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!

Lion poo

Doing a bit of research into the Environmental Permitting Regulations 2010 on the “Use of waste to manufacture finished goods” (U9) a little while ago, I couldn’t help noticing one of the permitted wastes was “200199 Lion faeces only”. So, being me, in an idle moment I just had to find out what sort of “finished goods” lion poo could be used to manufacture – just too quirky to ignore! My first thought was “paper” (you'd be amazed ....), but they’re carnivores, so no long fibres, so that couldn’t be it.

Anyway, I found it  – cat deterrent. It’s used to “odourise” clay pellets that you spread on your garden if you want to keep cats at bay. (And if I was a domestic moggie, yep, I think it would work on me!) So, if you happen to have a lion poo disposal problem, at least you now know how to recycle it!

Posting times

Arrgh! Why are the times on my posts 8 hrs out of sync when I post them? I've checked my account details and I'm definitely set to GMT, and the "Draft saved at hh.mm" is correct as I look at it, but when I hit "Publish" I appear to have done it 8 hrs ago - i.e. in the middle of the night, when in fact I'm sitting here with a cup of tea having  a very civilised morning.

So if you wonder just what I'm up to staying up into the night writing blogs, just add 8 hrs on and you'll get to the truth.

And if anyone knows why this happens and how to fix it, please leave me a comment!

Vehicle emissions - Pt. 2

Following on from Part 1 yesterday:

Did a bit of research into Bioethanol last night – its just the same as ethanol but using an organic feedstock. (Obvious really!) The combustion reaction is:

C2H5OH + 3O2 = 2CO2 + 3H2O

Which in terms of molecular weights looks like :

46.068 (ethanol) + 95.996 (oxygen) = 88.019 (carbon dioxide) + 54.046 (water)

So, 1 kg of ethanol will produce 1 x (88.019 / 46.068) = 1.911 kg of carbon dioxide on complete combustion. Given that the density of ethanol is 789 g/l, one litre of ethanol will give off 1508 g of CO2 when it burns, and a gallon (4.546 litres) will give off 6854 g of CO2. But as we commonly measure transport emissions in terms of “gCO2/km”, but think in terms of fuel economy in “mpg”, this needs to be divided by 1.6093 (ie 1.6093 km = 1 mile) to give my “magic number” – 4259, rounded to 4250

So, for pure Bioethanol, CO2 emissions in g/km = 4250 / mpg. Simple as that.

Which surprised me, as it is so much less than the figure for “petrol” at 6600 and more akin to LPG at 3250, suggesting that fuel economy should drop off markedly as bioethanol is blended in, but I also found an interesting snippet on the web that went: “By blending ethanol with gasoline we can also oxygenate the fuel mixture so it burns more completely and reduces polluting emissions.” (1)  And if it enables the petrol to burn more completely, perhaps it liberates more power from the mix, giving improved performance that offsets its lower carbon content.

But we don’t get pure bioethanol at the pumps - it’s normally E10 (10% bioethanol) or E85 (85% bioethanol). Simple mathematics gives the magic numbers for these blends as follows:

E10 Bioethanol – CO2 emissions in g/km = 6365 / mpg

E85 Bioethanol – CO2 emissions in g/km = 4600 / mpg 

So does blending bioethanol into a petrol mix actually maintain or improve fuel economy despite its lower carbon “chemistry”, and if it does, at what mix does the fuel economy start to drop off? I can feel a Part 3 to this story coming on … if I can ever find some info …

(1) http://www.esru.strath.ac.uk/EandE/Web_sites/02-03/biofuels/what_bioethanol.htm

SWMP course.

I have an "Understanding Site Waste Management Plans" course that I run for anyone in the construction industry. The purpose of the course is to provide a practical understanding of SWMPs, how they came into being, what they were intended to do, and the specific requirements of the Regulations. It lasts about half a day (3 to 4 hours) depending upon the amount of discussion generated within the group, and I give it a slightly different focus depending upon the background of the people I'm coaching. The presentation is deliberately interactive, asking questions of the audience at various points to generate discussion, and so for this reason it works best with smaller groups of people within companies who know each other rather than larger groups of strangers.

