Dear, Dear Royal Mail

Dear Royal Mail,

I know you're not a person but an institution, though I'm hoping you'll be able to reply to this email as if you were a person.

I met a man a few years ago who had previously worked for a company that made envelopes for junk mail. That is, when you receive a piece of junk mail it sometimes comes in an envelope that has promotional rubbish printed on the outside of it, eg. "PRIORITY: OPEN URGENTLY! YOU'VE WON A PRIZE!" someone has printed this envelope. And he told me that the direct (aka junk) mail company for whom his company printed envelopes aimed for a 2% response rate.

So let's take this apart. Somewhere in a rural location is a factory, employing local young people on temporary contracts, printing envelopes. These envelopes are transported by lorry to another place, where they meet up with the innards of the junk mail, trucked from somewhere else, and the envelopes are packed and posted. Royal Mail, I understand, has a separate and HUGE logistical system dedicated to the distribution of direct mail. So the post is posted, sorted, distributed and delivered.....

And 98% of it travels directly from the letter box to the rubbish bin or, if we're lucky, the recycling bin. And just think how many people are earning their livings from this 2% efficient system! Wow....

My local post office is about to close. This is a bad thing. Could you not just franchise out the generation and posting of junk mail to the scores of local post offices, to keep them afloat? Each office could manage the distribution of rubbish to its neighbourhood, and the targeting of rubbish deliveries could be much more refined. Customers could actually visit the post office and help the staff to target the rubbish at those people whose recycling bins have a bit of spare space in them. The post office would still exist for those ageing types who quite fancy picking up their pensions and posting a few letters to their loved ones, despite the underlying futility of this activity. And the rubbish could make a smoother transition from factory to bin, while saving on the massive overheads associated with running big distribution plants in the countryside.

Ah, joined up thinking........

If you'd like to hire a consultant at vast expense to help you deliver this deliverance solution product, please do not hesitate to contact my associate,

Yours,

Andrew.

The Neighbour of the Beast

A friend of mine looked over my shoulder this evening and noticed that my email account had 666 messages. Apparently it just says at the top of the page 'Andrew Wood (666)' and I gather that this number is known as 'the number of the beast'. Clearly, you could help me out by emailing me and, so long as I didn't delete the wrong number of emails, then I would be saved from this worrying fate....

This prompted me to do a little research, and using that mine of fairly accurate information, Wikipedia, it is a biblical reference which "scholars.....have speculated that the reference to this passage was a way of speaking in code about then contemporary figures about whom it would have been politically dangerous to criticize openly". I have a funny feeling that it has also suffered from some mistranslation at some point in the past, but that's another story. The idea of passages in the New Testament being subtle but pointed attacks at contemporary individuals is quite appealing, if wholly irrelevant to sustainable development. [Or is it?]

Reading the Wikipedia entry in more detail I've found parallels between the use of 'the Beast' to refer to godless kings and tyrants, and the way that 'the Man' is nowadays used to denote an unfair and heavy-handed system of tycoons, governments and police. Which puts a curious spin on the question "Man or Beast?" as might be asked of a hirsute and rather aggressive biped spotted in a city centre on a Friday night. Neither would be likely to be carrying an ID card.

Since I am neither a tyrant nor particularly hairy I feel confident that I am neither 'the Man' nor 'the Beast', though asked to choose which of the two I was, I have a feeling I'd probably go for Man. (Mind you, I am more hairy than I am a tyrant........) Anyway, here comes the undeniable logic. If the Man and the Beast are the unsavoury characters who control the ship in which we sail, and sustainable development is our aim, then what we need is not a nice, well reasoned argument promoting sustainable development, to which you or I would respond, "Fair enough". What we need is an argument that appeals to Man and Beast - that is "sustainable development will make you more powerful, more immortal, more able to control your snivelling subjects."

Then we might be in with a chance.

AW.

The Girls Who Live For Bin Day

The house next door to me is occupied by somewhere between 4 and 17 female students. Since it's a 4 bedroom house I'm guessing the true figure is nearer the lower end of my estimated range, but aside from the amount of noise they can make using the stairs, there is one particular conundrum: they seem to generate the kind of volumes of rubbish you might reasonably expect from a small but thriving coffee shop.

Bin day is Friday, by which time the bin's lid is stretched open like a yawning pelican's bill, black sacks hanging over the edge in what I believe the fashion industry describes as a 'muffin top'. Muffin top rubbish: fact. Yet by Sunday it's full again, and by mid-week there is a pile of binbags outside in our shared yard too.

What the hell are they doing?

The only conclusion I can draw is that these young ladies, with a solid secondary education receding behind them, find the academic and social opportunities of one of our finer universities is just, somehow, well err...., like not enough. There's something missing. What could it be? What is creating that cavernous feeling in their souls? I began to think, could I get away with installing a listening device through the wall, to see if I could detect what it is that's eating them up?

My advisors suggested such surveillance would be frowned upon, so instead I devised a scenario-modelling system, which I'm testing to destruction and is currently standing up well. I call it CAGNET - Conjecture and Guesswork Nearly Every Time [is right]. So I ran the model using four key variables, and the results were enlightening.

The variables were:
1. The number of people normally generating rubbish in the household
2. The likely consumption habits of those people.
3. The ability of those people to compress their rubbish before throwing it away.
4. The time available in the average day that could be dedicated to the act of throwing things away.

The conclusions I drew were as follows.

1. There are four tenants. One is addicted to milk, and is unaware of the squashability of plastic milk flagons after they are emptied. [Lacto-noncompressive Compulsive Disorder].
2. One tenant is a Business student who has sub-let the cellar as a basement business incubator which is occupied by a packaging company with scrupulous quality control procedures.
3. One tenant won the Tetrapak Icelandic Lottery and the first prize was a lifetime supply of 1 litre guava juice cartons.
4. One tenant is a science student undertaking exhaustive stress-testing on binliners.

All of which points to a worrying set of circumstances and positive feedbacks pushing the household to a wheelie-bin tipping point: that entrepreneurship, quality control, gambling, science, the stresses of modern life and associated dietary disorders are......

FRANKLY UNSUSTAINABLE.

Those readers who think students are just a bunch of layabouts, and that higher education is a giant holding camp saving people from having to be unemployed, had better go elsewhere for their reading pleasure, there is no place for you here. My neighbours' rubbish habits are a product of a modern age in which being a student is hard work.

AW.

Greetings

Hello you. Green Empire is my sustainability consultancy. Despite working in sustainability for 10 years I find it incredibly difficult to describe in a nutshell what it means, because none of the definitive answers I've seen of sustainability, or sustainable development, quite cuts the mustard for me. Not being an insurance salesman means I can't lie to you, and the truth is I don't genuinely know what sustainability looks like, and neither do you. No offence.

So, I thought that rather than trying to distill sustainability into a few words, I'd use as many words as possible, and what better way to do that than through a blog - so if you have come this far by finding the blog then you too can add to the great splurge of words that will ensue from here on in, as I work through what my business is really about, then you can discuss it with me here too.

Of course I shall be ruthlessly selective about the content that stays on this blog and the content that disappears into the virtual abyss.

Here comes the advertising. If you're enjoying reading the blog and think that I'm the kind of consultant you need, go to www.green-empire.co.uk and you can contact me. No job is too small or too large, but only some jobs are interesting.

AW.

Green Empire Welcomes You

Hello, we're Green Empire! This post will get edited by Andrew as soon as he's up and running. Ciao...