Not enough fat cats at the BBC

UPDATE: May 1st 2009

To follow on my story about the mouse infestation at the BBC World Service below:

Let me illustrate the danger of mice being allowed to infest buildings:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8026865.stm

The Australian government has ordered an investigation into the case of a bedridden elderly man who was found covered in blood in a nursing home after his ears, neck and throat were chewed by mice. The eighty-nine year old man was attacked at a government-run home in the state of Queensland, where health officials have been struggling to cope with an infestation of mice. An Australian government minister, Justine Elliot, described the incident as extremely disturbing. She's told investigators to look at the procedures in the nursing home.

My spy at Bush House tells me that now five months later; the mice are still running riot throughout World Service news offices. They are effectively immune from attack, they run along skirting boards, make brazen dashes across the floor and stop in the middle to stand up and survey the carpet for stale sandwich crumbs. The threat of disciplinary action hangs over staff who might be 'tempted' into taking matters into their own hands. It has been made clear to staff that killing a mouse would contravene health and safety regulations however the promised 'dusting' by Rentokil either hasn't happened, or hasn't been effective.

A BBC employee of my acquaintance has told me that the mice infestation at Bush House, the offices of the BBC World Service, reported in the Guardian in October 2007 continues unabated. (The Guardian has also reported a mouse infestation at Television Centre.) At Bush House Rentokil was employed to lay traps but come January 2009 my informant was still seeing and hearing mice while working night shifts there. Every time they reported a mouse to Building Control they were told afterwards it had been dealt with which actually meant that it had been reported to Rentokil.

They wondered how often Rentokil was checking their high-tech humane traps and so a few weeks ago they turned a trap in a staff kitchen about 30 degrees off-kilter, as they are meant to be set parallel to the walls where the mice run, to see if anyone put it straight again. Two weeks later the trap hadn’t been moved. It hadn’t caught any mice either.

In frustration they bought a traditional spring mousetrap and set it with Green & Blacks chocolate in the kitchen. In 24 hours the trap had worked but before they could return to work, the dead mouse was discovered by someone else who complained to BBC management about the use of cruel traps.

Management launched an investigation and subsequently a memo was sent to all staff that due to HSE regulations, the staff were not to set their own traps and the memo said in BBC code that any further instances would be a disciplinary issue. It appears that Rentokil are now ‘dusting’ the infested areas. I presume that is a euphemism for poison. My informant promises to forward me the actual memo very soon for my research. I hope that dead mice don't get stuck somewhere and stink out the offices or a studio, as happened at the Westminster offices of the Daily Telegraph in 2007.

A contributing factor if not the root cause of this infestation could be the hygiene of the staff. Now that all catering and cleaning has been long been contracted-out of the BBC and there are no longer any of the lovely tea ladies and their trolleys nor a canteen; everyone brings in food to the offices and yet, as anyone who has shared a flat knows, nobody takes responsibility for keeping communal kitchens clean. Coffee cups are left unwashed in the sinks, food is left to rot in refrigerators. Very occasionally one of the more dedicated cleaners will empty out the fridge of rotting food and do the washing up but they point out to BBC management that this is not in their contract. To be fair, in my research into sustainability in the workplace I have heard many similar stories from schools, theatres and banks. It seems a given that any domestic chore at work like emptying the recycling bin is always thought someone else's job.

I suppose it's too late now to employ permanent catering and housekeeping staff with some maternal instincts to both mother and admonish the workers at Bush House but I'll bet the cost of that would compare favourably with Rentokil's contract.

Alternately, a long time ago I had one of those 'Picture Post' type books about working cats in London. The Post Office, the Tower of London and the Cabinet Office all had official cats. It also appears that a German news channel has Lupin, its own studio cat who occasionally wanders into shot. I think a few quid of the license payers money on a cat would be far more effective than Jonathan Ross.

Please don’t print this posting

Did you know that one piece of office paper, for example 80gsm A4, uses 600ml water and creates 34g of CO2 and 2.4g landfill waste in its lifetime?

That figure is pretty hard to come by which is part of the problem.

My figures came from Australia and when I looked into others from the USA, the claim for another paper was for 8g carbon per letter sheet.

