Woolworths makes the switch: inefficient light bulbs out in 2010

Posted by jamie - 27 September 2007 at 3:22pm - Comments

Woolworths will be phasing out incandescent bulbs by the end of 2010

Great news. Woolworths have made a significant shift in their light bulbs policy and, as a result, are not longer bottom of the heap on our retailers league table.

After receiving thousands of emails and signatures from their customers (ie you) eager to see them take a lead on energy efficiency, Woolies will now be phasing out incandescent light bulbs by the end of 2010. It's not quite the 2008 date we were looking for, but never the less it's a massive improvement and they're now well ahead of many other companies such as Tesco and Waitrose. They're also cutting the price of their efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs).

And it doesn't stop there. The Co-op have told us they'll also be getting rid of inefficient bulbs by 2010, and Ikea have now committed to a worldwide phase out by 2011, moving both companies up one place on our league table. This leaves only Somerfield with no commitment at all as, according to an e-mail we received yesterday, their position hasn't changed one jot.

This is slightly odd, because they seem to be telling us one thing and the government another. Earlier today at the Labour conference, environment secretary Hilary Benn announced a voluntary initiative to remove incandescent bulbs from all retailers by 2012 and, according to the accompanying statement, it's backed by many retailers including Somerfield. I guess you can voice your support without actually doing anything about it, but the money certainly isn't where the mouth is.

However, Benn's announcement itself is pretty weak. Thanks to our campaign, most major retailers are already doing what the government is asking of them. What would stop all this shilly-shallying and force a major cut in our carbon emissions are mandatory energy efficiency standards. If the government introduced those instead (and not just for light bulbs, we're talking all electrical goods here), just think of the energy we could be saving.

And here's an interesting statistic for you - if all bulbs in the UK were CFLs, we would prevent five million tonnes of CO2 being released into the atmosphere each year. The 26 lowest emitting countries are responsible for 5.2 million tonnes. Makes you think.

Article tagged as: climate change, energy efficiency, light bulbs, successes, woolworths
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Alasdair Philips in "The powerwatch handbook" (London, Piatkus, 2006) which is concerned with preventing biological damage to people from the electrical and magnetic fields generated by electrical equipment, says that all energy
saving bulbs are high-frequency fluorescents which can give off significant EMFs (in contrast to incandescent bulbs, which don't). He recommends that you don't use them in places close to people's bodies (eg reading lamps, bedside lamps). Of course, electricity suppliers and retailers aren't going to tell you this, just as mobile phone sellers play down any dangers to health of flooding the nation with microwave radiation.

So what shall we use instead when the otherwise admirable Greenpeace campaign to abolish incandescent bulbs is a total success? Tilley lamps, like I used on Exmoor 50 years ago before we had electricity? Oh, incidentally, watch out for the mercury content of low-energy bulbs. Don't break one in your home or in your dustbin!

By Wolfram - 28 September 2007 at 8:55am

According to Ben Goldacre's Bad Science website, there's currently no scientific evidence to link electromagnetic fields and the symptoms attributed to electrosensitivity. Of the 37 studies undertaken on the subject, only seven have shown any measurable effects and there are question marks over those. Compare this to the colossal amount of scientific evidence pointing to the reality of climate change, and I don't think there's any competition.

He also has some interesting things to say about Alasdair Philips and his range of products designed to protect the unwary from rampaging electromagnetic fields. And the mercury question we've already covered here.

web editor
gpuk

By jamie - 28 September 2007 at 11:42am

Whilst being in 100% agreement in looking after and saving our planet, I think that the recent decision on banning incandescent bulbs is premature and not well thought through. The consequences of this ban are far reaching in many ways that are not at first obvious. and where the balance of plus and minuses lies has not , to my mind, been at all well considered. For a reasonably detailed but readable overview of most of the key points, please look at an Australian website (remember that Australia was ahead of the game on this topic.) http://sound.westhost.com/articles/incandescent.htm Hopefully, reading this website will generate more discussion on this topic to enable the balance to be more carefully considered.

