Archive for December, 2009
Brazil…
December 14th, 2009
With its colder days and longer, early nights, the arrival of December may feel a bit depressing but last week we found the perfect way to combat any winter blues and -for once- mulled wine had nothing to do with it.
The Cavendish conference team at the ICO helped organise an event for the Brazilian Ministry of Tourism.
As requested by our client, to bring the warmth of sunny Brazil to London, a delicious Brazilian lunch was provided; which combined with the live music and Brazilian drinks, made everybody feel as if the ICO was in Brazil not Soho.
Thank you to Mayfair Catering for all the work they put in making this possible.
As for me; I want to go to Brazil now….
Posted in News | Posted by: olga | No Comments »
Cavendish client features in the Archers on BBC adio 4.
December 12th, 2009
Cavendish Conference Venues award winning Green Credentials and in particular our unflinching focus on locally produced food resulted in us being awarded a major contract to host an event for the Plunkett Foundation www.plunkett.co.uk Surely it is not a coincidence that now the Plunkett foundation has featured on the Archers. Again it cannot be a co-incidence that the organisation is winning its on air battle for a local community shop. It amazing what a little London food produce can do.
Posted in Green / Sustainable | Posted by: tom | No Comments »
London – one of the most sustainable places on the planet – Cavendish Conference Venues place in the jigsaw
December 12th, 2009
We were told as youngsters to judge others by what they do, not what they say. So it is with greens.
If this week’s Danish hot-air balloon trip for the leisured classes was serious, it would be conducted by grown-ups through diplomacy and the internet.
Instead it is one more United Nations poverty summit with a phoney deadline, a high-flying, high-spending, all-feasting, all-pledging jamboree, unchanged in style since the 19th-century Congress of Vienna.
Meanwhile, back in London, citizens are quietly honouring ecology’s dirty secret, not a word of which is breathed in Copenhagen.
It is that the best way to conserve energy on the planet is to live in a big city, preferably a very big one.
I cannot quarrel with the overwhelming opinion of honest scientists that the Earth is warming, though it would help if they could resolve their disagreement with other, no less honest, scientists.
The world is clearly warming and humankind does not help by tipping quantities of harmful gases into the sky.
Where laymen can disagree is over what to do about it, and especially over what the private citizen can do, rather than just watch politicians enjoy themselves doing nothing, or doing the wrong thing.
One answer is given in a new book by the American urbanologist, David Owen, called Green Metropolis. His message is simple.
We should use more intensively the land area that is already built over, and not spread new settlement across virgin acres of carbon-rich countryside, wherever they may be.
New settlements, however many times you prefix them with “eco-”, are all carbon belchers. They are low density and require high mobility to service them.
Most people think of cities as ecological disaster areas, seething swamps of concrete and tarmac, fuming traffic and throbbing central heating.
Greens are seen as inhabiting a virtuous Hobbit-state of woodland cottages, where people dig potatoes, sing folksongs and cycle everywhere, except to Copenhagen.
To Owen it is cities that are the ecological paradise, especially his home in New York, a place “of extreme compactness, the greenest community in the United States“.
The residents of Manhattan get about it with 10 times the energy efficiency of average Americans. When Owen and his wife moved (briefly) to the country, they found their electricity consumption went up eight times, they had to buy a car and drove 30,000 miles a year on ordinary household trips.
Londoners are much like New Yorkers. They use space intensively and energy efficiently.
They mostly occupy long-constructed buildings, sharing walls, roofs, ceilings and heating systems with others.
They also share transport, street lights and entertainment. They walk, cycle or use public transport (mostly electric) to get to work or play.
Londoners crowd roads, shops, restaurants, theatres, pubs. They communicate with each other without having to take long journeys.
They do not heat, light and cook in isolated homesteads, where almost every journey requires the carbon emissions of an internal combustion engine.
Such behaviour does, of course, depend on how each individual uses the city, and travels from it.
In a recent Times audit of “typical” carbon use, the one activity that wrecked every family’s record was flying or driving long distances for work or holidays. The really green Londoner finds ever more original ways of staying in London.
The city’s greatest carbon “sink” is the stock of buildings, houses, flats, schools, shops and offices that have been used and re-used, often over centuries.
Victorian property can require no more than a patch of plaster and a lick of paint, a new top floor or a side extension, to be readied for another use and another century.
If re-using existing structures is good, then tearing them down and rebuilding them is bad. It eats energy.
Rebuilding in the form of energy-guzzling steel and glass boxes and towers, usually unadaptable for later re-use, is particularly crazy. London must learn to conserve itself in every sense.
Government planning policy is to encourage new building in the green belt and countryside. This is anti-green lunacy.
The tax system also discourages urban conservation by imposing VAT on repairs, yet relieves VAT on new building.
How can Gordon Brown lecture the world – as he did yesterday – that “our children will not forgive us” for increasing emissions when he encourages carbon extravagance in this way?
The same goes for the other shocker, the internal combustion exhaust. Londoners generate less than any other Britons, for the simple reason that they are intensive users of public transport.
No one can do much to reduce London’s traffic, as people will stop using the city if vehicles cannot move about with reasonable convenience.
