low carbon

The Prime Minister has today announced a long-term strategic partnership between Qatar and the UK as part of the UK Government’s commitment to forge new partnerships between hydrocarbon producing countries and consumer countries to help the move to a low carbon economy.

The Carbon Trust - set up by the UK Government in 2001 and one of the world’s leading experts on low carbon technologies - has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) on a new Low Carbon Innovation Partnership to set up a new £250m Qatar-UK Clean Technology Investment Fund and to investigate the creation of a Low Carbon Innovation Centre in Qatar.

Thanks for this alert from Anna Smee at the Responsible Business Club. Perhaps LCW researchers should be interesting Quatar in our work?

We are working with managers from the Ginsters factory in Cornwall to develop a learning history of their environmental management practices over the past 10 years.

Ginsters, part of the large and privately owned Samworth Brothers Group, have been making Cornish pasties and other savouries for over 40 years and currently produce over 3.5m products per week. With nearly 1000 staff on-site they are the largest private employer in Cornwall, and they take their community responsibilities and local reputation very seriously.  Their contribution to local sustainability was officially recognised when they won the “Best Large Company” and “Overall Winner” in the Cornwall Sustainability Awards 2006. 

Through the Learning History approach, we are helping Ginsters to notice, understand and learn about the factors which have come together to enable their proactive approach to carbon reduction.  In particular, we will be telling the story of Ginsters’ approach to resource efficiency and waste management.  We will attempt to show how changes in government legislation were the initial drivers for change (particularly the new IPCC† regulations in 2004) but how these ‘external’ factors have given way to more self-sustaining or ‘internal’ drivers, as the business benefits of sustainable practice have become more apparent, and a group of environmental ‘champions’ has emerged.  The Lowcarbonworks team are working with a number of theories which might help explain some of the contextual factors which Ginsters have faced .

An important turning point in Ginsters’ environmental history was their decision to support a new Anaerobic Digestion plant at Holsworthy, North Devon, in 2003.  The £7.8m plant was originally conceived by a group of local farmers as a cost-effective solution to their farmyard waste, and was one of the first of its kind in the UK.  The plant takes a mixture of farmyard slurry and local food waste and converts it into biogas* which is then sold back to electricity generating companies as green energy. The remaining by-product (or digestate) is spread back on the land as a nutrient-rich, natural fertiliser.  The biogas plant encountered significant technological, management and financial difficulties in 2005, which resulted in it being sold to a London based waste management company, so it is no longer in community ownership.  Another recent development is that from June 2008 the plant has stopped taking farmyard slurry from local farmers, and only accepts food waste from local manufacturers and municipal food waste collection schemes. This type of waste contains higher energy levels and has the potential for greater biogas production.  The new owners are hoping that this will enable them to make a profit for the first time since the plant opened.  Ginsters continue to send 20 tonnes of food waste to the plant every week, which would otherwise go to the landfill, and the green energy produced by the plant has the potential to power about 1000 homes.  

Despite the huge potential for anaerobic digesters to provide green energy, and the fact that thousands are being used in mainland Europe (particularly in Germany and Austria) only about 12 generators in the UK are currently being used to produce energy, and this is mainly to power farms.  There is currently a lot of interest in the press and government circles about the potential for such ‘Waste to Energy’ technologies, but there seems to be little understanding about all the complex factors which have to come together to make this finely-tuned technology actually work, and also the potential social, legal and political barriers which can stand in its way. By writing this Learning History we are hoping to achieve 2 important aims:

1. To enable Ginsters to learn from their own experience of working with this new technology and apply that learning to any future investment in low carbon technologies.

2. To disseminate the learning more widely, both within and outside the food industry, to help others understand the economic, organisational and political issues that might need attending to, in order to make this new technology a success.

We are currently in the process of conducting interviews with key people from within Ginsters, and also a number of external people who were involved at the conception of the biogas plant, and the current owner.  We will then construct and share the Learning History with the Ginsters team before disseminating it more widely.  

† Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPCC) regulations came into affect in 2004 and apply to all food manufacturers who produce more than 75 tonnes of product a day.  All companies in this category must get a permit from the Environment Agency in order to conduct their business.

