The UK’s biggest funeral care provider is now offering water cremation. But what exactly is it and what is its impact on the environment?
Water cremation is now available in the UK following rising demand for more environmentally friendly end-of-life options.
When you die there are currently only two options in most of Europe – burial or a traditional fire cremation.
But new options are becoming more popular.
What is water cremation or resomation?
Water cremation, also known as aquamation, resomation and alkaline hydrolysis, uses water to bring the body back to the skeletal remains.
The body is placed in a steel vessel filled with water and an alkaline solution.
It is then heated up which takes the flesh back to its chemical components – amino acids, peptides, sugars and salts.
After about three to four hours, only the bones remain. They are then ground down to a white powder, placed in an urn and given to the family.
Last summer the UK’s biggest funeral provider, Co-op Funeralcare, announced that it would start offering the service. This made them the first business to do so.
Water cremation was already legal in the UK subject to compliance with health, safety and environmental regulation.
It’s the method that South African anti-apartheid hero Desmond TuTu chose following his death in 2021.
He wanted an eco-friendly funeral and according to UK-based firm resomation, it uses five times less energy than a fire cremation.
What is the environmental impact of the funeral industry?
“For decades there have been just two main choices when it comes to [peoples’] end-of-life arrangements: burial and cremation,” says Julian Atkinson, director of resomation company Kindly Earth.
“[We] will be providing people with another option for how they leave this world because this natural process uses water, not fire, making it gentler on the body and kinder on the environment.”
And there appears to be an appetite for such a service.
Research by YouGov, commissioned by Co-op Funeralcare, found that 89 per cent of UK adults hadn’t heard of the term resomation. But once explained, just under a third (29 per cent) said they would choose it for their own funeral if it was available.
“The rise in ecological and sustainability concerns over the past decade combined with a desire to be part of nature or laid to rest in a natural setting, means more people are considering the environmental impact of their body once they die,” says Professor Douglas Davies from the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University.
Around 245kg of carbon emissions are generated by one traditional cremation, the equivalent of charging your smartphone over 29,000 times.
Traditional burials also have negative environmental consequences. The chemicals used in the embalming process can leak out and pollute the surrounding soil and waterways.
Which European countries offer water cremation?
The UK is not the only European country to make waves in the resomation scene.
Ireland is set to open its first water cremation facility this year. The service is also available in the US, Canada and South Africa.
Belgium and the Netherlands are among the other European countries looking to introduce resomation, but there are regulatory hurdles that must be overcome first.
The trading of carbon credits can help companies—and the world—meet ambitious goals for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Here is what it would take to strengthen voluntary carbon markets so they can support climate action on a large scale.
More and more companies are pledging to help stop climate change by reducing their own greenhouse-gas emissions as much as they can. Yet many businesses find they cannot fully eliminate their emissions, or even lessen them as quickly as they might like. The challenge is especially tough for organizations that aim to achieve net-zero emissions, which means removing as much greenhouse gas from the air as they put into it. For many, it will be necessary to use carbon credits to offset emissions they can’t get rid of by other means. The Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets (TSVCM), sponsored by the Institute of International Finance (IIF) with knowledge support from McKinsey, estimates that demand for carbon credits could increase by a factor of 15 or more by 2030 and by a factor of up to 100 by 2050. Overall, the market for carbon credits could be worth upward of $50 billion in 2030.
The market for carbon credits purchased voluntarily (rather than for compliance purposes) is important for other reasons, too. Voluntary carbon credits direct private financing to climate-action projects that would not otherwise get off the ground. These projects can have additional benefits such as biodiversity protection, pollution prevention, public-health improvements, and job creation. Carbon credits also support investment into the innovation required to lower the cost of emerging climate technologies. And scaled-up voluntary carbon markets would facilitate the mobilization of capital to the Global South, where there is the most potential for economical nature-based emissions-reduction projects.1
Given the demand for carbon credits that could ensue from global efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, it’s apparent that the world will need a voluntary carbon market that is large, transparent, verifiable, and environmentally robust. Today’s market, though, is fragmented and complex. Some credits have turned out to represent emissions reductions that were questionable at best. Limited pricing data make it challenging for buyers to know whether they are paying a fair price, and for suppliers to manage the risk they take on by financing and working on carbon-reduction projects without knowing how much buyers will ultimately pay for carbon credits. In this article, which is based on McKinsey’s research for a new report by the TSVCM, we look at these issues and how market participants, standard-setting organizations, financial institutions, market-infrastructure providers, and other constituencies might address them to scale up the voluntary carbon market.
