All our office paper and envelopes at Alara come from Viking Direct and have a recycled content of 80% and 75% respectively. Whilst this is good, we’ve recently been considering moving over to 100 % recycled paper and envelopes since this would be even better. I’ve been advised that Evolve is the best manufacturer of 100 % recycled office paper so I’ve been looking at how much it would cost to switch. If you buy more than 50 reams of recycled paper from Viking, the price is £1.89 per ream. Evolve 100 % recycled paper costs £2.85 per ream from the Green Stationery Company, but only £2.10 per ream from Paper Round. Clearly it’s worth shopping around! So if we were to switch, our paper costs would increase by around 11 %.

 

I’ve also looked at the price of envelopes and have found that Treesaver 100 % recycled envelopes from Paper Round are much cheaper than the same ones from The Green Stationery Company, and in some cases they are even cheaper than Viking! Result! If you want to see a table comparing the prices of paper and envelopes from Viking, Paper Round and The Green Stationery Company, please click here.

 

As I’ve mentioned before, Alara is working towards Green Mark certification and last week we had our Green Mark Level 1 assessment. Everything seemed to go well on the day and all we need to do now is submit as many documents as possible as evidence that we are doing all the things we say we are. This includes things like Duty of Care Notes from our waste carriers (it’s really important for businesses to hold on to these for at least 2 years in case of audits), evidence of compliance with packaging regulations and evidence of purchasing recycled products. All the evidence will then be reviewed by an external assessor and as long as they are happy with it, we will be awarded the Green Mark to display on our packaging in about 2 weeks time.

 

But it doesn’t stop there…as soon as we have achieved Level 1 we will start to work towards Level 2

 

It’s amazing how many people have heard about the permaculture forest garden project and what we are trying to do here! I recently spoke to a beekeeper called Orlando, who heard about our project through an email that had been passed on by several other people. Orlando has several hives at 2 other community gardens in London and has asked if we would be interested in keeping bees in the garden. Strangely enough, we had been talking about bee keeping before Christmas but couldn’t really see how to get into it.

 

We’ve agreed with Orlando that in April we’ll start with 3 hives in the garden with a view to having more the following year if they are successful. Most people (myself included until recently!) don’t realise that you can actually keep bees and make honey in the city. Apparently, city honey can have some unusual flavours because of the sheer diversity of plants available to the bees. Orlando left with me a sample pot from one of his hives in Brixham – an unlikely place for honey production you might think but it is absolutely delicious! I’m really looking forward to learning more about bees and how to keep them. What a great way to encourage biodiversity in the garden!

 

 

Last year we planned to spend a day making 3 compost bins so that we can start composting our garden waste. Unfortunately it rained so hard on the day that we couldn’t build the bins. We have now provisionally rescheduled for 3^rd February 2007 and we’re looking for volunteers to help us with the build. If you’re interested in coming along to help, please email green@alara.co.uk for more details and to register your interest. 

A few weeks ago, I wrote this post about how we decided to switch to Severnside Recycling for collecting our compacted cardboard and paper sacks and baled up plastic film. The collections have now started and after sorting out a few teething problems they seem to be going OK. Initially, the collection lorry they originally sent to us was a Luton van that was too small to take all our recycling – they only managed to load 2 out of the 8 bales of cardboard that were sitting in our yard before it was full!

 

Clearly the vehicle they sent was unsuitable for this type of collection, so we agreed that a Rear End Loading vehicle would be needed in future. They also offered to do the collections overnight to minimise any disruption to us, which has worked out very well. Now that we have ironed out all the initial problems, the system seems to be working very well and at a very reasonable cost.

 

 

I decided to try to make a small modification to the wormery to make it easier to harvest the worm compost. When we first built the wormery, we just piled the tyres on top of each other, but this means that the good compost will be at the bottom of the wormery. When we want to harvest the compost we will have to take the wormery apart completely and separate out the compost from the undigested food and worms which could be quite a messy and time consuming job.

 

To make it a bit easier I bought some plastic netting and some twine from the garden centre and put a double layer of netting underneath one of the tyres (picture to follow). Then I used the twine to tie the netting to the tyre tightly. The idea is that each tyre will form a tray similar to the sort that you get in the can-o-worms wormery. The netting allows the worms to move up from the lower tyres to continue feeding, but will not allow the compost to escape. So when it’s time to harvest the compost, you simply lift off the top tyres, (which will have worms and undigested food in them), remove the bottom tyre, (which will have the rich, worm compost in it) empty out the compost and put the empty tyre back on the top of the pile.

 

At the moment I have only modified one tyre to check that the worms can actually move up through the netting, and that the netting is strong enough to hold a tyre full of compost. If it works I will modify the other tyres.

Camden Council recently started a “Better Climate for Camden” scheme, which offers free advice to businesses in the London Borough of Camden on improving efficiency, reducing CO₂ emissions and increasing profitability. Alara is taking part in the scheme and last week we had a visit from one of Camden Council’s Environmental Policy Officers to talk about what we are already doing to reduce our impact on the environment and advise us on anything else that we can do.

 

The main area that we can improve on is the way that we heat our factory. At the moment we use electric bar heaters in the production areas, which are very old and very inefficient. If we wanted to replace the heaters with more efficient ones, we could get a grant for up to 50 % of the cost of the equipment. Other areas we can save energy are by making sure that doors shut properly and fitting draught excluders around windows and doors. In Unit 1 we also have a large gas heater above the door that blows hot air into the warehouse. This is positioned in the wrong place really as people don’t generally work in the area that it is heating, and being so close to the door, a lot of the heat is lost straight away.

 

I found the visit really useful even though we have already done a lot to reduce our energy consumption. I would advise all businesses in Camden to have one of these consultations as not only are they free, they could also save your business money. For more information you can visit the Better Climate for Camden website. If you have a business that is not in Camden, find out if your local council is running a similar scheme – it really is worth it!

 

Well, now that Christmas has gone by there’s a bit more work to do in the garden. Hopefully we will be mulching this coming weekend to provide a bit of insulation for our new trees and also to stop any weeds from growing through. We’ll be using a mixture of cardboard (that would otherwise have been sent for recycling from our factory) and wood chippings.

 

Once again Camden Council has really helped us out by helping us to find the wood chip. I phoned Street Environment Services and asked if the contractors who prune trees in Camden produce woodchips from the tree cuttings and if so, would they sell us any. The response was that the contractors could provide us with some wood chippings for free! So we have arranged for them to come and tip some woodchip outside the garden next time they are in the area. Hopefully we’ll have a fully mulched garden this time next week!