main website later this afternoon, but for those of you who can't wait, here's the list of successful applications to The Castle Environmental Awards Scheme:

Project A - Community Action Nepal. The Castle grant will enable CAN to build a health post in Ghap, currently a six-day walk from the nearest health post.

Project B - Beekeeping in North Wales. Castle instructor, Cordelia Molloy, has been given an award to start some hives in Llanberis.

Project D - Growing Communities. The Castle grant will fund educational signs for Growing Communities' plots in Hackney to teach visitors about organic farming methods.

Project E - The Saha Atitsva Foundation. We'll be funding the purchase and installation of solar panels for this eco-farm in Ganeshpuri, India.

Project G - Our Head Instructor, Dean Plant, will be undertaking a part-time internship with Greenpeace UK.

Project H - Magnificent Revolution will use this grant to fully fund the construction of their new hub located at Hackney City Farm.

Project J - Pangea Project will use our grant to purchase a bicycle and trailer for deliveries as part of their larger aim of making their business 100% sustainable.

Thank you to everyone who voted by ballot and email- your votes did make a difference!

Environmental Policy Interviews - Episode Four

2009-10-22T04:07:00.000-07:00

Ben Levey, HR Manager at The Castle shares his views on the environmental policy.

Powered Out - Part 2

2009-10-20T03:19:00.001-07:00

Well, our two-week testing period is over and the results are in. Just by exercising a bit of self-control and turning off our computers when not in use we've managed to cut down our inactivity hours by 30%! Not too bad but, to be honest, I was expecting a bit more progress. At least we've found out what computers are our worst offenders and can put some measures in place. I was a bit embarrassed to realise that my computer is the third worst! So I'm going to be extra-careful about turning my computer off and I've also asked that other people using my computer (weekends mostly) do likewise.

Research on membership cards

2009-10-19T17:16:00.000-07:00

We have regained our sometimes unhappy card printer but the main question has been "do we want plastic cards at all?"

I ordered some sample 'green' cards from www.eco-card.co.uk.

There is one made of PLA - a plastic made from plants instead of oil - which is compostable at the end of its life.
Looking deeper into bioplastics lead me into another minefield - the fact that much of this new technology is created using GM crops and could potentially contaminate the recycling stream if added to conventional plastic. However, it does seem to be a really important material which may ultimately solve our requirement for plastic in a post-petroleum world. Ingeo PLA (the type that eco-card uses) is meant to be one of the better ones and the company that produces it (www.natureworksllc.com) uses certified non-GM corn.

Another card is made of recycled PVC. Which certainly seems better than using the newly minted variety. Though maybe we want to get away from using plastic.

But what other options are there?
A wooden key fob with a barcode on it?
Tattooing our customers with their memebrship number? ;-)

We want something that is long lasting as well as environmentally friendly.
In the meantime, we'll be trying some of the eco-cards to see if they work in our existing printer and see where we go from here...

Awards Shortlist- cast your votes!

2009-10-16T12:25:00.000-07:00

We have a shortlist of 10 for the environmental awards. It was a tricky process to narrow it down to these great applications and now you can have your say on what you think of them.
From the 15th – 30th October we are holding a public vote. Read through the information and choose your top 3 projects, in order of preference. Vote by completing a ballot paper (available from the Castle) or by emailing your choices to audrey@castle-climbing.co.uk.You need to include your name and castle membership number, without which your vote will not be counted.
Voting closes on the 30th October.

We will be holding an awards ceremony on Monday 2nd November 11am-1pm to announce the winners – please come along and support all the brilliant applicants.

Check out the applications here.

Powered out...part 1

2009-10-06T02:26:00.000-07:00

Our IT superhero, John, has installed a nifty bit of software that helps us keep track of how much power we are wasting by leaving our computers turned on when we’re not using them. We’ve tracked this for the last two weeks without implementing any kind of policy to determine what our baseline is and to see which computers are the most prone to being left idle. The results are in and we’ve clocked up a terrible 719 inactive hours. On average the computers are inactive but left on about half the time. So lots of room for improvement there… I’ll report back in two weeks to see how much we’ve improved!

Garden Project, October

2009-10-01T06:25:00.000-07:00

It's been a month since I've started here, and even though it's the end of the Summer, and the beginning of Autumn, leaves are falling, temperature is dropping, I've been busy researching, surveying to help plan and design the garden project (garden activities of developing and planting a garden doesn't just happen in the summer!) and have already started gathering a team of helpers to help this process.

We've already made use of existing wild resource from the garden rosehips - packed full of vitamin C. I've made some rosehip syrup - I've left a bottle at the Castle cafe.

Next week as part of the survey process, I'll be meeting with some of the staff, and finding out, their ideas, wishes for the garden. I am also in the process of gathering a garden team, of volunteers, and hope to plan some activities and work days in the next few months. If you've been to the centre, you may have noticed we've already taken a delivery of topsoil and compost, ready for some planting activity in the next few months.

There's lots of nice warm wall spaces on the outside building. Great potential for climbing and espalier fruit trees and bushes. Here are few remaining tomatoes making the most of the autumn sun.

Environmental Policy Interviews - Episode Three

2009-09-28T03:23:00.000-07:00

Third in the series of mini interviews, Steve Taylor the original director of The Castle shares his views on the environmental policy.

Environmental Awards Update

2009-09-18T11:13:00.000-07:00

I’ve come over all emotional! I’m on the train on my way up to a youth competition in Edinburgh. As one of the panelists that will review the Environmental Awards applications and help select the successful applications my mission this weekend will be read through the 24 applications that have been carefully researched and put forward. My first thought, I’ll be honest, was something like ‘ohmigod what have I let myself in for’. I even put off opening the folder containing all the application for a couple of hours.

Then I started reading the first one and my outlook completely chnaged. Whenever I see the words ‘climate change’ I’ve become used to associating it with awful news and a sinking depressive feeling that no one cares. Here, in this folder, were dozens of people proving me wrong...showing me that they do care and that they can do something about the problem. It wouldn’t be appropriate me for at this stage to comment on specific applications or to give too much away. All I will say is that I’m blown away by the quality of the applications. Whatever our final selection all I can say is that the money that we’ve saved up is going to be put to great use by very capable, creative and dedicated people.