I suppose Australia has to import more of its wood pulp and it depends on where you're counting, whether at the mill or when delivered to the user as all those miles on trucks must make a difference and stuff like bond for letterheads must take more energy to make than plain copier paper.

Let's just go with the high figure for now as I hope to show it's not just the CO2 that matters. If each sheet of plain copier paper represents seven times its weight in carbon emissions, that means every 500 sheets of plain white paper is 17 kg of CO2.

Now add to that, that over its lifetime, the manufacture of a typical office printer and its consumables creates 110 kg of CO2 per year. A big photocopier/network printer creates vastly more but is hopefully more efficient per page.

The electricity used by a small office printer on standby (mine at least) emits at least another 200 kg CO2 per year.

In the USA the average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of paper per year.

Combined with envelopes, that could be a tonne (1000kg) of carbon emissions per worker, per year.

One of my employers has measured the carbon emissions from the office lighting and heating alone at 350 tonnes per year. They haven’t counted the paper use yet but we're going to and it could be very scary. Lots of organisations like ours admit in their public carbon reports that it is very hard to do this and depends wholly on the suppliers' estimates. Addendum: our main copier paper is Evolve Office 80gsm which is 100% recycled and the data from the mill (in Kent) says the CO2 emission in its production is 728kg per tonne. I reckon that's 3.64g per sheet but then there's the shipping to the warehouse and delivery too.

"But we use recycled paper in our copier and for all our literature" I hear the MD chime in. Not that they need to defend the organisation as it has just installed a biomass boiler and committed to a whole list of actions after a Carbon Trust audit. We didn't do that just for the brownie points, although there are some, but because it saves money. Large organisations are being required to establish their carbon baselines by 2012 so everyone's getting quite interested in carbon accounting now, at least I hope so. If they can find their carbon footprint now they'll know what kind of target reduction is possible and what it will cost when they are forced to act.

But when all that's done, where's the next round of carbon reduction going to come from? Then I think it's going to get really interesting. I think managers would rather install a fancy thermostat at twice the price of enforcing changes in employee behaviour because a thermostat doesn't complain when told what to do.

Using recycled paper is a good thing. Recycled paper saves trees but carbon is still emitted from the energy required to process it. A tonne of virgin pulp creates roughly 2.1 tonnes of CO2 emission. One tonne of recycled pulp causes 1.86 tonnes of CO2 emission. But everyone must cut consumption as well as recycle. Paper is the third greatest source of industrial carbon emissions.

My employer hasn't measured the cost and volume of the paper it uses yet because that requires data entry from stacks of invoices by hand but it's working on getting it done. Maybe suppliers could help by formatting their invoices better to enable that?

Apart from the carbon issue, our paper use is a high priority because the cost of paper these days gives enough incentive. Although everyone wants to reduce the charity's carbon footprint, allocating resources to do that has to be considered mostly on a financial basis. Our new heating controls will cost £8000 to install and will save 30 tonnes of CO2 annually but businesses will only do such things - until there are carbon quotas - because the cost can be paid back in energy savings in 2.5 years.

My low-end guestimate puts providing my co-workers' paper and electricity and printers at around 6 pence a sheet. There's a handy bit of software by which you can log network printing and charge it to clients called Papercut* (and it's free for up to five users) which can count the paper and printers used and so you can count the carbon value of your printing.

If everyone where I work reduced their paper consumption by 1000 copies, I reckon the bottom line would be improved by enough to raise wages 1%. That's a pretty good incentive besides the carbon impact.

Saving paper saves the bottom line which also means for grant supported organisations like mine that jobs can be funded for longer. So save paper = save the planet = save your job.

Some habits that can reduce the waste of office paper:

• Learn how to use the network dialogue box to send jobs to the most efficient printer.
  
• Have another person check a big mail-merge document for typos before you hit print.
  
• Always check in your printer dialog box that you are printing only the pages you want. This especially applies to printing off stuff on the web or emails.


• Don’t print in colour unless there’s a very compelling reason.


• Use a printer with two or more feed trays and load once-used paper in one tray or keep a letter tray beside the printer for print 'boo boos' and load this paper in when printing drafts.


