Ben Ainslie unveils first community renewables project funded by PURE using donations from British Airways’ passengers.

Team GB athlete Ben Ainslie has unveiled the first project to be funded by carbon reduction charity PURE the Clean Planet Trust using donations from British Airways passengers to BA’s One Destination Carbon Fund. The donations paid for the installation of solar PV panels on the Osprey Leisure Centre in Portland, Weymouth, close to the National Sailing Academy.
Osprey Leisure Centre is an ex-Navy building which was taken over by South Dorset Community Sports Trust in 2007 to provide recreation and sports facilities for the local community. The project received funding to erect a 10kWp array of PV panels to help it both reduce carbon dioxide emissions and make money from the generation of renewable energy.

According to Nigel Williams, Osprey General Manager, at current energy prices, the panels will generate around £125,000 of energy savings and feed-in tariff payments over the next 25 years.

Mr. Williams said:

‘When we opened in 2007, around a third of income went straight out of the door again to pay utility bills. We initially worked with an independent energy auditor to identify energy efficiency savings and reduce energy demand, then received funding through PURE to install the solar panels, further reducing our energy demand from the grid and allowing the centre to benefit from regular Feed-in Tariff payments. This will reduce running costs and help us to maintain facilities for all.‘

The Environment Agency will host bathing water seminars for beach controllers across the South West this week.

The two seminars held jointly with Defra are designed to increase awareness of the European wide revised Bathing Water Directive among Beach controllers and clarify their understanding of the new directive requirements and timetable.

The first seminar is on Tuesday 17 April at the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth, the second is on Thursday at Taunton Conference Centre, Somerset College.   The revised Bathing Water Directive, introduced in 2006, significantly changes the way bathing waters are managed.

Bathing water quality standards are getting tighter.

The Directive introduces a new classification scheme:

• ‘Excellent’ which is approximately twice as stringent as the current guideline standard • ‘good’ similar to the current guideline standard • ‘sufficient’ tighter than the current mandatory standard • ‘Poor’ normally non-compliant waters   The Agency will sample on a four year rolling programme and report against these new classifications for the first time in 2015. All bathing waters need to achieve a classification of at least ‘sufficient’.   The second important strand of the revised Directive is a greater emphasis on beach controllers providing public information at the beach.   If a site is classified as poor in 2015 measures must be taken and advice against bathing posted at the bathing water by the beach controller.

South Staffordshire College has hosted a sustainability event to support its strategic “Sustainability Energy’’ plan and to outline the Government’s “Rural Economy Grant’’.

Following the recent announcement of the grant, which provides an investment of up to £1million for micro and SME businesses, the College’s Workforce Development Team invited employers from across the county to a free event, “Making the Future Sustainable”, at the College’s new £3 Million Foster Learning Centre on Rodbaston Campus.
Many rural businesses from the forestry, farming, fishery, floristry, and land based industries attended the event and commented on how well it was presented.
Guests heard from a variety of keynote speakers about the areas where this investment can be made, including boosting farm competitiveness, reducing energy consumption, encouraging carbon reduction and implementing waste management.
Keynote speaker Mark Winnington, Cabinet Member for Environment and Assets, said “Rural businesses and rural communities can be left behind, rural areas are without broadband and there has been lack of funding available to support rural businesses expand.

If you could make small changes to your lifestyle to protect and ‘Love Your River’, would you do it?

That is the question that is being asked of everyone following the launch of a groundbreaking campaign to raise public awareness about the link between the health of our rivers and water use.

The ‘Love Your River’ campaign is being launched and backed by Defra, the National Trust, the Environment Agency, the Wildlife Trusts, Keep Britain Tidy, water companies and Waterwise, to promote the value and benefits of our rivers to our everyday life. The need to protect our rivers has become more urgent in light of droughts being declared in various parts of the country, with some of southern Yorkshire joining the list of drought affected areas today.

Businesses and other organisations aiming to improve their environmental performance received a welcome boost with the announcement yesterday that CO2Sense, the not-for-profit low-carbon expert company, will become an independent Community Interest Company. The company, which was formerly owned by the regional development agency Yorkshire Forward, was granted permission to become independent by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). The majority of RDA land and property assets are now managed by the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA).

CO2Sense supports businesses and other organisations to cut their carbon emissions and their costs, providing advice and investment funds for renewable electricity and heat installations and projects that cut energy, waste and other resources.

Announcing the move, CEO Joanne Pollard said “We never doubted that we had a secure future following the closure of the RDAs. For the last four years, we have been passionate about enabling businesses to grow and fighting global warming – and these objectives are as important today as they’ve ever been. We’re looking forward to helping more businesses to prosper and to cut emissions over the years to come.”

The BRE Trust, the charitable organisation that owns the BRE group of companies celebrates its 10th anniversary with the launch of a new thematic research programme at Ecobuild called ‘Future Cities’. The programme will explore the range of challenges faced by the global built environment as more people migrate to cities.

