Some good videos

December 18, 2010 by Leave a comment

I thought I would add a couple of cool videos that I’ve seen!!! Both are linked in to The Prince’s Trust Accounting For Sustainability – all with some interesting characters in them. The first involves a number of business leaders including Sir Richard Branson, Deborah Meaden and Theo Paphitis and the second features Stephen Fry.  The first of the videos again highlights the point made in my last post about how sustainability can indeed assist in reducing the cost of doing business, and should be embedded into day to day process rather than operate as something that sounds nice in a CSR policy.

I saw another horrendous video yesterday on Mother Jones where they’ve uncovered an excerpt from some utterly ridiculous ultra-right wing religious fanatics claiming that environmentalism is part of some satanic world order – aside from dismissing the link between fossil fuel usage and climate change, I think that they perhaps miss the point in the Bible about being custodians of the earth – which we are all quite bad at!

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An opportunity being missed – Government spending cuts and inefficiencies

December 14, 2010 by 1 Comment

In the last day or so, there have been a number of articles about spending cuts in the NHS, Defence and local government in the UK – one article by the Guardian was entitled No Credible Plan for £20 bn NHS savings, warns MPs and in small print “Target would require ‘unprecedented’ efficiency gains to maintain quality of care, says health select committee”. The Telegraph on the other hand wrote an article entitled MoD ‘wasting £ billion a year‘ – and a cursory glance of news sites has plenty of articles about the recently announced reduction in local government budgets.

These massive inefficiencies are hardly new news nor has been the news about budget reductions. What is sad though is that there is now a tremendous opportunity to look at how sustainability and cleantech can actually help deal with this. There is a great chance to demonstrate how efficiencies can be achieved through more sustainable services and products but I sometimes wonder if the message is getting through. And sadly with the public sector, the methods for procurement are so bad that there is very little opportunity for innovation or solutions from start up businesses. In our limited experience in trying to get through procurement, every single tender asks for services that were around five years ago and barely reflect technological change, or provide the opportunity for new market entrants to provide solutions (if for no other reason than they have not been around for three years).

It is a disappointing situation – like us, I am sure that there are many other start up businesses that can provide the solutions needed to help the public sector meet its cost reduction targets without diminishing the underlying service needs – but there is very little chance of that happening until there is a radical rethink about public sector procurement. It may sound logical, but perhaps the answer is a government-sponsored incubator of sorts that allows start up, innovative solutions to be piloted in suitable government locations…

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Carbon Voyage wins the 2010 Greenbang Award for Most Efficient Transport Programme

December 7, 2010 by 1 Comment

So today we can announce that we’ve won the 2010 Greenbang Award for Most Efficient Transport Programme for our “simple strategy to maximise the energy efficiency of existing modes of transport”. Some of the other winners included SAP, L’Oreal, Sony Ericsson and Verizon so it is nice to be included alongside some of those rather large business names! And of course congratulations to all the other winners – 1E, Onzo, TelecityGroup and Cawleys. Details of the awards can be found here, but the other winners are as follows:

Best corporate responsibility project: SAP, for its SAP Project Ghana, which provides women in Ghana with the training and technology needed to operate competitive, market-based cooperatives in the international shea nut butter trade.

Best IT technology: 1E, for its NightWatchman automated software for desktop and server power management.

Top smart-grid technology: Onzo, for its suite of energy management products and services to help both utilities and end-users improve energy efficiency.

Best data centre innovation: TelecityGroup, for the innovative, efficiency-maximising design of its Condorcet data centre in Paris.

Most efficient transport programme: Carbon Voyage, for its simple strategy to maximise the efficiency of existing modes of transport through taxi ride-sharing, web-based trip planning and reduction of empty taxis.

Best sustainable resource management programme: Cawleys, for its multi-benefit initiative to reduce food and agricultural waste while reducing landfill emissions of greenhouse gases and generating clean energy via anaerobic digestion.

Best low-energy building: L’Oreal, for its 100-per cent biomass-fueled beauty products plant in Libramont, Belgium.

Best cross-organisation sustainability effort: Sony Ericsson, for its GreenHeart across-portfolio initiative to eliminate paper phone manuals, significantly reduce packaging, phase out hazardous substances in its products and recycle phones to recover valuable resources.

Top in-house sustainability effort: Verizon, for instituting waste-reducing printing practices, greening its fleet with hybrid and compressed-natural-gas vehicles, re-engineering shipping processes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and trialing fuel-cell, geothermal and solar energy at its Garden City facility in New York.

