Sustainable Fashion with Oxford Climate Club

Wow! 2 hours went really fast today at the Natural History Museum, with barely a break for a biscuit. We talked about the problems of fast fashion and looked at some of the amazing innovations people are developing to combat the problems.

Did you know??

• Washing clothes releases half a million tonnes of plastic microfibres into the ocean every year. The equivalent of over 50 BILLION (!) plastic bottles. Ooops!

• 75% of the impact of our clothing over its’ life time comes from WASHING and DRYING. Wash less people!! And use all that lovely wind to dry your clothes. :)

• One cotton tee takes as much water to make as a person drinks in 2.5 years!!

• The clothing industry accounts for 10% of global carbon emissions - and we thought it was farting cows!

• All sorts of other noxious emissions such as Volatile Organic Compound are released to the air when clothing is made. Very bad news for people who work in and live near those factories.

• 100 billion items of clothing are bought each year. A DUMP TRUCK of clothing goes to landfill EVERY second!

Thanks to Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Forbes.com, The Guardian and other fabulous information providers for these juicy facts which raised our indignation and got us thinking.

On the positive side we enjoyed the following initiatives -

Trad businesses trying new models

https://www.marksandspencer.com/c/plan-a-shwopping

https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2019/10/john-lewis-launches-sustainable-buyback-trial/

Back to the drawing board approaches

https://www.wearethought.com/sustainable-fabrics/

https://po-zu.com/pages/about-po-zu

https://rapanuiclothing.com/our-story/

Rent don’t own business models

https://mudjeans.eu/lease-a-jeans/

https://www.hurrcollective.com/

And the most fun - new fabric tech!

https://boltthreads.com/

http://www.modernmeadow.com/our-technology/

Now in solution mode, we talked to Zaqiya, the founder of clothes exchange project, Swopitup, about how to set up clothes swaps in schools. Fired up we all left with action plans intact.

Salient moment for me today. I asked the students whether they needed any help from the adults to get the swap shops off the ground and they just shook their heads. They were confident, determined and organised - planning their next steps as they left the session. I thought that just about summed up the relevance of the adults these days - the teens have got this covered. We just need to move over. It felt good.

“I think it was really good. I liked how there were lots of conversations and discussions. I didn’t just get to learn new things, I also got to hear other people’s perspectives and ideas. This has showed me how there are things we can do to help. ”

— OCC participant, Feb 2020

“Do this workshop in schools!”

— Everyone who participated today.

Thanks so much to Sam, Oxford student and Climate Club volunteer, for ideas, support, contributions and positivity. More Climate Club in a few weeks.

Kim

PS - these guys, www.beeco.green saw this blog and emailed us suggesting we link to their guide on sustainable (and unsustainable) fabrics. It looks really good so we said yes. There is lots of other good information on there too. We haven’t verified anything about this organisation but the information seems sound - check out sources before you base an essay on it however!

ECI MSc field trip to CAT

The trip to the Centre for Alternative Technology in Mid Wales has been one the highlights of the ECI MSc for about 20 years. I was lucky enough to accompany the group again this year. It is a wonderful few days, with fun workshops on wind farm planning, low energy futures, and visits to a solar farm, a hydro plant and a wind farm. There were parties, pizza, lots of delicious food at the CAT cafe, and wonderful conversations.

Last year (2019) we offered a week at CAT as one of the LIGC weeks, but nobody signed up! I think we didn’t explain it well enough, and I’m not sure we can now. CAT is magical, and those who visit fall in love with the place, but it is one of those experiences that is hard to describe. It’s about slowing down, stepping outside our usual hectic lives, finding time to think and connect. It’s a small haven with warm beds, fantastic food, and beautiful nooks and crannies to hang out in with friends, as well as a laboratory for low carbon living and a change to explore and exchange new ideas. We think its a great place for a small group of teens to have fun, learn some stuff, and explore the local mountains and beaches. Perhaps we’ll try again in 2021!

Kim Polgreen

A sustainable Christmas?

Well that was tough! There are so many ways not to be green at Christmas and I feel that as a family our score was probably about 3 / 10: “must do better”!