Specific areas of focus will be: Energy Supply & Demand, Buildings and Infrastructure, Health and Wellbeing, Crime, Infrastructure and ICT and Communities and Social Interaction.

Timber is a valuable and versatile building material, but just like concrete or steel, it can be open to the threat of fire. In April 2012, DRICON, Arch Timber Protection’s water-based fire retardant, will celebrate 25 years of continuous British Board of Agrément (BBA) accreditation, giving confidence and reassurance of long-term and safe fire protection to the contractors, designers and most important of all, occupants of buildings and structures that use timber for all or part of their construction. DRICON, which has been used to protect solid timber and timber panels for more than 30 years worldwide, is the only BBA-approved fire retardant protection for timber.

The unusual outbreak of night tornadoes in the U.S. Midwest Wednesday morning may have been triggered by a warm winter, an expert says.

The twister outbreak, which started soon after midnight in Kansas, killed at least 13 people in southern Illinois, northern Missouri, and western Tennessee.

The most powerful tornado touched down in Harrisburg, Illinois, with winds of about 180 miles (289 kilometers) an hour. (Learn what happens inside a twister.)

"It'd be fair to say an unusually warm winter was probably a major factor [in causing the tornadoes]," said Jeff Masters, director of the meteorological website Weather Underground.

"You get far fewer tornadoes in February during cold winters."

By Jonathan Pearce, Marketing Manager at Northgate Vehicle Hire

14 February 2012: Introduced back in 2008 as part of efforts to improve air quality in the capital, the Low Emission Zone (LEZ) has now introduced tighter emissions regulations to force heavy polluting diesel vehicles to become cleaner. Since January, thousands of vehicles have had to comply with minimum Euro 3 emission standards when travelling within the LEZ. Non-compliance is clearly not an option, with the government imposing stinging daily charges and hefty fines.

The fifth in a series of events that began in 2005, WWEM 2012, the Water Wastewater & Environmental Monitoring event (Telford, 7/8th November 2012) will be larger than any of its predecessors and this is due in no small part to the collaborative arrangements that have been established with a number of major organisations, that now includes GAMBICA.

GAMBICA is the trade association for Instrumentation, Control, Automation and Laboratory Technology in the UK. It has a membership of over 200 companies, ranging from major multinationals to medium and small enterprises. Tim Collins is Director of the Laboratory Technology Group and says he is "delighted to become a partner of WWEM 2012; several of our members have already signed up to exhibit and I imagine that more will do so in the coming weeks."

Through the help of Recycling Furniture Ltd, FIRA are now able to recycle a large proportion of the furniture they test, rather than sending it to landfill.

Paul Soley, Operations Manager for FIRA Testing Services said, “At the FIRA testing centre we test thousands of furniture products to life expectancy and in some cases destruction, testing them in terms of strength, safety, stability, durability and flammability. This makes them dangerous for future use, meaning in the past FIRA had no choice but to dispose of them if they were not collected by the manufacturer.”

The full report on the Torbay I-Tree survey entitled Torbay’s Urban Forest - Assessing Urban Forest Effects and Values has now been published by Treeconomics. The completed cost / benefit analysis demonstrates that the value of urban trees to the environment significantly exceeds their cost in management. The figures have already had a positive impact as they have been used by Torbay Council to justify an additional investment of £25,000 into its tree maintenance budget.

South Staffordshire College joins elite group in sustainability standards

South Staffordshire College has become the only FE College in the UK to achieve Gold EcoCampus status and the demanding ISO14011 standards.

Report shows that CPI is playing a vital role in the
development of industrial biotechnology.

The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) welcomes the Government's commitment to invest in rail rather than seeking to promote new roads or air travel. But there is a long way to go before we can be sure that High Speed 2 (HS2) will not have an unacceptable impact on the landscape and local communities.

Mark Phillips, Head of Sustainability and Environment at South Staffordshire College, has been appointed as a regional advisor for the West Midlands by the Learning and Skills Improvements Service (LSIS).

As the New Year dawns, thousands of businesses face an unwelcome change: a £200 daily charge to enter the capital.

Today tighter standards are introduced to London’s low emissions zone (LEZ). Lorries, buses, coaches and other specialist heavy diesel vehicles entering the capital will be subject to a £200 per day fine unless they meet Euro 4 emissions standards.

Today’s news that Environmental Protection UK has been forced to shut is another blot on the UK’s air quality record.

It was announced earlier today that Britain's oldest environmental NGO, an expert body on air pollution and contamination, has succumbed to financial challenges brought about by government cuts to authority budgets.

Today’s Environmental Audit Committee report is an urgent call for the transport industry to clean up its act.

The Environmental Audit Committee sharply criticised the UK’s failure to meet EU standards on air pollution, calling for the creation of a network of Low Emission Zones (LEZ) across the country.

At 1pm today the solar industry presented a REA/STA letter signed by 200 prominent individuals and organisations, and a Friends of the Earth petition signed by 17000 concerned citizens, urging the PM and DPM to reconsider the drastic cuts and changes being rushed through to the Feed-in Tariff.