Carbon credits can help companies to meet their climate-change goals
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nearly 200 countries have endorsed the global goal of limiting the rise in average temperatures to 2.0 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and ideally 1.5 degrees. Reaching the 1.5-degree target would require that global greenhouse-gas emissions are cut by 50 percent of current levels by 2030 and reduced to net zero by 2050. More companies are aligning themselves with this agenda: in less than a year, the number of companies with net-zero pledges doubled, from 500 in 2019 to more than 1,000 in 2020.2
To meet the worldwide net-zero target, companies will need to reduce their own emissions as much as they can (while also measuring and reporting on their progress, to achieve the transparency and accountability that investors and other stakeholders increasingly want). For some companies, however, it’s prohibitively expensive to reduce emissions using today’s technologies, though the costs of those technologies might go down in time. And at some businesses, certain sources of emissions cannot be eliminated. For example, making cement at industrial scale typically involves a chemical reaction, calcination, which accounts for a large share of the cement sector’s carbon emissions. Because of these limitations, the emissions-reduction pathway to a 1.5-degree warming target effectively requires “negative emissions,” which are achieved by removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere (Exhibit 1).
Exhibit 1
Purchasing carbon credits is one way for a company to address emissions it is unable to eliminate. Carbon credits are certificates representing quantities of greenhouse gases that have been kept out of the air or removed from it. While carbon credits have been in use for decades, the voluntary market for carbon credits has grown significantly in recent years. McKinsey estimates that in 2020, buyers retired carbon credits for some 95 million tons of carbon-dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e), which would be more than twice as much as in 2017.
As efforts to decarbonize the global economy increase, demand for voluntary carbon credits could continue to rise. Based on stated demand for carbon credits, demand projections from experts surveyed by the TSVCM, and the volume of negative emissions needed to reduce emissions in line with the 1.5-degree warming goal, McKinsey estimates that annual global demand for carbon credits could reach up to 1.5 to 2.0 gigatons of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) by 2030 and up to 7 to 13 GtCO2 by 2050 (Exhibit 2). Depending on different price scenarios and their underlying drivers, the market size in 2030 could be between $5 billion and $30 billion at the low end and more than $50 billion at the high end.3
Exhibit 2
While the increase in demand for carbon credits is significant, analysis by McKinsey indicates that demand in 2030 could be matched by the potential annual supply of carbon credits: 8 to 12 GtCO2 per year. These carbon credits would come from four categories: avoided nature loss (including deforestation); nature-based sequestration, such as reforestation; avoidance or reduction of emissions such as methane from landfills; and technology-based removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
However, several factors could make it challenging to mobilize the entire potential supply and bring it to market. The development of projects would have to ramp up at an unprecedented rate. Most of the potential supply of avoided nature loss and of nature-based sequestration is concentrated in a small number of countries. All projects come with risks, and many types could struggle to attract financing because of the long lag times between the initial investment and the eventual sale of credits. Once these challenges are accounted for, the estimated supply of carbon credits drops to 1 to 5 GtCO2 per year by 2030 (Exhibit 3).
Exhibit 3
These aren’t the only problems facing buyers and sellers of carbon credits, either. High-quality carbon credits are scarce because accounting and verification methodologies vary and because credits’ co-benefits (such as community economic development and biodiversity protection) are seldom well defined. When verifying the quality of new credits—an important step in maintaining the market’s integrity—suppliers endure long lead times. When selling those credits, suppliers face unpredictable demand and can seldom fetch economical prices. Overall, the market is characterized by low liquidity, scarce financing, inadequate risk-management services, and limited data availability.
These challenges are formidable but not insurmountable. Verification methodologies could be strengthened, and verification processes streamlined. Clearer demand signals would help give suppliers more confidence in their project plans and encourage investors and lenders to provide with financing. And all these requirements could be met through the careful development of an effective, large-scale voluntary carbon market.
Scaling up voluntary carbon markets requires a new blueprint for action
Building an effective voluntary carbon market will require concerted effort across a number of fronts. In its report, the TSVCM identified six areas, spanning the carbon-credit value chain, where action can support the scaling up of the voluntary carbon market.
Creating shared principles for defining and verifying carbon credits
Today’s voluntary carbon market lacks the liquidity necessary for efficient trading, in part because carbon credits are highly heterogeneous. Each credit has attributes associated with the underlying project, such as the type of project or the region where it was carried out. These attributes affect the price of the credit, because buyers value additional attributes differently. Overall, the inconsistency among credits means that matching an individual buyer with a corresponding supplier is a time-consuming, inefficient process transacted over the counter.
The matching of buyers and suppliers would be more efficient if all credits could be described through common features. The first set of features has to do with quality. Quality criteria, set out in “core carbon principles,” would provide a basis for verifying that carbon credits represent genuine emissions reductions. The second set of features would cover the additional attributes of the carbon credit. Standardizing those attributes in a common taxonomy would help sellers to market credits and buyers to find credits that meet their needs.