By janszat - 3 October 2007 at 10:10am

If you think it's 'premature' to ban incandescent lightbulbs now, i wonder when you think is the appropriate time?? Would you like to wait until there is no ice left in the Arctic?? When the last polar bear has died? When the low lying islands are under water? I would be interested to know when your threshold is?

It isn't premature, it should have happened a LOT sooner. Whatever the 'inconveniences' you percieve of CFL's, we are not the only species on the planet. We do not have the right to systematically destroy every part of this Earth and the species on it just to please ourselves.

To be quite honest we shouldn't even be telling people to use CFL's, we should be telling people to switch off their lights full stop.

By Fiona - 4 October 2007 at 5:12pm

There's no reason at all why incandescents can't be banned from next year. 'Janszat' above is not 100% in agreement with looking after and saving our planet (yes, it's mine as well, and that of every organism that we share it with) otherwise (s)he would not be saying such a lily-livered thing.

In contrast, I feel Greenpeace have not gone nearly far enough with energy saving efforts. Whilst 5.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide sounds a lot, this is less than 1% of UK carbon emissions. All that effort, and Greenpeace may have saved maybe 0.5% UK emissions, if that. The equivalent of improving our national electricity producing plant efficiency by only 2%.

Surely time and resources needs to be spent by Greenpeace getting to the heart of the problem - breaking the morally corrupt commercial monopoly that makes us think that continuing our destructive behaviour is acceptable. Anything less is just timewasting.

Keith Farnish
www.theearthblog.org

By farnishk - 3 October 2007 at 5:08pm

Janszat - I read through the article you linked to and was disappointed that, despite the author claiming he was all for CFLs, he proceeded to comprehensively trash them. I haven't been able to find any records of mercury poisoning specifically from CFL breakages, but I did come across this succinct scientific explanation of how mercury vapour disperses in an average room, plus a piece on Snopes about the $2,000 clean-up bill story.

farnishk - Last night, I met a friend to talk about the Transition Towns project and we got on to discussing the root causes of... well, just about everything. Our solution was to change behaviour, both on an individual and societal level, but unless people are personally impacted by climate change and peak oil (and in a persistent, chronic fashion, not just sporadic flooding), then they're not going to change their habits. We haven't cared enough in the past about people starving in Bangladesh, so why should we care about them drowning?

His opinion was that, whatever happens, we're screwed and there's going to be a crisis before things get better. (Sometimes I agree - it depends which side of the bed I get out on.) Maybe that's the only way society can be reformed, an inevitable part of the process - as many have recognised in the past (and Naomi Klein touches on in her new book), change only comes with a crisis.

But maybe we'll be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat and fundamentally change the way we live without the trauma of war, starvation or whatever form this crisis might take. To answer your point more directly (sorry for the rambling, but it seemed broadly relevant), I don't think Greenpeace can do that alone, and should we, given that we campaign on specific environmental problems? It's probably not our forté and, in the same way that Amnesty tackles human rights issues and we don't (at least not directly), perhaps another organisation or a wider movement needs to take up that challenge.

web editor
gpuk

By jamie - 5 October 2007 at 11:22am

Hi Jamie, I know you directed your reply to Keith but I would like to comment too if I may. I totally agree with your friend, we are screwed. Our population has so far exceeded carrying capacity that it is inevitable that it will crash. We have polluted virtually every water source, the Arctic is melting, 128 species go extinct every day, we are deforesting faster then ever and on it goes. There will be a crisis as you say, but I don’t think its enough to say that we wait for the inevitable crisis to make people change, because who knows what will be left of the planet by the end of it.
I think it is vital that people change the fundamental way they live and even more vital that Greenpeace stands up and says that. There isn’t going to be a ‘rabbit in a hat’ answer, we aren’t going to stop climate change by switching lightbulbs and I think that to concentrate on that is giving people the premise that they can carry on business as usual, with only a few modifications. Even Decentralised Energy is not sustainable; it involves the use of mining, metal, oil, toxic chemicals..something that requires taking from the Earth and not giving anything back is not sustainable.
I don’t think its enough to say that it is up to other organizations to address these issues, Industrial Civilisation is destroying our planet, Greenpeace are supposed to be there to defend our planet, the two are directly related.
We are indoctrinated in a culture that has made people believe that they and their lifestyles comes before the welfare of any other species. We are in a midst of a culture that is so insane we are willing to destroy the very thing, the only thing that gives us life. We are trapped in culture that has made us forget how to live as we were meant to live on this Earth.