People that work and climb (or just drink tea) at The Castle know that it is so much more than an indoor climbing centre. This is one of those moments when I’m so proud of what The Castle has become and feel fortunate to be part of it. Bit of a misty-eyed moment there...sorry about that!

More on this later. We’ll be announcing a shortlist of applications on the 15^th of October and will have the projects on display at The Castle for you to vote on. Then the Panel will meet again before making it’s final decision on the 1^st of November. We will be awarding the funds at a Press Event on Monday the 2^nd of November. Stay Tuned!

Audrey

Environmental Policy Interviews - Episode Two

2009-09-16T06:41:00.000-07:00

The second of our series of Environmental Policy interviews - Chief Route setter Mike Langley. Next week we will be hearing from Steve Taylor, the original director of The Castle.

Castle Garden Project

2009-09-10T09:38:00.001-07:00

I've just started at the Castle to co-ordinate a garden project to make use of the lovely green space outside the centre. Whilst I've been climbing there these past couple of years, I've often thought about what could be planted out there; should I "guerilla" garden some fruit trees or sneakily throw around some vegetable seeds. Before I knew it, they launched an environmental policy part of which they want to make use of the garden for food growing.. and here I am. It is a very exciting project, and the ideas currently being collected will be part of a community effort between staff, members and the local community.

The initial vision for the garden is to create a food growing area and relaxation area based on permaculture design principles and environmentally friendly methods such as re-using/recycling materials where possible, organic growing techniques and creating habitats for wildlife.

Some of the ideas for food growing are to:

create a forest garden
create raised growing beds to grow fruit, vegetables and herbal teas for the Castle Cafe
use the abundant wall space to grow "climbing" and espaliered fruit trees and fruit bushes
mini plots for people to grow their own vegetables
gardening workshops for staff, members and local community
create wildlife areas such as a pond
bring in a bee keeper and bee hives and run bee-keeping courses
offer a small space to Growing Communities to be part of their "patchwork" farm to grow organic salads for their local box scheme in Stoke Newington. (Some Castle members may have already tried some of their delicious mixed salad leaves at the Castle cafe this week)

Of course this won't be done all at once - and not all by me! The idea is to start small, generate interest and a "gardening team" and start from there. This autumn and winter we will start with developing some areas. I will keep you posted.

I also work for C ap ita l Growth A London wide campaign to help create 2012 new community food growing spaces by 2012. The Castle Garden has already registered to be part of this scheme and is space 102!

Example of re-using materials found at the Castle.

Small growing beds made by Ray last week at the Castle. We will be ordering some top soil and planting some green veg for winter soon...

Used Castle climbing rope for the Capital Growth display at the Hampton Court palace Flower show in July this year - on the "freecycled" balcony. For other photos click here

Sustainable Food

2009-09-09T15:14:00.000-07:00

There’s growing awareness that a lot of our food comes with a big carbon footprint and there have been a couple of excellent programmes on TV recently highlighting the problem. Farm for the Future discusses how peak oil will affect UK farming http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xShCEKL-mQ8&feature=PlayList&p=9975CC0E8CC2CDDE&index=0

The Future of Food discusses food security both in the UK and worldwide. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00m9xk9/Future_of_Food_Episode_1/

Food accounts for roughly one third of the carbon footprint of the average person in the UK and that’s mostly from transport, petrochemicals used by farmers and heating for greenhouses. Local, organic food avoids most of these carbon emissions. So, we can actually reduce our personal contribution to climate change more easily by changing what we eat than by changing the way we travel and use energy at home. The Castle Café buys several tonnes of food every year and we’ve started to make changes to what we buy to make our food selection more sustainable. You may have noticed some of the improvements already.

Of course the most sustainable way of getting food is to grow it organically in your own garden. So that’s what we’re going to do. We have about an acre of garden at The Castle, which won’t be enough space to grow all the food currently supplied to the Café but, it could produce a significant proportion of it. Lots of us are very keen to get stuck in but we don’t have much experience. Luckily we know someone who does!

Ida Fabrizio climbs at The Castle so some of you will know her already. She works with several organisations that promote growing food, sustainably in London, including Sustain, Capital Growth and Growing Communities. She’s passionate about food and seems to have spent most of her life learning how to grow it. So we’re really lucky that, as of last week, Ida will be working at The Castle one day week to develop our garden into a sustainable food growing space. Of course, she won’t be able to do it on her own so her main focus will be organising all us willing, but inexperienced, volunteers to do the bulk of the work.

Look out for Ida’s post introducing what she’s got planned for us.

Low Energy Refurbishment

2009-09-08T07:38:00.000-07:00

Seeing as it was me that started this environmental revolution at The Castle nearly a year ago, and given the amount and time and effort that everyone here has put in, it’s about time I owned up to what I’ve been doing to further the cause.

Well, I’ve been overseeing the whole process of making our business sustainable and continuing to learn as much as I can about what climate change means for us and what we can do about it. The climbing world is taking notice of our environmental commitment at The Castle. Last month I was interviewed by Es Tresidder for UKClimbing.com as part of an article about climbers and climate change. http://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/page.php?id=2038 It’s a well presented piece which got a lot of responses. However, my main practical task is to turn this historic Victorian water pumping station into a low energy building. That’s not going to be easy because it was designed for a completely different purpose to the one it’s being used for now. The Victorians weren’t too worried about heating, draught-proofing or insulation. Retro fitting those items without damaging the original structure, all of which is subject to a Grade 2* listing by English Heritage, will be a challenge.

Earlier this year we commissioned a feasibility study, from a firm of specialist low energy building services consultants, to tell us what the potential is to both conserve energy and generate our own renewable energy at The Castle. The conclusions of the study were unexpected but very illuminating. For a start we’re using far more energy that we assumed and it looks like our options for replacing it with renewable energy generated on site are severely limited. So, not a great start, but I’ve learned a lot from the study so far and there is still hope that we can achieve our goal of a carbon neutral business. When I embarked on this project I tried not to have too many preconceived ideas but I confess that I thought it would be a question of spending a bit of money, tweaking a few of our operating procedures and emerging into a brightly lit new, eco friendly world. It’s not going to be quite that easy. In fact I don’t think we’re going to achieve our goals without a fundamental change in the way we think about energy, food and transport.

