Corporate Climate Response Blog Is Underway Live

I will be posting my updates from the first day of the 'Corporate Climate Response' later this evening.

Meanwhile for a fairly objective overview of the day in terms of the various themes, please check out the climate response blog.

My only comments for now are that the Presentation given by Dr Chris Tuppen of BT was perhaps the most interesting of the day so far. Partly due to the fact that BT uses a large portion of the UK energy supply, partly because Chris new his own carbon footprint (6 tonnes) do you, and partly because of the fascinating internal competitions that BT have been holding to track down servers that are still drawing power but are not currently being used, they have found literally thousands. So my confidence in BT as a leader on climate issue is increased, I knew that they where at least looking at the issues carefully because CarbonSense have donw work for them.

Finally, Andrew Jenkins of Boots gave a very interesting explanation of the work that Boots has done with the carbon trust in calculating the carbon footprint of one of its shampoos. This was particularly interesting because of the great complexity involved and Andrews take on this problem. In the past Andrew worked for a packaging company at around the time that seemingly laborious regulations where put in place to reduce packaging. Very soon this nightmare--where a huge number of companies where asking for information of suppliers--was simplified to a small number of central information handling nodes; and now a single centre.

There was a significant feeling in the room that carbon labelling of individual items would perhaps be to difficult and costly to achieve vs a range of other arguably more effective measures. My own view, partly from personal experience, is that in the beginning this information will indeed be a nightmare, but that as it is integrated into more and more businesses the burden will become less and less, once you are asked for information once, you might as well be asked for it a hundred times it is no more difficult. An once a given source materials energy usage is known then all customers can readily gain that information. Price, after all is the integration of a lot of information. It's just core to business and is therefore very well known for any product! I think that Andrew wasn't to far away from me in this belief.

Home del.icio.us Digg This!