Plants for Pollinators

The Royal Horticultural Society has recently published a list of plants that attract and support pollinating insects, so important when you consider planting schemes for landscaping around barren expanses of tarmac, concrete and cladding on projects. Not only does careful choice of local / native species improve your “credit rating” under BREEAM LE5, but deliberately including ones good for pollinating insects also attracts birds, as well as providing a haven for the insects themselves.

The RHS list can be found at:

http://www.rhs.org.uk/Gardening/Sustainable-gardening/pdfs/RHS_Polinators_PlantList_V1

A small selection of my own personal favourite “wildlife” trees, shrubs and hardy perennials includes:

Berberis darwinii (Shrub) – Not native, but a prolific flowerer, but also devilishly spiny, so good for secure areas where you don’t want people pushing through.

Buddleja davidii (Shrub) – The common “butterfly bush”. Is this a native now? I think it probably is as it’s so widespread.

Hebe species (Shrub) – Not native, but such prolific flowerers. Pick those with small leaves – they have an “alpine” heritage and are hardy even in winters such as the one we’ve just had. (Large leaved ones have a “maritime” ancestry, and need a milder climate). Masses of flowers and buzzing with insects in early summer.

Mentha aquatica (Hardy perennial) – Water mint. Excellent for damp meadows and margins of SuDS schemes.

Primula vulgaris (Hardy perennial) – The common primrose. How could you not include these in grassed areas? And oddly, although rabbits relish “commercial” coloured primulas, they seem to leave the native yellow ones alone.

Polemonium caeruleum (Hardy perennial) – Jacob’s ladder. I used to come across this while walking, growing wild on the limestone cliffs in deep valleys in Derbyshire. Not a plant for acid soils, but worth the effort to find a spot to feature it, if only for its spikes of blue flowers.

Rosa canina (Shrub) – The common dog rose of country hedgerows.

Rosmarinus officinalis (Shrub) – Rosemary. Not only a prolific flowerer with both blue and white forms, but an edible herb as well!

Sorbus aria (Tree) – The native whitebeam. “Lutescens” has deep purple shoots contrasting with silvery unfolding leaves in May, as well as having a dense oval shape.

Sorbus aucuparia (Tree) – The mountain ash or rowan. Dense inflorescences of woolly stems followed by clusters of berries in August, quickly stripped by mistle-thrushes, blackbirds and starlings. 

Tilia cordata (Tree) – The small-leaved lime. Short dense bunches of flowers in early July. Good for long-term structure planting especially on alkaline soils but will grow to about 30m.

Verbascum thapsus (Hardy perennial) – The great or common mullein. Stout spikes covered with thick woolly down and flat pale yellow flowers from June to August. Good for dry grassy spots and poor soil.

Viburnum opulus (Shrub) – The Guelder Rose. A deciduous shrub to about 4m that prefers damper places. Masses of shiny red berries after umbel-like clusters of flowers from May onwards.

And, of course, all the usual suspects – ivys, blackberries, teasels - and field poppies, scabious, ragged robin – lots of others suitable to create native “meadow” plantings for grassy areas to attract wildlife. (And you can always sell this idea to the client by pointing out that as it’s not designed to regularly mown, it keeps the maintenance costs down too!)

National Forest Walks - Calke Abbey

This is the route I was researching an extension to last Friday - artwork fresh off the press this morning.

Although I often start this from the car park near the reservoir (with stunning views), my guides tend to start from the best place for public transport, in this case Ticknall. But this does mean that you get to walk the length of the drive at the beginning, setting the scene properly for the stunning Calke Abbey Estate, with its majestic oaks, including the "Old Man of Calke", a venerable specimen at least 1000 years old. Calke itself is a National Trust premier site, a treasure-trove of a house, well worth a tour. The walk circuits the estate, including the deer park with Red and Fallow deer, ancient woodlands and farmland - a really good 5.1 mile (8.2km) amble on a fine afternoon. Here's one of the photos I took on Friday that I'll be using to illustrate the guide:

The guide is one of ten fully-illustrated walking guides that I'm currently working up, packed with interesting snippets and useful information, to put on sale for visitors to the National Forest. Each guide is OS map size (21cm x 13cm, so they fit in map pockets in jackets), printed in full colour, and laminated for durability.

If you would like to try out any of my routes (watch out for more appearing here) please contact me.

£95 fixed fee SWMP service

The Site Waste Management Plan Regulations 2008 made SWMPs mandatory on all construction projects over £300,000 in value. Failure to prepare one can lead to a Fixed Penalty Notice (typically £300), or worse – prosecution, bad publicity, a criminal record, and fines running into thousands of pounds. And a lot of hassle you could probably do without.

I offer a simple, cost-effective solution to preparing Plans using a straight-forward step-by-step questionnaire which draws on my years of experience as a construction industry Environmental Manager to give me the information I need to create a practical project-specific SWMP on your behalf. Simply complete my questionnaire and e-mail it back to me, and for a fixed fee of £95.00 (excluding VAT) I will prepare a comprehensive Site Waste Management Plan specifically for your project ready for you to implement on site, including:

·   The project details the Regulations require to be recorded in a Site Waste Management Plan.

·   The legal declarations the SWMP Regulations require to be recorded in a Plan.

·   A record of waste minimisation initiatives implemented prior to the Plan being prepared.

·   LOW codes for the wastes that you are likely to encounter on the site.

·   A Waste Duty of Care section to record when license checks have been carried out.

·   An estimate of the quantities of the different types of waste for the project.

·   Options for each waste stream to reduce landfill.

