I took 30 mins while I ate my lunch and I watched Oprah.   She was discussing earth Day and had a variety of guests.  None was new to me but it was very graphic and great exposure to a hidden problem

For centuries man has washed his waste down the rivers into the sea.  Ships toss their garbage into the sea.  Now every ocean has a central gyre which is effectively a giant rubbish dump.  This is all types of waste but it had huge amounts of household waste.

In the centre of the Pacific Ocean there is a floating rubbish dump that is larger in area than Texas and in places it is 90 metres deep.  The majority of the floating debris is plastic – bags, bottles, cigarette lighters etc.  Huge quantities of plastic bags.   The seabed had the heavier waste.

In Adelaide where I live the government has banned the use of plastic shopping bags which I think is a great idea.  I use fabric shopping bags anyway and have done for years.

The show went on to show the tons of waste going to landfill daily and the largest problem was paper.  This is one of the organic materials that break down to in landfill giving off methane emissions.

One thing I really liked was the US concept of a recycle bank where people get credits than can be used like cash for their recycled materials.  We don’t get that here although we do have deposits on all beverage containers and have done for many years with the noticabale result that beverage containers are not found as litter.  They are all collected and cashed in.

I was given a birthday card with a picture of a half a glass of liquid with the wording “glass half empty, glass half full” and the personal message added was “You would be proactive and look for more”.  I was thrilled by that and it started me thinking.  This is actually pretty true about me.  One of my brothers said he did not want to remember birthdays as he gets older and I think “bring them on – the more I have the better!”

We can look at climate change as either a danger or as an opportunity.  Why not be proactive and see the wake up call to start making savings in your business.

I think we are all totally over exposed and tired of hearing about climate change – We know it is a clear and present danger but it is not as urgent as making sure that our business survives in tough economic times.   And it seems to be getting more confused and more expensive.  Most of us wish it would just go away.

But what if you can find an easy and time effective way that you can go green to save money in your business and also at home?

This is the help I give to proactive small to medium businesses so that you make real savings in your business with the flow on benefit that you also help the environment.  You choose from:

* Online training with small bite sized chunks of help each week and lots of phone and email support whenever you need it, or
* Offline in a more typical consultancy style or
* Do-It-Yourself training programs that have the same training materials as the online training but without the weekly teleconference coaching although you can choose to book an extra half hour one-on-one phone support for a small extra.

As well as the savings you will also reduce interruptions and problems as you recognise and reduce the threats that have always been inherent in your business and still are now.

Go to http://www.enviro-action.com/what-training-can-i-do.html to find out how I can help you
94% of the businesses that work with me increase their profitability and grow.  My clients win awards, resolve pre existing legal problems and develop better staff, neighbour and regulator relationships.

Wow, at last real moves to start managing climate change in the US!  Their House of Representatives passed their renewable energy bill.  This is a huge step to going green but I guess the negative campaigns will really turn on before their Senate vote.

If you don’t keep things simple they don’t work.  My major worry about climate action is  politicians making it much too complex..

It is now time for us all to step up and start going green… AND this is where I help.  Going green in YOUR BUSINESS will save you money and a well planned slimline ISO 14001 saves even more because of the efficiency and risk reduction that you build in.

And for a few more days now you can save even more than usual………….

…………. because I still have a FEW clearance sale versions of ISO 14001 Do-It-Yourself training going for a ridiculously low price of A$330 (+gst for Australians) and even if you choose to book an occasional half hour coaching with me you will still be way out on top.  There are a few safety modules also at A$99.  Fax your order to 1300 88 2283 or 618 8311 5233 for international clients

Don’t take too long deciding because you will miss out.

Or you may choose the coached training and join the group doing ISO 14001 scheduled to start in the week beginning 20th July.  Fax me on 618 8311 5233  to make a time to discuss this with me if you are wondering how it will help you.

Either way you will find that going green saves

Would you believe that it is the auditing process?  Yes – because this forces continual improvement.  No one is perfect and a collection of well meaning people in a business are most unlikely to be perfect BUT if the business is ISO certified, mistakes are taken seriously, they examine WHY the mistake was possible and how to prevent it happening again.  They don’t just patch it up and patch it up again the next time, and the next time.  Then every 6 to 12 months an auditor walks in to check if they do what they says they do and he keeps asking questions like –“well, show me….”