Fiona

By Fiona - 7 October 2007 at 11:34am

Hi Jamie

There is an answer and it is related to behaviour (as you rightly say).

Two articles I have written recently take on the established environmental groups head-on, and try to show why the status quo cannot be maintained:

http://earth-blog.bravejournal.com/entry/23122
http://earth-blog.bravejournal.com/entry/22804

The answer lies in separating people from the brainwashing behaviour that they live with. This will be gone into in great detail in my forthcoming book: A Matter Of Scale. This book will be free to download; money isn't important, saving the planet is.

For the time being the two articles above should be of some help.

Keith

By farnishk - 7 October 2007 at 3:57pm

hi jamie!

i received a follow-up email from trevor bish-jones yesterday urging me to revisit your site to read about woolworth's progress on CFLs.

keep it up!
rob

By Rob Purdie - 13 October 2007 at 11:11am

Hey Rob, thanks for the reminder. I got one last week too but neglected to mention it on the site. It's been a busy week...

Fiona - sorry also for not replying sooner as well. Re-reading my comment, it does sound somewhat dismissive which I didn't intend. Post in haste, repent at leisure! I'm undecided about the future but I certainly wasn't suggesting we sit around and wait til doomsday, otherwise I wouldn't be working here. It looks like we've divided opinion though with campaigns like the light bulb one: some people are pleased we're working on consumer issues, others think we're faffing around with incidental matters. For the record, the light bulb push is part of an ongoing EU-wide energy efficiency project, but no, it doesn't address the uber-problem of overconsumption.

I hope I wasn't shifting responsibility on this issue - after all, we're all culpable in the current state of things - but you're right, maybe we should be getting stuck into it. However, the chances of us launching an overall anti-consumption drive are slim which is what I was getting at, but what I was remiss in pointing out was that, oddly enough, this aspect is probably going to become increasingly apparent in our established campaign work. I know other people here feel it's a core issue, and presumably a lot of people reading this agree, but it's unlikely to be a campaign issue in its own right.

But here's an open question: if it's all about changing behaviour, what can we do - either as individuals or organisations - to achieve that?

web editor
gpuk

By jamie - 19 October 2007 at 5:50pm

Hi Jamie,

Thanks for the reply back. :-)

In response to your question..

**
But here's an open question: if it's all about changing behaviour, what can we do - either as individuals or organisations - to achieve that?

**
I personally think Greenpeace should stand up and tell people the truth and hold them accountable. I think we could stop telling people that we have a 'convenient solution' (because we both know DE is not sustainable) and start telling them that our entire lifestyles are murdering the planet and we need to stop.

There is no easy answer, and i think because of that Greenpeace tries to ignore the problems and just skims the surface instead.

It really makes no difference (to the big picture) whether people are using F rated of A rated appliances. To use appliances at all still involves the destruction of the planet.

I noticed on another thread that Bex agreed that electricity was essential to modern life, i happen to think that a healthy planet is more essential. And the two are not, and never will be compatible.

We really really need to start looking at what industrial civilisation has done to this world, and start admitting that it can't continue.

I would like more than anything for Greenpeace to be the one NGO to stand up and say this, to be the one who puts the planet (and all its species, including us) before economics, before people's holidays, before people's 'right' to play their X boxes. Because nothing, NOTHING, is more important than the Earth, it is the only thing which gives us life.

The health of this Earth must be the priority, and we should say that. We should tell people they can't fly. Yes, even the person that needs to go and visit their sick grandmother one last time.., because we are not the only species on this planet, we are not the centre of all existence. The earth was not put here just for us to abuse and destroy for our own purposes. So as much as people might think they have the right to their 2 week holiday, polar bears have more right to not be made extinct. And Greenpeace should be on the side of the polar bears.