·   A practical waste management strategy specific to the site.

·   Guidance on the waste training the Regulations require in project inductions.

·   Tables suitable for you to record Interim Waste Reviews on longer projects.

·   Tables suitable for you to record your End of Project Waste Review.

·   An Appendix containing a copy of your original questionnaire.

·   An Appendix for copies of Duty of Care Documentation.

·   An Appendix for copies of Waste Transfer Notes.

The completed plan will be e-mailed to you as a printable pdf file, together with an invoice for it’s preparation. It really is as simple as that. And if things crop up (as they do) the £95 fee also includes one free update for any information you may want to add into the Plan later.

For a copy of my questionnaire, simply e-mail me and I’ll send you one by return, and tell you my current turn-around time.

I also offer a full and comprehensive SWMP service for larger or more complex projects throughout England and Wales, including training and site visits, as well as many other Environmental Management services for the Construction sector. Please contact me if you would like more details of the services I offer, or to discuss any specific requirements you may have.

Low carbon steel - and cement?

Browsing through May’s ENDS Report (ENDS 429 p.28-30), I came across an article on the prototype HIsarna blast furnace that is being trialled by Tata Steel at IJmuiden in the Netherlands which promises to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 20% by moving away from conventional coke/sinter/air furnaces to coal/ore/O2 processes. Which, as steelmaking accounts for 6-7% of global CO2 emissions, makes this seem like a very exciting development.

But it wasn’t the potential CO2 reduction that caught my eye, laudable as it is, as much as a comment about one of the benefits of the process being that the top gas from a HIsarna furnace - rather than being a mixture of CO, CO2, hydrogen and nitrogen - is 90% CO2 and no nitrogen, making carbon capture feasible.

Which made me think of Calera cement. (1) I saw this a few years ago – a technique to use hot high CO2 flue gases to produce a cement substitute that sequesters half a tonne of CO2 in every tonne of cement produced. What if the steelmaking industry and the cement industry got together and looked at how the flue gases from these new furnaces could be used to make cement? (Also one of the industries responsible for significant global CO2 emissions.)

Looks like a potential step change for the emissions from construction products to me – I wonder if anyone will ever join the dots and make it happen?

(1) http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=cement-from-carbon-dioxide

National Forest Walks - Ashby Canal

This is the most popular route for walking the full length of the restored Ashby Canal (at least, if you don't want to just retrace your footsteps!). Its 3 miles long (or 7 miles if you choose to add in the Conkers Circuit at the north end), and I normally start it at the Moira Furnace Museum, (one of the best-preserved blast furnaces in Europe, first fired in1805) head down the canal towpath, cut through Donisthorpe Woodlands to the Ashby Would Heritage Trail, follow this up to the Youth Hostel, then cut out to Conkers Waterside, then down the towpath back to Moira Furnace. Lovely easy walking, lots of wildflowers and plenty of wildlife if you get up and do it early enough.

The map & photos are my own from my fully-illustrated walking guide to the route, packed with interesting snippets and useful information, one of ten that I'm currently working up to put on sale for visitors to the National Forest. Each guide is OS map size (21cm x 13cm, so they fit in map pockets in jackets), printed in full colour, and laminated for durability.

If you would like to try out any of my routes (watch out for more appearing here) please contact me.

Pollen Beetles

At Sustainability Live on Thursday, I was chatting to Duncan Ashcroft, the owner of "Environment Times" (one of my LinkedIn contacts) and we got onto pollen beetles, which he and I had discussed in the past after he had posted a query about black midges on yellow washing. He mentioned he had included an update on the ET website with my answer, so this morning I sought it out, and here it is:

http://www.environmenttimes.co.uk/news_detail.aspx?news_id=1409

Thank you Duncan, for the mention!

Sustainability Live 2011

I visited Sustainability Live at the NEC yesterday, mooching around for new stuff, innovations and bright ideas that I could use in my work. I picked up a few ideas that might eventually be of use to me (with the right applications), but here’s some other bits of interesting stuff that I saw with a common theme of “flexible”:

Astrid LED-Neon lighting : Flexible tube LED lighting – low energy, low heat, long lasting LED tubes that are so flexible they can be used for sign-writing as an alternative to conventional neon tubes. Simply a brilliant idea.

Flexcell PV modules : Flexible PV amorphous silicon modules laminated into light thin plastic substrates that look like they could just be stuck onto almost any curved surface rather than having to have a separate flat frame. I know there’s other stuff like this out there, but it caught my eye on the day.

Lighthouse signage and labelling : DIY customizable signage and label printing system. Looks so simple to use, but produces “professional” looking self adhesive signs and labels. Looks like just the sort of thing that larger contracts might use on rapidly changing sites where fixed signage is unworkable, and needs to be adapted to different situations on a daily basis, such as refurbishment of an occupied space.  Well impressed!

But if you didn’t go, here are a few more things I spotted that I’d not seen before:

• A new heat recovery system that’s applicable to virtually any building
• An energy management system that could be modified to control demand-side use within a fixed supply-side limit – keep connection costs down to what's available rather than having to pay for off-site supply upgrades for new buildings. (It's not marketed to do this, but chatting to them it could be programmed to work in this way.)
• A great dust-suppression system
• A solar mapping service for PV installation planning
• A brilliant system for creating temporary working platforms on water
• A solution to the problem of safely de-pressurising aerosol cans on site, and capturing their hazardous contents safely.
• A resin injection system for soils – loads of applications
• A silo company that specializes in biomass storage and combustion, including wet materials.

Feel free to get in touch if you think any of these sound as if they might be useful to you!