Five years on
In our regular critical review, we revisit stories we identified as interesting back in 1999 – and check where they’re going now.
What do celts, bridges and pots have in common? Not an easy question. Finding the common denominator between the multitude of medieval-sounding local exchange trading system (LETS) currencies takes some thought. But that’s what a proposed ‘clearing house’ for independent currencies has been designed to do [GF15, p8], allowing community schemes to trade amongst themselves and with each other. “It’s not conceptually different from the clearing systems that banks use for different conventional currencies,” explains Bernard Lietaer.
He’s now applying his experience of designing the euro to the development of the Complementary Currency System Software (CCSS). The programme, currently being trialled by Gernot Jochum-Müller in Austria, should be available to local exchange systems from March this year. A shared internet server will provide a marketplace where members can offer their own services and ‘buy’ them from others further afield than their own local network – which may sometimes consist of just a handful of people.
With the choice offered by an ‘open LETS market’, says Lietaer, there’ll be much more value in participating in local trading schemes. But others fear that exchanging at the European scale is over-ambitious. “We should concentrate on getting our own house in order first,” feels Mary Fee of Letslink UK.
International trading aside, though, the potential of the CCSS is that the software could replace LETS’ time consuming “miniature manual banking systems”. Organisers are sometimes having to put so much work into running the schemes that “they end up several K rich in the neighbourhood with nothing to spend it on”, as Fee puts it. Bring on the online open market? – Hannah Bullock
Bernard Lietaer, bernard@accessfoundation.org
Gernot Jochum-Müller,
g.jochum-mueller@tauschkreis.net,
www.zart.at (after March 2004)
Letslink UK, www.letslinkuk.net
A ‘no nukes, no fags, no arms’ personal equity plan was an innovation worth welcoming five years ago [GF15, p13]. And the ‘Global Care’ PEP set up by WWF and NPI was also the first ethical investment partnership between a charity and a City investor. Customers’ money was to go into renewables, health care, IT, transport and social housing.
The WWF branding has long since disappeared from the ‘Global Care’ PEP, which lives on as an ISA in the hands of Henderson Global Investors as the result of various finance industry takeovers. The money it pulled in, you’ll be pleased to learn, is still doing good in “industries of the future”. But is it doing well? Well, it’s not exactly multiplying.
And although independent financial advisors are advising people to ‘hold on’ to Global Care funds if they’re already in, they’re not encouraging new customers to come on board. That’s because it is sectors that SRIs won’t touch – tobacco and alcohol – that are booming today. On the bright side, points out Giles Chitty of ethical investors Charcol Holden Meehan, they weren’t affected by the downturn in the tobacco industry several years ago during the climate of litigation claims in the US.
And long-term prospects of ethical funds have proven to be even better than for the average UK fund, according to the Investment Management Association (IMA). So if you’re hoping to get that ISA in before the end of this tax year, you could do worse than getting help from the following: www.ethicalmoneyonline.com, the UK Social Investment Forum (www.uksif.org) or the Ethical Investment Research Service (www.eiris.org). – Hannah Bullock
Henderson Global Investors
(Mark Campanale), 020 7818 4267
IMA, 020 7831 0898, www.investmentuk.org
The motor industry hasn’t exactly rushed to fall in line with the eminently sensible idea of documenting all the data on a car’s ‘cradle to grave’ environmental impact. Volvo, having pioneered the Environ-mental Product Declaration (EPD) with a 16-page glossy booklet on the lifecycle of the Volvo S80 [GF15, p11], still has the field pretty much to itself five years on. Commendably, it has stuck with it, and now produces EPDs for all the cars in its range, covering everything from water and electricity used in the production cycle, via the car’s emission levels in normal use, to how much of the materials can be recycled at the end of the line.
But the sad fact is that very few customers take an interest. Dom Potts, Volvo’s environmental advisor, says they “tend to rate environmental impact one below the CD player” when choosing a car, although there has at least been more interest in CO2 emissions since the government changed the tax rules a couple of years ago. Not giving up, Volvo will continue to calculate the environmental impact of each of its cars’ components.
“We have environmental targets and we use these figures to reach those targets,” says Potts. “Plus we’re guessing that in the future polluting vehicles will be more heavily taxed and will have difficulty entering conurbations.” Time for the sliding scale congestion charge?