I often feel that Greenpeace still speaks from an anthropocentric viewpoint much of the time.

Thanks
Fiona

By Fiona - 22 October 2007 at 3:30pm

I guess we can't help being anthropocentric - it's hard-wired into all of us and even though we are the sole cause of the mess around us, it's impossible to talk about environmental problems and solutions without considering the impact on individuals and communities. We could try taking people out of the equation, but I don't think we'd get very far.

Time is short, but we also have to recognise what is achievable with the limited resources we have within the organisation. For instance, the long-term goal in our forests work is zero deforestation, but to get there we have to break that up into manageable goals that move us in that direction. Likewise, in aviation we're challenging areas where the industry is expanding (short haul flights and bigger airports) and moving on from there. Saying no one should fly ever again is unrealistic and won't give us the momentum we need to win debates and our campaigns.

Again, we're not going to win a campaign against the use of electricity which is why Bex made that comment. The issues we deal with are usually too complex to paint in black and white terms of good versus bad, so our aim is to change policy and behaviour that reduces our environmental impact to as near as zero as possible.

And no, decentralised energy is not sustainable in the terms you're talking about - it requires metals, glass and plastic to build the plants and infrastructure, not to mention transporting fuel - but then by that token neither are bicycles, candles or basic farming tools. Unless we go back to living in caves, we're going to have an impact on the world around us - it's unavoidable. The trick is to manage the resources we use responsibly and value them for their own right, not just their commercial potential.

But the issues of consumption and population are being raised elsewhere on the site as well...

web editor
gpuk

By jamie - 9 November 2007 at 3:34pm

Hi
You are all arguing over what I think is the wrong thing. Yes these lamps may be good for us, yes the safe disposal is paramount, mercury is not our immediate problem, although if we start throwing these lamps away like normal filament jobs then it will soon become a problem.

What everyone seems to be ignoring is that carbon emissions is a global issue not just for us. Take one of these units apart (Don’t break the tube) and you will find that it is packed with electronic components and packaged in a plastic moulding.

Based on the fact that I imagine the majority of these lamps are manufactured in China or India where their carbon emissions are far greater than ours are they really good for the global environment or just my pocket? I can find nothing to indicate that anyone has considered these points when telling us to use these lamps

Does the energy used to produce all these component parts, including moulding a very fancy glass tube and then to assemble them into a final unit really cost less than the amount that I will save.

I think that in ten or twenty years time we may look back at our efforts to save the planet and say, Once again we were misguided by limited, inaccurate information.

Martin

By martinv - 20 December 2007 at 12:08pm

The energy used to manufacture CFLs is more than compensated for by the energy saved during their lifetime. True, many are made in China but the reason their emissions are far greater than ours is that they're manufacturing vast quantities of consumables for export to the UK and other countries. Per head of the population, China's emissions are half that of ours.

That doesn't mean it's fine to transfer all our emissions from manufacturing to other countries and let them deal with the problem, but it does highlight the fact that - as you rightly point out - it's a global issue that needs global solutions as well as local ones.

web editor
gpuk

By jamie - 9 January 2008 at 5:40pm

Alasdair Philips in "The powerwatch handbook" (London, Piatkus, 2006) which is concerned with preventing biological damage to people from the electrical and magnetic fields generated by electrical equipment, says that all energy saving bulbs are high-frequency fluorescents which can give off significant EMFs (in contrast to incandescent bulbs, which don't). He recommends that you don't use them in places close to people's bodies (eg reading lamps, bedside lamps). Of course, electricity suppliers and retailers aren't going to tell you this, just as mobile phone sellers play down any dangers to health of flooding the nation with microwave radiation. So what shall we use instead when the otherwise admirable Greenpeace campaign to abolish incandescent bulbs is a total success? Tilley lamps, like I used on Exmoor 50 years ago before we had electricity? Oh, incidentally, watch out for the mercury content of low-energy bulbs. Don't break one in your home or in your dustbin!

