Green Neighbourhood News Feed

GROUPS GO HEAD TO HEAD FOR ‘GREENEST NEIGHBOURHOOD’ TITLE

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 14:08:36 GMT

Seven teams have been hand-picked to take part in a regional carbon-cutting campaign which aims to see who can do the most to save (and possibly generate) energy, cut emissions and encourage local people to foster a low-carbon lifestyle.
The groups will be competing in the ‘Green Neighbourhood Challenge’ across North Yorkshire to make lifestyle changes that will create greener communities for themselves and for future generations.
The winning team will receive £500 worth of goods for a local environmental project of their choice.
The campaign, which runs until January next year, challenges community groups to take part in a sub-regional competition to achieve an 11% reduction in their carbon footprint by the end of 2011 - whilst raising awareness of a low carbon lifestyle and earning the laudable title of North Yorkshire’s ‘Greenest Neighbourhood Team’.
Supported by local councils across York and North Yorkshire, the project is funded by the Yorkshire and Humber Improvement and Efficiency Partnership (YoHR Space). It is managed by Yorkshire Energy Partnership and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) at York University.

NEW WEBSITE LAUNCHES FOR THE GREEN CHALLENGERS

Tue, 5 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Featuring money-saving and energy-efficiency advice, team calendars, galleries and much more, the website has launched with the aim of creating a legacy which will remain long after this particular challenge has finished.
Dr Gary Haq, freelance author, broadcaster and researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute, is keen to witness the website taking shape over the coming months:
“It’s our intention that the website will evolve with the project and take shape as the centre-piece of all our work. It will play host to some valuable tools and resources which will benefit our neighbourhood teams – but also anyone else who wishes to make greener lifestyle changes.”
Visit www.greenneighbourhood.co.uk to see more and to join the mailing list.

GNC NEWSLETTER - COMING SOON

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

A newsletter for the GNC challengers will be available soon, featuring tips and team updates. We'll be making these available on the downloads page but you'll also get one if you've joined our mailing list.

GUEST BLOG: Kirkbymoorside – reasons for joining Green Neighbourhood Challenge and my situation

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Kirkbymoorside – reasons for joining Green Neighbourhood Challenge and my situation (a Guest blog)

Our group

Our volunteer group are trying to reduce our energy usage by around 11% and for most of us who have been energy wise for a long time it will prove to be a hard task. The first meeting was to tell us about our energy profiles, worked out from a survey we all answered and the second was about Energy Efficiency (home insulation, reduction in wasting electricity). Some measures such as turning off appliances when not in use are fairly obvious but to really save energy things that sit there on standby should also be turned off.

Relatives and my footprint

A relation is very profligate with electricity, especially since he stuck £15,000 worth of photo-voltaic cells on his roof. He leaves lights on all the time, umpteen appliances on standby and cannot grasp that turning them off saves money and energy. He works on the principle that the start up of things uses the most electricity. That is correct up to a point but after a low energy light has been off for three minutes and isn’t switched on again for a while energy is being saved.

In my own case I was surprised to come out bottom in our group in terms of the energy profile. That is perhaps because we have coal fires, and a conventional- not a condensing boiler. The house is also old and listed which doesn’t help much. It is however fairly well insulated, apart from the small modern extension, so it looks like improvements there will help a lot. Our car usage is also fairly modest, less since the price of fuel rocketed and I use a bicycle for popping up to the town. I’ve not travelled abroad by air for nearly four years but had to take a flight to Slovenia for our son’s wedding earlier this year. Fortunately business trips are not counted otherwise I would be in trouble as I’ve made one trip already this year and another three are planned. Unfortunately alternative methods of travel are simply not really available to get to Trondheim in Norway and the Faroe Islands!

A bit about why we got involved

This joint venture with Kirkbymoorside Energy Group may seem odd to those who have always tried to have a low carbon footprint (although it was not called this in the old days - it was living carefully on a small income). With the present fast moving range of products and increasing use of electricity and plastics, it is good for us to re-examine what we actually need in our lives. In the film "Learning from Lashka" we saw the reaction of people from this remote Himalayan valley, who were used to living with all waste recycled to the earth or to other people, to our prolific wanton wastefulness in a London rubbish tip.

