Picture: Heavy Rain in Japan

A house leans perilously after being damaged during heavy rain in the Tokai region of central Japan has left one woman dead. A further 1.2million people were advised to evacuate after a record 246 millimetres of rain fell in three hours, last week. Authorities dispatched about 100 soldiers to the hardest-hit city, Okazaki, to rescue the stranded from flooded homes. Some areas were left without power or telephone service hours after the storms and several rivers overflowed, forcing drivers to abandon their cars in the streets.

Get EnviroWise About Water!

A scheme which proposes to help businesses save up to 30 per cent on their water and effluent bills is issuing a final call for participants to sign up.

The Rippleeffect, a water conservation project from Envirowise, offers businesses structured information and support to reduce the amount of water used.

Simple measures such as ensuring showers and taps do not leak, installing water efficient toilets and rainwater harvesting, could help firms make significant water savings even as the cost of water is set to rise by 22 per cent between 2010 and 2015.

"While cost-savings may be a key driver for water conservation, companies that do so demonstrate to customers that they are adopting best environmental practice. This in itself offers a competitive advantage."
Mary Leonard, Director, Envirowise

Saving water also helps save energy and emissions as the utilities use energy, often generated by fossil fuel burning to get water to residential and commercial taps.

Companies have until September 10th to sign up for the project.

Related Articles
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Is Climate Change The Reason for the Westlink / Broadway Flood?

At the weekend during "freak" weather conditions, parts of Northern Ireland received in excess of August's rainfall in under 12hrs, leading to extensive flooding across the province, which lead to 850 calls to emergency services, and over 8000 calls for assistance from public service providers such as the Department of the Environment (DoE), Road Service NI, and Northern Ireland Water. Since I had not posted since Saturday, I'm sure you may have even thought I was stuck somewhere.

However, one iconic part of the road network in Belfast was left submerged in 20ft of water, capturing in excess of 20 million gallons of water. The Westlink and M1 upgrade scheme began in February 2006 at a cost of around £104m in a bid to solve the problems of daily rush-hour bottlenecks. The underpass was opened to traffic six weeks ago — 13 months ahead of schedule — and was designed to improve the strategic links between the M1, the M2 and the M3 motorways.

The Broadway roundabout underpass has two live rivers that run beside it, the Clowney Water to the west, and the Blackstaff adjacent to the east. These rivers are underground and therefore have a fixed capacity. Despite the construction of a large overflow chamber under Broadway roundabout. The design shape of the Westlink is effectively a basin or bowl which would funnel any water to the centre, this water would then drain away, making use of the overflow chamber. In the days preceding the "extraordinary event", there had been continued rainfall, this saturated the area which was worst affected, leading to the ground being unable to absorb any further rainfall. Rain then lay, or in the cases where it fell on uneven ground ran to the lowest point. This increased substantially the amount of water in rivers, and water from previous days were still filtering downwards. At the Clowney Water and Blackstaff, where the capacity is fixed, water could only pass through at normal rates, or increased rates at increased flow, so to cope with twice as much water, the river would have to have passed at twice normal speed, it can to a certain degree cope until no more when the waters will back up an eventually force the rivers to burst their banks.

This month has been the wettest August on record, with 177.8mm of rainfall so far. The last wettest August was in a 1956 with 161mm of rainfall. So how could climate change or global warming be to blame?

Research from Newcastle University in 2006 suggested that rain intensity has doubled in the UK over the last 40 years due to climate change, this has an affect on current systems which may have been designed to cope with large amounts of water over long periods, however as rainfall becomes heavier and more intense, these systems have to cope with the same amount of water but in a shorter time frame, as on Saturday; existing systems simply could not cope.

"If the trend continues, which is likely, this suggests we will have an increase in flooding over the coming years which has major implications for flood risk management"
Dr Hayley Fowler, Newcastle University

This may not be the last time that the Broadway underpass becomes submerged, holding the equivalent water of 32 Olympic swimming pools as the area flooded previously in December 2007, and that was before the underpass had been dug out, it's now only a matter of time and alot of intense rain before it happens again. Floods can also be exacerbated by plastic bags. Bangladesh, imposed the ban after it was revealed they were a major contributor to the 1988 and 1998 floods which submerged two-thirds of the country.