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Carbon Voyage meets Peter Jones

July 29, 2010 by 1 Comment

On the 22nd of July, Carbon Voyage was one of six finalists out of around 3,000 entrants in the Enterprise Business Challenge, a competition to pitch to Peter Jones of Dragons’ Den fame.

James Swanston with Peter Jones at the Enterprise Business Challenge

In the week preceding, I went from someone who had never really watched Dragons’ Den to someone who has now pretty much watched every episode in existence. Unfortunately we didn’t win, but it was still a great day (the winner was Funky Lunch which is a great idea to get kids to eat more healthy food)

It was a good day, not just in terms of getting some more pitching experience, but also to meet some of the other finalists and hear about what they are up to.

In other news, we’re working on a really exciting project at the moment which I am hoping will launch later this year up north. There is a very cool article in the National Geographic that is sort of an aspiration what we would like to achieve called ‘A Day with Less Driving’ – check it out!

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The Launch of Tesco Carbon Voyage

June 16, 2010 by 1 Comment

We are launching a ride sharing service called Tesco Carbon Voyage this week in partnership with Tesco and the University of Manchester’s Sustainable Consumption Institute (SCI). The service will be operating as a twelve week trial at three of Tesco’s big stores in North West London; if it proves successful, it may be extended. To visit the site, click here. The service will be offered to Tesco Clubcard holders in three Tesco Extra stores in North West London.

This is a really important activity; 84% of all passenger car trips in the United Kingdom only have one occupant according to DfT figures, so any opportunity to increase vehicle occupancy can have a impact on reducing carbon emissions, congestion as well as cost. The service we provide will be great in being able to get a baseline of the impact of customer travel to and from these stores and then identify potential financial and environmental savings.

What we are trying to do here is firstly understand travel patterns to and from supermarkets and then provide Tesco customers with a safe and convenient way to share their trips to and from their stores. The customers of the service will be able to book via phone, text or online. We will capture all the financial and environmental data so customers can find out how much they are saving through the ride-sharing scheme.

At the end of the trial, the SCI will also interview several hundred participants to get a detailed understanding of their views to such a service – what is a good enough incentive to get people to share, what barriers are there and so on. Something that is unique here is that not only are people being surveyed about their travel patterns, but we have the opportunity to see what they actually do. The SCI has also written a short information piece on this trial here.

As a start up, this is a tremendous opportunity to deploy a service on a very large scale and demonstrate the value of what we have to offer, and we’re really pleased to have been selected by these organisations to help them deliver this service.

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HEATHROW AND GATWICK EXPRESS LAUNCH ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY DOOR-TO-DOOR AIRPORT SERVICE WITH CARBON VOYAGE

June 25, 2009 by 1 Comment

Heathrow and Gatwick Express have launched the first ever environmentally friendly door-to-door service to and from the airport with Carbon Voyage. Travellers can book a pick up from either their home or office in a Carbon Voyage car and travel to Paddington or Victoria Stations where they will board the express train service to Heathrow or Gatwick Airports.

This new integrated service, which is booked on-line, means customers will only need to make one booking, to arrange a Carbon Voyage vehicle and train ticket. Train tickets will be sent electronically to the customers, saving postage and paper.

James Swanston of Carbon Voyage said, “From an environmental perspective, this new service will assist in taking cars off the road, reducing congestion and more importantly the pollution caused from the five million people per year that use taxis and minicabs to travel to and from Heathrow and Gatwick Airports. The average taxi trip from Paddington to Heathrow is approximately 6.2 kg of CO2 emissions as opposed to 1.4 kg using a train (Source: www.transportdirect.info ).”

George Fripp, Account Manager for Heathrow and Gatwick Express adds: “We wanted to optimise our offering and provide a best-in-class service and assistance to our travellers. This product is applicable not just to our UK customers as it can be booked on-line it is just as relevant for international travellers coming into the UK.”

Jonny Goldstone of Green Tomato Cars, London’s largest exclusively green taxi company said. “By working with Green Tomato Cars, the service combining Carbon Voyage and Heathrow and Gatwick Express demonstrates that travellers can easily “go green” without settling for a lower quality of service or paying a premium – customers will experience smoother journeys, excellent customer service, reduce their environmental impact and pay less for the journey all at the same time.”

Prices start from £32 and can be booked online at www.carbonvoyage.com

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