So, why are we using more energy than we thought? In short, we don’t know! We assumed that our energy usage would be fairly low because our operation is fairly clunky and down to earth with no unnecessary frills. However, it turns out that, we use twice as much energy per square meter a typical dry sports centre (i.e. one where playing in water isn’t the main focus). At first we wondered if it was a mistake or if one of our neighbours had tapped into our supply and was having a non-stop party at our expense. A far more likely explanation is that the centre has developed organically over fourteen years with extra electrical circuits and gas heaters added on when needed and a lot of our electrical equipment is old or second hand. It’s all been tested to make sure it’s safe but efficiency has never really been considered.

The feasibility study also gave us an indication of how much renewable energy we could expect to generate on site and the various technologies that we could use. Once all the practicalities have been considered this came down to a very short list.
1. We have a huge south facing roof so solar water heating and solar photovoltaic (PV) generation are viable but expensive.
2. Wind power is a possibility but it doesn’t tend to work well in unban areas and the listed status of our building will be a consideration. We’re investigating this option by monitoring wind conditions at roof level but the chances of it being viable are fairly slim.
3. Ground source heat pumps use warmth in the ground to bring low level heat into a building but they take power to pump the fluids round so they’re best thought of as very efficient electric heating rather than a renewable source of energy. We still need to get the electricity to run them from somewhere.
4. The remaining option is biomass heating using wood or plant oil as fuel in a boiler. A lot of businesses and even households are going down this route because it’s relatively cheap both to install and run, it’s seen as renewable and non polluting because the CO2 produced is equal to that absorbed by the plants as they grew and it’s seen as abundant. Unfortunately, I don’t see it that way. If we’re talking about someone living in a shack in a wood and burning coppiced timber for heating and cooking then biomass is a sustainable, low carbon fuel. Commercially, it’s nothing of the sort. The energy involved in transporting and processing the fuel represents up to two thirds of the energy released when it’s burned. All biomass produces particulates and toxins when it’s burned. Some are worse than others. But, my biggest problem with it is that it takes up agricultural land. In a world that’s running out of food (yes we are and Britain isn’t immune) using agricultural land to grow energy crops doesn’t make any kind of sense. This is bound to be a controversial view, and hope it starts a debate; however, we’re not going to be using biomass heating.

In short, solar power is our only reliable option for renewable energy, so how much of it can we produce? Maybe about one fifth of the energy we currently use! It’s going to take some serious efficiency measures to balance our energy use with our energy generation. But why would we need to do that? We’re a climbing centre not a power station. Surely, we can just convert everything over to electrical power and buy it from a 100% renewable source (which we already do) and then we’ll be carbon neutral, at least as far as energy’s concerned, won’t we? Technically, that’s probably true but do you honestly think that approach would be sustainable if everyone took the same attitude, using as much energy as they want as long as the power company tells you it’s green? There’s lots of scope for debate on this issue as well but this approach doesn’t make any sense to me.

I believe we need to drastically reduce our energy consumption to get as close as possible to the amount of energy we can produce ourselves and then source the remainder intelligently. A typical approach to reducing energy consumption would be to examine all our areas of energy consumption and make them as efficient as we can. I intend to take the opposite approach and completely rethink our energy use buy considering what we need to run the centre and not basing it on what we do now. I think that’s the only way we’ll find out how efficient we can get. This may sound radical and unmanageable but once we have a plan we’ve given ourselves five years to implement it so it doesn’t have to mean ripping the place apart and putting it back together again all in one go.

Generating our own energy gives us some resilience to supply interruptions and price fluctuations. Teaming up with some of our neighbours to share resources would bring even greater local resilience and this is something we can try to do as the project progresses, but how do we source the remainder of our energy needs intelligently? Well, we can buy our energy from a 100% renewable supplier, which we already do. We also need to support the development of national infrastructure which will allow large scale, efficient renewable energy generation to be made available to everyone. This support could take the form of offsetting some of the carbon emissions we can’t reduce any more (once we’ve done all we can) by supporting appropriate renewable generation schemes. This is something we’re going to look into.

The first practical step at The Castle is to install a monitoring system so that we can see where all our energy is going in real time and develop an understanding of what functions use the most energy and how that can be improved. Then we’ll be in a position to design something better. The monitoring system will be installed this month and we’re taking the opportunity to record gas and water use plus internal temperatures with the same system.

I’ll let you know what we learn from the monitoring programme and what we intend to do next.

Environmental Policy Interviews - Episode One

2009-09-03T04:18:00.000-07:00

We will be running a series of mini-interviews with staff at The Castle. We've asked them how our Environmental Policy has affected their work here and whether it has altered their personal life as well. Here in the first of our series, we spoke to Managing Director, Audrey Seguy. Next week, we'll be speaking to our Chief Routesetter Mike Langley.

If you have any questions about the environmental policy and what changes we are making- just drop us a line. Audrey would be happy to hear from you at audrey@castle-climbing.co.uk.

Trains, planes and automobiles

2009-08-30T09:18:00.000-07:00

When you consider the scope of climate change, just picking on flying might seem at first as a bit silly. It's like making a big deal about plastic bags when the real problem is the carbon footprint of what you're putting in your hemp, re-usable tote. Flying is not the largest contributor to carbon emissions by any stretch of the imagination. And when you realise that the flight you're considering booking is probably going to go ahead whether you're on it or not, you might feel that you may as well be on it.

The real problem is not personal carbon footprints, but industry and government carbon footprints. But, these are more difficult for us to affect and control. It can be frustrating, but if we don't do anything then it's impossible for anything positive to happen. So what can we do? For most most of us, we can only affect our own personal carbon footprint. And travel is often the biggest contributor to individual carbon emissions.

Likewise, for a climber, transport is often the biggest environmental impact of our sport. UKClimbing published a good article on it recently. You can read it here.