There is a great deal of sympathy for those who have been affected by the recent events, its hard to contemplate that it may be months or even a year before homes will be returned to normal, and the loss of irreplaceable items.

For those disposing of destroyed white goods and electronics, you should contact the council for a free household amenities collection. When replacing white goods, consider purchasing the most energy efficient appliances.



Related Articles
Effects of Climate Change on Local Level
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Photos
Belfast Telegraph (2-5)

How Much Water is in the Beijing Olympic Swimming Pool?

I thought about this the other day as I watched the Olympics. According to the La Federatio Internationale de Natation (FINA) the world governing body of swimming, an Olympic Pool must be 25m wide with a depth of 2.0m (min) at all parts of the course and must be 50m in length - between touch panels if they are used. The 25m width is to allow for 8 lanes to be 2.5m wide minimum with 2 spaces of 2.5m wide outside lane 1 and 8.

The minimum volume is therefore 2.5m litres of water, the pool in Beijing is 3m deep, and therefore has a volume of 3.75m litres.

There was no real reasoning behind it other than pools take alot of water, obviously the water is changed on a very very occassional basis, but in perspective. Even a relatively small 3m x 2m x 2m pool, could require 12 000 litres of water, enough for 300 showers, or enough to drink for 6000 days, rainwater harvested pools are of course more environmentally friendly, and that would be a great idea for those that don't already make use of that resource.

Related Articles
Feeling Hot ... Fancy a Dip in the Pool?
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Picture: Greenpeace Protest Coal Shipping (... and the Coal of Course)

Greenpeace activists used an inflatable boat to reach this coal ship off the east coast of Australia, before painting their environmental slogan on the hull.

Feeling Hot ... Fancy a Dip in the Pool?

As the Summer gets almost too hot to handle, have a thought for those in the swimming pools in Japan (or, China which was reported in todays Times). Would the pools have to remove the word "swimming" before "pool" should this happen at one in the UK. This isn't really an environmental post, but of course sharing a bath can conserve energy, and water. Check out the free swim (or other activity tokens) on packets of Kellogs and Nestle cereals.

Eco Design in Victoria Square

On a recent trip to the almost new Victoria Square shopping complex in Belfast, some rather interesting, but basic environmentally friendly features have been included into the core concepts of the complex. With an open ended mall there is no need to heat or cool the air inside, the glass ceiling providing sufficient light to illuminate the main walkways, where concrete ceilings exist large solar tubes funnel light to those areas minimising the need for extra lighting.

In the toilets, each cubicle has light sensors, illuminating each only when a person enters. The toilets also have dual flush functions to save water. The basin also benefit from sensors to reduce water use.

Stay Hydrated This Summer

As the Summer heatwave continues, we are all searching for ways to stay hydrated in the basking Summer sun. Before we all grab a branded PET bottle of the shelf of our local convenience store, in these times of the "credit crunch" remember that in the majority of cases you are simply paying for the plastic bottle, which I found out when looking at a B2B price list from Coca Cola, a 250ml bottle of water with sports cap costs more than a standard 500ml bottle, and a 750ml bottle with sports cap, is twice that of a 500ml bottle.

So simply if you want to reduce your spending, waste, energy consumption and environmental impact as well as reap the benefits of hydration can bring to your body. Simply get a water bottle, and carry it everywhere, of course you can reuse your old PET bottle, even if it says you can't (like Volvic bottles did, or maybe still do, its been a long time since i have seen one).

In the USA, 2.5m bottles are thrown away every hour, so what options are there to reduce? Buying a reuseable bottle such as that of Platypus bottles, which are in the league of premium water bottles, and shown above. Even more expensive are SIGG water bottles, which have a strong environmental focus on their website, and an eco-chic "I am not plastic" water bottle for $21.99.

Drink Tap Water!

Government departments have been told to stop serving bottled water at meetings and switch to more environmentally friendly tap water instead by top civil servant Sir Gus O'Donnell. DEFRA is among departments that have already done so - it had been using more than 1,000 bottles a month. According to the Cabinet Office tap water uses only 0.3% of the energy required by the equivalent bottled water.

How Many Trees Died For Our Telephone Directories?

We just received our chunky new Yellow Pages, and it certainly is thick, weighing in at 2.3kg it could easily replace the candlestick as a weapon in the popular game Cluedo. This prompted my hoarding mother to ask which of the 8 directories on the bookshelf she had received in the last few years she could alleviate herself of. On carrying this task, and I'm sure many people at home are the same about four were not even removed from their polythene cover, and the ones that were, probably didn't even get used. So we decided to recycle them in our green recycling bin provided by the council.