Developing contracts with standardized terms
In the voluntary carbon market, the heterogeneity of carbon credits means that credits of particular types are being traded in volumes too small to generate reliable daily price signals. Making carbon credits more uniform would consolidate trading activity around a few types of credits and also promote liquidity on exchanges.
After the establishment of the core carbon principles and standard attributes described above, exchanges could create “reference contracts” for carbon trading. Reference contracts would combine a core contract, based on the core carbon principles, with additional attributes that are defined according to a standard taxonomy and priced separately. Core contracts would make it easier for companies to do things such as purchasing large quantities of carbon credits at once: they could make bids for credits that meet certain criteria, and the market would aggregate smaller quantities of credits to match their bids.
Another benefit of reference contracts would be the development of a clear daily market price. Even after reference contracts are developed, many parties will continue to make trades over the counter (OTC). Prices for credits traded using reference contracts could establish a starting point for the negotiation of OTC trades, with other attributes priced separately.
Establishing trading and post-trade infrastructure
A resilient, flexible infrastructure would enable the voluntary carbon market to function effectively: to accommodate high-volume listing and trading of reference contracts, as well as contracts reflecting a limited, consistently defined set of additional attributes. This, in turn, would support the creation of structured finance products for project developers.
Post-trade infrastructure, comprising clearinghouses and meta-registries, is also necessary. Clearinghouses would support the development of a futures market and provide counterparty default protection. Meta-registries would provide custodian-like services for buyers and suppliers and enable the creation of standardized issuance numbers for individual projects (similar to the International Securities Identification Number, or ISIN, in capital markets).
In addition, an advanced data infrastructure would promote the transparency of reference and market data. Sophisticated and timely data are essential for all environmental and capital markets. Transparent reference and market data are not readily available now because access to data is limited and the OTC market is difficult to track. Buyers and suppliers would benefit from new reporting and analytics services that consolidate openly accessible reference data from multiple registries, through APIs.
Creating consensus about the proper use of carbon credits
A measure of skepticism attends the use of credits in decarbonization. Some observers question whether companies will extensively reduce their own emissions if they have the option to offset emissions instead. Companies would benefit from clear guidance on what would constitute an environmentally sound offsetting program as part of an overall push toward net-zero emissions. Principles for the use of carbon credits would help ensure that carbon offsetting does not preclude other efforts to mitigate emissions and does result in more carbon reductions than would take place otherwise.
Under such principles, a company would first establish its need for carbon credits by disclosing its greenhouse-gas emissions from all operations, along with its targets and plans for reducing emissions over time. To compensate for emissions from sources that it can eventually eliminate, the company might purchase and “retire” carbon credits (claiming the reductions as their own and taking the credits off the market, so that another organization can’t claim the same reductions). It could also use carbon credits to neutralize the so-called residual emissions that it wouldn’t be able to eliminate in the future.
Installing mechanisms to safeguard the market’s integrity
Concerns about the integrity of the voluntary carbon market impede its growth in several ways. First, the heterogeneous nature of credits creates potential for errors and fraud. The market’s lack of price transparency also creates the potential for money laundering.
One corrective measure would be establishing a digital process by which projects are registered and credits are verified and issued. Verification entities should be able to track a project’s impact at regular intervals, not just at the end. A digital process could lower issuance costs, shorten payment terms, accelerate credit issuance and cash flow for project developers, allow credits to be traced, and improve the credibility of corporate claims related to the use of offsets.
Other improvements would be the implementation of anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer guidelines to stop fraud, and the creation of a governance body to ensure the eligibility of market participants, supervise their conduct, and oversee the market’s functioning.
Transmitting clear signals of demand
Finding effective ways for buyers of carbon credits to signal their future demand would help encourage project developers to increase the supply of carbon credits. Long-term demand signals might arrive in the form of commitments to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions or as up-front agreements with project developers to buy carbon credits from future projects. Medium-term demand might be recorded in a registry of commitments to purchase carbon credits.
Other potential ways to promote demand signals include consistent, widely accepted guidelines for companies on accepted uses of carbon credits to offset emissions; more industry-wide collaboration, whereby consortiums of companies might align their emissions-reduction goals or set out shared goals; and better standards and infrastructure for the development and sale of consumer-oriented carbon credits.