Two years ago, I was still travelling by plane a lot. Long weekends in France or Spain, competitions in Russia, Switzerland, Italy. For several years I was abroad an average of 2 months a year, mostly on short trips like that. Last year, I decided to stop. In the last 12 months I've only taken one flight, so I've made some good improvement. I've been to Southern France several times, Italy, Switzerland and Spain. I travel by van and train now. It does cost a lot more in time and general expenses, but I've started to really enjoy travelling this way. Just last month I was picking up a friend at an airport. I realised I hadn't been inside an airport in nearly a year and I remember how unpleasant the experience generally is. Not that train stations are all that. The last journey I did, coming back from Cannes involved a one hour delay to get onto a slow train that had no air-conditioning in over 30 degree heat! Not very pleasant at all. But, I don't think that travel should be easy. There is a cost to traveling by plane (and I'm not talking about the ticket cost!) and we're just kidding ourselves if we don't realise it. It's unfortunate that the market doesn't reflect the true cost of flying because if it did tickets wouldn't cost £50 but £500.

Audrey at Baume Rousse - in Southern France. One of many climbing areas you can get to by train.

I feel so fortunate to be living in Europe where there is such great and diverse climbing all within relatively access. My home country, the USA also has world class climbing, but everything is so isolated. Yes, us Americans notoriously love to drive long distances, but let's face it, living in London I can be in a number of different countries within one day's drive. Back home, I could drive all day and still be in the middle of cornfields.

When I have to spend more money and take more time to travel by train I don't think of it as being ripped off or that it's inconvenient. It's just the true cost of being able to travel. Like all good things it does involve a sacrifice, but the rewards are worth it. Now if teleporting were viable...

In with the new and re-use the old....

2009-08-17T05:23:00.000-07:00

Over the last week we took delivery of over a 1000 new climbing holds. Following on from the previous blog you will know that we are only purchasing holds from selected manufactures that we deem to be as sustainable as we can find whilst maintaining absolute quality. So if we are in with the new what’s occurring with all the old holds?

Yeah sure we could just lob them at a Chinese land fill and forget about it but what about our ambitious zero waste to landfill by 2015 target?

So I put the word out that we are giving away vast quantities of our old holds to charitable organisations or to other good homes. So far we have given around 500 holds to Greenpeace UK which got their first outing at this year’s Glastonbury Climbing wall. We have also given 250+ holds to Baranbas adventure charity. James Hodges from Baranbas;

“The climbing holds are now being put into place, routes are being created and the wall is starting to take shape....Without your help and support this would never have happened in the time frame that we have now achieved - so many thanks for all your help”.

In the local area Dean Plant (Castle head instructor) is working with some youth clubs on the Woodberry Down and Mydleton Grange estates to build traversing walls that will have all the holds supplied by the Castle.

Success!

Mike

Enviromental route setting?

2009-07-29T01:40:00.000-07:00

To keep with the Green theme the route setting department i.e. Mike A.K.A me has been researching how climbing holds are made and looking into whether we can source our holds from the most sustainable companies out there. But first I had to find out how the holds are made.

Unfortunately for the world the results were not good. Currently these are some the materials that are going into making the pretty plastic shapes we love so much;
Styrene, Methyl Ethyl Ketone Peroxide, Epichlorohydrine, Bisphenol-A ,Toluene diisocyanate-TDI, Hexamethylene diisocyanate-HMDI

If these words mean as much to you as they did to me let me summarise what some of these bad boys can do;

They are Carcinogenic, mutagenic, harmful to skin and eyes, form explosive mixtures in the air, highly flammable, extremely destructive to tissue , affect embryo or foetus, are a reproductive hazard, very toxic by inhalation and may explode when heated! Don’t panic and run for your bio hazard outfit just yet though because all these materials become stable once cured and the finished hold is perfectly safe to handle.

So with this newfound knowledge on the materials involved I emailed all the hold companies we currently purchase holds from and asked them what their stand on the hold making game was and what, if any, environmental policies they had.

From the responses I got and through further research via Greengrip.org it was becoming clear that the technology for making quality environmentally friendly climbing holds just is not out there at the moment.

So what can I do? At this stage we can concentrate on the companies with the strongest written environmental policies and avoid air freight delivery. So our latest purchases have been with Bulgarian based HRT safety whose green policy is extremely strong and make the majority of the holds we have ordered from Polyurethane. We have also ordered from Chesterfield based company Core Climbing.

So where can hold manufacturing go from here? According to sites such as Greengrip the technologies and materials are becoming available but they need to be embraced and tested via the companies that are making 1000’s of holds every week. On the current available materials side companies such as HRT and Holdz are now switching over to a Polyurethane set-up similar to that of the American market. Polyurethane is used as opposed to Polyester resin which is a different form of plastic that uses around a fifth less material to make each hold and this form of the plastic is less toxic in handling and is therefore said to be more environmentally friendly way of producing climbing holds.

From here it’s over to those companies who make the holds to push the technology forward and try and reduce the impact that hold production currently has on the environment.

Check us out!

2009-07-20T08:50:00.001-07:00

The guys over at UKClimbing seem to think it's big news - http://www.ukclimbing.com/news/item.php?id=48331

They must be right. In the first two hours of the news item going live it was viewed over 300 times- and not just by me ;-)

Thanks UKC! Hopefully this will get the word out and we'll be getting plenty of applications in...the more the better.

Environmental Awards- deadline extension

2009-07-15T08:24:00.000-07:00

We've already had some interest in the Environmental Awards, but we want to extend the deadline to make sure that everyone has a chance to research and put together a good application.

New initial application deadline: 15 September 2009
Shortlist: 15 October 2009
Awards: 1 November 2009

You can download our application form and notes for applicants here:
E0 Environmental Awards Notes for Applicants.pdf
E1 Environmental Award Application Form.doc

For further information contact ben@castle-climbing.co.uk

Audrey

The Castle goes to Glastonbury with Greenpeace

2009-07-08T02:57:00.000-07:00

A number of very tired sunburnt members of staff have just returned from the Glastonbury festival having spent 6 days building , running and then dismantling the Greenpeace "out of control tower" climbing wall. The Greenpeace field at Glastonbury this year was transformed into a replica of Sipson village and the Greenpeace AirPlot - which will be obliterated by a third runway at Heathrow, residents from the village were in attendance as well as dozens of Greenpeace volunteers who all weekend did a great job of informing festival goers about the issues surrounding the enviromental disaster that the proposed third runway at Heathrow would create. The wall was a massive success with over 1100 adults and children managing to keep Mike, Iwona, Richard, Aron, Olly and Dean busy in between their meditation and yoga sessions that made up their times off shift from the wall. (I think they may have also attended a performance or two of some popular music combos).

