Energy Performance Certificates Influence Buyer Decisions

After commenting on the introduction of Energy Performance Certificates last week, research released today, compiled by Drummond Madell on behalf of the Energy Saving Trust suggest that the EPC rating of a house will influence 29% of peoples buying or renting decisions.

This is a positive sign of the effect EPCs will have in future on the housing market as more properties are included within the legislation from 10th September and beyond. This will empower homeowners and landlords to implement energy saving measures to ensure their properties are salable or rentable, and of course through this command a premium. 37% of people surveyed said that the EPCs would influence them to improve a home they buy.

Improvements to increase efficiency will directly impact on the emissions produced by homes. Annually in the UK there are over 1m house sale transactions, from the research this could easily lead to 400 000 homes implementing energy efficiency improvements year-on-year.

With such positives on the benefits of individuals knowing about EPCs, it was unfortunate that 53% of individuals were not aware what an EPC was. In time this will increase through continued media coverage and peer-to-peer education. For more information on Energy Performance Certificates visit the Energy Saving Trust or Home Information Pack websites.

“I am not surprised to learn people want to know how their home would rate on the energy efficiency scale. This reinforces what we already know from our Green Barometer2 report: ‘60% of people want tailored advice on energy saving’. What does surprise me is how many householders admit to being unaware about the Energy Performance Certificate. Clearly we need to inform people about energy efficiency, because once they are on-board they’re interested and will change their behaviour. We are urging householders to complete our free home energy check online, speak to Energy Saving Trust’s free, impartial advice network, and take advantage of the Energy Performance Certificates.”

Philip Sellwood, Chief Executive, Energy Saving Trust

Offsetting the Week

This week we learned from Cambridge Econometrics that the UK government were well on their way to failing to meet targets for reductions in carbon emissions by 2020, this came a day after Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) suggested that rich nations could pay poor ones to reduce their emissions for them. A bit like carbon credits. These comments didn't go unnoticed by environmental groups who hit out at the suggestion, and called on rich and poor nations to both cut emissions together. A logical idea when you consider that developed countries make up the majority of CO2 emissions, therefore any reduction by poor nations, who often have the lowest emissions would have a negligible effect on overall emissions in the short term.

"This proposal simply won't deliver the cuts we need in time. The scientists are telling us that we need to cut carbon dioxide (CO2) by 50-80% by 2050. Unless rich countries start to wean themselves off fossil fuels right away this won't happen."
Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs responded to the research by Cambridge Econometrics stating the UK had a "good record" on tackling climate change and was on target to "meet and exceed" greenhouse gas reduction targets under the Kyoto protocol. The government's Energy White Paper and other measures meant the country was on track to meet the 2020 goal relative to 1990 levels, it said, even though the UK economy will have doubled in size in the same period.

Whilst we were worried about our emissions at home being handed over to developing nations to deal with, Sienna Miller jetted of to India to "plea", as the BBC put it for residents to reduce their CO2 emissions as part of the Global Cooling Campaign. Visiting the Bandra Kurla slum home to 350 000 people she said the experience was "humbling" and was "embarrassed" to ask for help when the west produce and have produced the majority of emissions. The Global Cool movement is using celebrities and high profile individuals to spread the word about reducing emissions, part of their campaign is trying to empower 1 billion people to reduce their emissions by 1 tonne each.

With all this offsetting news in the media this week, I began pondering something that has been troubling me for quite some time. My holiday plans for this year, although I have yet to book and the holiday will combine business with pleasure, I will go to Hong Kong, of course this is going to be an environmentally unfriendly holiday, and as yet I have not had the courage to calculate the emissions from the flight. An Eco-nightmare you might say.

I therefore want your ideas on the best way to offset a return flight of 5845 miles? I know there are many solutions in the marketplace, and I am not fond of offsetting, but I want to do something original, creative and clever, and do something, rather than do nothing. I have a few ideas of my own, however I want to hear yours. If the idea involves you doing something then I may out source the project to you. So get those energy saving bulbs lighting up with ideas, turn them off though if you don't need them on.

Picture: Sharp Unveil Low Energy LCD TV

At just 1.1" (29mm) thick this prototype LCD television from Sharp on display in Tokyo, Japan this week is the thinnest in the world. Not only is the television slim, its power consumption is the lowest of any LCD in the world. As I previously stated in High Powered Gadgets Threaten Energy we need to press forward with advancements in technology ensuring that efficiency and reduction in power consumption is a key focus rather than the current trend of "bigger is better" and graduated increases in energy consumption. If you are thinking of purchasing a new television check for environmentally friendly tellies at the Energy Saving Trust.