By Wolfram - 28 September 2007 at 8:55am

According to Ben Goldacre's Bad Science website, there's currently no scientific evidence to link electromagnetic fields and the symptoms attributed to electrosensitivity. Of the 37 studies undertaken on the subject, only seven have shown any measurable effects and there are question marks over those. Compare this to the colossal amount of scientific evidence pointing to the reality of climate change, and I don't think there's any competition. He also has some interesting things to say about Alasdair Philips and his range of products designed to protect the unwary from rampaging electromagnetic fields. And the mercury question we've already covered here. web editor gpuk

By jamie - 28 September 2007 at 11:42am

Whilst being in 100% agreement in looking after and saving our planet, I think that the recent decision on banning incandescent bulbs is premature and not well thought through. The consequences of this ban are far reaching in many ways that are not at first obvious. and where the balance of plus and minuses lies has not , to my mind, been at all well considered. For a reasonably detailed but readable overview of most of the key points, please look at an Australian website (remember that Australia was ahead of the game on this topic.) http://sound.westhost.com/articles/incandescent.htm Hopefully, reading this website will generate more discussion on this topic to enable the balance to be more carefully considered.

By janszat - 3 October 2007 at 10:10am

If you think it's 'premature' to ban incandescent lightbulbs now, i wonder when you think is the appropriate time?? Would you like to wait until there is no ice left in the Arctic?? When the last polar bear has died? When the low lying islands are under water? I would be interested to know when your threshold is? It isn't premature, it should have happened a LOT sooner. Whatever the 'inconveniences' you percieve of CFL's, we are not the only species on the planet. We do not have the right to systematically destroy every part of this Earth and the species on it just to please ourselves. To be quite honest we shouldn't even be telling people to use CFL's, we should be telling people to switch off their lights full stop.

By Fiona - 4 October 2007 at 5:12pm

There's no reason at all why incandescents can't be banned from next year. 'Janszat' above is not 100% in agreement with looking after and saving our planet (yes, it's mine as well, and that of every organism that we share it with) otherwise (s)he would not be saying such a lily-livered thing. In contrast, I feel Greenpeace have not gone nearly far enough with energy saving efforts. Whilst 5.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide sounds a lot, this is less than 1% of UK carbon emissions. All that effort, and Greenpeace may have saved maybe 0.5% UK emissions, if that. The equivalent of improving our national electricity producing plant efficiency by only 2%. Surely time and resources needs to be spent by Greenpeace getting to the heart of the problem - breaking the morally corrupt commercial monopoly that makes us think that continuing our destructive behaviour is acceptable. Anything less is just timewasting. Keith Farnish www.theearthblog.org

By farnishk - 3 October 2007 at 5:08pm

Janszat - I read through the article you linked to and was disappointed that, despite the author claiming he was all for CFLs, he proceeded to comprehensively trash them. I haven't been able to find any records of mercury poisoning specifically from CFL breakages, but I did come across this succinct scientific explanation of how mercury vapour disperses in an average room, plus a piece on Snopes about the $2,000 clean-up bill story. farnishk - Last night, I met a friend to talk about the Transition Towns project and we got on to discussing the root causes of... well, just about everything. Our solution was to change behaviour, both on an individual and societal level, but unless people are personally impacted by climate change and peak oil (and in a persistent, chronic fashion, not just sporadic flooding), then they're not going to change their habits. We haven't cared enough in the past about people starving in Bangladesh, so why should we care about them drowning? His opinion was that, whatever happens, we're screwed and there's going to be a crisis before things get better. (Sometimes I agree - it depends which side of the bed I get out on.) Maybe that's the only way society can be reformed, an inevitable part of the process - as many have recognised in the past (and Naomi Klein touches on in her new book), change only comes with a crisis. But maybe we'll be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat and fundamentally change the way we live without the trauma of war, starvation or whatever form this crisis might take. To answer your point more directly (sorry for the rambling, but it seemed broadly relevant), I don't think Greenpeace can do that alone, and should we, given that we campaign on specific environmental problems? It's probably not our forté and, in the same way that Amnesty tackles human rights issues and we don't (at least not directly), perhaps another organisation or a wider movement needs to take up that challenge. web editor gpuk