PAPERPAPERPAPERPAPER

2009-06-26T09:50:00.000-07:00

So, I spent all afternoon researching paper!

I have three issues:

1. I heard somewhere that the energy used to recycle the paper was more than the energy to produce it…
2. I was attempting to buy not only recycled but chlorine free and good quality as well…
3. I wanted to try to buy paper produced in UK.

I have settled on 3com paper.
(This 100% recycled A4 copier is off-white/grey in appearance, due to the use of low-grade post-consumer waste material, which is generally in low demand and hence more likely to be consigned to landfill. Manufactured at the Steinbeis mill in Germany, this 80gsm paper passes the Blauer Engel/Blue Angel certification. Sold in reams of 500 sheets.)

It ticks as many boxes as I could do without resorting to buying Elephant poo paper (made in the UK but with poo from Sri Lanka???)
Unfortunately it is made in Germany (I could not find a recycled paper made in UK that ticks as many boxes, they are mainly in France or Germany) but it has the highest ‘right type’ of recycled material in it (hence its colour) and no Chlorine has been used in the recycling process. It also has the badge of recycling honour Blue Angel Cert. My third issue with the energy used for recycling was discussed in the article below and seemed to make sense to me. However, i am still quite interested in finding out about how recycling plants actually sort all the stuff they collect. Watching them collect in the dump trucks they seem to just chuck everything in and compress it, surly this makes it make harder to seperate, which makes me wonder if they do...

Phew – Let’s hope it doesn’t jam the printer…
It was delivered today, its very thin and i guess we will find out soon if it was the right choice.

I came across an article after reading many others; this is by far the best.
Happy reading…

It's from the website linked below where i also ended up buying the paper from.

http://www.greenstat.co.uk/storefront/evolution_content.html?Content=12
Recycled paper, sustainable forestry and bleaching

A Pleasant Email to Hackney Commercial Waste Services

2009-06-26T07:44:00.000-07:00

We're starting to see some results from the changes that have been implemented around here! Today, I had the pleasure of sending this email to our Waste Removal contractors:

Dear Sir / Madam:

Last year we started making some changes to our business and made a commitment to send less waste to landfill. We’re very pleased that we are achieving this and we are now in a position to downgrade our waste removal contract. Currently we have two bins removed on a weekly basis. We would like this reduced to 1 bin per week.

Please let me know when this can be implemented. Thank you very much.

Regards

Audrey Seguy
Managing Director
The Castle Climbing Centre

How cool is that- we've reduced our waste to landfill by half already (not to mention reduce our waste collection bills).

Well done everyone.

Home 2009 video project

2009-06-22T03:09:00.000-07:00

I watched this film last night...all 1.5 hours of it. I can only describe it as a cross between Planet Earth (amazing footage) and Age of Stupid. Anyways- I highly recommend it. You may have heard of Yann Arthus-Bertrand who shot 'Earth from Above'. His techniques are so effective for showing the scale of the changes that we are responsible for.

http://www.youtube.com/homeproject

The beginning is a bit slow, but stick with it and you will be rewarded. Enjoy!

Audrey

Audits, Codes and Blogs

2009-06-16T05:50:00.000-07:00

Well if I thought that launching the EP was the hard part, I was wrong. Now comes the real nitty gritty of auditing, assessing, reporting and monitoring.

Thankfully most of the really boring stuff is for Audrey to sort out. She is currently working on an Environmental Report for 2008 (including our Carbon Footprint) and getting us Acorn registered, both of which require a lot of paperwork and writing of action plans.

For my part, I have tried to bring some sort of order to the timeline of changes and started this blog with the intention of letting our customers and the wider public know what we're up to: why we started this, where we started and how far we've come. A common worry has been that we'll get too focused on the EP and lose focus on our business: climbing. With so many plans afoot for developing the climbing within the centre, I don't see this as a real concern (though I might need to find some more inspiring climbing magazines for the cafe again - they seem to have been replaced with one called "Rhubarb").

Other changes in progress at the moment are:

Improving our bike parking facilities

finding an alternative for disposable ice packs

subsidies for staff to buy bicycles

trying to find more vegan/vegetarian alternatives in the cafe

researching low energy lighting solutions

monitoring wind power potential

monitoring the power circuits

Researching agroforestry potential for the garden

And now the EP launched, I'm off for a year's sabbatical from the Castle but will be watching this space closely for many more exciting and radical changes. It's something I'm really proud to be involved in, as I've come to think in the last 9 months that preventing "runaway global warming" is the single most important thing humanity can do, and in fact has to do now. To paraphrase Leo Murray in Wake Up Freak Out: Those who came before didn't know about this problem and those who come after will be powerless to do anything. It's fallen to us to do something about it. These are exciting times.

Sieta

Environmental Award Scheme

2009-06-15T06:18:00.000-07:00

The Castle is proud to announce the launch of it's Environmental Awards Scheme.

For more info on how to apply, look on our website here.

Closing date for applications is 31st July 2009.

Thank you from the boss

2009-06-07T05:20:00.000-07:00

Hi Everyone,

THANK YOU.

The Environmental Policy launch was a great success because everyone pitched in and helped out. I have heard so much positive feedback from our customers and other people who attended the day. A few personal mentions:

Janos- your food was divine. Thanks.

Ray – your illustrations and creativity made the event look amazing. Your support for the policy over the past months has really helped get everyone enthused.

Kerry- Thank you for all your hard work- you’ve done more things for this than I can begin to mention. Your commitment was evident when you stayed until the bitter end (nearly 11?)

Dean – In addition to all of the research that you’ve done for us on the issues, thank you for the tents and sorry about the banner.

Steve – It really meant a lot to us that you came down just for this on Saturday and your speech introducing the film was just right.

I’m sorry if I missed out specific people who organised things (Sieta, Min with the DJs, Caroline, etc…) but the list would be endless!

OK, now the policy is officially launched and we’ve got to keep the ball rolling! There will be new information on the Environmental Policy Intranet and the website this week. The Castle Enivronmental Awards will be publicised this week on the Intranet and by email.

In the meantime I’m going to be working on our Enivronmental Report 2008 and getting accreditation for our Environmental Management Scheme.

Audrey.

