Partnership working can be road to success

It’s no coincidence that I work for a partnership. I really believe that working this way, if done properly, can be a very powerful and effective way to deliver extensive and impressive results.

There are many different reasons that you might want to work in partnership and it’s always exciting and varied. Some partners can help you generate ideas or design activity, while others may share their skills and knowledge to ensure activity resonates with target audiences. More rarely, partners may be prepared to put resources into the activity.

Certainly at ClimateNE we work with a range of organisations and individuals on a whole host of projects; from national strategic and policy-led work to delivering projects with communities across North East England.

For example, a lot of my time is devoted to engaging with the business community in the North East. One of the ways that I do this is working with Nicola and her team at Daisy Green Media and Events.

Together we organise business events and provide the space where they can connect and form meaningful, like-minded working relationships. This is important to me as getting more businesses of all sizes to take advantage of the opportunities that tackling and responding to climate change presents is crucial.

Developing and delivering ideas like ConnectFriday and The Big Eco Show helps us, and our respective organisations, achieve our objectives.

But, like anything, managing partnerships can be tricky sometimes and need to be established and maintained carefully.

Here are a few tips:
• Be clear and honest from the outset on what you want and get your partners to do the same. As well as establishing the essential joint vision, be frank and share worries and any awkward realities so that expectations can be managed. Don’t agree to something that you know you can’t deliver or that makes you feel uncomfortable.
• Be flexible and responsive. Ideas evolve and relationships change. Something will go wrong somewhere! Review the partnership regularly and if something isn’t working, pipe up and sort it out.
• And finally, always let your true character shine through. I try and apply personal integrity and use my natural humour to initiate and sustain partnerships and networks; that way understanding stakeholders’ motivations and needs and aligning them around a common goal is so much easier – and often great fun!

My weekend with a Nissan Leaf

I’ve never been one to gush over a car. As long as it gets me safely from point A to point B and doesn’t cost the earth (in more ways than one) I’m happy. Even so, the opportunity to take the Nissan Leaf electric car for a weekend held enormous appeal.

In principle, I’m a massive fan of electric vehicles, but I had never actually sat in one let alone driven one.

The Nissan Leaf’s quirky styling immediately had me smitten. The headlights are like frog eyes and its body is sleek and sporty.

The interior is smart too and was luxuriously spacious with plenty of leg and head room.

Climbing behind the wheel and switching on the power button activates a host of lights on the dashboard in a futuristically impressive fashion.

Its clever on-board computer includes a sat-nav, a rear-camera for reversing, and can even look-up nearby charging points.

There’s even an app so you can instruct the car to warm up from afar so it’s toasty upon arrival.

As expected, the car was disconcertingly silent. More surprisingly, it was quick – its power immediate and responsive, and torque uphill was even and constant.

It was a pleasure to drive in weekend city traffic, as well as winding country roads. It felt robust and sure-footed and handled well. Once I had adjusted to the auto gearbox it was a pretty relaxing experience.

When it comes to charging up the battery there are a few options. You can recharge with a standard cable and household plug that takes up to eight hours. Great for me but admittedly no good if you live in a block of flats or don’t have a garage or driveway.

The other options are offered via charging points, which takes around half the time. Better yet, there are also rapid charge points that take about 30 minutes. Using these spots is free, so in the cities you’ll escape annoying parking fees.

While North East England is incredibly well plugged-in, lack of recharging points elsewhere in the country poses a problem for distance driving and requires meticulous forward planning.

But things are getting better. I was reliably informed that charging points are arriving on both the M6 and M1 so ‘range anxiety’ may well soon become a thing of the past.

A full charge will last for about 100 miles, which costs roughly £2 in electricity. It doesn’t take much number crunching to realise the significant savings this offers.

At £31,000 the Leaf isn’t cheap, but drivers can claim a £5,000 government grant towards this upfront cost.

Running costs are cheaper than its conventional counterparts. Aside from the eye-watering fuel savings, electric cars are exempt from tax and congestion charges and tend to have cheaper insurance premiums.

So if you drive to work and have access to charging points, it’s worth seeing if the sums work for you.

A stress-free option could be to lease one, which works out at about £250 a month – which is likely to work out less than the average monthly fuel bill.

I can safely conclude that my weekend with the Leaf was a joy and when I’m ready to purchase a car in the future, it will be at the top of my list. Even my petrol-head husband agreed.

For information on charging points in North East England visit the Charge Your Car website.

For details on electric vehicle grants go to the Department of Transport website.

Are you sensible with your food choices?

As a keen cook, this is an issue really close to my heart. But with rising food prices, it can be difficult to be economical and ethical with our food habits.How can we be smart when we’re doing the weekly food shop or cooking a meal and think about the environment at the same time?

Portion control

Portion control is a critical factor when cooking. It’s true that our eyes are frequently bigger than our bellies and it’s tempting to chuck in that extra cup of rice or handfuls of pasta to the pan for good measure; but stick to the scales instead.

Adopt a similar stance when shopping, go armed with a list and do it after eating; and when tempted by nibbles and treats at a party, adopt the ‘take what you want but eat what you take’ mantra.

Dining out

It’s easy to get careless when dining out, especially when nearing the end of a second glass of wine. But nothing troubles me more than seeing others order a few different dishes yet not finishing any of them, and not taking any of it home either.