I had my audit for both ISO 14001 and ISO 9001 again on Thursday, I did pass it, ad I did find a few areas I can improve in.  I actually enjoy this because it is an opportunity to have an outsider come in and look at my business behaviour and planning, and give me feedback.

ISO 14001 and ISO 9001 are about identifying where you potentially have risks of some form of business interruption, incident or even legal breach.  It is about planning and behaviour.  It’s about training and maintenance.  It’s about looking for the real reason that something happened.  It’s about preventing problems before they happen.  This is why ISO systems save money.  Sure when you do ISO 14001 and you include reducing your carbon footprint your power bills will also go down but prevention of interruptions and proactive planning is the real saver.  It is certainly not about locking yourself into mountains of paper of “having” to do things the way someone wrote it down.  That sort of system is a bad business choice.  My sort of ISO system is slimline and very simple because if it is not simple it won’t work!

I like the fact that ISO 14001 businesses are not perfect but are still accepted into a system of continual improvement then regularly checked in ongoing audits by skilled auditors.  I like the fact that my ISO 14001 clients successfully grow their businesses because of their better planning and behaviour.  You will like the fact that your business will be more efficient, you will reduce risk and you will save money.

The biggest breakthrough in improving human health has been providing drinking water that has been separated from waste water.  There are nasties in the gut that we do not want to circulate in our drinking water.  Checking that our drinking water is clean and safe to drink has been mainly by checking on the presence or absence of E. coli but has now been superseded by a preventive risk management approach.  Water shortages and a need to use recycled water has prompted a big push to improve the tools needed to ensure our drinking water is safe.

Essential first steps are providing a quantifiable definition of safety. Which is based on recognising that not all pathogens are created equal, some only cause mild diarrhoea while others such as E. coli  0157 can cause more severe symptoms including haemolytic uraemic syndrome and death.  And the definition of safety provides the goalposts that need to be achieved. using a risk management system. For use of recycled water include either reducing pathogen concentrations using treatment OR by reducing exposure through mechanisms such as how the water is used (eg, drip versus spray irrigation), applying buffer zones between points of use, and public access or crop restrictions (eg, irrigation of fruit trees rather than lettuce).

The guidelines describe typical reductions achieved by various types of treatment and exposure controls. This dual approach means that even sewage with relatively low levels of treatment can be used safely, provided appropriate end-use or on-site restrictions are applied. However, high-exposure uses such as dual reticulation will always rely on high levels of treatment.

In the risk management approach, monitoring focuses on checking that control measures work effectively. It relies on recoding contact time with chlorine which correlates with inactivation of enteric bacteria and viruses and removing turbidity by filtration correlates with removal of particles such as Cryptosporidium. The advantage of this approach is that the indicators can be measured continuously using automatic monitoring devices connected to alarm systems rather than relying on sampling.

This is based on a much more detailed paper by David Cunliffe provided courtesy of The Australian Society for Microbiology.

Research commissioned by the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, studied the impact of higher energy costs from the planned Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme on a sample of Small to Medium Enterprises (SME’s) in the food processing, plastics and chemicals, and machinery and equipment manufacturing industries.

Big surprise!  The report found that the Australian emissions trading scheme could eat into the profits of small and medium businesses and may force owners to axe jobs.   What they forgot t mention is that SME’s can reduce their expenses by reducing their wasted carbon

“The concern is that as energy costs go up profitability declines, business will look at what areas they can make savings in terms of their expenses, and we’re concerned that labour would be one of those,” Mr Evans  from the Chamber said.

“Trade-exposed SME’s face prices set in the international markets, and hence will have no opportunity to pass the costs of CPRS to their customers.  And those SME’s selling to domestically will be constrained by the prices of imported goods,” the report said.

One of the things I have said repeatedly is that the Australian Government does not take proper account of the small end of town.  One could be cynical and say that jobs in the small end of town are not union jobs.

Geologist Ian Plimer has labelled climate change theory an “ascientific, urban, religious, fundamentalist movement” promoted by academics and activists who would be “unemployable outside taxpayer-funded climate institutes”.

Plimer says that climate change has become the new Western religion with the elements of failed European socialism and Christianity and it imposes guilt on the community, creates a fear of damnation, demands appeasement by selling indulgences to the faithful, ignores any contrary information, demonises dissenters.”   This all sounds a bit UGH to me.