Environmental Policy is Launched

2009-06-04T11:22:00.000-07:00

EP Launch Festival 2009

On Saturday 30th May, we launched our new Environmental Policy in style with a festival in the garden, DJs and a film powered by bicycles, a free BBQ, workshops, stalls and a surprising amount of organic pear cider! The environment must have sensed what we were up to and been pleased with our new initiatives as the weather was absolutely perfect!

…So where did our journey start? It’s a bit hard to say – it was mostly a dawning realisation that things can’t go on as they are. About 9 months ago, The Castle’s CEO Steve Taylor approached the core managers and the board of directors with his thoughts about the state of the planet. He’d been reading up on climate change, carbon emissions and peak oil and become certain that if he didn’t act now in any and every way he could then he too would be to blame for runaway global warming – the point of no return for human life on our planet.

Needless to say, if we weren’t already switched on to the urgency of the situation (and some had been for years) we all got excited by Steve’s approach that “now is not the time to panic or despair, now is the time to act!” as it became obvious that we can’t rely on governments to help us, and it is not enough to make individual changes in our own lives – businesses like us HAVE to change the way we do things.

Since last September, The Castle managers and staff have been reading books, watching films, debating vegetarianism, planting vegetables, going through the rubbish, looking at light bulbs, writing policy and trying not to panic. Finally around April we came up with our Vision Statement:

Our aim is to make The Castle Climbing Centre a benchmark for environmental and economic sustainability and to demonstrate that there is a place for sport and commerce in a sustainable future without compromising financial success and high standards.

The full Environmental Policy (EP) can be found here

And a thankyou letter to staff from Audrey here.

Included in it are our goals of:

Producing our own energy
Capturing our own water
Zero waste to landfill by 2015

No greenwash here!

Our launch party was to be a celebration of our exciting new policy that has brought about so many changes since we began just talking about it, and with some help from our friends it was one of the best festivals The Castle has ever seen. (We might even do it every year…)

It wouldn’t have been what it was without all the other inspiring organisations who joined us on the day:

Magnificent Revolution (bicycle-powered DJ, film and workshop)
The Energy Saving Trust (info on helping everyone save energy in their homes)
Greenpeace (info on taking action for the environment. And lending us their tents)
Climate Camp (info on camping for climate action)
Growing Communities (organic local veg boxes)
The Pangea Project (veggie BBQ and delicious curries)
AK Press (Anarchist and Environmental literature)
Small Mountains (illustrations of the EP journey)
The Age of Stupid (the film)
Transition Finsbury Park (part of the Transition Towns Network)
Ecoclimber (climb harder, climb greener)
Ecoactive (the worms!)
Sustain London (the alliance for better food and farming and the lovely Ida with a planting workshop)
Capital Growth (2012 new green spaces in London by 2012)
London Plains (seasonal cookery demo. Get in touch with Deborah via Growing Communities)
The DJs: Ed, Mike and Simon.
(sorry if I missed anyone!)

Of course our journey does not stop here – it has only just begun!

Finally – the biggest thanks must go to you, the humble climber. For getting excited, for getting involved, for coming along and joining us in our love of climbing. It’s our love of climbing that has got us where we are and we hope to help preserve our wonderful climbing habitats for future generations.

Sieta

Wake Up Freak Out

2009-06-03T07:38:00.000-07:00

- Then Get a Grip.

This is (in my opinion) a really good explanation of climate change. It helped wake us up to what is going on and galvanised us into action...

Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.

The Power Issues

2009-05-31T05:07:00.000-07:00

Lots happened in May, not the least of which was WE FINALISED THE EP AND LAUNCHED IT LIKE A (small, green, non-polluting) ROCKET!

Check out the write-up of the launch event here

And Audrey's thank you letter here

So, with those exciting developments, it's surprising that we've had time to make more changes around here, but we have!

Firstly, Steve introduced a moratorium on the purchasing of ANY new electrical equipment

Secondly (with this first point in mind) we purchased some hand shredders to replace our old electrical one. Hours of fun! We also need the shredded paper for our compost which is rather wet at the moment.

Thirdly, Tumble sorted out the lighting for the bike park area so it's on a sensor.

Fourthly (is that a word?) we got an additional water point on the mezzanine (so now we have 3) and made the decision to stop selling water from the cafe. All our water points are fitted with filters so now you can get a free glassful or buy one of the attractive, washable, re-usable castle-branded drink bottles to use at your leisure.

The Environmental Policy - Issue 1 April 2009

2009-05-07T04:36:00.000-07:00

1. Statement of Intent

Climate change is a real problem that is already affecting us. Resources are running out rapidly and the future economic landscape is increasingly uncertain. We must put in place an effective Environmental Management Scheme and radically alter the way we operate to minimise our environmental impact and reduce our dependency on scarce resources.

High Performance Sports Ltd is committed to doing this because we believe that we are collectively responsible for the causes of climate change and that we can, and therefore must, take action. In doing so, we can inspire change in other people and companies to also reduce their impact.

Our aim is to make The Castle Climbing Centre a benchmark for environmental and economic sustainability and to demonstrate that there is a place for sport and commerce in a sustainable future without compromising financial success and high standards.

The purpose of this Environmental Policy statement is to provide structure and direction to our actions in reducing our environmental impact. The challenge is a complex and broad one and cannot be solved by a simple solution.

It is only possible to make the business sustainable by changing our practices. While it is not in our power nor is it appropriate to prescribe or prevent certain behaviours, some aspects of the Policy will be mandatory and become part of performance appraisals, enforced through our Disciplinary Procedures and incorporated in each employee’s terms of work here. In areas outside the scope of our influence we will include systems and processes designed to encourage the reduction of negative environmental impact in the lives of our staff and customers.

This is a position supported by the Board of Directors and the Core Management Team.

2. Scope

The Environmental Policy is mandatory for all staff working at The Castle. It covers all business that takes place on Castle grounds or in connection with The Castle. A breach of the Environmental Policy may lead to Disciplinary Proceedings as per The Castle’s Disciplinary and Grievance Procedures. All staff will be informed of the Environmental Policy and this will be taken as a part of their terms of work at The Castle.

