Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to clarify legal obligations under the Trade Practices Act for businesses involved in carbon offset activities.

There is a need for a single standard to limit confusion and misleading behaviour in the emerging market.

The ACCC said consumers and businesses are facing difficulty in understanding and verifying claims and there are concerns consumers are facing “misleading and deceptive conduct”.

This is an area which is certainly very confused at present. There are also concerns that some companies may be establishing carbon neutral targets as an excuse to continue polluting activities without attempting to reduce their environmental impact.

I think that there are a large number of activities that need to continue even though they generate a large amount of carbon emissions and in this case, so long as they are trying to reduce where they can, it is responsible to pay someone else to offset what is unavoidable. Hopefully new technology will be developed that can reduce those emissions further.

I see the role of Government to have legislative incentives to reduce atmospheric pollution but also to “get out of the way” and remove red tape to allow innovation.

Technorati Tags: ACCC,   Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, businesses involved in carbon offset, carbon offset, carbon emissions, atmospheric pollution

A new survey showed that only 2% of Australia’s largest companies have a high level of confidence in their company’s greenhouse emissions data and 36% have no data about their business emissions at all. PricewaterhouseCoopers, ran the survey, says swift action is needed in the climate of growing regulatory requirements and demand from investors for robust emissions data.

And only 8% of the CEOs surveyed feel they fully understand emissions reduction opportunities and risks. Furthermore, 98% of those surveyed say they are yet to implement a strategic response to climate change.

Experience in Europe shows business needs to be prepared for an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) that will come into effect in Australia by 2010.

Technorati Tags: business emissions, emissions, not up to standard, greenhouse emissions data, emissions data, climate change

It is a fact - Management systems save money! They build in efficiency, reduce problems, plan to minimise the effect of emergencies and build in evidence of legislative compliance.

Consumers want to buy from green business - so long as it does not cost more. What a good thing that a well planned system saves money and increases profits. Many businesses find that they have access to a bigger range of markets and/or premium priced markets.

Employees like to work for green businesses and it is good to be able to attract and retain a workforce who want to want to work for your business and care about your real and perceived image.

You will have better relationships with regulators, neighbours and pressure groups.

Even if you don’t care about the environment, there are very sound financial reasons why going green makes sense.

Very briefly my daughter had her second child on Sunday. A little boy called Dante. He is a very welcome brother for Luka after multiple miscarriages.

It is a real joy to see these little people grow – hopefully into sensitive and caring adults who are environmentally aware and able to think outside the square and cope with the world we leave them.

Luka’s favourite DVD is The Lorax by Dr Seuss. This is a fabulous story about conservation and ecology and I can’t recommend it highly enough. My children grew up with The Lorax book which is also really good so it was a wonderful find to be able to buy the DVD for the kids.

Technorati Tags: The Lorax, Dr Seuss, environmentally aware, conservation, ecology, The Lorax by Dr Seuss

Three days a week I walk to the local Gym and workout with a trainer for 30 minutes. I normally enjoy the walk down a back lane away from the traffic but this Wednesday it was very different!

The first obstacles were separate waste management trucks collecting recycling, general house hold and green waste from a series of bins in the lane. Very noisy and hard to avoid as they sped past me to the next bin, then stopped and mechanically lifted the bins, put them down, then sped on past me again to the next bin to repeat. It was horrendous in a narrow lane. Necessary I guess – but bad timing. They seemed to be leapfrogging me all the way to the main road which I need to cross to reach the gym.

Next came a council truck, mulcher and chain saw gang who were pruning overhanging branches – wow – they may have had ear muffs on to reduce the noise but the residents and pedestrians did not.

Then there were the frustrated commuters who were trying to reach their parking spots that access the lane and the more help up they were, the more furiously they planted their foot when there were a few spare metres between other obstacles.

All in all, the normally pleasant walk to gym was rather horrendous and unbelievably noisy. Not a pleasant way to wake up and get going in the morning. I am not sure that our inner city environments are really very human friendly places. I rather like the concept where people in many parts of Europe take their rubbish to the appropriate bins themselves. That way they all get some exercise as well as reducing the stop starts and the distances the waste removal trucks have to travel.

Technorati Tags: waste management, recycling, commuting, walking, gym, adventurous, environment, waste removal, noise

I live in a north facing apartment block and since I erected a canopy over the windows to keep out the summer sun, I seldom have any real desire to use an air-conditioner. The apartments are all very well insulated so that we don’t hear sound from one to another. Really quite environmentally friendly.

We have a series of recycling bins in the basement – I feel that if they were better labelled for cans, bottles, plastics etc it would be better. Paper is pre-sorted and most of us are good about using these. The household waste has to be bagged and put down a shute with organic waste going into an in-sink-erator that grinds it up which prevent odours in the waste bins but does add to the biological load in the sewer. I use a worm farm on my terrace in winter but the heat on the tiled surface cooks them in summer.
My concern is for bagging the rubbish. Like most council waste, our waste all must be bagged and I have not found a satisfactory biodegradable bin liner bag that I can use that avoids plastic bag use. With the Federal Environment Minister wanting to make plastic shopping bags illegal by the end of the year, it would be great if all the bin liners sold were biodegradable too. In Australia almost 50% of shoppers bring their own cloth bags for shopping but here are still millions of the plastic bags entering the environment and killing wildlife, especially when they reach the sea and are mistaken for edible jelly fish by wildlife who then choke to death.