Wrapping paper. I had good intentions to make fabric present wraps etc etc, as per those good people on Facebook, but in the end settled for recycled and recyclable paper from Oxfam. The non plastic tape that I had ordered from &Keep didn’t arrive in time so I ended Christmas day removing plastic sticky tape from the pile of wrapping paper in the living room! Little use for this year was my plea to rellies that next year we could all avoid glittery and shiny cards, paper and tags. It pained my to throw those in the bin.

Food. We spent a fortune on an organic turkey and bacon, and bought all the veg from the farmers market. So was feeling good. Totally let down by the plastic tubs on shop bought Christmas puddings and trifle. Note to self - give up work and be a domestic giant next year and make it all from scratch. Male family member spent literally months making and nurturing an enormous Christmas cake from organic ingredients (which come in plastic bags of course).

Presents. My brother loved his eco gift bag (I think), which included bamboo loo roll, and a paper packet of toilet cleaner. I hope he realised I was celebrating the fun of eco ideas with him. Totally failed to persuade the teenager to have a second pair of sea-plastic trainers and ended up buying (a fabulous) pair of leather and plastic ones which will end up in landfill for a thousand years. Went for buying books from the wonderful Blackwells Bookshop in Oxford for everyone else - the mistake was doing it online because they send every book in a separate parcel in a separate van!! Next time - GO to the shop, by bike!

Chocolate. Adult male in the family tried hard to avoid palm oil when buying stocking fillers but ended up with a ridiculous amount of plastic packaging around some very expensive and delicious chocolate.

Best thing about working on climate change all year it turns out is that you can switch off the gloomy social media feeds and focus on family life for a few days. Merry Christmas!

Business for a Wilder Future

Our local Wildlife Trust, BBOWT, went straight for the business brain this week with an event at the Said Business School on “The Role of Business in a Wilder Future”. Intrigued, because I have always seen business as having a key role in ensuring we don’t endanger our own futures by damaging our limited planetary resources, I went along. On one hand it was an inspiring event - Jordans Cereals talking passionately about sustainable sources of almonds and oats being the highlight for me. And meeting the fantastic Kathy Willis who is hopefully going to lend us one of her team for our courses next summer was brilliant.

But on the other hand it did feel as if the arguments being made were the same as those I was engaged with 20 years ago as a sustainability consultant for businesses. The same arguments and opportunities are being discovered by a new generation of sustainability managers - which goes to highlight how hard it is to shift a paradigm. Perhaps the time is now right. It really does seem that good business means working within the bounds of what the planet has to offer.

Wilding at St John's College

Tickets were in short supply for a talk at St John’s College yesterday, but cold driving rain, and the fact that people get lost traversing St John’s site meant that I was able to squeeze in. Wilding, Isabella Tree’s recent book, is an uplifting account of how she and her husband “wilded” their farm in Kent, the Knepp estate. Many people have been entranced by this story, and hearing about it first hand from Isabella left me with an enhanced sense of hope for our futures.

After years of conventional farming, Isabella and Charlie finally stopped trying to extract a profit from their land, and, withdrawing their machines and chemicals, they relaxed and let nature step back in. They took out all the fences across the land, blocked up the ditches and stood back and watched the land heal itself, and the species come back - insects, birds, reptiles, amphibians, small mammals. On advice from a Dutch expert, they fenced the outer perimeter and introduced large herbivores - longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies, and tamworth pigs. These three complement one another in the way they graze, and between them they challenge the vegetation and keep opening up new opportunities for fresh growth and diversity of species and habitats.

Over remarkably few years, by letting nature lead, the farm was transformed from the typical barren landscape we are sadly so used to in the British countryside, to an astonishingly rich British wilderness, which is not only seeing rare species literally fly and hop in every day, but is now profitable.

My very next action when I got home was to book myself a camping spot and safari at Knepp - for when the weather warms up a bit.

Field Studies Council

An invitation to an event at The Linnean Society in London requires an affirmative, because to peer at the books and exhibits it holds feels like stepping back in time to an innocent and exciting era in scientific thought. London is full of quirky hidden places, and for a naturalist, this place holds a special power.

