Five years on

In our regular critical review, Hannah Bullock revisits stories we identified as interesting back in 2001 – and checks where they’re going now.

Dams and damage

Back in 2001, the World Commission on Dams was hailed as bringing “the era of destructive dams” to an end [‘Building a new dam consensus’, GF26].

Yet a recent report from WWF warns that “bad dams and bad economics are still alive and kicking five years after the WCD”.
 The report, To dam or not to dam? claims that badly conceived schemes are still displacing people, damaging wetlands, destroying fisheries and threatening endangered species, as well as disrupting economic activity.

One of the worst examples in recent years is the Chalillo Dam in Belize, which has flooded 1,000 hectares of pristine rainforest. Its proponents claimed it would lead to a cut in both electricity imports and prices. But according to the report, prices have since actually risen by 12%.

The report urges governments and the World Bank to ensure that all future dam projects are economically and environmentally sustainable – by applying the WCD’s recommendations. “This is not the engineering heyday of the 1950s, when dams were seen as the hallmark of development – we know dams can cause damage and we must put this knowledge to work,” insists WWF’s Jamie Pittock.
For a copy of the report, contact Lisa Hadeed,
+41 22 364 9030, lhadeed@wwfint.org

On standby for change

Vampire appliances are sucking precious electricity while they sleep, warned researchers five years ago [‘ A sensible switch?’, GF26].  That little red or green standby light should be a warning signal, according to the Energy Saving Trust (EST), which says the UK is facing “an energy obesity epidemic”.

From DVDs to phones, the average home now has up to 12 different gizmos on standby or charge at any one time. Across the country as a whole, they guzzle a cool £740 million worth of energy each year, producing over four million tonnes of CO2 each year, says the EST’s report, Energy and Waste in an Age of Excess.

The worst culprits are the humble domestic desktop PC, whose average standby power use is 11.39 watts, and the increasingly common digital TV ‘box’, racking up 17 watts. With even the garage door opener requiring 3.5 watts when it’s asleep, standby electricity consumption eats up a whopping 7% of UK domestic consumption.

Yet turning our TVs off at the set wouldn’t necessarily solve the problem. Some appliances, like satellite television boxes, need to stay on to receive signals and download software changes. Others, like microwaves, would lose stored information, such as the time, if turned off.

So what to do? Manufacturers need to meet us half way, by designing to the lowest possible standby power, says EST’s Richard Bawden. He’s heartened by the success of the voluntary code to reduce satellite decoder standby power to 3 watts by the end of 2007, but admits that, “with Freeserve-type set-top boxes, the pressure has been on making switch-over as cheap as possible, not as efficient as possible”.

Some governments have taken the bull by the horns and ‘edited out’ the most energy-guzzling consumer choices. In the US, the Federal Agency is required to buy appliances with a maximum standby of one watt, assuming they’re available. Australia has a ten-year ‘one-watt target’ for products from dishwashers to DVD players. If, by the end of the project, ‘asking nicely’ brings no changes in design, the Australian government has said it won’t hesitate to introduce new laws to bring runaway standby buttons under control.
Energy Saving Trust, 0800 915 7722

Businesses bare all?

Eliminating greenwash and getting corporates to hang out their dirty washing in public was quite a challenge to take on. But that’s what the Global Reporting Initiative had in mind when it launched eight years ago. The fledgling start-up with big ideas whose progress we charted in 2001 [see ‘ Full steam ahead at GRI’ GF26, p10]  is now a heavyweight ‘multi-stakeholder movement’, whose ground rules for corporate sustainability reports are becoming increasingly accepted.

BAA, IKEA and Microsoft are among the business giants who’ve used the GRI’s guidelines on transparency and consistency in their reports. But the 750-plus who’ve signed up aren’t restricted to the corporate world: other GRI adopters include the NHS Purchasing and Supply Agency, the Ministry of Defence and the Development Bank of Japan. The GRI Foundation (now independent of its ‘parents’, the UN Environment Programme and the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies) has high hopes for 6,000 GRI reporters by 2010...

In the meantime, it’s revamping its guidelines to encourage participants to put in place a system to realise their vision of sustainability, and report on how they have actually performed in relation to this. Forum for the Future’s David Bent, who has brought an NGO perspective to the GRI’s stakeholder process, is enthusiastic about the impact the new guidelines will have when they’re launched in October: “Because of intensive stakeholder involvement in development, what’s popped out at the other end is a legitimate set of guidelines.”

He points out that, while regulating the purpose of business appears to be politically impossible today, promoting transparency remains essential: “We need a way to discuss businesses’ role in society, to applaud positives and hold them to account for the negatives. The GRI guidelines are the strongest means of giving stakeholders the information they need, short of legislation. Only then can we make choices as consumers and as citizens. Only then can we apply pressure for change.”
GRI, www.globalreporting.org

Soak it up on the streets

Westminster was set to be a European leader back in 2001, when it announced trials of a revolutionary new pollution-absorbing paving slab [‘ Pavement promises a pollution sink’, GF26].  After a closer look, it seems, the council shirked at the £450,000 price tag for repaving the small section of Oxford Street – and, in an echo of Victorian tussles over railway gauges, came up against a niggling incompatibility between the size of London pavements and the slabs produced in Belgium for the trial....

But NOx-absorbing pavements have made strides in London since then, with the first one due to be installed in Camden in January. At a cost of £50,000, the 1,200 square metres of ‘photocatalytic’ slabs are expected to reduce NOx levels in Southampton Row by up to 30%. The magic ingredient in the blocks is titanium dioxide, which, when exposed to sunlight, breaks down nitrogen into oxygen and a weak (harmless) nitric acid solution.

Alongside these ‘Ecostar’ blocks, Imperial College and Global Engineering are due to trial the similar Ecopaint on a school façade in Aldgate. Julie Maltby, of Millennium Chemicals, which supplies the active ingredient, explains that the trials should help them move towards the ultimate pollution-sink; the “photocatalytic street”, complete with painted façades and absorbent pavements.

It’s good to hear that someone’s got their thinking caps on, as the EU is expecting its member states to curb NOx levels drastically by 2010.
Millennium Chemicals, 01469 571000


Getting to GRIps with GRI

5 January 2006

Hannah Bullock