3. Method

A. Environmental Audits

We will carry out environmental audits to assess our environmental impact on an annual basis. These audits will include but are not limited to:
· Inputs – supplies brought into the centre;
· Outputs – waste produced by the centre;
· Energy and Resources – use of electricity, gas and water;
· Processes – the environmental impact of our systems of work with special attention to cleaning and maintenance products and processes;

Although a separate audit may be carried out for the Café, if practical, it can be incorporated into the general centre audit.

One of the purposes of the audit will be to establish our Carbon Footprint as per the methodology recommended by The Carbon Trust (Appendix A).

B. Action Plans

From the findings of the audit we will formulate immediate, 1 year, and 3 year action plans with specific targets. Tasks will be assigned by agreement to staff members and will form part of their general performance appraisal for their work at The Castle.

C. Performance Monitoring and Reporting

Our performance will be communicated to staff and public through the publication of an annual Environmental Report. To achieve our goal of demonstrating the possibilities of sustainability in business we will, in addition, produce monthly Environmental Updates to both customers and staff.

D. Reviewing Policy and Targets

The final piece of our Environmental Management Scheme is a review of our policy and procedures. This will be undertaken annually in conjunction with the publication of the Environmental Report.

4. Targets

Our main purpose is to reduce our environmental impact by reducing the carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions that we are directly and indirectly responsible for. In addition, we want to have a positive influence on the actions of our customers, staff and other businesses to encourage them to reduce their contribution to climate change.

We will consider our Policy a success when we achieve the following:

· Develop and implement an Environmental Management Scheme with external accreditation;
· Become carbon neutral through minimising our emissions and genuinely offsetting what emissions we cannot eliminate;
· Source all of our electricity from renewable resources;
· Become Water Neutral by collecting and recycling water ourselves;
· Regulate the environment within the building (temperature, ventilation and lighting) with the least amount of energy;
· Reduce the environmental impact of transport associated with the business;
· Actively encourage our customers and staff to reduce their own environmental impacts through an awareness campaign;
· Source all of our supplies from companies with high environmental standards;
· Send zero waste to landfill; and
· Eliminate the use of toxic substances in our cleaning and maintenance processes.

We must do this without compromising the financial success of the company and the high standards that we have come to expect.

5. Inputs

A. Purchasing Code

When purchasing supplies, staff are obliged to take the following elements into consideration (in no particular order):
· Our need for the product;
· Suitability for our purposes;
· Cost;
· Materials and processes used in making the product;
· Transportation used to make and ship the product;
· Product packaging;
· Expected life span and end-of-life disposal possibilities; and
· Supplier environmental and ethical record.

B. Supplier Code of Conduct

We will notify our suppliers that we will now be looking at environmental impact when purchasing and that we encourage them to take the following steps: assessing their impact, formulating a policy, reporting on their progress. Those suppliers that achieve this will be our preferred suppliers.

C. Café supplies

In addition to the Purchasing Code, the Café will have additional considerations when purchasing and preparing food. Where possible, the café will use organic, sustainable, local produce. Food will be assembled on site where possible to limit packaging and waste.

D. Utilities

Our first priority will be to minimise the consumption of electricity, gas and water. Secondly we will source these in the most environmentally responsible manner.

6. Outputs

a) Waste Management Plan

Recycling and composting are mandatory for all staff and strongly encouraged for customers. We will provide adequate facilities for both recycling and composting. To keep track of performance we will monitor and report on our performance monthly as part of the Environmental Update.

Our Waste Management Plan will respect the following waste hierarchy:(http://www.envirowise.gov.uk/uk/Our-Services/Resource-efficiency.html)
If we are not able to re-use the items ourselves we will invite outside organisations to re-use our waste unless there is a health and safety issue with the product being re-used.

b) Carbon Dioxide and other Greenhouse Gases

We will identify what emissions we are responsible (directly or indirectly) for and monitor our ‘carbon footprint’. We will accept responsibility for all activities connected with the operation of The Castle including our purchases, electricity and related activities such as climbing trips. Our aim, as stated above, is to be carbon neutral by 2015.

7. Outside Organisations

The Environmental Policy is applicable to all activities that happen in the building. To this extent organisations with activities that take place in the centre must be informed of the Policy and its implications for them. With regards to lessees and licensees we will include an environmental clause in our agreements. Where possible we will seek compliance with the policy by requiring them to engage in an Environmental Management Scheme of their own.

Is that a rocket taking off?

2009-04-30T04:25:00.000-07:00

No, it's just the sound of the new hand dryers in the changerooms.

The old ones were very inefficient. The hand towels had to be washed at high temperatures in strong cleaning chemicals and trucked around. We've now got those new ones that dry your hands in seconds by efficiently blowing the water off them. The best alternative to wiping your hands on your trousers (which may not be a hygienic solution).

On another note, this month our Route Setting Manger Mike has been getting in touch with all our hold suppliers and requesting statements from them about their environmental policies with regards manufacturing and where they are being made. We are choosing to buy from manufacturers who make things as close to us as possible and have strong environmental statements.

Finally, Audrey has signed the Castle up for the Mayor of London's Green Procurement Challenge. It is sometimes difficult to decide which of many options is the "greenest". The Green Procurement Code reminds us to consider that a new product:

uses fewer natural resources

contains fewer hazardous or toxic materials

has a longer life span

consumes less energy or water in production or use

can be reused or recycled on disposal

generates less waste, for example be made from recycled materials, use less packaging or be recycled by the supplier.

Our EP (which is almost finalised and needs to be agreed by the Board of Directors and the Core Management Team) will also remind us to think about whether or not actually buying something is necessary at all.

Cafe Changes

2009-04-01T04:10:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd make a separate entry about all the changes that have been happening in the cafe becasue there have been so many. Although the cafe forms such a small part of the business, it seems that it's one of the most visible aspects of the business and one of the most emotive. People really care about food!

What we have done so far:

Got rid of coke and nestle products

tried to source local, fairtrade and organic food where possible (for example all our coffee is now organic and fairtrade though obviously not local!!)

Got a proper milkman (Peter) who delivers organic milk in reusable glass bottles like the old days (no more plastic bottles!)

Peter also delivers us some juices so we can get rid of the tetrapak single portions of juice.

Sourced a local organic bread supplier.

Reduced our packaging by not using cling film any more and using proper glasses, plates and cutlery instead of disposable versions.

Ordered some bulk snacks to also reduce packaging.

Tried to find more vegetarian and vegan options.