He is right that climate always changes and there have been greater and more rapid changes in the past and we’ve had varying carbon levels in the past.  But what is happening now is different and the atmospheric changes have been measured.   The current problem is superimposed on top of the history described by Plimer.

Climate change is not new -  it was predicted over 30 years ago to my certain knowledge because while my kids were small I taught secondary biology so I had school hours and holidays to fit in with my family.  I taught about global warming then.

However in Australia we have another “voice of reason” our Family First senator Steve Fielding has made up his mind on climate change and apparently according to the “expert” the world is not warming now, and humans aren’t changing the climate.

The government and the country’s top scientists have tried to convince Senator Fielding, who holds a crucial vote in the upper house, that global warming is real.  But he’s released a document setting out his position and he says “Global temperature isn’t rising”

The US House of Representatives is about to vote on clean energy and climate legislation.  Thank Goodness say most of the world!  However it has really brought out the sceptics in force.

There are two types of sceptics (or skeptics):
-  The ultra conservatives who hate change even more than the rest of us and
-  The geologists whose research is largely funded by the mining and especially the coal and oil industry and we need to remember that geologists are trained to look DOWN at the soil, earth’s crust and BACK to the past and Atmospheric physicists look UP at the atmosphere and at what is happening NOW and in the future.

They have totally different training and most actually have less in common than a gynaecologist and a dentist and you would not dream of mixing those to groups of medical professionals up.  In Australia we have Professor Ian Plimer, a geologists much of whose work has discredited by many in the scientific community because it defies some of the laws of physics, publicising his new anti climate change book.

However the naysayers are having campaigns on TV and behind closed doors to scare politicians and put our children’s future at risk.

I would love the bulk of scientists who are warning us of the need for urgent action to be wrong but there is too much evidence they are right and the risk to my grandchildren is too great to take.  I refuse to gamble with their future!

Tasmania is the world’s largest producer of legally grown opium for the pharmaceutical market.

About 500 farmers grow the crop supplying the market with about 50 per cent of the world’s raw material for morphine and related opiates.

The problem is that wild life and sometimes sheep get into the paddocks growing the opium poppies and eat poppy heads.  All walk round in circles but wallabies, a small version of a kangaroo, get into the crops and jump around in circles creating crop circles with their tails the poor things as they increasingly hop in circles eating the poppy heads and squashing the plants.

The security of Tasmania’s poppy stocks, are considered some of the safest in the world.

We all know that cattle and other ruminant animals have wind problem, mainly belches but definitely from both ends.  Their wind issue is about greenhouse gases not manners.  Methane is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

There has been a lot of research happening on reducing this windy issue.  So how green is a “green” cow?  Most of the research into improved dairy farming is about improved genetic techniques and growth hormones.  People don’t like that either.

It is like the dilemma over nappies –which is worse filling landfills with disposable nappies or to wasting water and energy washing cloth ones?  I have 2 daughters and one is in each camp and having used cloth ones for my kids (a long time ago when there was little choice) I much prefer babysitting with the disposable ones available!

Another problem is the biofuels dilemma – if we make more fuel from crops to reduce oil consumption, are we really worse off by using up too much land, pesticides, fertilizer and tractor fuel in the process?  And starving some people into the bargain?  And driving Orang-utans to extinction?  I would love to get bio fuel made from algae grown on sewage farms.  We are not short of shit.

OK Back to Cows
•    1944, In the  U.S. dairying 117 billion pounds of milk from 25.6 million cows.
•    2007, it produced 186 billion pounds of milk from 9.2 million cows.
That is a huge reduction and the volume of methane and nitrous oxide emissions has halved in that time. . Manure output is also down 24%.  So the total carbon footprint for dairy production shrunk by about 41%.

BUT the cost was increased use of the growth hormone recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST) and using this on a million cows would further reduce carbon emissions equivalent to planting 300 million trees or taking 400,000 cars off the road. The European Union, a leader in the effort to curb climate change, bans the hormone because consumers don’t want this type of hormone in their food.

Another way to reduce methane from cows is to feed them fish oil which comes mostly from small fish already threatened by overfishing.  Fish oil also reduces the fat content of milk, so that you need more cows to produce the same amount of cheese

Personally I like to eat food that has been fed on “natural” foods and I have actually never seen cows going out to catch and eat fish.  We have already had horrific examples of that can happen when cows are fed meat.

There are some pretty tricky trade offs here.  And I’d like to see the figures for cattle that just craze on unimproved pastures,