Carbon Hero

The Carbon Hero, winner of the British Standards Institute (BSI) prize for Sustainability Design, is a personal carbon calculator and works by tracking a person through their phone signal every time they go on a journey. This then allows the device to work out the method of transport the user is on, and from that calculate the amount of carbon dioxide going into the air as a result. The invention is in two parts: a keychain which calculates the relative location, velocity and pattern of a user's activity and the mobile phone which displays the carbon used and the amount of credits needed to be purchased in order to offset the amount used.

The device is currently configured to work in the UK, although it has also incorporated 1,000 thousand airports from around the world. In theory, a person can travel anywhere and have their journey included in the carbon footprint calculation as well.

Home Information Packs

The start of August marked the introduction of Home Information Packs (HIP) into the United Kingdom, initially for houses with four or more bedrooms in England & Wales, extending to three-bed houses on September 10, 2007, this will cover over 60% of the housing market. Scotland will introduce their own version of the HIP in 2008. Costing about £400 to compile, a Home Information Pack must include:

• Evidence of title
• Copies of planning, listed building or building regulations consents
• A local search
• Guarantees for any work on the property, and;
• An energy performance certificate

Energy Performance Certificates are created by energy assessors who complete an audit on the property taking into account measures that the owner has implemented to improve the efficiency, such as cavity wall insulation, double glazing and energy saving light bulbs. This data is then fed in most cases to a computer program which then produces a report and rating, displayed like that of energy labels on white goods. The Energy Saving Trust believe following the advice in the EPC report the average household could save £300 per year off their bills.

"Hips and EPCs can help families to save hundreds of pounds off their fuel bills, and cut a million tonnes of carbon a year"
Baroness Andrews, Communities Minister

The introduction of the Home Information Packs has been cited by many as a way to reduce house sales falling through, with the potential buyer receiving in advance basic clear information about the property. They also reduce the need for multiple people compiling the same information on the same property, and the government hopes will empower people to make simple but effective changes to their homes to improve the efficiency. Installing cavity wall insulation and filling your home with LED or energy saving bulbs will only cost a few hundred pounds and can be completed in an afternoon, but could mean the difference between an E or a C grade, and thousands of pounds in fuel costs to prospective buyers. They also ensure the government complies with an EU directive before the 2009 deadline.

"It will give the opportunity for people, for the first time, to understand their energy consumption. It will let them know - possibly for the first time - what level of energy standard a home is currently reaching and could be reaching."
Philip Sellwood, Chief Executive, Energy Saving Trust

My only hope is that they roll out the information packs to smaller properties within a reasonable time scale which suits market conditions, as these properties are most likely per capita producing more emissions than those of larger properties. Also if you are in the property industry, make your packs available electronically and save all that paper.

Dumped

Next month sees the launch of a three-week reality tv series on channel four in the UK, titled "Dumped", the shows eleven unsuspecting volunteers are left marooned on one of Britain's biggest landfill sites for three weeks. Their challenge? To survive off the rubbish the rest of us have thrown out.

The participants have willingly agreed to take part in a testing eco-challenge but they don't know where. Most have assumed that they will be dropped into a pristine natural environment like the Amazonian Rain Forest or the Arctic.

Starts Sunday 2nd September 2007.

Picture: Sony Bio Battery

The 50 mW bio battery by Sony is powerful enough to charge a MP3 player and speakers. The bio battery casing is made of a vegetable-based plastic. It measures 3.9 cm (1.5 inch) along each edge and works by pouring sugar solution into the unit, where enzymes break it down to generate electricity. The company said it aims to produce the batteries for commercial use, without specifying when.

Energy Saving Cartoons

The Milieunet Foundation is a Dutch non-profit organisation focused on awareness and change of behaviour by means of communication about waste, energy, sustainability, nature, environment, climate, human rights and international development cooperation. Each week they will be offering a cartoon highlighting ways in which we can all reduce our energy consumption, save the environment and money. In general the battle of educating the public in matters of energy efficiency has been approached through various mediums, this is key to the success of any education campaign. Cartoons are just one of these methods and are a simple and clear way to educate.

Drive Efficiency ... Drive Efficiently

Changing your car to a new environmentally friendly model may not be easy for us all. But there are some ways you can reduce your fuel consumption, save money and help the environment too. The following simple tips could save the average driver £120 a year and reduce your CO2 emissions by 200kg per year.

• Gear Changes
  Change up before 2,500rpm (petrol) and 2,000rpm (diesel).
  
  
• Plan Ahead
  Anticipate road conditions and drive smoothly, avoiding sharp acceleration and heavy braking. This saves fuel and reduces accident rates.
  
  
• Air Con
  Use air conditioning sparingly as it significantly increases fuel consumption.
  
  
• Kill Your Speed
  The most efficient speed depends upon the car in question but is typically around 55 - 65mph. Faster speed will greatly increase your fuel consumption.
  
  
• Don't Wait Around
  Drive away immediately when starting from cold - idling to heat the engine wastes fuel and causes rapid engine wear.
  