By jamie - 5 October 2007 at 11:22am

Hi Jamie, I know you directed your reply to Keith but I would like to comment too if I may. I totally agree with your friend, we are screwed. Our population has so far exceeded carrying capacity that it is inevitable that it will crash. We have polluted virtually every water source, the Arctic is melting, 128 species go extinct every day, we are deforesting faster then ever and on it goes. There will be a crisis as you say, but I don’t think its enough to say that we wait for the inevitable crisis to make people change, because who knows what will be left of the planet by the end of it. I think it is vital that people change the fundamental way they live and even more vital that Greenpeace stands up and says that. There isn’t going to be a ‘rabbit in a hat’ answer, we aren’t going to stop climate change by switching lightbulbs and I think that to concentrate on that is giving people the premise that they can carry on business as usual, with only a few modifications. Even Decentralised Energy is not sustainable; it involves the use of mining, metal, oil, toxic chemicals..something that requires taking from the Earth and not giving anything back is not sustainable. I don’t think its enough to say that it is up to other organizations to address these issues, Industrial Civilisation is destroying our planet, Greenpeace are supposed to be there to defend our planet, the two are directly related. We are indoctrinated in a culture that has made people believe that they and their lifestyles comes before the welfare of any other species. We are in a midst of a culture that is so insane we are willing to destroy the very thing, the only thing that gives us life. We are trapped in culture that has made us forget how to live as we were meant to live on this Earth. Fiona

By Fiona - 7 October 2007 at 11:34am

Hi Jamie There is an answer and it is related to behaviour (as you rightly say). Two articles I have written recently take on the established environmental groups head-on, and try to show why the status quo cannot be maintained: http://earth-blog.bravejournal.com/entry/23122 http://earth-blog.bravejournal.com/entry/22804 The answer lies in separating people from the brainwashing behaviour that they live with. This will be gone into in great detail in my forthcoming book: A Matter Of Scale. This book will be free to download; money isn't important, saving the planet is. For the time being the two articles above should be of some help. Keith

By farnishk - 7 October 2007 at 3:57pm

hi jamie! i received a follow-up email from trevor bish-jones yesterday urging me to revisit your site to read about woolworth's progress on CFLs. keep it up! rob

By Rob Purdie - 13 October 2007 at 11:11am

Hey Rob, thanks for the reminder. I got one last week too but neglected to mention it on the site. It's been a busy week... Fiona - sorry also for not replying sooner as well. Re-reading my comment, it does sound somewhat dismissive which I didn't intend. Post in haste, repent at leisure! I'm undecided about the future but I certainly wasn't suggesting we sit around and wait til doomsday, otherwise I wouldn't be working here. It looks like we've divided opinion though with campaigns like the light bulb one: some people are pleased we're working on consumer issues, others think we're faffing around with incidental matters. For the record, the light bulb push is part of an ongoing EU-wide energy efficiency project, but no, it doesn't address the uber-problem of overconsumption. I hope I wasn't shifting responsibility on this issue - after all, we're all culpable in the current state of things - but you're right, maybe we should be getting stuck into it. However, the chances of us launching an overall anti-consumption drive are slim which is what I was getting at, but what I was remiss in pointing out was that, oddly enough, this aspect is probably going to become increasingly apparent in our established campaign work. I know other people here feel it's a core issue, and presumably a lot of people reading this agree, but it's unlikely to be a campaign issue in its own right. But here's an open question: if it's all about changing behaviour, what can we do - either as individuals or organisations - to achieve that? web editor gpuk