It made me think, what is the purpose of an annual paper directory, the numbers and addresses could easily change over the year, making them constantly outdated. Each of the companies who send out the phone books offer a free online version and a charged phone service, so why on earth in this day and age, forty years after they launched does Yell UK need to send out 28.4m directories a year. Especially when their website receives 33m queries a month and their phone service attracts 16.9m calls a year. Is their motive financial you may ask, well it could be, here's the figures;

In the year ending 31 March 2007, the yellow pages had 450 000 unique advertisers, 254 000 of which only advertise in the printed version. The other 196 000 advertise online or a mixture of both. On average each unique advertiser spent £1 335 in that financial year, leading to the Yellow Pages generating a minimum £339.1m in revenue from printed advertisements, with a potential maximum of £600.1m (or £12 to £21 per directory distributed).

So it would appear that Yell make the majority of their revenue from print advertising, forcing them to distribute directories, and by distributing to every business or household nationwide they can command a credible fee for providing this service, yet from the figures on their website it would appear that if you want to be found, it would be more advantageous to advertise only on their website, because who really wants to break their back lifting the directory to spend 4 hours searching through the thing, finding the right section to find the company that you really want, to realise that you could have done it in 2 seconds online.

But this still does not give the answer to the question in the title of the post, How Many Trees Died For Our Telephone Directories?

The Reduce CO2 blog tried to answer this question on their blog, and came up with 384 000 trees per year. However using the more detailed figure of 28.4m directories distributed, taking the average of 1.6kg (RCO2) and 2.3kg (mine) for each directory, giving 1.95kg (Yell publish over 114 different directories in the UK of varying weights, this is a very rough calculation to get a precise figure you would need the weight and number of copies issued for each). This results in 55 380t of paper.


Taking UK government figures I used in a previous blog post about how to stop junk mail, it would be reasonable to assume that the Yellow Pages phone directory in the UK requires in its production ...

• 941 460 trees,
• 1.72 billion litres of water,
• 221 520 mega watts of electricity (producing over 100 000 tonnes of CO2),
• 144 000t of air pollutants, and;
• 127 374 cubic metres in our landfills (assuming we don't recycle any, but we pretty much do recycle them)

As my article was a little one sided, I contacted Yell.com to give them the right of reply against my criticisms, and I thank Jon Salmon from External Relations for his response;

"The reason that the directories are produced and delivered is that there is a clear and strong demand for them, reflected in the fact that they are used almost a billion times a year with 86 per cent of users agreeing that they are very useful.

Similarly, for advertisers the Yellow Pages directory represents a very significant source of sales leads for their business and supports the growth of these businesses in their local economy.

You suggested also that the directory was an "environmental faux pas". This is most definitely not the case.

Our Yellow Pages directories are produced with full consideration of the potential environmental impact. They contain 51 per cent recycled fibre content, with the remaining virgin fibre used in their production coming from forestry waste, e.g. sawmill chips and offcuts from logs obtained from sustainably managed forests and used predominantly by the wood and timber industry.

Old Yellow Pages directories can be recycled when the new updated edition is delivered annually, into cardboard, packaging, insulation, animal bedding and paper.

In a wider context, we have also been regularly acknowledged for our work on environmental issues. For example, we have been registered to the ISO 14001 standard for six years, and have been awarded two Queen's Awards for Enterprise for our approach to sustainable development in 2002 and 2007 and have been included in several global and international Socially Responsible Investment(SRI) indices.

I hope this clarifies some of the background to our Yellow Pages directories, as well as our operation in relation to the environment."

I certainly don't disagree with the majority of the response, Yell does give alot back to the environment. And I do admit I used the Yellow Pages book for the first time in about 3 years yesterday, when a friend asked me where a town was whilst at work, although I could have connected to Google maps on my phone I opted to use the Yellow Pages as it was convenient at the time.

Energy use is also a factor in the production of the big Yellow Book which I also hope if not already considered will be in the future. If you have to make use of their services use their online phone directory which is exceptionally fast and efficient at finding the companies with up to date information and request that you do not wish to receive a printed version.

So how can we stop this environmental faux pas?