• Make sure you have a printer than accepts used paper without grumbling. If your printer can't, save your ‘boo boo’ paper to put in a printer that does.


• Try to keep waste paper (once printed both sides) out of recycling collection. Think of ways to reuse it. You can shred it and use it for packaging or put it in chicken coops or horse stables then add it to compost. You can also mix it with starch or PVA to make things like seedtrays, egg boxes or carnival costumes.

*note to Papercut: Wouldn't it be great if there was a widget in your printer dialogue box that popped up and said "you are about to emit .... kg of CO2. Do you really need to do this?"

Further reading:

Paper http://www.edf.org/papercalculator/

HP Printers http://www.hp.com/large/ipg/ecological-printing-solutions/carbon-footprint-calc.html

Xerox http://www.consulting.xerox.com/flash/thoughtleaders/suscalc/xeroxCalc.html

Papercut http://www.papercut.com/

A great explanation of the production cycle http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Ten Green Bottles

The country bus route 521 I take to work (combined with cycling on my folding Dahon Vitesse) has to make several diversions from the A12 to serve the small villages along the way.

Each morning it winds around Yoxford long enough for me to buy a paper and you could probably alight at Darsham long enough to have a swift half in the Fox Inn while it goes through the village and comes back the way it came.

This morning at Darsham an old lady, a pensioner with a travel card, was waiting at the stop with one of those wheeled shopping baskets that only pensioners use. "Morning Doris" the driver said. "Good morning Hector" said Doris. The driver and passenger were obviously well acquainted. (I didn't actually catch the first names so let's pretend shall we?)

As she slowly dragged the basket up the steps I heard the unmistakable clank of glass bottles. "One to Sax, please" she asked. Saxmudham is about five miles from Darsham where I get off. "Having a party?" Hector jokingly asked her on hearing the sound of glass. "If only, just a trip to the bottle bank" Doris told him. Once she was settled behind me, the bus set off for the church where it can make a U-turn to go back to the main road.

Although admiring her devotion to be green I couldn't help thinking that although the cost to her was nil, it certainly wasn't very green to tranport a few bottles by bus each time. Curious, I turned to Doris and said "Don't you have a bottle bank here?" "Oh no dear" Doris said. "There's no room for one." I thought that unusual and told her I used a very small bottle bank in Wenhaston which also raised money for the village pre-school. Doris replied the parish council had looked into one but there was nowhere to put it. She knew a lot about village affairs and she agreed it wasn't very green to ride the bus to drop off a few bottles but sometimes she didn't have much else to do anyway.

As we passed a long low utilitarian building I said, "what about your village hall, could it not go there?" Doris said "they said they haven't got the room, now that they've sold off the land around it." Then as we approached the Fox Inn I asked, "what about the pub? What do they do with all their bottles?" "I don't know" said Doris "but here's the publican. I'll ask her."

The bus was being hailed by a smartly dressed woman, who must be be in her fifties as she didn't have a bus pass, who was going to Sax and she and the driver exchanged the pleasantries that occur at every stop on this route. When Nell was settled, Doris asked her, "Nell, what do you do with your bottles?" "Why, I put them in our bottle bank of course" Nell replied.

Nell explained to Doris' surprise that one had been in place "for about three months now. Didn't you get the letter?" "No" said Doris, obviously crestfallen at the severeal wasted journeys she must have made since, "I'll have to have a word with Shirley about that."

It appeared to present company that Shirley, the parish clerk, hadn't sent a letter to every household about their new amenity. Nell went on to explain she'd tried to get a 3-unit sorting station but because of overhead wires, their site was only suitable for a 'mixed' collection. "It's under my bedroom window" Nell said, "so I hope people will be considerate about using it."

Then the conversation went onto the pub's recent change in menu; "we've stopped having the full menu on Sundays" said Nell ,"it was too much work. Some days Chef didn't know if he was Arthur or Martha!" Despite all the news about the decline of the pub, the demand for Sunday roasts alone kept their bookings at 75% of capacity.

I went back to my newspaper with some satisfaction that my intervention had solved Doris' problem in the way that only country buses can.

image: bottle bank at Pettistree, Suffolk copyright 2005 Chris Garner