I was at first sucked straight past the door, tucked away as it is under an archway, into the impressive Annenberg Courtyard towards the Royal Academy, with its temporary exhibitions on Eco-visionaries and Lucian Freud - I need to get back there! But once inside the Linnean Society I felt weirdly at home amongst gathered naturalists past and present. It occurred to me that it was the confidence I had gained from naming birds and plants as a child, and later understanding how they interacted, that set me off on a path that led to my helping teenagers come to terms with the climate emergency today. And I think many of the other people there that day had had a similar journey - although it does seem that many people consider teens to be a challenging group to work with, while I think its the best.

The event was the 75th Anniversary of the Field Studies Council, a fantastic charity which teaches people young and old to feel at home in the outdoors. I am really interested in what they offer and keen to see if we can share ideas to the benefit of our LIGC students.

It was a day of talks and discussion around the theme of field work. From tales of adventure in far flung places, to urgent visions of how we can solve our climate and ecological emergencies with outdoor education, the day felt collegiate and hopeful. Favourite talk of the day? Prof Pete Higgins. Check out his TED talk. My head is swimming with ideas.

Kim Polgreen

Ellen MacArthur Foundation talk to IB teachers

A day in Warwick University conference centre on an IB teacher training event usually means delicious food and interesting conversations, and this time was no exception. We were very grateful to IBSCA for letting us come for a second time to talk to their delegates about climate change.

This time we brought our lovely friend from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation education team, Harrison Wavell, to talk to them about the Circular Economy and how it is a vital approach to tackling our climate and ecological emergency. A circular (regenerative) economy is one where we use our waste as our raw materials, and design our products to re-enter the manufacturing cycle at end of life. It is an approach which bursts with great ideas and is leading to some of the most exciting an innovative business models we are seeing today.

It turned out that an hour was not nearly long enough for our IB teachers. Harri had them hooked. IB teachers think outside the box and you could see the excitement as the education experts immediately saw the application to their own teaching and schools. We left them slightly frustrated not to have more time to talk about their ideas, but hopefully we’ve spread the CE meme!

“Really interesting and challenging - links well with my curricular teaching.”

— Rupert

“I like the part about creating student who think in systems”

— Mamoun

Harri (pictured above) is teaching with LIGC on the circular economy course in July 2020 in Oxford.

2040 the movie

If you get a chance to see a screening of 2040, grab it. Even if you are still in blissful ignorance about climate change, this movie will make you feel great. And if you are feeling even a tiny bit worried about the future today’s kids will face, then watching this will give you a whole new energy.

I learned about a last minute screening at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (where we are running the first meeting of the Oxford Climate Club for school students on Saturday - very excited!), through the very active Parents for Future Oxford network (check out your local Parents for Future group on Facebook - it’s really fun). I grabbed a ticket and cycled off in the pouring rain. The lecture theatre was packed - that’s Oxford for you.

The film’s Director and star, Damon Gameau, and “renegade” economist Kate Raworth* who features in the film, were there for a Q&A. Plus Izzy from one of the Oxford secondary schools who, with three friends, started a petition asking for more climate teaching in the curriculum, which has over 90,000 signatures so far. The convener could barely stop the audience from clapping everything everyone said, people were so energised by the movie.

The film showcases some of the existing technologies and approaches that, if applied fully across the planet, could take us towards a future that looks a whole lot better than today, let alone the future we are currently heading for. Three favourites: (1) marine permaculture using very fast growing seaweed that can absorb CO2 from the oceans (where most of the CO2 ends up), increases fish stocks and reduces pollution; (2) local electricity grids linking small solar panels on house roofs making communities more resilient; and (3) rapidly building new soil which absorbs carbon - and improves farming! See the What’s your 2040? website for more information.

*read Doughnut Economics, or at least look at the website if you haven’t already - fun, uplifting, logical - we have used it on LIGC courses and Kate has been to speak to our LIGC students.

Climate discussions with International Baccalaureate (IB) teachers

School climate strikes in Oxford 2019

The School Climate Strikes are undoubtedly a challenge for teachers and school leaders. Many are concerned about climate change and support their students’ initiative, but they are also under pressure to keep students at school, learning and passing exams. As Greta Thunberg becomes a teenage hero, teachers across all subjects are finding themselves seeking climate information, and school leaders are finding creative ways to harness climate awareness in support of school learning!