We also saw the care of everyone in the community in this remote place as we did in the film about how Cuba coped with Peak Oil. It showed how people pulled together to produce food in Cuba when Cuba suddenly found itself without oil and fertiliser because Russia in crisis could no longer help them sustain the "modern economy".

We see now how the oil companies are desperately trying to get access to remote places to extract oil from tar sands or from deeper and deeper sea beds. Plus the process of extracting oil and gas from shale deposits by drilling and then firing off explosives to shatter the shale and release the deposits.

This is known as Hydraulic Fracturing or ‘fracking’ some FAQs on this process are answered here
www.gaslandthemovie.com/whats-fracking

A Guardian report on controversial fracking for natural gas near Blackpool can be seen here
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/mar/01/fracking-shale-gas-energy-mps

You may perhaps take the internet and its marvels for granted but there is a large energy downside to it. The massive ever growing size of the servers that power the internet use huge quantities of electricity. In some cases this is as much as that used by a small city. Multiply that by umpteen servers across the world and it amounts to a large amount just to serve a communications medium. It also seems to be continually growing to serve an ever increasing worldwide demand.

Guest post by Stuart Harrison, from Kirkbymoorside group.

If you are in a group participating in gnc and would like to write something, then please get in touch with denise.hall@energypartnership.org.uk

LATEST EVENT: Kirkbymoorside and Pickering groups renewable event

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Kirkbymoorside and Pickering group held their first renewables event at Kirkbymoorside Memorial Hall last Saturday - with almost 100 people attending (not bad given that there are only 11 people in the group!)

Over 20 people asked for information about renewables after talking to one of the four local installers on hand, and Adam Gillespie from Energy Saving Trust gave two talks (with a Q and A) on the Feed-In Tariffs (FiT) and the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI).

The event aimed to raise awareness about renewable energy to the public and gave everyone a chance to ask Adam questions, talk to installers and enjoy the homemade buns!

Helen, from the group did a super job organising the event and it was mentioned on the local blog, on the town council website and in local newspapers.

See some more pictures on Flickr

Thank-you to Helen, Mike and the team for organising such a brilliant event!

IT'S WATER-SAVING MONTH:

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:00:00 GMT

In August we're focusing on water-saving and there are lots of events and talks going on - take a look at our events page.

The Whitby team are going to the Whitby Regetta (fireworks, rowing, yacht racing etc) this weekend and Yorkshire Water will be there looking at water-saving and activities for kids.

PDCS (Pickering and district civil society) and KMEG (Kirkbymoorside environment group) have asked for something a little different, so Ivanna from St Nicks, (a York based organisation promoting sustainable living) is going to come and talk about rain water harvesting and grey water systems on 25^th August at Pickering Memorial Hall.

Everyone is welcome to these events - we hope to see you there!

Ivanna from St Nicks talks about rainwater harvesting and composting toilets

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Ivanna from St Nicks field, (a York-based charity promoting sustainable living) joined Pickering GNC team for a talk on rain water harvesting at Pickering Memorial Hall on 25th August.

Her talk explained how St Nicks system collects rainwater off their slate roof and pass it through a three-stage filteration system that purifies the water for drinking and hand-washing (they don’t have mains water at St Nicks). Ivanna then went ont o talk about their waterless composting toilets.

Ivanna got a big clap at the end of her talk and was very well recieved, we really appreciate her sharing her knowledge and experience. Thank you!

Also, teams in Kellington and St Johns held their water-saving events with free water butts up for grabs. Coming up we have transport events with the driving simulator.

St Nicks run all sorts of action days, talks, skill classes and tours of their buildings; from learning how to identify bats to taking better photos – take a look at what they do.

In other news, Denise got an A* in her English GCSE – well done Denise!