This is, one of many reasons, why I prefer to cook myself. I’m certainly not suggesting that venturing to restaurants should be strictly prohibited, simply urging that sense must rule over greed.

Use-by dates

Speaking of sense, it is true that our uncertainty over how to store food has made us unnervingly slavish in sticking to use-by dates, rather than using our own judgment.

Hopefully the recently announced revised food labelling will help end this and make clear when food is safe to eat. Of course the rationale behind this move is based on the presumption that customers are, well, idiots but I won’t go into that debate now.

It is hard to say exactly how much food British supermarkets waste, as they are not required by law to reveal how much they throw away, but it’s estimated to be about 1.6 million tonnes per year.

But let’s not forget that food waste starts before it even arrives at the supermarket. Unless we have grown it ourselves or bought it locally, there is a high chance the food we purchase has endured an epic journey just to get in front of us.

A journey that may have involved ships, planes, wagons, and warehouses; and at each stage there’s a good chance that a proportion of the food will have been binned for a host of reasons. Let’s breathe a sigh of relief that it’s no longer illegal for shops to sell ‘ugly’ fruit; I’ll never fathom what was wrong with a curvy cucumber or a knobbly carrot in the first place.

It can’t be left unsaid the untold damage that this will be wreaking on our environment.

Such is the extent of the food waste if it were actually eaten it would be the equivalent of reducing the carbon emissions if one in every four cars were taken off UK roads.

So, apart from opting for a freegan lifestyle, what can we do to reduce this mountain of waste? The reality is that all of us have a responsible role to play. We have to make simple changes, like buying food based on a meal plan, in order to waste less. Conscious, and conscientious, purchasing will make the difference personally and consumer demand will always influence the corporations.

A good starting point is the Love Food Hate Waste campaign. It provides easy practical everyday things that we can do to reduce food waste, which will ultimately benefit our purses and the environment.

What a load of greenwash!

As concerned and informed shoppers we want ‘green’ and ethical products. Countless studies have proven that shoppers seek to purchase from companies that do their best to reduce their impact on the environment, particularly when it comes to buying clothes, groceries and cars.

What a shame that some companies take advantage of the well-meaning consumer with over-hyped claims about their green credentials.

Also known as ‘greenwashing’, it’s a way for them to make you think that they care about the environment, when their true goal is probably just to increase profit margins.

I believe that ignorance is no excuse, so I have no qualms when I suggest that the culprits deliberately look for ways around laws and regulations and use sneaky advertising to make us think that what they are selling is better for us (and the environment) when in reality it’s probably just as bad, or even worse.

This was clear when I looked at purchasing a car a couple of years ago. With economic and environmental credentials both high on my wish-list, I quickly found myself inundated and completely overwhelmed with the wide assortment of wild claims being made.

Alongside images of cars travelling through verdant meadows, phrases from ‘high performance and low emissions’ to ‘more power and less pollution’ screamed out, striking me as outrageously misleading to say the least.

Upon further inspection, most of these outlandish claims weren’t backed up with any supporting evidence; they were it transpired big fat fibs cunningly crafted to dupe environmentally-caring consumers like me to part with considerable cash with a warm, virtuous glow.

Deeply disillusioned and deeply out-priced too, I shelved my new car plan and opted for the bus as my preferred mode of transport.

Unsurprisingly, some of the finest greenwash specimens in recent history are the proud work of the oil industry. British Petroleum, Shell, Exxon Mobil and others, have spent hundreds of millions of dollars branding themselves as eco-friendly.

In July 2000, British Petroleum launched a million dollar campaign to position itself as an environmentally-friendly organisation.

Its new slogan claimed the company was ‘Beyond Petroleum’ and the shield-style logo was changed to a new, cheerful green and yellow sunburst, obviously aiming to invoke a warm and fuzzy feeling about the earth and the company.

Similarly, I remember the eminently deceptive advert issued by Shell, which featured those pesky carbon dioxide molecules being caught with butterfly nets and chimneys spewing out flowers.

The advert made it so easy to be drawn into a false sense of security and believe that Shell had all but abandoned oil. Luckily the Advertising Standards Authority wasn’t so easily fooled and wisely upheld a complaint from Friends of the Earth.

But greenwash isn’t restricted to the motor and oil industries. It’s a lot closer to home as well.

An extraordinary number of beauty products have the word ‘natural’ plastered over their packaging alongside beautiful images depicting lush outdoor scenery. Don’t be fooled – this is gravely misleading.

As there are currently no regulations in the UK, this remains a legal grey area allowing companies to describe a product as natural, or even organic, when it perhaps only contains insignificant amounts of relevant ingredients.

Thankfully, companies peddling green spin are under scrutiny as never before. Campaign groups are enjoying increasing success at exposing greenwash while advertising regulators worldwide are cracking down on bogus environmental claims.

Of course we can’t expect companies to be purely benevolent. But they do need to be candid about their green claims. Nothing is quite as powerful as consumer pressure and demand; so as individuals we need to be on alert.

We need to be able to recognise greenwash for what it is, ask the right questions and ultimately make the right purchasing decisions.

A couple of good places to start are:

Seven sins of greenwash. Although written by a US-based firm it’s still valid and very easy to understand

The Greenwashing Index not only help consumers become savvy about evaluating environmental marketing claims of advertisers, but also hold businesses accountable to their environmental marketing claims