• Contact Yell to request that you do not wish to have a directory delivered to your home or work, and instead use their online service
  
• If you are an advertiser, you could refrain from advertising in print, and alternatively advertise online

H2O ... Tap into it

In the UK we spend £1.5 billion a year on 2.17 billion litres of bottled water. This equates to 15% of the soft drinks market and is projected to grow to 21% by 2008. I was once one of the 26m people in the UK who consume bottled water on a regular basis, however I have as part of my carbon reduction plan replaced this with tap water.

But Why?

The main reason is that bottled water requires a large use of energy, from the process of bottling, through the requirement of a glass or plastic bottle, then the huge food transport cost through carbon emissions. Petcore figures from 2004 said that Europe wide we recycled just over 30% of PET bottles. However, this is on the increase with a 47% increase over the last two years.

I have decided to take Evian (my favourite brand of bottled water) and the brand leader in the UK with a 14.3% market share or 310m litres in sales per year. Evian is an imported mineral water from several sources near Évian-les-Bains, a few kilometers to the east of Thonon-les-Bains along the southern shore of Lake Geneva.

So if I was to fill a lorry (or truck) with Evian and bring them to my home town of Belfast, how much Co2 emissions would be produced directly from food transport. Using Google maps to gauge the driving distance, note this is the most direct route available from source to Belfast, United Kingdom. It equates to 1115 miles. Taking the load as 5.29 tonnes (the average load on a UK lorry, Transport Statistics Great Britain 2002) or the equivalent to 5290 litres of Evian. The journey would emit 1936kg of Co2 (or 366g of Co2 per litre of Evian) for the one-way journey, one-third of food transport lorries are empty, so to assume that the vehicle may be empty on its return this could increase the Co2 emissions even further.

This is however only an assumption, if other forms of transport were used (preferably train / boat) this would result in lower emissions per litre. Over 1.5 billion bottles of Evian are sold every year in 125 countries worldwide, as far away as Hong Kong (just over 5000 miles).

Whilst Evian carry out over 300 quality checks per day, the quality of bottled water is similar to that of tap water. So next time your tempted by bottled water, imported coca-cola or beers consider its food transport cost.

H2O ... Tap into it





NB: The figures in this article were changed on Tuesday 23rd April 2007 due to a mistake in the source. The emissions were based per tonne but were taken as the load. This then increased the carbon emissions by 5.29.

Hippos Save Water

Not only is water an expensive commodity it also takes huge amounts of energy to distribute water to each home in the UK. By wasteful use of water, you are also wasting energy. Toilet use accounts for up to one-third of domestic water use. With each flush you could be using 4 - 9 litres of water, if your toilet uses seven or more litres of water per flush you should consider installing a Save-A-Flush (for cisterns of 7 litres or more) or a Hippo (for cisterns of 9 litres).

A Save-A-Flush saves 1 litre of water per flush, about 2000 litres per year per person, and a Hippo saves up to 3 litres of water per flush, about 5000 litres per person per year. Water costs approximately £1.50 per 1000 litres in the UK.

UK residents can order a free Hippo or Save-A-Flush bag online at Thames Water. (Maximum of one per household in regions other than Thames Water)

Water saving tips

Each person in the UK uses on average 160 litres of water per day (60000 litres a year), this is eight times that of a person in a developing country, here are some water saving tips

• Cleaning your teeth with the tap off uses 1 litre of water, compared to leaving the tap running which uses 6 litres (save 5500 litres per year).
  
• Have a shower instead of a bath - this can save 300 litres of water a week. Be careful though - a power shower can use more water than a bath! (save 15600 litres per year).
• Fix Leaking Taps - dripping taps can waste up to 140 litres of water a week (save 7200 litres per year).

How much water is used for ...

... a bath	80 litres	8 buckets+
... a 5 minute shower (not power shower)	35 litres	3.5 buckets
... brushing teeth with tap running	6 litres/min	0.6 buckets
... brushing teeth with tap off	1 litre	0.1 buckets
... a dripping tap	140 litres/week	14 buckets
... a washing machine cycle	65 litres	6.5 buckets
... a dishwasher cycle	20 litres	2 buckets
... washing a car with bucket	10 litres	1 buckets
... a hosepipe/sprinkler	540 litres/hour	54 buckets

* A bucket is equivalent to 10 litres