The IB education programmes have something special to bring to our climate futures: the focus on critical thinking, problem solving, and collaborative working develops exactly the set of skills that we need in the future workforce to solve the climate problem. Could the IB community be co-opted as climate champions? Today we had the opportunity to talk to a group of 16 teachers and leaders from IB schools, who were at Warwick University for some IB training, about their professional responses and needs in relation to climate change.

The discussion was wide ranging. It confirmed what we had learned from other teacher training organisations - that it is difficult for teachers to quickly find impartial and up-to-date sources of climate change information that are suitable in a school setting. All agreed that for an international community of teachers the biggest sustainability concern is flying, and there was a desire to understand the relative significance of school initiatives on plastic, meat and waste.

There was some concern that students are being hypocritical in blaming adults for climate change but doing nothing in their own lives to reduce consumption. In unpacking that view we all recognised our own reluctance to have our own behaviours challenged. Isn’t that the nub of the entire climate problem?

There was an acknowledgement that far from being “skivers” the students who are most eco-conscious tend to be the ones who are most diligent at school, and in the light of the statistic from the International Labour Organisation that climate management will create 24 million new jobs, we discussed whether in fact student engagement with their studies may increase as they become more aware of the climate crisis facing them. Could this be a win-win for schools and planet?

The IB was created as a force for good in the world in the 1950s and it may be needed now more than ever before. The take home message after a really thoughtful discussion was a comment from one of the attendees: “Every IB teacher should be a climate teacher”.

Our sincere thanks to IBSCA, the UK IB Schools and College Association, for making this discussion possible. We look forward to the opportunity to engage with more IB teachers, on climate, and on the circular economy on 29th November.

“I loved exchanging ideas and sharing experiences with teachers from other schools”

— Samah

Kim Polgreen

Oxford University Said Business School and Paul Polman

Paul Polman has been a hero of mine in business and sustainability. He has been the business leader who gave us all hope that business could lead us out of our environmental problems. He has just become the Chair of the School Board for the Oxford University Business School and last night I attended his talk at the Business School. He is a fount of knowledge about sustainability. He had some great facts: There are 3.3M jobs in green energy in the US - three times as many as in fossil fuels; 1.7Bn people in the world use 85% of the earth’s resources; 77% of Americans want to stay in the Paris agreement. Hope I noted them down correctly.

He talked about how scientists don’t use the language of certainty, and the big challenge in sustainability is communication. A shout out for all our students developing communication skills - use your school studies and your social life to develop your written and verbal skills!

My favourite take home? He said that we don’t need Business-As-Usual, we need Business-Unusual. I really hope that he will inspire the MBA students at the School, and all the other Business Schools around the world, and that business really can become the agent for change that I hoped it would be twenty years ago.

Kim Polgreen

Finding out where our waste goes

Residual waste is the term being used for waste that we haven’t managed to separate out for reuse or recycling. In Oxfordshire it used to go to landfill. But now we have an amazing facility just outside Oxford called an Energy Recovery Facility (Ardley ERF). I was lucky enough to have a visit there earlier this week. The trucks that collect waste from our bins go straight to the facility, the waste is tipped into a massive (really massive) hopper. It is mixed by some huge grabbers controlled remotely by a skilled operative and then moved into the incinerators. It’s hugely high tech and most of the plant is to do with cleaning the air. Apparently nothing comes out of their tall chimneys except water vapour - and of course CO2. The residue from the burning is used as aggregate in road building, and the finer ash is made into building blocks. The best thing is that they recover energy and make electricity. As the educator at the ERF was at pains to point out - WE STILL MAKE TOO MUCH WASTE! And we could be reducing, reusing and recycling an awful lot more. But at least in Oxfordshire we are doing something more sensible with it. See this Virador video for a quick peek of the landfill site. This shows how another Virador ERF works.

Kim Polgreen

Climate in Geography A Level

LIGC sponsored a recent seminar, organised by the ECI, on how climate change can be taught effectively withing the existing British A level Geography curriculum. Prof Martin Evans was involved in creating the latest syllabus that teachers are currently using. Although there isn’t much in the specification about climate, and curriculum changes happen far too slowly for this to be a sensible area for climate action, Martin explained to an audience of teachers that in fact they have a great deal of freedom to include climate in a large proportion of the modules.