Training session, Captain Rumage and driving simulator

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT

New GNC news: Training session, captain Rumage and driving simulator

Several of our GNC champions came to a training session at York last week.

James Mills EST team leader gave a training session on energy efficiency and renewable and Denise delivered raining on sustainable travel. Each advisor took home a pack of literature from the EST covering most household topics on saving energy, a leaflet on each renewable technology and a EST energy efficiency primer.

‘Captain Rumage’

Boroughbridge are having a visit from Captain Rumage (AKA Chris Powell) of the Cone Exchange http://www.coneexchange.org/– see him at 7.pm on 16 Sep at Aldborough Village Hall where he will talk about recycling and how they collect and make new things out of old or waste products.

Then Denise with the help of Jayne and the driving simulator are on their travels, Jayne will be helping out with the sim and Denise will trying to get everyone involved in the smarter driving quiz. So we are hoping lots of people will turn up at these events to pit their wits against us and our machine!

Award celebration

We have booked our award celebration at the York Theatre Royal De Grey Rooms for Saturday 28 Jan 2012

Events coming up in September:

Pickering Memorial 20^th to Hall 7pm

Richmond Station 22^nd to 2pm

Mencap Centre, Northallerton 27^th 5.30pm

September Newsletter

Mon, 3 Oct 2011 00:00:00 GMT

This month the GNC newsletter covers transport; looking at events we have coming up, top tips, energy-saving grants and a short update on where we are having the GNC awards ceremony.

We are now half-way through the year-long challenge and we thought we’d take this chance to find out how our teams are progressing towards their 11% target.

Fingers-crossed we’ll have the feedback from members of each group by the end of next week and will upload the results for everyone to see.

You can download the September newsletter here.

Seeding community energy action

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The Local Energy Assessment Fund

Seeding community energy action

The Department of Energy and Climate Change are providing a new fund which is available to communities who are playing an active role in the development of a low carbon society.

Money is available to finance projects that increase understanding and uptake of energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies and help to make energy supply secure and affordable for everyone in your community. Interested community groups should visit http://www.greencommunitiescc.org.uk/ to submit an online application.

An energy-saver's Christmas

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Buy local food reduce food miles and carbon emissions and when cooking on the hob keep the lid on the pan when it can reduce boiling time and energy consumption by 10%!

Putting your oven on? consider cooking several things at once to make the most of the energy. If you are baking a batch of mince pies on the top shelf, a tray of vegetables could go on the middle shelf for roasting and a load of jacket potatoes could go on the bottom shelf to make efficient use of the heat.

Avoid single-use paper or plastic cups for entertaining which are wasteful. If you’re running short of glassware for your party, many supermarkets now lend out glasses for your celebration

Close your curtains at night. This can reduce your energy bills by reducing heat loss through your windows, which will save you money and when your not using your chimney you can stop draughts by blocking it with a special inflatable balloon or by fitting a draught-proofing screen in front of the fireplace. You’ll have saved £20 in heating bills by next Christmas and your home will be cosier too!

Christmas lights can be energy intensive. Switching to LED Christmas lights from traditional Christmas lights will cost you nearly six times less to run. If all 26 million UK homes swapped one string of standard fairy lights for LED lights, during the 12 days of Christmas alone, collectively they would save enough carbon dioxide to fill 188,000 double-decker buses (over 26,000 tonnes of CO₂). Financially, it would save nearly £9.7m – that’s enough to pay the weekly energy bills for 400,000 homes. A simple money-saving tip is to always remember to turn Christmas lights off when you go out or go to bed. If you’re forgetful, try using a timer switch so that they automatically turn off over night.

Don’t forget your exterior lights too. An extravagant light display can cost as much as £100 to power throughout December. Again, use LEDs where possible and make sure that you flip the off switch when you head off to bed and go out during the day.

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas from the GNC

Funding for our community buildings

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Funding of up to 75% up to £1,000 is avaible for our communities to insulate their community buildings in North Yorkshire.

Call Yorkshire Energy Partnership for further information 01904 554406