By starting off with "What is Waste?" and the "Waste Duty of Care", I can ensure that everyone has a proper appreciation of what the SWMP Regs relate to, and the background to some of the legal requirements that are reinforced in the Regulations.

Before starting on the SWMP regs themselves, I like to take a quick straw poll on the audience's current knowledge of the Regs, with a few simple questions, followed by an explanation of why and how the Regulations came to be drafted. A detailed look at the Regulations themselves follows, with a summary of their specific requirements as they apply to projects at the end.

"Practical Issues" is where I look at slightly different issues depending upon the audience, looking, for example at the true cost of waste, waste minimisation and designing out waste, the different waste templates and how plans might be prepared, changing trends in plans expectations and reporting, waste targets, practical issues regarding waste record-keeping and monitoring during the works, end of project waste reviews, etc.

The session closes with an open discussion which gives the participants the opportunity to raise any final issues, and if a suitable connection is available, can include a "guided tour" of the various waste and SWMP resources available on the internet.

Feedback from the audience at a recent session was very positive: "It was refreshing to gain an insightful and practical perspective of SWMPs from someone with first hand experience. The feedback from all attendees was extremely positive citing a thought provoking and informative session."

If you are interested in running this course in your company, please get in touch.

Vehicle emissions - Pt. 1

A few years ago, I bought a new car that told me the average mpg I was achieving on the latest tankful of petrol and I started to wonder about what gCO2/km this meant I was achieving at a specific fuel economy. A little bit of research revealed a fairly linear relationship between mpg and CO2/km that was true for almost any car for a given fuel type, and a bit more thinking made me realise that complete combustion of a fixed quantity of any given fuel would give off a fixed quantity of CO2 irrespective of the engine it was burnt in. (Obvious when you think about it, but it took me a while!) And that this was directly related to the weight of carbon in the fuel, which could be determined by looking at the molecular weight of its chemical composition and its density.

Which led me to develop a "magic number" for petrol which, divided by the mpg I was achieving gave me a good idea of my emissions on the latest tankful - "6600" for "petrol". So, if I achieved 40 mpg, my emissions were roughly 165 gCO2/km, 50 gave 132 gCO2/km and 60 gave 110 gCO2/km. So, if I wanted to break the magic 100 gCO2/km, I needed to achieve 66mpg (which I have done on occasion!). And the same is true for any petrol engined car / 95 octane fuel brand within a small margin of a few grammes / km. (Blended additives in commercial fuels and the temperature of the fuel when its volume was measured affects the calcs a little). And the equivalent magic figure for "diesel" is "7575", and for "LPG" is "3250", so average 76 mpg in a diesel engined car or 33mpg in a LPG car, and you are achieving better than 100 gCO2/km, and you can hold your head up whenever you pass a "hybrid".

Which brings me to the reason why I've started to ponder on this again. I was watching BBC Countryfile last night and there was a segment on biofuels and the EU Directive on blending fossil fuels with biofuels to reduce overall emissions and I started to wonder about what the magic number might be for "Biodiesel" and "Bioethanol" - just the "combustion carbon" ignoring any offsetting from its production methods, so that I could quickly calculate a compound "magic number" for any given blend.

Which also made me wonder if engines run better on different types of fuel - not just more economically, but actually better? For example, assuming that "petrol" and "bioethanol" have exactly the same magic number, ie their theoretical "combustion carbon" content is exactly the same, would an engine tuned for petrol give exactly the same CO2 emissions per power output as the same engine tuned for bioethanol, or would one make the engine more efficient overall than the other? (Not as daft as it sounds - the combustion characteristics of a fuel affect its power output - hence the interest in laser igniters as an alternative to traditional spark plugs - faster more uniform combustion = more power for the same carbon)

So I guess its back to scratching my head, prowling around for info, and punching buttons on my calculator (and hence Part 1 on the title) Watch out for Part 2 when I have some answers!