Limiting the rise of global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius will require a rapid, drastic reduction in net greenhouse-gas emissions. While companies and other organizations can achieve much of the necessary reduction by adopting new technologies, energy sources, and operating practices, many will need to use carbon credits to supplement their own abatement efforts to achieve net-zero emissions. A robust, effective voluntary market for carbon credits would make it easier for companies to locate trustworthy sources of carbon credits and complete the transactions for them. Just as important, such a market would be able to transmit signals of buyers’ demand, which would in turn encourage sellers to increase supplies of credits. By enabling more carbon offsetting to take place, a voluntary carbon market would support progress toward a low-carbon future.
A giant new community solar park initiative is going to make more than 400,000 Danes co-owners in solar parks located in Denmark (around ¾ of them) and Poland (the other ¼ or so).
This massive initiative will be the largest solar investment in Denmark’s history, totaling around DKK 4 billion ($651.5 million). It is a partnership between Danish pension fund Industriens Pension and Better Energy.
Furthermore, the initiative involves absolutely no support from the government of Denmark.
The announcement does not indicate how many solar parks will be deployed across Denmark and Poland as part of this initiative, but the total capacity is expected to be around 1 gigawatt (GW), which will actually make it one of the largest — if not the largest — such projects across the world.
As of now, 5 of the solar power parks are in operation (power capacity is not indicated), but “the majority of the parks are expected to be in operation in the course of 2021 and 2022.”
It’s a 50–50 partnership between Industriens Pension and Better Energy, and Better Energy is the one developing, building, and operating the solar parks.
“We’re extremely pleased with the investment, which we expect will secure solid, long-term returns for our members, while at the same time contributing significantly to accelerating the scale and pace of the green transition. This is the first time that solar energy has been rolled out at this scale in Denmark, and the investment marks a real breakthrough for solar energy in Denmark,” said Laila Mortensen, CEO of Industriens Pension.
“For the first time, Danish pension savings will help accelerate a massive scaling up of subsidy-free green energy production in Denmark. In that sense, our partnership with Industriens Pension marks the beginning of a new era. The next chapter in the green transition will entail accelerating the deployment of renewable energy capacity without state support, together with ensuring critical widespread community ownership and backing. And this is precisely what we are doing with this agreement,” said Rasmus Lildholdt Kjær, CEO of Better Energy.
“This agreement establishes a robust partnership model for how to rapidly scale up the green transition. And this is imperative if Denmark is to have a reasonable chance of achieving its climate targets,” said Mark Augustenborg Ødum, EVP Partnerships in Better Energy.
This is one of the most exciting and empowering solar projects I’ve seen in my 10+ years covering the solar industry. The combination of the fundamental co-ownership of the projects, the massive scale, the fact that it’s all subsidy-free, and the promise for more like this elsewhere make for just one of the most inspiring solar power stories I’ve seen. Furthermore, all of this is happening very far north. This is seriously grey-weather territory. But solar power is competitive nonetheless.
As indicated recently, the International Energy Agency (IEA), which has a history of close ties to the fossil fuel industry, has determined that solar power now offers the “cheapest electricity in history.” That was more recently echoed by Lazard as well.
The record-low solar power prices come after a constant drop in solar panel prices across the globe that follow the now totally common reality that as you ramp up production of a technology, costs drop. As I wrote in September, solar PV panels were 12× more expensive in 2010, and 459× more expensive in 1977. The results of this technological learning curve mean that the future of electricity will increasingly be solarized, while the Denmark and Poland projects above show that we can expect a growing flood of large and unexpected solar PV growth in even the greyest of places.
This also comes not long after Google’s announcement that it, too, is going to be getting a large amount of subsidy-free solar power in Denmark. The 100-megawatt solar power plans seemed like a large announcement, but that just ends up being one-tenth of the Industriens Pension plans. That said, Google has the same partner as Industriens Pension — Better Energy. The solar power developer will build three new solar power parks in Denmark for Google.
Clearly, Better Energy has become quite adept at developing low-cost solar power plants, and convincing major companies and pension funds to choose the firm to build and operate its power plants. We’ll have to keep our eye on BE.
An enormous, 1,600-foot-tall coral reef was discovered in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, scientists announced Monday, in the first such find in more than a century.
The massive underwater structure — the first newfound reef in 120 years — dwarfs iconic skyscrapers such as New York City’s Empire State Building and the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
The detached reef was first observed Oct. 20 by a team of Australian scientists aboard a research vessel from the Schmidt Ocean Institute, a nonprofit foundation that supports marine research. The 12-month expedition is designed to explore the oceans surrounding Australia and map the seafloor around the northern Great Barrier Reef.
“This unexpected discovery affirms that we continue to find unknown structures and new species in our ocean,” Wendy Schmidt, the institute’s co-founder, said in a statement.
On Sunday, the team used an underwater robot to explore the new reef, finding that it measures almost a mile wide at its base. The reef’s tallest point extends to roughly 130 feet below the ocean’s surface, according to the researchers.
The robotic dive was streamed live over the weekend, offering close-up views of the massive reef structure.
“We are surprised and elated by what we have found,” Robin Beaman, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, who is leading the expedition, said in a statement.
The reef is located off the coast of North Queensland, in the area around Cape York. Seven other detached reefs have been discovered in this region since the late 1800s.
“To find a new half-a-kilometer tall reef in the offshore Cape York area of the well-recognized Great Barrier Reef shows how mysterious the world is just beyond our coastline,” Jyotika Virmani, executive director of Schmidt Ocean Institute, said in a statement. “This powerful combination of mapping data and underwater imagery will be used to understand this new reef and its role within the incredible Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area.”
Beaman and his colleagues will continue exploring the northern area of the Great Barrier Reef until Nov. 17. Data from the expedition will be publicly available through AusSeabed, a national Australian seabed-mapping program.
Google stated last year that they “strive to build sustainability into everything we do.”
This is a huge mission. What are the company’s strategies to accomplish it?
TFI’s Teymoor Nabili spoke to Marija Ralic, APAC Lead of the company’s charitable arm Google.Org, for the insider’s report on Google’s philanthropic work in Asia Pacific.
Ralic says giving innovative nonprofit organizations and social enterprises the funding, technology, and volunteers (who are more often than not “Googlers” themselves) they need to solve society’s most complex problems – which in turn benefits marginalized and underserved communities.
Check out the full conversation with Ralic in the video below:
Climate Change Minister James Shaw wants to see a new petrol and diesel car ban, to kick in at the same time as the United Kingdom’s ban.
During an interview with Stuff on his second-term priorities, Shaw said he would recommend the policy to new Transport Minister Michael Wood as an “anti-dumping measure” as well as for environmental reasons.
Shaw, the Green Party co-leader, is concerned about the fate of the UK’s cars after the UK ban, considering most of the world drives on the right. “If we let those into New Zealand, we are stuffed. We will have no chance of being able to reduce our transport emissions, which are the fastest-growing sector,” he said.
Despite the merits, Shaw is not sure a ban on vehicle imports will gain Cabinet approval. “I will be recommending that but we have to warm people up.”
Under a Labour-Green deal, Shaw kept his role as climate change minister after this year’s election.
Shaw said Labour MPs held many of the portfolios with the power to introduce the most effective carbon-cutting policies, such as Energy Minister Megan Woods.
“In this term, the priority has to be on working with the economic sectors where we are going to get the greatest gains in actual reductions in emissions,” he added. “For me, it is a co-ordinating role.”
Transport contributes a large chunk of the country’s emissions – will the Government take aggressive action this term? PETER MACDIARMID/GETTY IMAGES
Of the legislation Shaw will oversee this term, the requirement for large companies to report their climate-related risks – announced earlier this year – would have the biggest impact on emissions, he said.
“It is one of those things that most people do not care about, because it is corporate reporting … [but] the long-term effect of that could be one of the most significant things that we do.”
“Certainly, it has to be introduced in this term of Parliament but it is going to be very significant. Whether or not it passes in this term of Parliament … who knows?”
Outside his portfolio, Shaw thinks the country’s biggest emissions cuts will come from decarbonising travel.
“Transport emissions are the one area where our emissions growth is uncontrolled. In every other sector, including agriculture, emissions are roughly stable and have been for some time – they are high, much higher than they need to be, but at least they have been flat. But transport has just gone up and up and up because we fell in love with the Ford Ranger.”
Would he recommend the Government introduce measures – such as congestion charges – to make driving less desirable? “What I am going to fight for is more money on the other modes. You have to enable mode switching … You can apply all the stick you want but if there is no alternative, people are still going to drive.”
The country can also save carbon by encouraging businesses to ditch fossil-fuelled boilers and heaters. Shaw believes Woods will provide the right incentives this term.
“The whole point of that is to develop a commercial investment system to enable that transition. It does not necessarily mean the Government has got to put taxpayer money up in every case.”
Shaw anticipates a bill outlining the methods to calculate agricultural emissions will be drafted this term. The He Waka Eke Noa partnership between government and the farming industry will present its recommendations in 2022.
“If you are going to have it in place on every farm in 2024, you have to legislate for it by the end of 2023. Because there is an election in 2023, that suggests you need to legislate for it before that.”
During this parliamentary term, an agricultural partnership is expected to detail how farms measure greenhouse gases. TOM LEE/STUFF
The partnership will get to decide how to measure emissions – as long as sufficient progress is made. How to price each greenhouse gas under the scheme remains up for discussion, Shaw said.
He had heard talk that the price for on-farm emissions would be pegged to the current carbon price under the emissions trading scheme, however, “those decisions are yet to come”, he said.
“Across the political spectrum, you can grumble and gnash your teeth because their view is different from your own set of reckons,” he said. “I said when we passed the Zero Carbon Act: as long as everyone hates it equally, we have probably landed in the right place.”
Hospitality businesses have a special opportunity when it comes to driving positive change. Whether you’re a restaurant owner or run thousands of hotels like InterContinental Hotel Group, hospitality companies work in a connected, people industry and exist at the heart of communities — employing local people and operating with a network of partners and suppliers.
IHG is uniquely positioned to be able to make a difference because of its scale and, importantly, this is all underpinned by the company’s culture of doing business responsibly, which guides our decisions and how we work.
IHG has almost 6,000 hotels around the world and the vast majority — around 80 percent — are franchised, which presents a unique challenge when it comes to implementing change at scale. It means the IHG team is in constant dialogue with our hotel owners, who operate and finance these hotels, so that we can work with them to drive sustainable change. We also know that our guests and colleagues are hugely passionate about how we behave towards the planet and our communities, so this makes engagement, collaboration and partnership key to getting things done.
For example, when it comes to minimizing IHG’s waste footprint, our teams consider each stage of the hotel lifecycle to find solutions that can be amplified and rolled out at scale. We do this in a way that supports the hotel’s operational needs, while enhancing the guest experience wherever we can.
Today’s technology plays an important role in making such changes because it enables IHG to identify suppliers and partners that have developed innovative solutions to find new ways to embed sustainability into their products, and in turn create solutions that help us reduce our environmental footprint, drive a more circular approach and produce an even better experience for our guests.
IHG has around 400,000 colleagues around the world. Source: IHG.
One great supplier relationship that illustrates this at IHG is with The Fine Bedding Company, which is working with us to help minimize the global plastic waste footprint through our growing voco hotels brand.
The supplier takes single-use plastic bottles that have been discarded and repurposes them in its eco factory to become plush, cozy filling inside the duvets and pillows of our voco guest rooms all over the world. In fact, more than 3 million water bottles have been diverted from landfill and into our bedding to date. When you think of the scale this innovation ultimately can create over time, it’s a huge amount of waste that’s being repurposed and also helping to drive more circular operations for our hotels.
Filling is extruded and spun from recycled plastic bottles. Source: The Fine Bedding Co.
Since forming this partnership, we have received great feedback from our guests, who say that this initiative not only provides them with a great sleep experience, but knowing it is good for the planet brings extra value to their stay.
For us, it’s exciting that consumers are becoming more aware of sustainable innovations such as these, and we are seeing uptake grow across our hotels, with our owners showing increasing interest. It’s a great opportunity for the suppliers themselves, too. Claire Watkin, managing director at The Fine Bedding Company, says working with IHG has many benefits for her business.
“At The Fine Bedding Company, our aspiration is to find ways to recycle products at the end of their life so that they can be truly circular, and so this bedding was really exciting for us,” Watkin said. “We worked in partnership with IHG to create something that had never been done before in the hospitality sector, and it achieved many firsts: It was fully traceable with Global Recycling Standard, it used more sustainable cotton and it was produced in our zero-waste factory that uses 100 percent renewable energy. A few years on, it’s great to see the positive feedback from the guests at voco hotels on both the quality and innovative nature of the product. For us, it has set a new standard in sustainability of bedding, which we look forward to seeing roll out across other brands as it becomes more mainstream.”
The Fine Bedding Company’s Nimbus Smartdown collection. Source: The Fine Bedding Co.
As we begin to recover from the impact of COVID-19, the focus must remain on the long-term sustainability agenda, ensuring we adapt to a new normal in a way that continues to drive circular economy practices and protects environments and communities.
This makes partnerships such as the one we have with The Fine Bedding Company more important than ever. If we want to emerge from the events of this year in a stronger position that helps protect the planet, it’s important we share ideas and collaborate to find solutions. You can’t isolate a business from its value chain, so working together towards common goals becomes even more central to moving forward.
Shell Singapore is aiming to cut its CO2 emissions by around a third over the next 10 days – but the strategy will also reportedly come at the expense of 500 jobs.
Shell Singapore has outlined a 10-year plan which builds on the company’s overarching ambition to be a net-zero emissions energy business by 2050 or sooner.
Commenting, Aw Kah Peng, Chairman of Shell Companies in Singapore, said: ‘Today, our extensive presence in Singapore’s energy sector carries with it a carbon footprint. Our businesses in Singapore must evolve and transform, and we must act now if we are to achieve our ambition to thrive through the energy transition. Our decisive action today will help Shell in Singapore stay resilient and build a cleaner, more sustainable future for all of us.’
The company plans to accelerate the transition through three pillars, one of which involves providing low-carbon solutions for customers in sectors which are also important pillars of Singapore’s economy – including shipping.
Shell Singapore said that its Pulau Bukom Manufacturing Site ‘will pivot from a crude-oil, fuels-based product slate towards new, low-carbon value chains.’
Shell Singapore said: ‘We will reduce our crude processing capacity by about half and aim to deliver a significant reduction in CO2 emissions. Repurposing Bukom will not only involve significant changes in our refinery configuration, but also increased investments in our assets, and critically, in our people.’
However, these changes, said Shell Singapore, ‘will have a corresponding effect on our staff numbers.’
The company noted that as the Pulau Bukom Manufacturing Site transforms and becomes smaller and smarter, the resizing of operations ‘will result in fewer jobs but more highly skilled jobs as digitalisation and automation progress’.
Shell Singapore currently employs 1,300 staff, however, according to media reports, this number looks set to fall to around 800 after a spokesperson for the company confirmed that the company would be cutting 500 jobs by 2023.
A consortium led by Rolls Royce has announced plans to build up to 16 mini-nuclear plants in the UK.
It says the project will create 6,000 new jobs in the Midlands and the North of England over the next five years.
The Prime Minister is understood to be poised to announce at least £200m for the project as part of a long-delayed green plan for economic recovery.
Rolls argues that as well as producing low-carbon electricity, the concept could become a new export industry.
The company’s UK “small modular reactor” (SMR) group includes the National Nuclear Laboratory and the building company Laing O’Rourke.
Last year, it received £18m to begin the design effort for the SMR concept.
The government says new nuclear is essential if the UK is to meet its target of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 – where any carbon released is balanced out by an equivalent amount absorbed from the atmosphere.
But there is a nuclear-sized hole opening up in the energy network.
Six of the UK’s seven nuclear reactor sites are due to go offline by 2030 and the remaining one, Sizewell B, is due to be decommissioned in 2035.
Together they account for around 20% of the country’s electricity.
What is a modular nuclear plant?
Rolls Royce and its partners argue that instead of building huge nuclear mega-projects in muddy fields we should construct a series of smaller nuclear plants from “modules” made in factories.
The aim is to re-engineer nuclear power as a very high-tech Lego set.
The components would be broken down into a series of hundreds of these modules which would be made in a central factory and shipped by road to the site for assembly.
The objective is to tackle the biggest problem nuclear power faces: the exorbitant cost.
The reason it is so expensive is that the projects are huge and complex and have to meet very high safety standards.
And, because so few new nuclear power stations are built, there are very few opportunities to learn from mistakes.
EDF says Sizewell C will provide electricity for six million homes and create 25,000 jobs
So, Rolls Royce and its partners are saying let’s make them smaller and make lots of them so we get really good at it.
The concept would dramatically reduce the amount of construction that would be associated with a nuclear project, claims Tom Samson, the CEO of the UK Small Modular Reactor consortium (UK SMR).
“If we move all that activity into a controlled factory environment that drives down cost by simplification and standardisation,” he explains.
Each plant would produce 440 megawatts of electricity – roughly enough to power Sheffield – and the hope is that, once the first few have been made, they will cost around £2bn each.
The consortium says the first of these modular plants could be up and running in 10 years, after that it will be able to build and install two a year.
By comparison, the much larger nuclear plant being built at Hinkley Point in Somerset is expect to cost some £22bn but will produce more than 3 Gigawatts of electricity – over six times as much.
In addition to the six nuclear plants going offline by 2030, there’s another challenge. You have to factor in a massive increase in electricity demand over the coming decades.
That’s because if we’re going to reach our net zero target, we need to stop using fossil fuels for transport and home heating.
The government has said this could lead to a three-fold increase in electricity use.
The government says it remains committed to the construction of new nuclear power stations. GETTY IMAGES
The renewable challenge
UK SMR isn’t the only player which has spotted that there could be a gap in the market for smaller reactors. There are dozens of different companies around the world working on small reactor projects.
That has got the critics of nuclear power worried. Greenpeace and other environmental groups say small nuclear power stations pose similar risks of radioactive releases and weapons proliferation as big ones.
Greenpeace UK’s chief scientist, Doug Parr, says if the government wants to take a punt on some new technology to tackle climate change it would be better off investing in hydrogen or geothermal power.
And there are other reasons to question the SMR concept, says Professor MV Ramana of the University of British Columbia in Canada. He is a physicist and an expert on nuclear energy policy who has studied small modular reactors.
He says UK SMR’s 10-year time-scale for its first plant may prove optimistic. The one constant in the history of the nuclear industry to date is that big new concepts never come in on time and budget, he says.