But traffic managers are still committed to making car journeys longer and slower, with proliferating traffic lights and one-way systems, generating millions of tons of unnecessary emissions. They are still in the dark ages.
To add insult to this injury, the Government’s green minister, Ed Miliband, is inexplicably campaigning for a third runway at Heathrow.
Such policies are not the fault of London’s citizens, who are its victims. They are the fault of London’s rulers.
They are the fault of those painting themselves green and cavorting through the streets of Copenhagen.
It is the mass of humanity trudging over London Bridge and quietly going about its daily business that deserves the greenest halo.
In our microenvironment we at Cavendish Conference Venues feel we are doing our sustainable bit, reusing buildings, taking hard to let spaces, deliberately locating our sites as near to our clients as possible, this and a myriad of other measures has helped us win the recent Visit Britain sustainable venue of the year award.
Posted in Green / Sustainable | Posted by: tom | No Comments »
Water – one of the keys to ensuring truly green conferences and events
December 11th, 2009
Water – one of the keys to ensuring truly green conferences and events
This is something they are talking about a lot at the Copenhagen climate change conference, it is vital to ensuring your events and our venue is truly sustainable. The combined effects of increasing temperatures increasing populations and increasing development are inevitably going to put a very heavy strain on water resources. Put it another way the average person in England uses 150 liters of water a day 50% more than 25 years ago.
What can we do? – Well these are a few of the things we have done at Cavendish Conference Venues:
- Water meters: You have to start by knowing where you are, how much you use etc.
- Regular readings: ensure there are no leakages in your system; it was only through our twice daily readings that we indentified a leak beneath a kitchen floor. Minimization: working with www.Envirowise.gov.uk we have identified a number of areas where we can save water i.e:
- We have installed flow controllers in taps throughout
- We have installed ‘hippos’ in all toilets
- We have cut to zero our use of plastic / glass mineral water through the introduction of the pure water system, we now offer all delegates / organizers free of charge chilled purified still and sparking water.
Pollution:
Linked to water use is pollution, not spoiling the remaining water. We started by trialing the use of non phosphorus chemicals at our Cavendish venues, after a successful trial we have moved to ensure that all cleaning products from carpet cleaning products to kitchen cleaning items to ensure they are all as green and sustainable as possible.
Posted in Green / Sustainable | Posted by: tom | No Comments »
Episode 2 –Transport
December 10th, 2009
Transport accounts for more than a ¼ of the UK’s carbon emissions and rising. The key to understanding this issue is understand the impacts of different transport methods, I have listed out some of the major types below: (showing carbon omissions per passenger per kilometre)
Transport Type Emissions per passenger
Short Haul Flight 130g/km
Long Haul Flight 105 g/km
Ford Mondeo 1+1 93g/km
Toyota Prius 1+1 52g/km
Bus 89g/km
Train 60g/km
Coach 20g/km
NB- it is important to point out that things are not quite as simple as this i.e. emissions from airlines are particularly problematic due to the height they are released, overall this concentrates the problem meaning airline omissions are 2.5 times more damaging that ground level omissions.
Here at Cavendish we have introduced a number of initaives to reduce vehicle transport ideas for further reduction would be greatly appreciated.
- Annual independent transport survey showing cause of all vehicle movements to the centres.
- Annual survey of delegates asking what would induce them to use public transport more
- As a result of the point above we have put the maps to the individual venues on page 1 of our website
- Series of supplier forums to facilitate load sharing
- All company vehicles are now electric
- Company sponsored cycles
- Free webcasting offered
Posted in Green / Sustainable | Posted by: tom | No Comments »
Episode 3 – Waste & Recycling – Part 1 Waste Reduction
December 3rd, 2009
A massive issue, in 2004 a massive 335 million tonnes of waste was created (DEFRA figs) at the moment
We are lagging miles behind our continental neighbours in terms of how much is recycled / reused.
Here at the Cavendish we have taken a number of steps in this direction:
Reduce:
- First and most importantly we have conducted a complete review of all our waste streams, enabling us to set verifiable targets as to how much waste we are producing. This gives us a benchmark to establish whether or not we are really reducing our output.
- We have gone through our entire operation working our where we can reduce waste for example:
- We now use no individually wrapped items – sugar / tea bags etc
- We have removed all one of disposable items from our operation i.e. paper slip cloths on tables / paper napkins / paper doilies for cups etc
- We have got rid of all mineral water bottles –we were one of the first users of the pure water system – a water purifying and carbonating system.
- All brochures / contracts and invoices are now emailed, paper copies are only sent when specifically requested.
- We have worked with our supply chain to reduce waste i.e.
- We organised a series of supplier forums to help communicate our green policies
- Both our greengrocer and butcher have now committed to leave no packing at the centre, i.e. the take all their boxes back with them, hopefully this will make them think more carefully about how many they use in first place.
- We have worked with our customers to try to reduce waste for example
We offer conference organiser a substantial discount if they undertake to minimise the amount to waste they leave at the venues
Posted in Green / Sustainable | Posted by: tom | No Comments »