low carbon

 

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.�

Becoming an active reader requires using highlighter pens, scrawl, doodles, post-it notes and anything else you fancy to annotate a text, as participants in Bath Universitys’ LowCarbonWorks Learning History Workshop discover.

The idea is to respond to a particular narrative about low carbon innovation with your own ideas, emotional reactions, questions, and comments about what interested or surprised you and notes about themes of relevance to your own work.

In this way, new active readers expand the learning from the previous version of the text and to some extent make it their own.

Margaret Gearty, the action researcher behind this new application of the learning history to low carbon innovation in local authorities, defines two types of reader:

• The active reader is someone exploring the value and relevance of the History for their own learning.

• The participating reader is someone directly or indirectly involved in the history who have helped to shape it with stories and comments about how events took shape.

An important definition of a learning history is “a jointly told tale”. It differs from a typical case study because it seeks out more than one perspective and includes more of the messy human dimension of change.

If you’ve had the active reader experience, add your comments about it to this post.

You can also click on this link for an example of a learning history about the development of a combined heat and power district heating and cooling scheme by Southampton City Council.

 

Quick link to Learning History blog site 

A highly interactive Learning History workshop for achieving low carbon reduction in local authorities has led to the creation of the UK’s first ever online collaborative learning history. Created and hosted by CARPP PhD action researcher, Margaret Gearty, the site is inviting comments and continuing participation from those who came to the workshop and others whom they may recommend.

Even if you weren’t able to attend the workshop in Bath in February 2008, you can read  the various stories of low carbon innovation such as the development of a district heating system in Southampton or the widespread use of biomass in Barnsley and see and hear what other people learnt.

The idea of using blogging technology, although innovative when applied to creating a joint learning history, has already established a place in higher education. For some background to how this learning movement is developing we refer you to the following paper: Exploring the place of blogs in higher education

achieving-carbon-reduction-jcc.pdf

 photo courtesy of Adrian Hewitt  

In the lowcarbonworks article published in the Journal for Corporate Citizenship and downloadable from the link above, I, Margaret Gearty, explain how a learning history uses a narrative approach to formulate a rich picture of how change occurs. This technique can unearth more detail and include more perspectives than a more traditional case analysis.

Using the Merton Rule as an example, I attempt to cast light on the messy process of policy transformation and the role that even a cat like Randolph might play!

Story teller and facilitator, Geoff Mead

Story Circle Guidelines 

The story circle was a feature of lowcarbonworks’ first successful learning history event for local authorities in February 2008. Story telling was a particularly rich experience for some participants who told us that there was very rarely a forum such as the one we created for the rapid exchange of inspiring ideas. Telling a story is also a lot more personal, some would say intimate, than reading a case study. Some of the seemingly random or irrelevant detail left out of a traditional case study can be found to have enormous value for engaging and resonating with an audience’s own experience and need to feel a sense of relationship with the story.

However, there is a discipline to a successful exchange of stories so some ground rules help. Accesible from the green link above are the guidelines we used at our event which was facilitated by Geoff Mead from the Centre for Narrative Leadership. We include them for the benefit of people who want to give this exercise a go.

Our prompt was firstly a trial round where the instruction was: “Tell a one minute story about a person, an event or a time that first made you aware of the need for carbon reduction”. Followed by a round using the instruction: Tell a three minute story from your own experience abaout a successful innovation (for carbon reduction) in a Local Authority or other public setting.” �

 

Action researcher Gill Coleman, has recently returned from a visit to an eco-factory in Sri Lanka which will be supplying underwear to Marks and Spencer. Gill was impressed by the collective ingenuity and the speed of innovation achieved by the company, MAS. The idea is to create a learning history at the site to enable the company to learn from its success so that it can be replicated elsewhere.

Set up an rss feed using the orange button above if you want to be kept up to date with this project.Â

As councils and organisations across the UK increasingly recognise the need to put together plans and strategies to tackle climate change there is an ever more urgent need to understand how to translate these into timely action on the ground. There is also a need to communicate and share experiences about the changes we are making. The Learning History workshop held in Bath on 25th and 26th February was aimed at those practitioners in Local Authorities and elsewhere who are trying to understand and make the necessary changes in their own organisations.

At the workshop, Learning Histories of well-known cases were presented and common themes across these examples explored. Learning Histories foreground a human story against a more conventional case account. Moments of doubt, lucky breaks, twists and turns - these all serve to confirm a lamented response to many ‘good news’ stories: i.e. that could never happen here! Indeed this response is true, but by working narratively, participants have the opportunity to work with these stories, identifying themes and linking them to their own experiences so that they draw learning that is relevant for their own situation in a way that can be helpful and empowering for all involved.

Featured Examples and Take-Aways

The following 5 examples of innovative work in local government can be downloaded. Click on each link to take you to a page where you can also leave comments if you were at the workshop. (Subject to joining and promotion to author status)

- The Nottingham Declaration

- Barnsley’s push on Biomass

- “The Merton Rule”.

- Kirklees’ solar villages and

- Southampton’s district heating network

Later we will post a copy of the overall Learning History that will be based on data from the workshop.

 

Many people noticed and commented on the imaginative and professional use of graphics at the Learning History event for local authorities run by action researcher, Margaret Gearty for lowcarbonworks in February 2008. These weren’t developed solely for their aesthetic value, though this is important.

Action researcher, Chris Seeley designed the graphics for the event. This is how she describes their importance for facilitating learning:

“Graphic facilitation is a way of making wholes visible and “creating a group memory” when working with large gatherings of people, especially in exploratory, research settings. The graphic faclitator prepares large scale visual templates and drawings to help guide participants through a process.

Participants add to the templates with their own words and images as they emerge, and the meeting room gradually fills with collective intelligence.

This forms a “set of processes that uses words and pictures to record and facilitate meetings as large visual displays… The record provides a group memory of the meeting that is easy to understand and share with others” (Braisby 2005)”

Action research values different kinds of knowing including what is sometimes called “presentational knowing” In other words the importance of paying attention to different forms of communication and developing these skills as an implicit part of any research.

Kirklees Learning History A5 Pdf

Find out how the drive to end fuel poverty set Kirklees on the road to installing solar panels. Click on the green link to download the full learning history and record any comments you want to make in the comments box below.