If you are in any doubt at all about whether global warming is actually happening, go and see An Inconvenient Truth at your local cinema. If you're a bit sceptical about climate change or don't really understand what all the fuss is about, this film will explain everything you need to know in a very easy to understand and concise manner. I guarantee that once you have seen this film, there will be absolutely no doubt in your mind about the inconvenient truth that planet earth must now face.

An Inconvenient Truth presents the facts about climate change - the ones that the entire scientific community now agree on. The facts have not been exagerated or hyped up for Hollywood - I myself have seen most of the data before in scientific papers. Climate change is real - it is happening.

If you miss An Inconvenient Truth at the cinema, watch it when it comes out on DVD. Make sure your kids see it. Get all your friends to see it. Tell your work colleagues about it. If you don't do films, read the book instead - it will present the same facts. Whatever you do, do something to prevent global warming.

Our electricity supplier here at Alara is Good Energy. They are the only UK company that supplies only 100% renewable energy. Although they are a quite a bit more expensive than other energy suppliers, we firmly believe that switching over to 100% renewables was the right thing to do because by doing so we have cut our carbon emissions by 52740 kg per year. We’re also well on our way to being carbon negative, which is our ultimate aim.

 

Changing electricity supplier has got to be one of the easiest ways to reduce your carbon emissions. If you don’t fancy paying higher prices to get 100% renewable, there are lots of other “green” energy tariffs out there. Ecotricity are investing a lot of money in wind turbines and Scottish Power also have a green tariff.

Last weekend we attended The Natural Trade Show at Harrogate where we won the award for Best Product Food & Drink for our new product Goji and Yacon Muesli!
For anyone (like me!) who has never heard of goji berries or yacons…

Goji berries have many health benefits, contain very high quantities of vitamin C and essential amino acids
Yacon is a prebiotic (it is deliciously sweet, but the sugar is not absorbed to the blood stream), supports beneficial gut bacteria and it helps the body to absorb calcium which is not normally easy.

We’re very proud of this combination as together they have more health benefits than you can shake an organic stick at!

Goji and Yacon Muesli is one Alara Wholefoods six new muesli’s that were launched this week. The other new varieties are A Date with Cacao, Absolutely Active, Very Berry, Fruit Seed and Spice, and Crispy Coconut Crunch.

The new range of muesli’s has been launched in our new packaging. We’ve decided to put our new products into paper bags with a clear window instead of in a plastic bag inside a cardboard carton. This not only minimises the amount of packaging that we are sending out into the market place but also allows the customer to see the product.

At the moment the window is made of a clear plastic film but we will soon be moving over to a clear biodegradable film so that the entire bag can be composted once it is empty. Sainsbury’s recently launched compostable packaging in their organic range and you can read more about it here.

Below are pictures of Alex Smith (MD) in front of Alara's stand at The Natural Trade Show, the Award that Alara won, and Zuber accepting the award and a bottle of champagne!

        

Behind our factory in Kings Cross is a strip of disused land that backs onto the railway line. We are currently in the process of turning it in to a permaculture forest garden.

“What’s permaculture?” you may be asking yourself. Well essentially it’s a method of sustainable land management and food production based on following nature’s patterns. At the edge of a forest or woodland area, a wide variety of plants live together – it is made up of trees of various sizes, shrubs, herbs and root plants. This is a naturally occurring ecosystem that is self-maintaining, that is, it doesn’t need weeding, fertilising or watering - it just looks after itself.
The idea of a permaculture forest garden is to replicate the ecosystems that occur naturally at a woodland edge, but using plants and trees that are edible or bear edible fruit. In this way, the garden can provide a substantial amount of food without the need to employ a gardener to look after it. For more information about permaculture, take a look at the Agroforestry Research Trust, the Permaculture Association and this definition from Wikipedia

Our aims in planting this garden are

• To make use of an otherwise unused and derelict piece of land
• To use the land to sequester CO2 and reduce the effects of global warming
• To educate young people about healthy eating and where food comes from
• To provide an area of land for locals and employees at Alara to enjoy
• To grow fruit trees and edible plants for people to eat
• To reduce the amount of municipal waste being sent to landfill by starting a composting scheme
• To promote links between local businesses and the local community

We are undertaking this project in partnership with a local youth charity called the Jubilee Waterside Centre who provide outdoor activities to school groups throughout London. Once it is complete, they will use the garden as an educational facility to teach children about healthy eating, where food comes from, the importance of locally grown organic produce, composting, global warming and peak oil. We have already invested nearly £9,000 to have the site cleared of rubbish, make it secure and carry out hard landscaping. The organisations listed below have all agreed to help us in various ways so a very big thank you goes to them.