There were lots of great ideas in Martin’s talk, and the teachers seems suitably enthused if slightly daunted. Geography is arguably the fastest changing subject, which means that teachers are always challenged to keep up with latest information, data, case studies etc. They have to cover a huge breadth of material. And they are probably the teachers most in the firing line for climate questions from students. There is a certainly an opportunity for them to become leaders in climate solutions by arming themselves with appropriate knowledge, resources and lesson plans, but they probably need some support.

LIGC is offering local teachers support in climate understanding through the one hour sessions we have trialled with IB teachers. We have also partnered with an Oxford teacher and climate activist to create the Teachers for Future Oxfordshire Facebook page for local teachers to swap ideas. We are highlighted the ECI’s intiative Maths for Planet Earth which although created for maths teachers, shows how an existing curriculum can be adapted to teach new material. And we are encouraging teachers and schools to look at EduCCate Global, the UN accredited online climate training for teachers. This is 20+ hours but those who have done it feel it has been very empowering.

A positive outcome for geography as a school subject might be that after years of being one of the less popular subjects, students might begin to see its value for their lives and their careers.

Student poetry inspired by Wytham Woods

On our weekend in Wytham Woods we and the students wrote a few words of poetry in response to finding and learning about fungi, and then standing still and looking closely as something in the woods for a few minutes. The woods were in full autumn colours, everything was wet, and there were amazing fungi everywhere. These are what the students wrote that day.

Battlefield

The flora’s fallen brethren

Consumed by the unseen scent

Ready to set the cycle again

Old and fallen trees, decaying in the woods

It was dying, but, it was helping new lives

To appear, small twenty mushrooms.

Nutty, wise

Lucky disguise.

Caring, strong

Daring song.

Three little mushrooms living off the dead,

With nowhere to grow but up ahead

Three little mushrooms living among the dead,

It’s a graveyard someone once said…

Branch like fungi, grey with a narrow roof surfacing gills

Existed in a colony exuding a nutty scent.

A broken tree trunk with red mushrooms growing out of it’s broken end. 

“lying broken detached by my roots although unknown red raw roots are growing beneath me.”

Cream and brown splothches like bubbles rising skywards

Shortly to fall earthwards as the tree trunk dissolves

Fungi oasis in a birch stump. Thriving where the tree is no longer. Silent in the cracking, dripping, plinking, wish-ing soundscape.

Fungi littered around you

Green splattered around the bark

Roots buried deep

Unmoving.

In the greatest of winds

Only few branches remain.

A weekend in Oxford's laboratory with leaves

The University of Oxford owns one of the most researched pieces of woodland in the world, and oddly, in the middle of it, is a Swiss Chalet.

The chalet has just had a major makeover, and been transformed from the witches’ hut of your nightmares into a rather chic abode. Having shown ourselves to be enthusiasts for bringing teenagers into the woods to learn about the research there, we were excited to be asked to test out the chalet as a venue for student sleepovers.

Our lovely friends at Westminster Academy school in Paddington mustered a group of eight very enterprising year 13 IB students who agreed to get on a train to Oxford for a weekend in the unknown. The weather was atrocious so armed with spare wellies and mountains of food we went to meet them at the station, with some trepidation about whether they were going to enjoy their weekend.

We need not have worried. They were the most fantastic group - enthusiastic about exploring Oxford, and open to new adventures. We did a whistlestop tour of some of our favourite bits of Oxford - diving into the famous Norrington Room in Blackwell's bookshop, gawping at the ceiling of Exeter College chapel, being warmly welcomed out of the rain by the Education Manager at the Museum of Natural History, and ending up with tea and biscuits and a fast and fascinating talk at the Environmental Change Institute.

Thence to the woods in the gathering gloom, a communal cook up and an early night. The following day was a gentle, drippy exploration of research projects in the woods, a fungal foray, writing some poetry, and close encounters with Dani, the Bat Lady's, “education” bats. We passed the evening carving pumpkins and baking apple crumbles. One of the students made custard from scratch!

The sun finally shone as we delivered our brave recruits back to the station on Sunday morning, leaving the pumpkins on guard back at the chalet.

We have proved that you can have a huge amount of fun and learn a lot in 36 hours. We are now keen to do it again …..

Kim Polgreen