Technorati Tags: environmentally friendly, environment, recycling, recycling bins, organic waste, biological, biodegradable bin liner bag, avoid plastic bag

Our food prices are going up partly due to the drought, partly due to the increased cost of oil used in production and transport but also because grains are being diverted from food to biofuels. If this is a problem to consumers in the affluent countries – just think about the impact on those people who live in the third world! This is MADNESS!
Apparently people are clearing tree covered land to grow grain as well. Actually I have heard of people clearing established ecosystems of native trees to grow TREES – then claiming greenhouse credits for this.I am unsure whether these people are insane, greedy or both.

Waste organic material can and should be used for this instead of being allowed to become a disposal problem. There are some examples below of this being done. I would love to find more.

• Algae grown on sewage waste can be used to make biofuel.
• Methane can be captured from landfill to provide an energy source and also prevented from entering the atmosphere as a serious greenhouse gas.
• I read this week that fish waste, including fish oils can and is being used in fishing vessel boilers around the world or converted to esters for biodiesel. Alaska burns quite a bit of their fish oil and in Nova Scotia , Canada they take the saturate ethyl ester fraction from the production of omega 3 concentrates and burn that. I believe it is being used in the Halifax bus system.

Technorati Tags: biofuels, biofuels make food, drought, cost of oil, grains, established ecosystems, ecosystems, waste organic material, organic material

16 US states have launched a joint lawsuit against the against the EPA (Environment Protection Agency) because it is preventing California from implementing a law to limit global warming pollution from new cars. The states have been joined by 5 non-profit groups.

Following on from the Bali Conference where the USA really dragged its feet and Papua New Guinea told them to get out of the way, the US states need to sue the feral EPA for dragging its feet.

We live in interesting times.

The latest opinions published today in Sierra Sun commented that truly smart car companies out there will begin building the cars of the future as soon as they can, taking advantage of consumers’ predictable desire to reduce their need for high-priced gasoline.

There’s a reason why Toyota has surpassed General Motors in the last year or so as the leading seller of cars in America: Years before it had to, that Japanese company dared to bet on the intelligence and environmental consciousness of U.S. citizens and built the hybrid Prius, which eventually became a hot seller. Toyota will soon offer hybrid versions of all its models.

Which demonstrates that it can be done, that making fuel efficient, cleaner cars is both possible and a wise economic move.
There is now a bunch of hybrids, none as popular as the Prius, which leads the hybrid market because of its quality and because it got a leg up on the competition.

Now there’s a chance for someone else to leapfrog Toyota by hastening the commercial appearance of hydrogen fuel cell cars, one of which will be offered soon by Honda on a lease-only basis. Market these in quantity and with all the amenities motorists enjoy, like air conditioning and and keyless entry and power windows and locks and GPS systems and leather seats and consumers who like to stay on the cutting edge will buy them, with masses of others to follow.

Technorati Tags: US states, joint lawsuit against the against the EPA, Environment Protection Agency, California, a law to limit global warming pollution, global warming

I recently read a very interesting article by a guy called Seth Borenstein. The Arctic is warming faster than the computer models predict and apparently the combination of both a natural and cyclical increase in the amount of energy in the atmosphere that moves from south to north around the Arctic Circle and man-made global warming serve as a one-two punch that is pushing the Arctic over the edge.

It makes sense to me that these is bound to be a combination of both natural and man made causes to the very rapid melt but the atmospheric pollution increasing the earth’s temperature is what we can try to control.

Technorati Tags: arctic circle, man-made global warming, global warming, atmospheric pollution, Seth Borenstein

Let’s put Global warming into perspective. Sure the earth has warmed and cooled in the past due to variations in intensity of heat from the sun.

Now we have added atmospheric pollution! We have changed the chemical composition of the earth’s atmosphere. There is now an insulating layer of polluted atmosphere that lets the sun’s rays in but lets less than normal of the reflected rays out.

Pouring excess CO2, Methane, NOX and other gases into the air is pollution and this is putting our children and grand children’s future at risk. We ignore it at THEIR peril.

OK so it means we need to make some changes now. Many of these will actually save us money once we get our head around them and decide that change is ok. If we don’t we risk major economic effects (see Stern Report), political instability and increasing unpredictable weather patterns.

In the diagram, the arrows on the left indicate the situation before we started to seriously pollute our atmosphere and the right hand side shows the greenhouse effect.

I know I seem to keep banging on about this subject but I deeply care about the future for my grandchildren and all their friends. I guess that this is a major motivation for my business. I have two major passions - my deep love of the natural world and my understanding of the way systems help businesses to run more profitably and provide business owners with a less stressful lifestyle.

Technorati Tags: global warming, symptom of atmospheric pollution, atmospheric pollution, pollution, greenhouse effect, carbon dioxide, methane, greenhouse gases, Stern report