The Jubilee Waterside Centre – The Managing Director of Alara Wholefoods, Alex Smith, is a trustee of this local charity. Since they will be one of the main users of this facility once it is complete, they will help to raise funds by making grant applications on behalf of the project. They have already received £2,400 towards the project costs from the Community and Green Values grant scheme

Costain – This is one of the engineering and construction groups who are working on the channel tunnel rail link at Kings Cross and have helped by providing materials and labour for the garden fence

Glendale Services – Glendale is a leading provider of green services to the private and public sectors, offering a complete range of solutions from one unique source. They are helping to source the plants for the garden and will support the project by helping to plant the garden

Envision – This is a charity that supports a key age group, 16-19 year olds in schools and colleges, to develop their own social and environmental projects. Volunteers from Envision will help to plant the garden

Community and Green Values – This is a grant scheme provided through Groundwork Camden and Islington with the aim of improving quality of life in Camden that awarded a grant of £2,400 to the Jubilee Centre to help to fund this garden project in 2005.

London Community Recycling Network – London CRN have advised us of grant schemes that we could apply for to set up our composting facilities and put us in touch with their network of master composters some of whom are professional gardeners and permaculture experts.

The first planting stage will take place in December and the garden will be open for the first visitors in spring 2007. The pictures below show the garden at the start of the project and how it looks now - quite a difference!

       

For clear plastic film like shrink wrap, pallet wrap and lining bags that are uncontaminated with food, paper or labels plastic companies will pay up to £180 per tonne if they can collect 20 tonnes at a time. For smaller quantities the price drops as transport costs need to be taken into account.

If the bales are mixed colours or contain paper labels then most reprocessors will still pay if they can collect in large enough quantities but won’t pay so much of a premium because they will have to sort and separate the different types themselves. At the moment our bales are a mixture of clear and blue plastic and some bags that have paper labels on them so we’re getting a free collection but not getting paid for it.

There are loads of companies out there who will collect bales of plastic for recycling and reprocessing and some will even pay you for it! However if, like us the quantity of plastic you are producing is relatively small, it can be quite difficult to find someone who will collect. What do we mean by relatively small? Well most of the companies we spoke to had a minimum collection of about 5 tonnes – that’s about a years worth of plastic for us!

Recovered plastics told us that they would pay us for our plastic if we could fill an articulated lorry at each collection – that’s about 20 tonnes so not practical for us. They did say that they could do smaller collections for free but wouldn’t be able to pay us for the material.

Baylis Recycling told us that their minimum free collection is around 5 tonnes but put us in touch with the company that does their London pick ups because if they happened to be in the area anyway, they might be able to collect smaller quantities for free.

Compact and Bale sell balers but if you buy one of their machines they also arrange collections of baled materials through a company called Total Waste. The minimum plastic collection would be about 3 tonnes but they could also arrange to do a combined collection of cardboard and plastic for free.

Since we’re buying a baler from Pressing Solutions, it made sense to use their collection service. They are quite a small company and have many contacts with local recyclers. They said they could collect our plastic bales on a monthly basis for free and have been very helpful through the whole process.

We recently decided that it’s about time we started to recycle all our plastic instead of just throwing it away. Plastic waste on our site comes mainly in 2 forms:

• Clear pallet wrap – all of our ingredients arrive on our site in pallets, which are wrapped in clear film
• Blue plastic liner bags which come inside boxes of dried fruit

After realising that we would need a baler to reduce the volume of all this plastic we contacted several companies about our baler requirements. We spoke to Edwina and Brian Watson at Pressing Solutions who were very helpful. They agreed to let us have a free trial of a machine called a plastipress.This machine basically presses about 5 kg of loose plastic into a brick, then the sides heat up so that plastic in contact with the outside edge softens, then the brick is cooled so that it retains it’s shape.

The advantage of the plastipress is that there’s no need to tie off bales with string or twine – the bale just holds itself together. On the downside, it takes 30 minutes to make each bale as the press has to heat up and cool down and is quite energy intensive due to the heating and cooling cycle.

Unfortunately, the plastipress is just too small for our requirements. We've been making about 6 bales a day weighing between 3 and 5 kilos and still have plastic left over waiting to be baled! So we've now chosen a Model 270 baler from Pressing Solutions which makes bales of about 75kg that are held together with banding tape. Pressing Solutions have also offered to collect the bales of plastic once a month free of charge which is great as it can be difficult to find companies that will pick up relatively small quantities of plastic.

            

Because we care about the environment! At Alara we are committed to minimizing the environmental footprint of our business and hope to be an example to others. We want to manufacture high quality muesli without damaging the planet. In our opinion sustainability is not an option - it’s a necessity.