The life of pens

After 5 minutes of me talking, she turned to me and asked 

‘Are you talking about pens? 

Pens, as in the things we write with’? 

 Yes I am… and I am also aware of the fact that this may seem to be going overboard for buying pens. Part of my job here at The Castle (among other things, thankfully) is purchasing bulk orders of items that we use on a daily basis. There was a time when it took a very short amount of time and all I had to worry about was how much it cost in £’s. Over the last few years, things have changed around here (for the better).
Now, before I commit to buying anything for company use I need to ask several questions:

• How does it fit in with our environmental policies? 
• How and where is it made? 
• How is it transported from beginning to end point? 
• Are the materials used sustainable? 
• Do we really need it in order for our business to continue and to grow. Will our customers suffer if we do not provide it? 
• Is there a better option, if we really do need it and it doesn’t fit into our environmental ideals then are there any better alternatives? 
• At what point do you have to accept that there are things we cannot do without even though they fly in the face of what we are trying to do? 

Those of you that are regular customers with us would have undoubtedly have come into contact with our current model of pens. Three years ago at the beginning of our journey we wanted to tackle a seemingly simple issue of buying branded pens that were as environmental friendly as possible. After some weeks, we found a solution that seemed to answer our needs. Pens whose casings were made from recycled post-consumer waste. Not a 100% compostable but at least the nib and inside could be removed from the casing and it could be chucked in the compost. We ordered them (around 5000 of them) and we very pleased with our efforts. At this point I can see you sitting there saying to yourself, but those pens are terrible, they do not work. What is the point of having pens that don’t work even if they a compostable? Agreed; we made further efforts with the pens and contacted the supplier who then offered us a pen with a metal nib and supposedly better quality. We tested them and they seemed to be fine, we ordered another 5000… Winter at The Castle, and the pens cannot cope with the low temperatures; Summer at The Castle and the pens stop working In the heat. We are finally at the end of the supply, thankfully; and I have sat down and given consideration to this problem.
My first reaction was a lets return to plastic pens that work. Buying expensive products that are overpriced only for the fact that they claim to be ‘eco’ friendly and yet are of poor quality doesn’t do our efforts justice. It makes a mockery of the whole issue of what sustainability actually means and allows companies to go on producing things and for us to continue purchasing them without having any further thought on the issue. It also makes it easier for those who wish, to weaken the arguments for making the effort to ‘buy green’. I began the task of researching which type of plastic pens would be best… Oh dear.
The UK uses over 5 million tonnes of plastic each year of which an estimated 24% is currently being recovered or recycled. There are basically 3 types of so called environmentally friendly of plastic for me to consider using.

• Bio plastics made from natural materials such as corn starch. 
• Biodegradable plastics made from traditional petrochemicals, which are engineered to break down more quickly. 
• Eco/recycled plastics, which are simply plastics made from recycled plastic materials rather than raw petrochemicals. 

One night at home I began my research (yes that’s right I actually did this). It only took me 3 hours to come to my decision. I put the pros and cons of each plastic type next to each other.

(It actually took me longer to try to get the table fit into the blog template than it did to research it! Anyway, if you click on the table it will pop out in another window so you will be able to read it!)

    Bio plastics   Biodegradable/compostable   Recycled

 

At this point in my research my brain began to ache and a radical thought occurred to me.

My search for a good type of plastic is fruitless, there are not any ‘good’ types of plastic. All plastic has serious and terrible long lasting side effects and just like in any other industry driven by profit and convenience they will do their best to hide the facts from us under a pile of non-biodegradable hog wash. And we, made lethargic and blind by too much fat, salt, sugar, coffee and nicotine let them sooth our guilt away with heroic claims of saving the planet, saving the polar bears, saving the forests (saving their own arses).
(Here is the radical part) Where we can, we are going to stop buying into their rubbish… And we can stop this conversation right here. We do not need to buy pens that are branded. This makes them a desirable object. People come to The Castle, they have a great time; they then see the pens with our logo on them and ask ‘Can I have one?’ ‘Of course’, we say, and they take two or three and the rest of their groups take two or three and so on. Stop branding the pens and they become just a pen. Although we all end up with pens that we do not know where the hell we took them from… but nevertheless we can still cut down on the amount of pens we lose each day by this simple step.
The next step is to use them as if we knew the real cost of them. I.E. Not just the fact it cost us 30p per pen, but the actual cost, this is incalculable, but it shouldn’t stop us imagining it. We are not being tight and begrudging our customers a pen; we are just asking them if they really need to take it with them. Fair enough if after they considered it and they answered yes I do, then of course, take it.

How far we take this depends on us. Do we add string to the backboard where people write out the forms in order to stop them being taken away? And then just leave a couple out at a time for people that do need one?
If we go through the centre and collect all the old pens that are sitting in drawers not being used because they are not our branded recycled type, I have the feeling these will last for months (also due to the fact that they work). I guess it is the next logical step (but a long time coming) after we decided not to use plastic cards on reception any more. Some customers got upset by the cardboard cards seeing them as less valuable than the old plastic ones (which the ink rubbed off anyway and they became unreadable very quickly). They assume that the cardboard ones are temporary and we are going to go back to plastic. Again, we need to look at the real cost of convenience. We don’t really need a membership card at all, we can send the number via email and ask the customer to remember it or have it in their phone notes, all that is required is a change in the way of thinking about what we really need in order to get through the day. Does having a membership card made of plastic make a real difference to my climbing experience? Does The Castle having a branded pen I can take home and chuck in a draw or at the bottom of my bag make a difference to my life? Well it will, but not in the way we like to think about.

So, in conclusion, sorry for rallying the troops about getting ‘new pens that work’; ‘pens that we can be proud of’! I have changed my mind and think that we should use every pen we have in the centre, put them out in small amounts, tie a few to the backboard, when the time comes that we need to buy some more, we will go for recycled plastic, manufactured in the UK and unbranded. Seems like a big deal about pens I know, but we got through 5000 pens in a year, imagine this amount of plastic on the scale of Barclays and then times it by 100, 000 other companies in the UK alone and then times it again for the World.

Yes, I’ve just written a three page essay on pens, for those that got to the end, thanks for taking the time to think about it.

 

Carpet tiles

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

Research on membership cards

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...

Enviromental route setting?

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.

PAPERPAPERPAPERPAPER

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

Wake Up Freak Out

- 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

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.

Is that a rocket taking off?

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

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?

the cost of consuming

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.

We have identified a need for change...

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.