Chris Tomkins’ Blog

Last night we went on a free 90 minute, guided, evening nature watch at Blashford Lakes study centre, just north of Ringwood. We were provided with binoculars and a bat detector on arrival and then set off on the short walk to the hide. Once there we took up positions around the circular hide and sat for about 45mins in silence (well apart from the annoying kids who kept kicking their feet against the side of the hide) and saw pretty much nothing. I saw the back end of a rabbit and Shelley saw a rabbit and a roe deer in the distance (badgers have been regularly seen from the hide in the past but not on this occasion).

Disappointed we headed back towards the study centre and then got out our bat detectors and turned them on. These convert the bats ultrasonic calls and convert them into audible sounds. We could hear lots of bats around (mainly pipistrelle according to the detected frequency apparently) and as we walked back to the study centre we could clearly see them flying overhead.

Once we got back to the study centre we examined the moth trap (a bright light to which moths are attracted) and could see several different varieties. While looking at the moths we heard the call of a female tawny owl and our guide got out his owl whistle and shortly after we could hear the call of both the male and female. After a few minutes of listening to the calls and blowing the whistle we saw the fantastic site of one of the twany owls flying directly overhead, its wings outstreched, fully illuminated by the moth lamp. This made the whole evening really worthwhile.

All in all it was a pretty interesting evening (especially as it was free) and we will definitely go back to have a proper look around the site which is run by Hampshire Wildlife Trust at a later date. If you want to see wildlife such as deer and rabbits though, then you are probably best just driving through the New Forest late at night - we saw a small heard of deer, several rabbits and some New Forest ponies just on the way back

It’s amazing how far some people will go to be green:

Over the last few weeks (as those of you in the UK will know) we have experienced the wettest start to a summer since records began nearly 300 years ago. As a result places like Hull, Tewkesbury, Gloucester and Oxford have experience extreme flooding and in the case of some towns they have lost fresh water supply due to the water treatment facilities being flooded.
As a keen environmentalist this got me thinking about whether rainwater harvesting may have gone some way to help. Freerain, a supplier of rainwater harvesting systems in the UK, seem to supply domestic tanks from 3,500 to 6,500 litres in capacity and commercial systems which I can only assume have larger tanks.  Systems like this would not only take rainwater out of the mains drainage system but would also provide you with water in your house even when the mains water was not available. I appreciate such systems are unlikely to have prevented the flooding, but it would be interesting to know what the impact of installing such systems would have been on the flooding or would be in future flooding situations. Definitely one to consider for the Environment Agency.

I have been using Freecycle for some time now and think it is a really good idea - I’ve even encouraged a few friends to sign up. However, I think there are a number of things that it could do better:

Notification

Currently you have the option of:

1. An email for every single item posted (best option to maximise your chance of getting an item but huge volume of email)
2. A daily digest summary email of items posted (most practical option)

3. Checking for posts on the web (not an RSS feed so requires you to keep going back to the web site)

Items are either posted as offered, taken, wanted or received. Currently there is no way of being able to subscribe to a particular category (e.g. offers only) and no automated logic that removes no longer available items from the daily digest (i.e. an item can be reported as offered and taken in the same digest). This can result in a lot of unnecessary email  and people leaving the movement because they get frustrated with the sheer volume of information.

Regional separation

Freecycle has chosen to split users into geographical regions. You can subscribe to multiple regions but only post to one - this one being the one in which you live. This is to encourage people to both offer and accept local items (there is no point saving something from landfill if you drive hundreds of miles to collect it), however there is a flaw in this argument. What happens if you live on the edge of a region (for instance I have just been told I am in the New Forest East group instead of Southampton). This means that people who live incredibly close to you, but in another region, will not be able to see your posts and vice versa - thus potentially reducing the amount of freecycling taking place. I think what they need to do is allow you to define a profile which has to contain your postcode and an amount of distance you are willing to travel in order to collect an item. Then you could subscribe to posts that are made by people who live within that geographical region - thus preventing the need for regional groups altogether.

Freecycle is still a great idea and I am not advocating people giving up on the movement - but if I was to give it a report card today it would say “Good, but could do better”.
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When I was at school, it was only the girl’s whose uniform was green - and that was only the colour. If you want an environmentally friendly school uniform, Marks and Spencer, has just launched one where many of the clothes are made from recycled plastic! Read more here. It looks like BHS are going to follow suit. Lets hope this is the start of things to come.

Sainsburys have announced that on Friday 27th April that shoppers at their stores will not be given the normal carrier bags but will be given one of their bags for life free of charge. This is in a bid to encourage shoppers to reuse their bags rather than use disposable carrier bags.

It will be interesting to see if it works as if people don’t bother reusing these bags for life then this is just as bad as not reusing carrier bags.

Good on Sainsburys for giving it a try - its a shame the other supermarkets don’t join in.

Water is a precious commodity and many people are not as lucky as us in the western world where we can normally get water just by turning on a tap in our house. Consequently we should all do our bit to save water wherever we can to reduce our usage - a useful side effect of this is that our water bills go down! Some of the water saving tips I have adopted so far and I think pretty much anyone can do are:

• Install a water butt in your garden
• Turn the shower off when actually washing and then on again to rinse off
• Only boil the amount of water you need for a cup of tea (this also saves electricity - an added bonus)
• Share a bath
• Ensure the tap is turned off while cleaning your teeth

Combined these tips save quite a bit of water.

Having a water butt in the garden has proved to be invaluable. Not just for the obvious watering of plants in the garden but also watering plants indoors, cleaning down the patio, cleaning the car, etc. - so much so, that I am thinking of getting a second one (if anyone has one going spare and is local to Southampton let me know!). Some water companies and local councils have offers allowing you to buy such water butts at a discounted price and recycling organisations such as Freecycle often have these on offer, so there is no excuse - go and get one!

Lenovo (the Chinese PC manufacturer who bought IBM’s PC business in 2005) has just been ranked by Greenpeace as the most eco-friendly electronics firm. One of the main reasons for the high ranking was the number of takeback services it offers in countries where its products are sold. However there is still work to do as Lenovo lost points for using toxic chemicals in their manufacturing process. Read the full story here.

The headlines will no doubt talk about Helen Mirren winning best actress or Martin Scorcese finally winning best director, but look at all the results and you will see that An Inconvenient Truth has won in 2 categories - best original song and less surprisingly best documentary feature. Hopefully this will encourage even more people to see the film - which can only be a good thing.

Apparently one of the major problems with music events such as Glastonbury is the vast number of tents that get left behind after the event. A student has come up with an environmentally friendly solution involving tents made of cardboard which can be recycled after the event. Now before you ask, yes they are waterproof (apparently)! Not sure I fancy staying in one of these at an event like Glastonbury which has been plagued with mud and heavy downpours over the last few years! Any takers?