By jamie - 19 October 2007 at 5:50pm

Hi Jamie, Thanks for the reply back. :-) In response to your question.. ** But here's an open question: if it's all about changing behaviour, what can we do - either as individuals or organisations - to achieve that? ** I personally think Greenpeace should stand up and tell people the truth and hold them accountable. I think we could stop telling people that we have a 'convenient solution' (because we both know DE is not sustainable) and start telling them that our entire lifestyles are murdering the planet and we need to stop. There is no easy answer, and i think because of that Greenpeace tries to ignore the problems and just skims the surface instead. It really makes no difference (to the big picture) whether people are using F rated of A rated appliances. To use appliances at all still involves the destruction of the planet. I noticed on another thread that Bex agreed that electricity was essential to modern life, i happen to think that a healthy planet is more essential. And the two are not, and never will be compatible. We really really need to start looking at what industrial civilisation has done to this world, and start admitting that it can't continue. I would like more than anything for Greenpeace to be the one NGO to stand up and say this, to be the one who puts the planet (and all its species, including us) before economics, before people's holidays, before people's 'right' to play their X boxes. Because nothing, NOTHING, is more important than the Earth, it is the only thing which gives us life. The health of this Earth must be the priority, and we should say that. We should tell people they can't fly. Yes, even the person that needs to go and visit their sick grandmother one last time.., because we are not the only species on this planet, we are not the centre of all existence. The earth was not put here just for us to abuse and destroy for our own purposes. So as much as people might think they have the right to their 2 week holiday, polar bears have more right to not be made extinct. And Greenpeace should be on the side of the polar bears. I often feel that Greenpeace still speaks from an anthropocentric viewpoint much of the time. Thanks Fiona

By Fiona - 22 October 2007 at 3:30pm

I guess we can't help being anthropocentric - it's hard-wired into all of us and even though we are the sole cause of the mess around us, it's impossible to talk about environmental problems and solutions without considering the impact on individuals and communities. We could try taking people out of the equation, but I don't think we'd get very far. Time is short, but we also have to recognise what is achievable with the limited resources we have within the organisation. For instance, the long-term goal in our forests work is zero deforestation, but to get there we have to break that up into manageable goals that move us in that direction. Likewise, in aviation we're challenging areas where the industry is expanding (short haul flights and bigger airports) and moving on from there. Saying no one should fly ever again is unrealistic and won't give us the momentum we need to win debates and our campaigns. Again, we're not going to win a campaign against the use of electricity which is why Bex made that comment. The issues we deal with are usually too complex to paint in black and white terms of good versus bad, so our aim is to change policy and behaviour that reduces our environmental impact to as near as zero as possible. And no, decentralised energy is not sustainable in the terms you're talking about - it requires metals, glass and plastic to build the plants and infrastructure, not to mention transporting fuel - but then by that token neither are bicycles, candles or basic farming tools. Unless we go back to living in caves, we're going to have an impact on the world around us - it's unavoidable. The trick is to manage the resources we use responsibly and value them for their own right, not just their commercial potential. But the issues of consumption and population are being raised elsewhere on the site as well... web editor gpuk

By jamie - 9 November 2007 at 3:34pm

Hi You are all arguing over what I think is the wrong thing. Yes these lamps may be good for us, yes the safe disposal is paramount, mercury is not our immediate problem, although if we start throwing these lamps away like normal filament jobs then it will soon become a problem. What everyone seems to be ignoring is that carbon emissions is a global issue not just for us. Take one of these units apart (Don’t break the tube) and you will find that it is packed with electronic components and packaged in a plastic moulding. Based on the fact that I imagine the majority of these lamps are manufactured in China or India where their carbon emissions are far greater than ours are they really good for the global environment or just my pocket? I can find nothing to indicate that anyone has considered these points when telling us to use these lamps Does the energy used to produce all these component parts, including moulding a very fancy glass tube and then to assemble them into a final unit really cost less than the amount that I will save. I think that in ten or twenty years time we may look back at our efforts to save the planet and say, Once again we were misguided by limited, inaccurate information. Martin

By martinv - 20 December 2007 at 12:08pm

The energy used to manufacture CFLs is more than compensated for by the energy saved during their lifetime. True, many are made in China but the reason their emissions are far greater than ours is that they're manufacturing vast quantities of consumables for export to the UK and other countries. Per head of the population, China's emissions are half that of ours. That doesn't mean it's fine to transfer all our emissions from manufacturing to other countries and let them deal with the problem, but it does highlight the fact that - as you rightly point out - it's a global issue that needs global solutions as well as local ones. web editor gpuk

By jamie - 9 January 2008 at 5:40pm

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