Chris Hines, the founder of Surfers Against Sewage, is now Sustainability Director of the Eden Project in Cornwall. He spoke to the Behind the Spin conference about the steps individuals can take to improve the Environment
Sustainability impacts on every single aspect of our lives: the air we breathe, the food we eat, pollution, environment, quality of life, happiness…
And for most of us, once we earn over a certain amount (£22,000 is often quoted) we don’t become any happier. When I get stuck in a little wicker box at the end of my life and put in a hole or burnt I’m not going to say: “Damn, I never did get that Mercedes Turbo SP20 Super charged car”.
The things that I will regret will be not having spoken to people like you, not having gone and seen my parents, my partner – all of those things – and celebrating the natural environment that I live in. So we need to change some of our value systems.
Every organisation and every person has an impact and sustainability is about minimising that impact, maximising the efficiency of what we’ve got and making it relevant.
Action speaks louder than words, and we at the Eden Project put in a lot of effort to make sure that we do walk the talk.
Take Green Tariff Electricity. Buy it now because if you want organisations like us to be your customers we are going to start to ask whether you use renewable energy. If we are looking to source services from a company, we want to know whether you whether you’ve got Green Tariff Electricity. Go and talk to the RDA for the South West because the money that they will invest in projects will start to require that people can show their sustainability, and if you haven’t done something as basic as signed up with Green Tariff Electricity, don’t expect those grants to come in so easily.
Take Waste Neutral. The Eden Project diverts over 66% of our waste. It used to go to landfill. We now deal with it on our own site or send it off to be recycled. And if we can do that, why are we building incinerators? Why aren’t we having composting plants all over the place? Why aren’t we doing things properly instead of just taking the easy option and going and burning the whole lot?
We’ve invested a lot of money in Waste Neutral and we build it in right through our whole supply chain. We say to people when we’re buying things, “We want that to be either a material that we can recycle or can be composted. And if you can’t do that, we will give you six months and we will help you, but ultimately if you can’t work with us, than you won’t end up supplying us”. But we help people. It’s not just either you do or you don’t. It’s a relationship with suppliers.
Take Local Sourcing – 80% of what we source is bought locally. Investing in our local economy, upping jobs and value of people and the wages that they get paid, investing in our local agricultural industry and also cutting down on all that carbon mileage of where things come from. Our menus are seasonal so that we are able to use the foods that are there for us.
Take Biomass – we are just in the process of changing over the heating for the baseline heating for all of our Biomes to Biomass. We’ve got a giant wood burner in which we’re burning miscanthus (elephant grass) and wood. And that has to come from within 26-mile radius of us, otherwise the carbon footprint doesn’t add up.
Take the Great Washing Machine Debate - anybody who went to Eden in the first two or three years would have seen acres of disposable cups in the fast food café.. It was madness. We looked at that with our catering staff. This wasn’t my decision; this was working with people.
We shifted from disposables to a washing machine, used crockery and cutlery, reduced our landfill by nine tonnes a year, reduced the carbon and material impact of manufacture and transportation of all these things down to us. People got a nicer cup of tea, we created two jobs and we noticed on the first day that people were suddenly eating salad with their pasties. So diet was improved as well, and financially it saved us £189,000 over five years. We also sell far more cups of tea. So that was a win, win, win situation.
And the last little line there – be open. A problem shared is a problem halved. If you’ve got a problem, put your hand up and say, “I’ve got a problem”, because then two things will happen. First, other people will go: “Well I don’t feel quite so bad about my problems then”. Next, someone somewhere can say “I think I can help you. I think I’ve got the answer.” And that is such an important thing.
If all six billion inhabitants of planet Earth live like we do now in Europe, we need three planets. If we all want to live like the Americans, we need five. Well, hey we’ve got one. So we’ve got to solve these issues. Why are we drinking French Perrier carbonated water in Cornwall? Why? We’ve got some of the best tap water in the whole world. We should celebrate it. We’ve even got kids not understanding that milk comes from cows. So, good old Jamie Oliver.
Everybody is responsible. We all have a responsibility to get in to this. And the twenty first century is about answers to questions, solutions to problems and communicating it to everybody. So you’re all communicators. Help communicate it. And even if the companies that you represent aren’t specifically into this agenda, it’s important that they are because that makes it mainstream.
Everybody should be carrying a little tiny thing, any brochure, any bottle, anything you pick up should have some statement of care on it. And we’re turning around hundreds of years of culture that was blasting off in one direction. We didn’t know what we were doing; we didn’t purposely set out to stuff things up or stuff people up. It was just…; we were using the wrong palette of materials and the wrong palette of technologies.
But the human species can achieve anything if we put our minds to it. So if we use the right palette of materials, we can make the most amazing circles, the most amazing cars, and the most things. We can live brilliantly on this planet, and we can do it.
Each day enough energy falls to the Earth to supply the planet’s six billion inhabitants for twenty five years. We’ve hardly begun to tap into it. And that’s from the US Department of Energy. We don’t have an energy shortage; we just haven’t applied ourselves to it.
Every car coming to our site comes past our Waste Neutral compound because we’re proud of what we do. We don’t want to hide our waste compound behind us. We don’t want to hide sewage treatment works behind us.
I live next to a sewage treatment works. I’m not NIMBY (not in my back yard), I’m a YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard). Because I consume energy, I produce waste, I produce sewage. I need it treated. So therefore every community needs to have these things in them.
When you get in there, understand your waste. The only way Eden could do it was to get in there. We pulled every single bin bag to pieces over a five-day period. Five different days through the peak of summer, we went through every bin bag and weighed everything - that helped us design the system to manage our waste.
We used to send a ton of food waste to landfill every day. Now, for every ton we put in our composter, we get 100 kilos of lovely stuff that we put back on our plants. It’s not rocket science.
It’s everybody’s responsibility. Don’t say it’s just children - this is one that drives every potty. “Oh it’s alright. We’ll leave it to the children. We’ll just educate them and they’ll sort it all out and we’ll carry on blasting away and consuming, consuming!” Rubbish! It’s all of us now. Every single one of us, and then the kids will go, “Brilliant, well done. We can do anything. Let’s do it.” (Applause)
But you have to get in, you have to be in the House of Commons as well giving evidence and putting suits and ties on. People used to say to me, “Why are you putting on a suit? You’re spending too much time up there with a suit and tie on and not your wet suit on.” That was rubbish. You had to have the wetsuit that enabled you to get called in front of a House of Commons Select Committee and then you put a suit and tie on. You give respect. The last thing you want someone saying is, “He’s a scruffy urchin,” and being able to diss you because you don’t comply.
Comply with all of it. Anything they want because you know what’s inside here. Nothing’s changed. But play the game. Play the game better than they do.
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