This final point has created quite a discussion amongst the staff. We started the Great Vegetarian Debate on our staff intranet and got possibly the most passionate, involved and enlightening discussion in the history of the Castle! It seems on an environmental basis, the meat industry is simply not sustainable in its current state but people are not ready to give it up. I'm making no comment either way in here for fear of igniting the debate once again, I just want to point out that currently the cafe only serves organic ham, bacon and occasionally chicken, line-caught skipjack tuna and we're trying to find some more delicious vegan and vegetarian menu options. I'll leave it at that for now.

Meat Free Mondays anyone?

Busy month of March

2009-03-31T03:41:00.000-07:00

Seems like the rolling ball is gathering speed. This month we made loads of changes, and Audrey is almost there with the full EP.

Some of the things that we've done include:

Introducing composting. We now have compost caddys at all recycling points and in the cafe. We've got a composting tumbler in the back garden.

Sourcing biodegradable cleaning supplies and recycled toilet roll.

Setting up a new intranet site for staff specifically for the EP so they can see what's going on and get involved

Starting power monitoring on all the computers

Improving our recycling points once again. Ray did an autopsy of our recycling and discovered that the majority of our recycling is plastic milk bottles. (There is an easy solution for this in the cafe and I'll blog separately about that)

To fly or not to fly?

2009-02-28T03:34:00.000-08:00

Well, from an environmental perspective, Not to Fly obviously!

But if you've only got limited holiday time it's so much quicker to get anywhere! We were talking about how to encourage staff to take the train or car-share on their climbing holidays whenever possible and this was one of the biggest concerns (the other being price of course). Whilst we're not really in a position to offer cash for holidays (and if you book a train in advance it can be cheaper and much more convenient) we decided that any staff member who approached the management team about going on holiday and taking a slower, less carbon intensive route could be granted a couple of extra days holiday for travel.

Great for me becasue I hate flying and not just for environmental reasons!

the cost of consuming

2009-01-30T03:15:00.000-08:00

We ran out of our lovely orange pens this month. We were just going to order a load more but started to wonder if going through around 2000 plastic pens every 6 months really was in fitting with our EP.

We wanted to keep having them though as they're so useful and people seem to really like them, so we found some cardboard versions. There are so many "eco" pens out there made from, amonst other things: recycled CD cases, recycled car tyres, recycled money (I really liked this one) and corn starch. We decided on the carboard ones in the end as they can easily be recycled themselves (and to be honest were a bit cheaper than some others).

We also had to order some new staff clothing this month and, as we have come to do for most new purchases, wondered where the clothing came from, who made it and was it made with consideration for the environment? Our suppliers, Continental Clothing do an "earth positive" range which is 100% organic and 90% lower CO2 so we thought we'd give that a go.

Calling in the experts

2008-12-30T05:05:00.000-08:00

Some solutions are fairly obvious when it comes to conserving energy: turn off light switches, switch off computers, close the door to keep out the cold etc but some things are more tricky. Even more so with our Grade 2* listed building that lets in rain and cold through the skylights in winter... and manages to keep it warm and humid in the summer. Helpful.

We do have a few building features that will help us be cooler in summer and warmer in winter such as a huge roof, tall towers creating draughts and nice thick walls but we can't radically alter the look of the building or original features due to our heritage listing. For these reasons we have asked a few people to help us with greening our building. We've commissioned an Energy Options Survey from Fulcrum (a founding member of the UK Green Building Council) and appointed our architects Cook Townsend to project manage the building work.

Hopefully when the building work is done, we'll not only have a building that is much more energy efficient, we'll also have a nicer space in which to climb and work.

Our Mission Statement and Renewable Energy

2008-11-30T03:05:00.000-08:00

After a bit of wrangling and tweaking, we have come up with our Mission Statement for the Environmental Policy:

Our aim is to make The Castle Climbing Centre a benchmark for environmental and economic sustainability and to demonstrate that there is a place for sport and commerce in a sustainable future without compromising financial success and high standards.

Eventually this will form part of a larger and more detailed Environmental Policy (EP) but we are happy with our progress so far.

Another very exciting change this month is we switched our energy suppliers to Green Energy and have opted for their "Deep Green" policy which now means 100% of our energy comes from renewable sources. This plan is slightly more expensive than your regular, run-of-the-mill, not even slightly renewable brown energy so our next move will be to find out where and how we use so much of the stuff.

Increasing recycling

2008-10-30T02:57:00.000-07:00

While we are still formulating our Mission Statement for the new environmental intitiative, we thought we might as well get on with improving the recycling system around the centre. Kind of a no-brainer really. We got new bins, new signs, and contacted our recycling company Greener World about what kinds of things we can recycle. We have actually been recycling for some time but were often unsure about what we can recycle these days as it seems to change.

We then got interested in what is recycled here in the UK and what goes to China and is that bad?

THEN we got to thinking that surely whilst it is admirable to recycle everything we possibly can, maybe we are simply producing too much? Ray has offered to do an autopsy of the recycling and rubbish. Rather him than me!

We have identified a need for change...

2008-09-30T02:52:00.000-07:00

This month, The Castle’s CEO Steve Taylor approached the core managers and the board of directors with his thoughts about the state of the planet. He’d been reading up on climate change, carbon emissions and peak oil and become certain that if he didn’t act now in any and every way he could then he too would be to blame for runaway global warming – the point of no return for human life on our planet.

Needless to say, if we weren’t already switched on to the urgency of the situation (and some had been for years) we all got excited by Steve’s approach that “now is not the time to panic or despair, now is the time to act!” as it became obvious that we can’t rely on governments to help us, and it is not enough to make individual changes in our own lives – businesses like us HAVE to change the way we do things.

Not only did all the managers agree, we were very excited about the new direction for The Castle...

We aim to examine our business' impact on the environment and invest heavily in reducing that impact. We are going to do this in 5 ways:
1. Create an Environmental Policy and use that policy as the standard in all our business dealings.
2. Communicate to our staff, customers and the Board about what changes we are making and why.
3. Make physical changes to the building to minimise energy usage.
4. Assess our supply chain and opt for locally produced, organic and low carbon products in ALL purchases where possible.
5. Examine our waste management - REDUCE our waste where possible and RECYCLE everything that it's possible to recycle.