* Biogas produced by AD consists of mainly methane and carbon dioxide. The Biogas can be
used to generate electricity and heat (CHP). It can also be converted to a vehicle fuel.
Biogas is a renewable energy source. It displaces fossil fuels and therefore helps to reduce
additions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. It does produce carbon dioxide when burnt
but this comes from the natural atmospheric carbon cycle, so it doesn’t add to the stock of
green house gases that lead to climate change.

 Action researcher, Gill Coleman creating a learning history with a MAS Intimates employee.

We are engaged in a learning history process to describe the development, construction and start up of the Thurulie low carbon factory (see video) in Sri Lanka which has been built by the Sri Lankan company MAS Intimates to supply lingerie to Marks and Spencer as part of the latter’s Plan A.

MAS Intimates in Sri Lanka has a longstanding reputation for innovative products and manufacturing and an equally longstanding concern for creating high employment standards. The company is a significant player in the Sri Lankan economy with considerable economic and political power. The wider Sri Lankan context presents both challenges and opportunities: wage and skill levels are relatively high and to compete in the global economy leading companies need to offer added value, often through contributing an ‘ethical’ dimension-social and environmental-to the supply chain.

The Thurulie factory has been designed to minimize energy through a set of design features that create a building appropriate to its tropical environment. The main green features of the building are:
- designed to sit lightly on the site, with minimum disturbance to ecology, on two floors to minimise footprint
-  ‘returned to nature’ at night
- set in a cool micro-climate to maximise thermal comfort and air quality, using native plants
- carbon neutral, using green power - hydro and solar PV
- low operating energy, using evaporative cooling, and natural lighting supplemented by LED task lights
- structure of re-usable steel framework and timber flooring to upper floors
- reflective roofing and partial green roof, to minimise heat absorption
- walls and roads built using cement stabilised soil with low embodied energy
- rainwater harvesting tanks to collect storm water
- anaerobic treatment system for waste water

As our theoretical orientation would suggest, the creative adoption of these technical features has only been possible because several stakeholder groups have collaborated to design and build this factory:
* Strategic thinkers within MAS looking for opportunities to add ethical value to the supply chain and strengthen relationship with a key customer;
* Marks and Spencer, whose need to create a novel strategic position in the UK high street aims to ensure that the goods it offers, and thus its entirely supply chain, reach high ethical and ecological standards. (See Plan A);
* A centre for energy studies at Moratuwa University in Colombo, whose members have been developing energy-saving practices in the tropics for many years, linked to an architect colleague with a passion for green design;
* A project management group able to act with energy and creativity to realize these strategic objectives in practice;
* A senior management team in MAS with a strong ‘can-do’ culture willing to give freedom and space to support innovation;
* A highly skilled and responsive building contractor able to respond flexibly and speedily to their client’s unusual requirements.

We have interviewed representatives of all these groups and at the time of writing are developing a draft learning history which we will take back to Sri Lanka for collaborative exploration in July.  The purpose of this learning history is to help those involved in a project reflect and learn, so that future projects may benefit from the experience.  Everyone involved has been extremely busy getting the factory to completion, and so it has been difficult to reflect on what has happened.  Further, each person involved has their own perspective, and it is difficult for individuals to have an overview and see how the different contributions have fitted together.  So our first objective in this visit is to help them in thinking about this, and noticing what has gone on.

We also have a second important purpose as part of the wider Lowcarbonworks research project.  Given the challenges of climate change and the importance of reducing carbon emissions, we wish to engage a wider audience in understanding interaction of technology and contextual factors in the achievement of a low carbon future. What has been achieved at Thurulie is important, and clearly demonstrates the systemic complementarity between several approaches to low carbon  with contextual factors including organizational strategy and inter-organizational relations in the supply chain, economic opportunity, national cultural conditions and the individual knowledge and agency of several important champions. We believe that the story of Thurulie offers important lessons for both business and policy audiences and contributes to our academic understanding of the adoption of low carbon technologies We hope the story will encourage business audiences to emulate it in their own original projects.�

Lowcarbonworks is an action research project aiming to tackle barriers which inhibit low carbon innovation. Our starting point was food and drink production as this sector is a heavy user of energy and has plenty of scope for further efficiencies.