If other manufacturers produced similar figures, it would give Volvo’s more significance. Andrew Davis, director of the Environmental Transport Association (ETA), also believes (as he’d have to, really) that consumers would be interested if the information was more readily available, but even he doesn’t know of any manufacturer other than Volvo who produces lifecycle impact information. “Most companies tend to give details of the factory emissions when a car is in production, then the car’s emissions once it’s on the market. So you don’t see the environmental impact per unit,” he says.
The Car Buyer’s Guide, the ETA’s best selling booklet, has details of each model’s emissions and noise, but doesn’t include lifecycle impact, precisely because most manufacturers don’t calculate it, says Davis. “And to paraphrase Rumsfeld, people don’t know what they don’t know. But we’re planning a campaign to raise awareness later in the year.” – Kath Stathers
Volvo, 08457 564636, www.volvocars.co.uk
ETA, 01932 828882, www.eta.co.uk
Tinkers Bubble made some waves when the community first got planning permission to put up some low impact housing on their co-operatively owned land in south Somerset [GF15, p6]. Five years later, six of the original members are still there. “Two families left to found something more agricultural,” explains founder member Simon Fairlie, “but two other people came in”. It’s more about a shared ethos of how to live, than sharing everything.
All heating and cooking is powered with wood from their managed woodland, while solar and wind power provide fossil-fuel-free electrics, and water is supplied using a hydraulic pump. Every evening the community eats together in the thatched communal building they have built. Then most retire to their ‘benders’ of wood and canvas.
“Some people think we’re odd to live like this,” says Simon, “but on the whole we’ve got a pretty good relationship with the local community. We have to reapply for planning permission this year. Last time we applied the objections had gone down from 144 to 27, and this time I’m confident it will be even lower.”
A sawmill and vegetable garden are run collectively, generating income for the site, but individual families also have cows and bees and make their own incomes from those products and part-time jobs. “There is the potential to be more self-sufficient,” Simon says, although in his own view “it’s not wholly desirable. It’s good to get out and be part of the larger economy.” However, a plan to sell home-made cheese and cider was thwarted this year by health and safety regulations that require sterile facilities for the production of food. – Kath Stathers
Tinkers Bubble, 01460 249204
Small-scale local power generation is a big part of the appeal of renewable energy, not least for solar and fuel cell technologies. But neither of the two particular paths we picked up on as promising for mini power plants five years back [GF15, p10] has yet set the world on fire. What Solargen Europe was excited about were small-scale parabolic dish solar thermal generators, either free standing or built into homes or offices.
The principle is not unlike the simple solar cooker, where the heat from the sun’s rays is focused into the centre of the dish. In the cooker it cooks the food there; in the generator there’s a heat absorber, from which the energy can be converted to electricity by a conventional device such as a steam turbine. In practice there are tricky problems with moving parts, since the dish, and the heat absorber within it, need to track the sun. A static variant, the parabolic trough system, has proven somewhat more workable so far; several are in use in the southern US.
As for the dishes, Solargen Europe did get its trial device in Crete to work in its April 1999 test. It heated up to an impressive 705ºC, producing 30 kilowatts of electricity, which it described as enough for six de luxe homes, with all electrical systems in use simultaneously, or for the needs of 150 homes in the developing world. Still no sign, however, of commercial versions. Also slower to market than its inventors hoped has been the ‘Kendall’ tubular fuel cell.
Kevin and Michaela Kendall’s first working design dates back 10 years. Their ‘spin out’ company Adelan, developing the work begun at Birmingham and Keele universities, got an injection of funding from the US company TechSys Inc. in 2001 to expand its lab facilities in Birmingham. They successfully took out a patent the following year for a solid oxide fuel cell technology on which TechSys (which has also sponsored the development of other portable fuel cell technologies) will have exclusive marketing rights. One selling point of the Kendall approach is the ability to use a range of operating fuels in the cells (butane, methane, natural gas, hydrogen and biogas). – Roger East
Solargen Europe Limited, 01223 208544
Adelan, 0121 414 2739, http://www.adelan.co.uk/
18 March 2004
Registered charity number 1040519