He is sceptical that the factory concept can deliver significant cost savings given the complexity and scale of even a small nuclear plant. Smaller plants will have to meet the same rigorous safety standards as big ones, he points out.
He says where the concept has been tried elsewhere – in the US and China, for example – there have been long delays and costs have ended up being comparable to large nuclear power stations.
Finally, he questions whether there will be a market for these plants by the 2030s, when UK SMR says the first will be ready.
“Ten years from now, the competition will be renewables which are going to be far cheaper with much better storage technology than we have today,” says Prof Ramana.
Export opportunities
But Boris Johnson’s powerful adviser, Dominic Cummings, is known to be taken with the modular nuclear idea.
One of the reasons the government has been fighting so hard to free itself from the EU’s state aid rules is so it can get its shoulder behind technologies it thinks will give the UK economy and its workers a real boost.
Modular nuclear has the potential to do just that.
If Rolls Royce and its partners can show that the factory concept really does deliver high quality nuclear plants on time and on budget then there is potentially a huge world market for the technology.
The price per unit of electricity may be higher than with wind or solar, points out the clean energy consultant Michael Liebreich, but nuclear delivers power pretty much 24/7 and therefore can command a premium.
UK SMR is pitching the concept as a UK solution to the global challenge of tackling climate change and says there will be a vast export market as the world starts to switch to low carbon energy.
Boris Johnson is rumoured to be planning to take a big punt on nuclear power.
His government has always said new nuclear is going to be a key part of Britain’s future energy system.
As well as the potential investment in SMRs, the BBC has already reported that the government is expected to give the long-discussed new large nuclear plant at Sizewell in Suffolk the go-ahead.
Mr Johnson is expected to say these investments are essential if the UK is going to meet its promise to decarbonise the economy by 2050 as part of the worldwide effort to tackle climate change.
And, while there may be good reasons to question whether the SMR concept will deliver on its promise of low-cost nuclear power, there is no question it holds out exactly the kind of optimistic vision for the UK’s industrial future the government is desperate for.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday denounced the “audacity” of oil giant Shell after it waded into the global discussion about the climate crisis by asking members of the public what they would do to reduce carbon emissions.
“I’m willing to hold you accountable for lying about climate change for 30 years when you secretly knew the entire time that fossil fuels emissions would destroy our planet,” the New York Democrat and co-sponsor of the Green New Deal legislation replied.
I’m willing to hold you accountable for lying about climate change for 30 years when you secretly knew the entire time that fossil fuels emissions would destroy our planet 😇 https://t.co/ekj1Va1Cp0
In the poll it posted to Twitter, Shell offered choices to the public including “stop flying,” “buy an electric vehicle,” and shifting to renewable electricity.
📊 What are you willing to change to help reduce emissions? #EnergyDebate
Coming from the world’s third-largest company, which knew as early as 1988 that its extraction of oil and gas was linked to the heating of the planet, the question was seen by Ocasio-Cortez and other critics as a gross deflection of Shell’s own responsibility.
“The audacity of Shell asking YOU what YOU’RE willing to do to reduce emissions,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “They’re showing you RIGHT HERE how the suggestion that individual choices—not systems—are a main driver of climate change is a fossil fuel talking point.”
The “good choices” American voters and lawmakers can make, the congresswoman added, are ones that will help “reign in fossil fuel corporations” that are actually fueling the destruction of the planet.
The journalism initiative Covering Climate Now called Shell’s tweet “a textbook example of greenwashing.”
Prof. Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Texas Tech Climate Center, echoed Ocasio-Cortez’s disgust at the company as she noted that out of 90 companies in the world, Shell is the sixth-highest contributor to fossil fuel emissions in history.
“Yes, everyone must do their part—starting with the biggest emitters,” Hayhoe tweeted, adding that the company has previously publicly suggested that individuals making changes to their daily habits is what will help save the planet.
Royal Dutch Shell is #6 on the list of 90 companies responsible for 2/3 of greenhouse gas emissions since the dawn of the industrial era. Their cumulative emissions equal those of the country of 🇨🇦. https://t.co/EbbRqtExWOhttps://t.co/uLXUYHp1o3
You polluted our planet, you funded climate change deniers, you fund the lobby to slow down climate protection laws and you still invest massive into fossils. But you're asking us to help reducing emissions?
“What am I willing to do?” Hayhoe wrote in reply to Shell’s poll question, which she later said was hidden on Twitter by the company. “Hold you accountable for 2% of cumulative global greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to those of my entire home country of Canada. When you have a concrete plan to address that, I’d be happy to chat about what I’m doing to reduce my personal emissions.”