Researchers from different disciplines from Bristol, Manchester and Bath Universities are working with industrial partners and other innovators in the public sector. They are working on a variety of projects logged in the Projects section.

A core principle underlying our projects is shared learning. We are not starting with answers but learning with partners. Some of these are focussed on running successful businesses, others may be creating the conditions for communities to flourish. What we aim to do together is to create further win/win opportunities for low carbon innovation.

This website is designed to encourage shared learning and inquiry. It also offers an opportunity to grow a wider community of people interested in working with us, formally or informally, virtually or face to face.

As a start or an experiment why not try adding something to the site? It’s quite easy to use once you’ve joined but for those more cautious we’ve compiled a beginners guide. (link to follow)

History
LCW came about in response to the challenge of climate change and in the context of the UK Government’s policy to reduce carbon emissions by 60% by 2050. This challenge was made more urgent by the recent Stern Review (Stern, 2006) and the fourth IPPC report.

The bid for funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s (EPSRC) Carbon Vision Programme was sparked by a meeting between climate change strategy consultant, David Ballard, Jonathan Aylen from the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Nick Morley from Oakdene Hollins, and a bunch of engineers in a “sandpit” event organised by EPSRC.

David was carrying out research into human and organisational change at the Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice at Bath University’s School of Management which now hosts this site. David could see how useful his insights and action research approaches could be to the challenge of low carbon technology transfer. Proven technologies exist which can save both money and carbon emissions but many have stalled, why?

LCW argues that:

1) The barriers to transformation do not lie in the technologies themselves but in the wider social, political, economic and organizational context; and that it is important to integrate economic and technical dimensions with social, organizational and psychological dimensions of change.
2) There is interplay between technological, economic, and human factors which creates conservatism in the system as a whole. Attempting to change one factor alone may be of limited impact. It may even be damaging if it causes the whole system to ‘lock in’ to a suboptimal path, but addressing several of these at the same time can result in a virtuous cycle of change.
3) To create change we need both awareness of the issues and a sense of agency—that we can initiate relevant change. Our experience is that while awareness of climate change issues has increased significantly, people generally feel powerless in the face of planetary level events such as climate change and the experience of human agency remains very limited.
4) However, there are moments—for example when technological, economic and political factors come together -which offer a window of opportunity; when the capacity to make change is significantly increased.

LCW is concerned to identify and capitalize on these moments. One strand is the Learning History with Local Government which identifies the ways barriers to low carbon innovation are overcome on the local scale. A second strand is to work with industrial partners through a process of action research to more fully understand the contextual issues and find ways to respond to them so that stalled technologies and other business processes are more easily adopted. A third strand is to identify the opportunities that arise when capital stock is replenished. 

References:
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2007). Climate Change 2007: The IPCC 4th Assessment Report. Retrieved February 4, 2007, from http://www.ipcc.ch/
Stern, N. (2006). Stern Review on the economics of climate change. London: HM Treasury.

Gill is a tutor on the MSc Responsibility in Business Practice which she co-founded with Peter Reason and Judi Marshall at Bath University’s Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice.

Gill has worked in the area of business and social responsibility since the early 1990s, with Bristol University, and then with the New Academy of Business from 1995, establishing its values led management education. She has particular interests in the role of action research in organizational change, and in gender and other forms of diversity.

Gill and Michelle Williams are the lcw action researchers looking at how some of the organisational and communication barriers to the take up of air cycle technology can be dissolved.�

Business Plan 

The Carbon Trust has set up a business enterprise to broker the connection between those producing waste heat from their manufacturing processes and consumers who’d like to buy it.

Connective Energy Ltd claim that 45% of the UK’s industrial primary energy consumption is currently wasted as heat released to the environment.

40 TWh of waste heat could be recovered. This is equivalent to the heating needs of Greater Manchester.

It is worth around £1 billion per year with annual carbon savings of 7.5 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent.