They forgot about printing on recycled paper too (that seems to cost 3x).
BOFH: On the PFY's Scottish estate, no one can hear you scream...
BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns "Obviously we're after sustainable," the Boss burbles. "Yes, sustainable is good. I'm thinking of a mix of solar and wind generation - low carbon footprint building materials, potable and non-potable water storage and filtration in the workspaces, natural and borrowed light..." "Sounds …
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Friday 21st March 2014 09:49 GMT Chris Miller
Ah yes, recycled paper. Let's overlook the fact that trees grown for woodpulp are a crop, and the concept of recycling paper makes as much sense as recycling wheat. No, let's collect our waste paper, take it in a fume-belching lorry to a factory, where it can be mashed up and treated with lots of nice environmentally friendly bleach (because there'll be a lot of toner and ink mixed in and no-one wants to send out bank statements and bills printed on muddy grey-brown paper). Environmentalism in action.
And don't even get me started on 'recycling' bottles ...
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Friday 21st March 2014 10:02 GMT Nigel 11
Not running out of oil
We won't run out of oil, we'll jut run out of oil that's cheap enough to burn as fuel or to throw away as low-value packaging. There are huge numbers of oil finds that flowed a little oil and were then plugged and abandoned as hopelessly sub-economic. To get oil for use as a high-value petrochemicals feedstock, the day may come when it's worth re-opening those wells to extract said feedstock at $1000/barrel, $10,000/barrel or whatever.
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Monday 24th March 2014 12:25 GMT petur
We are not running out of oil, it is just becoming harder and harder to get it out of the soil, so the cost will increase and with that the problem will probably fix itself.
Years ago I read a prediction of 50 years, so we still have some time to go and probably get inventive to stretch this a bit longer, but you can bet that when oil becomes too expensive some clever people will be making money off the replacements ;)
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Friday 21st March 2014 10:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Bleach?
Bleach shouldn't work on toner. I imagine they use much worse things.
But I have been told that "recycled paper" is in reality the stuff left after trimming (there is a lot of border on most commercial print jobs) which is recycled. Office paper doesn't get recycled to office paper.
There have been attempts at really environmentally friendly printers (e.g. the Ricoh Gelsprinters) but they haven't caught on.
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Friday 21st March 2014 12:36 GMT Aldous
You missed the bit where instead of recycling in the host nation the cardboard and paper is loaded onto boats and sent to China.
Now its true they do this because the boats would be going back nearly empty but paper does weigh something and shipping is a major cause of pollution/carbon.
Nevermind though its green so people can feel less guilt when they buy the whizzbang6xgti (so much better and cooler then the normal whizzbang 6) which they can then write about how green they are on facebook before driving their 6 kids down the street.
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Friday 21st March 2014 16:11 GMT imanidiot
recycling fibers
Shipping good quality cardboard and wood chips to china has more to do with the lack of high quality fiber for making paper and cardboard in china. If you've ever had to deal with shipments from china you'll have noticed their cardboard comes only in shitty, terrible and already disintegrating qualities. Theres few domestic sources of high quality wood fiber to make high quality paper and cardboards. This means there is a high demand for recyclable fibers. And this in turn means shipping companies can make a bit extra by shipping recycled wood and cardboard fibers back to china in otherwise empty ships.
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Friday 21st March 2014 16:28 GMT Frumious Bandersnatch
and shipping is a major cause of pollution/carbon.
Really? Ships have diesel engines. Diesel engines become more efficient the bigger you build them. This wikipedia page rates fuel efficiency "of rail and ship transport [as] generally much more efficient than trucking, and air freight is much less efficient".
So do you have any argument to back up that claim? Or are you really trying to say that transporting stuff is the problem? What's the solution, if not using the most efficient transport systems (ie, rail and ship) possible?
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Friday 21st March 2014 17:24 GMT Rick Brasche
now they do a lot of bleaching with oxygen. Pure O2, cryogenically stored on-site (Weyerhauser, early 1990's) at significant energy cost to produce, transport in large dewar bottle trucks, where a significant portion is lost due to venting while stored and travelling through pipes.
Not sure there's a net savings there either.
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Friday 21st March 2014 19:09 GMT Dave 32
Recycling bottles
Ah, yes, recycling bottles. It they were serious about that, then they'd make bottles with a 12 inch opening instead of those little half-inch openings. After all, it's devilishly difficult to hit a half-inch opening to refill them after you've consumed the contents. ;-)
Dave
P. S. I'll get my coat. It's the one with the "dry" pockets.
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Friday 21st March 2014 14:32 GMT Trygve Henriksen
The only GREEN way of handling paper is...
Not Effing use it!
In my organisation we had a big problem of users coming to a location, connecting their PC to the network to read email or browse lolcats or whatever, and of course printing the sh!t to one printer or another...
Checking WHICH printer is set as default before printing?
Why?
That tended to waste a bit of paper. Especially when they accidentally sent long documents to one of the A0 Designjet plotters...
Now we're using a system 'Papercut' combined with card readers on all larger printers.
Anything they send to the printer but doesn't actually print out within 3 days is automatically deleted.
A 10% saving is easy to achieve with this...
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Friday 21st March 2014 09:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
This would be funny except ...
I worked all to close to an office of a well known government organisation who stuck an anaerobic composter in the basement car park of their city centre office.
Nothing quite beats the smell of fermenting banana skin, and putrefying rancid sandwich after your morning Starbucks (then again waste animal fat rendering plants do but that is a different office and another story).
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Friday 21st March 2014 10:05 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: This would be funny except ...
But, but, but! You've got to have the green stuff in the plans!
Otherwise the architects all sulk, the poor dears. Then they get smears on their weird designer glasses, and get tear stains on their pristine hi-vis jackets.
Of course when the engineers get involved in the spec later, the green stuff might actually be made to work. With a following wind and a bit of hope. But that's OK, as then the beancounters come along, they'll take it all off the spec anyway. But none of us begrudge the effort, because a happy architect is worth all the wasted time and effort. Oh yes.
[But like the Murphy's, I'm not bitter.]
Hmmm, quicklime and a shovel you say? Forest up in Scotland? Hmmm. interesting. Checks diary... tappity... tappity... change meeting location... now onto the next... New meeting request accepted. Excellent! Books hotel in Scotland... do we need meeting facilities? Oh no, I don't think we'll use those... I plan by the green agenda. All meetings to be outdoors, to inspire us with nature... tappity... tappity... quicklime.co.uk? It's just possible you could save my life...
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Friday 21st March 2014 11:20 GMT Anonymous Custard
Re: This would be funny except ...
Reminds me of this London Underground poster, with apologies to the blogger for any excess traffic (as I can't find the image online anywhere else).
Henry with Anne Boleyn and court, with tagline "A return trip to the Tower, and a single for my wife".
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Friday 21st March 2014 11:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: This would be funny except ...
A further thought ... I do know the location of either an urbane composter or indeed a waste animal fat rendering plant the smell from both would doubtless be marginally improved by your organic waste suggestions.
Travel to either would have a far more acceptable carbon footprint to "your companies green policies" than the pine forests of the Scottish highlands.
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Friday 21st March 2014 12:52 GMT d3rrial
Re: This would be funny except ...
"Do remember that, apart from one return, "train tickets" need only be one way. Every little helps ...."
Wouldn't it be environmentally better than, if all tickets were return tickets with the seats on the return ride empty? Train has less mass (due to seats being empty) and thus requires less energy...
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Friday 21st March 2014 10:06 GMT ElReg!comments!Pierre
they won't need these 70k in equipment anyway
Not after everything is moved to the cloud (surely that would not be equipment budget).
Which is where I tought everything would go sour, with someone taking a short but entertaining flight from the retreat environment to the tiered greenspace. Possibly a duo flight even.
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Friday 21st March 2014 10:52 GMT Thomas Whipp
Re: they won't need these 70k in equipment anyway
Of course the bit of me that's run budgets knows that the equipment budget is likely capital (and thus subject to amortisation over a number of years) and any consultancy would be revenue (which is booked straight to costs).
Therefore typically a £70k reduction in equipment would provide something like a £23.3k consultancy spend within the budget year (and probably creates £23.3k savings in years 2 and 3 which could then go to savings targets in those years without needing to do anything else).
I'd therefore be particularly annoyed about exactly how they'd nicked my budget.
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Friday 21st March 2014 13:20 GMT Corinne
Re: they won't need these 70k in equipment anyway
"Of course the bit of me that's run budgets knows that the equipment budget is likely capital (and thus subject to amortisation over a number of years) and any consultancy would be revenue (which is booked straight to costs)."
Not in the old days in the Civil Service - consultancy was always capital costs. So contract staff could come out of capital rather than current, meaning you could have more staff that weren't included in running costs (which permy staff were).
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Friday 21st March 2014 11:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: they won't need these 70k in equipment anyway
Oh yes, the mythical cloud... its not like the cloud has datacenters is it???
oh no...
I hate the idea of my data being stored in cloud storage... unfortunately there are not real good open source alternatives to dropbox/google drive yet... (own cloud is OK, but it is PHP....)
Well I will stop moaning about it and add it to my list of things to write I guess....
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Friday 21st March 2014 13:13 GMT Alien8n
The irony
The irony is architects seem to be very good at creating designs that generate a lot of energy, just not so good at harnessing that energy (except as Jaguar melting plants). Imagine a couple of well designed window frontages that actually focused the beam onto a solar panel, rather than onto nearby parked cars, or high rise skyscrapers that directed winds through turbines instead of creating pavement level local hurricanes...
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Sunday 23rd March 2014 20:33 GMT AlbertH
Re: The irony
NO wind turbines actually "work". They consume energy in low wind situations (they have to keep turning to stop them jamming) and they'll NEVER pay back the energy used to manufacture, transport, install and commission the damn things. They are as bogus as "cold fusion", just like the vast majority of "green" projects.
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Friday 21st March 2014 20:58 GMT willi0000000
i've worked with architects who can design an energy efficient building and ones that i wouldn't trust not to hurt somebody while assembling a five-piece Lego set. the key difference is knowledge. you need to understand how, where and why a building gains and loses energy.
on-site energy collection is usually a huge waste of money, unless the site has some peculiar properties like it's own small, fast river running through.
the most efficient designs i've seen use passive energy collection/rejection to achieve the desired savings. the use of a passive solar design also reduces heating and cooling with no parts requiring movement or maintenance. then you get into the surface treatments, what color roof and siding. an HVAC designer once told me that the most efficient heating and cooling system, both in installation and maintenance, is insulation.
all of the requirements are, of course, location specific and require quite a lot of specialized knowledge to be properly applied. i've seen solar panel installations where the panels are shaded from the sun by adjacent buildings or placed where they won't interfere with the "look" of the thing.
bottom line, know your architect, don't let them design you a monument to their brilliance. if they can't or won't design an efficient structure take them for a Scottish Road Trip™.