  
• Aerodynamics
  Roof racks, bike carriers, and roof boxes significantly affect your car's aerodynamics and reduce fuel efficiency, so remember to remove them when not in use.
  
  
• Avoid Short Distances
  A cold engine uses almost twice as much fuel and catalytic converters can take five miles to become effective. Walking or bikes can be a great alternative to short journeys.
  
  
• Plan Your Route
  Plan your journeys to avoid congestion, road works and getting lost. Sat Nav and online map services such as Google Maps can help you find the way.
  
  
• Tyre Pressure
  Under-inflated tyres are dangerous and can increase fuel consumption by up to 3%.
  
  
• Switch Off
  Stuck in a jam, switch the engine off if you expect to be there for more than a minute or two. Cutting the engine will save fuel and reduce emissions.
  
  

Picture: MSC Napoli Recycled

The 62,000-ton MSC Napoli which ran aground off the Devon coast in January, was split in two after a series of explosions last month. She was towed in a five day operation by Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) and the Ministry of Defence to a point just outside Belfast Harbour before being taken to Harland and Wolff shipyard where it will be essentially recycled.

Stop Junk Mail

Junk mail is often a nuisance for the majority, with most of us simply destroying the item without reading it, and thus serving little or no purpose. In the UK it is estimated we receive 21 billion items weighing in at one million tonnes every year, about 18 for each household per week. Over 17 million trees and 4 billion kWh of energy are required to produce the paper, produce the mailing and transport it to our homes. Not only does this require energy and trees, it also each year;

• fills 2.3 million cubic metres in our landfill
• uses 31 billion litres of water
• burns 1.6 billion litres of oil
• emits 26m tonnes of airbourne pollutants

Preventing the majority of junk mail only takes a few minutes by simply excluding your address from the relevant mailing lists via the Mail Preference Service. The MPS is a free service set up 20 years ago and funded by the direct mail industry to enable consumers to have their names and home addresses in the UK removed from or added to lists used by the industry. It is actively supported by the Royal Mail and all directly involved trade associations and fully supported by The Information Commissioners Office.

The MPS can remove your name from up to 95% of Direct Mail lists. It will not stop mail that has been sent from overseas, un-addressed material or mail addressed to The Occupier. You can expect to continue to receive mailings from companies with whom you have done business in the past. You may also receive mailings from small, local companies.

To prevent un-addressed material, you should contact Royal Mail, who offer a similar services to that of the MPS.

Both services can take up to 4 months to become fully active, any unwanted mail that continues to arrive can be put back in the post box (no additional stamp needed) with a message written on it asking to be removed from that company’s mailing list.

You can help further by ensuring that any mail you do still receive is sorted and sent for recycling rather than just being placed into your main rubbish bin.

Picture: Inside "Big Ben"

Each of the four 7m-wide clock faces of The Great Westminster Clock (commonly incorrectly know as Big Ben) in London is illuminated with 28 energy efficient light bulbs that have a life of around 66,000 hours. The clock will stop operating from 11th August, until September for general maintainence.

Photo: Phil Coomes

Green Labels

When out shopping its often difficult to differentiate products on their environmental merits. With the addition of green labels manufactures are trying to help us understand how their product meets environmental standards, but whilst some labels and logos are self explanatory some labels are not so easy for us to decipher. Included on the posts below are some logos you may have come across in the past or will in the future with explainations and links.

• Product-Specific Labels
• World Labels
• Fuel Economy Label
• Energy Labels
• Timber Products
• Ecolabels
• Organic Produce
• Food
• Recycling and Packaging

If there are some you think we should list on these pages please feel free to email us and we will add them to the appropriate category.

Video: Tall Chimneys Demolished

On 6th July the skyline of Belfast was permanently altered when three 240ft chimneys from a coal fired power plant which was closed in 2002 were demolished. At the height of production the 240MW power plant used 600 000 tonnes of coal annually, unloaded by four cranes from a continuous stream of trucks, 150 tonnes an hour. This power station alone produced over 1 million tones of CO2 annually. This image of the fall of the chimney of a coal fired power plant should be the image for the future of electricity generation. No longer should we be so reliant on fossil fuels especially coal to produce electricity.

"The demolition of the chimneys not only changes the Belfast skyline, it marks a new opportunity for power generation in Northern Ireland. Once the demolition project is completed, the site will be kept in a landbank reserved for future electricity generation."
Robin Greer, Northern Ireland Electricity

How Are Tyres Recycled?

Over 50 million tyres (just over 480,000 tonnes) were scrapped in the UK in 2001 and around 80,000 tonnes was disposed of in landfill. When disposed of in landfill sites, tyres in large volumes can cause instability by rising to the surface of the site, affecting its long term settlement and therefore posing problems for future use and land reclamation. Rubber materials contain proportions of organic chemicals and little is known about the long-term leaching effects of these materials.

Tyres account for around 3.5% of the weight of an average vehicle, and as a controlled waste under the Environmental Protection Act 1990, a Duty of Care is placed upon waste producers to ensure that waste material is disposed of safely through registered carriers to licensed sites. According to the Used Tyre Working Group's 2001 survey 22% were recycled, 8.3% went to energy recovery, 9.9% were retreaded, 16% were reused and 3.3% were used in landfill engineering. The remainder (approximately 40%) will have been landfilled, stockpiled or illegally disposed of.

There are many ways tyres can be recycled in their original form;

• Reuse of part-worn tyres
  Extracting the maximum safe life from a tyre saves valuable resources (oil, rubber, steel etc).
• Reuse through landfill engineering
  Whole tyres can be used in the preparation/construction of landfill sites, where they are used as leachate draining systems.
• Tyre Retreading
  Tyre retreading is a major industry in the UK. Colway, now C-Tyres, processed 1 million tyres in 1999. Manufacturing a retread tyre for an average car takes 4.5 gallons less oil than the equivalent new tyre and for commercial vehicle tyres the saving is estimated to be about 15 gallons per tyre. Car tyres can only be retreaded once but truck tyres can be retreaded up to three times.
  
  

However when they can't be recycled in their original form they can be chipped. TyreGenics, the UK and northern Europe’s only cryogenic tyre recycling company has officially opened in Baglan, Neath Port Talbot, Wales. The £4m facility (£1.4m of which came from a grant from the European Union’s Objective One fund in support of the jobs and commercial opportunities) will process in excess of 9 000 tyres a day, amounting to 30 000 tonnes a year which would have otherwise been disposed in landfill or in some cases burned producing toxins. The launch follows on from a statement from the Environment Agency in 2003 that urgent action was needed to cut the number of tyres dumped illegally in Welsh beauty spots.

"The volume of tyres being recycled was the equivalent of all the tyres produced in Wales annually. Instead of those going for landfill, drainage or being burnt in cement kilns, they are getting recycled into usable product"
Nick Wyatt, TyreGenics

So how are tyres recycled?, first they are collected and reprocessed by shredding the tyres into millions of tyre ‘chip’, pieces of rubber approximately 50mm x 50mm that have a variety of uses. In the case of TyreGenics, this process is complete by their venture partner Credential Environmental, this company will also collect tyres for recycling in most parts of England & Wales.

This tyre ‘chip’ is the raw material for the cryogenic recycling process. The ‘chip’ is loaded into an enclosed freeze chamber cooled using quantities of inert liquid nitrogen. The 17m chamber takes the chip, cooling all the way along the 15 minute journey, to banks of mechanical hammers. When the chip reaches the hammers, it has been cooled to a temperature of –80 degrees centigrade where the rubber becomes very brittle. The hammers are enclosed in large steel chambers mounted some 2.5m below ground level, where drive shafts running through the chambers propel the hammers to strike against themselves thousands of times each minute. As these hammers hit the frozen tyre chip, they smash rubber off in pieces of various size (known as grade) of tyre ‘crumb’. This crumb is then extracted from the hammer chambers and graded and sorted within the plant into one of 6 grades of crumb for further treatment or direct use.

The process delivers three end products; rubber crumb, steel and fibre.

• The main by-product is rubber crumb, separated and graded for a variety of uses. Around 70 percent of the plants output is used by Field Turf Tarkett who designs and manufactures the surfaces at some of the world’s most famous sporting clubs and stadia including the Denver Broncos, New York Jets and Barcelona’s Nou Camp. Other uses for the crumb include as a component in the manufacture of durable recycled safety flooring systems, within specialist sound insulating wall coverings and in the manufacture of other rubber products.
  
  
• Annually the 4000 tonnes of steel that is recovered during the process at the plant is used by Welsh steel works to produce a wide range of steel products.
  
  
• Annually the 6000 tonnes of fibre extracted during the process is recovered and is currently sent to landfill, but soon hopefully to be used to produce energy. Other potential uses include insulation and cattle bedding.
  
  

If you have Tyres that need recycled find a company that can take them off your hands.

What's in Season from Your Local Farmer in August?

Vegetables
Beetroot
Broad Beans
Broccoli
Brussel Sprouts
Carrots
Celery
Cucumber
Leeks
Parsnips
Peas
Peppers
Savoy
Scallions
Tomatoes
Turnip

In Season All Year
Cabbage
Cauliflower
Lettuce
Mushrooms
Pammphrey
Potatoes
Red Cabbage
Soup Veg
Swedes

Fruit
Raspberries
Strawberries

Meat
Beef
Chicken
Lamb
Pork

Other
Eggs
Milk
Oats
Other Grains

Please note the above selection of foods is based on what is in season in the United Kingdom.