Sloes and Carbon 2.0 Can London Lead the Low carbon Revolution?

This week the Sustainability Team celebrated the arrival of winter and the first frosts in London by using our lunch breaks to harvest hundreds of sloes from the countless bushes spread across Avery Hill Campus. Sloes are the berries found on the Prunus spinosa or blackthorn bush – a common shrub or small tree found in hedgerows all across the United Kingdom and are abundant among the rosehips (Rosaceae), hawthorns (Crataegus) and snowberry (Symphoricarpos albus) hedges at Avery Hill.

Avery Hill Sloes Picked on Monday

With the sloes we have been busy making sloe gin, a liqueur that is made by mixing the berries, sugar and gin. This year Nigel Slater’s recipe is the one being followed:

“Prick your sloes, about 450g, with a needle or freeze them and bash with a heavy weight. Tip them into sterilised bottles, the fruit coming a third of the way up. Divide 350g of caster or granulated sugar among them then top up with gin or vodka. It will take about 750ml. There is little point in using an expensive brand, by the way. Place the sealed bottles somewhere cool and dark. Leave for 8-10 weeks, turning the bottle occasionally, giving it a shake every week.” (taken from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/10/nigel-slater-classic-sloe-gin-recipe)

It is best to avoid the recipes that start with, “buy a bottle of gin, drink half....”

As well as picking sloes the Sustainability Team has been gallivanting around central London. On Wednesday evening we headed to London’s City Hall for the event ‘Carbon 2.0: Can London lead the low-carbon revolution?’ The event was put together by Carbon Culture, an organisation that tries to marry up the technical and cultural approaches to embedding sustainability in an organisation. Carbon Culture’s most famous work is the real-time energy monitoring for the Department for Energy and Climate Change that we have mentioned on this blog before: http://greengreenwich.blogspot.com/2011/09/carbon-management-plan-update.html.

View from the top of City Hall: Tower Bridge with Canary Wharf in the background.

The panel was debating the title question and taking questions from the floor that was made up from staff of universities, councils, airports, financial Institutions, construction companies, charities, theatres and a whole host of sustainability minded professionals from the public and private sector. While the overriding feeling at the event was positive and the panel seemed to genuinely believe London (and perhaps more specifically intelligent design) could bring about the low-carbon revolution there were also a lot of quite challenging questions.

- How do you cater for a global middle class that will have 3 billion more people?
- How can you join use technology to influence behaviour?
- What future is there for consumerism?
- How do you make loft insulation sexy?

Phwoarr! Check out that loft-insulation!

The questions are intrinsically linked and if you can find an answer you also provide an answer for a lot of other questions regarding the world of sustainability. Luke Nicholson from Carbon Culture was keen to push the idea that you need to make your sustainable solution/product appealing to the end user. If you can give someone what they want, they will use it and it is only once they are already engaged with it that you add the ‘sustainability story’. As long as the popular products and practices of the future are low carbon then you are already on the way towards a sustainable future effectively by ‘tricking’ people into sustainable practices. By answering the last of the four questions you can perhaps see how this might work – instead of selling loft insulation as a great way of saving money and cutting carbon emissions, sell it as a way of making your home warmer, more cosy, a more desirable place to live and for friends to visit and stay. This is a well known method for communicating sustainability and Futerra’s ‘Sell the Sizzle’ is the sustainability communicator’s bible: http://www.futerra.co.uk/downloads/Sellthesizzle.pdf.

As for the future of consumerism, well we have already decided everyone will be buying into great technologies that are not only appealing but also more sustainable - but how do you cater for the extra billions of people projected to be living on the planet over the next decades when you have limited resources to go round? Mat Hunter from the Design Council suggested making London a ‘shareable city’ a place where ‘collaborative consumption’ is the order of the day. Instead of everyone owning a car people will be members of car clubs like StreetCar or ZipCar, instead of owning a bike people will use the ‘Boris Bikes’. Mat Hunter was particularly positive that London could lead in this way because the city is ‘a densely packed vast Petri dish with a concentrated group of highly intelligent people.’ High praise indeed for London.

The Sustainability Train at full steam.

It has been a little while since I last posted here on the Green Greenwich Blog, largely due to the non-stop nature of everything going on here! It barely feels like we have had a moment to catch a breath here at the University and it looks like it is going to be that way for foreseeable future.

Where's Kat hiding?

The Sustainability Team is somewhat reduced at the moment with our Captain Kat Thorne exploring the rainforests in far and distant lands but John and the Gnome have been hard at work in her absence. Most notably on the Higher Education Carbon Management Plan where we have joined forces with the Head of Estates and the Building Services Manager to keep the University chugging along in getting the plan ready for early next year. Expect to see numerous projects appearing spread across all the departments of the University all with measures in place for cutting our carbon emissions and working towards the targets set out by HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) and the Climate Change Act 2008.

Last week Sustainability and Marketing were knocking their heads together to work towards an exciting campaign to promote everything ‘sustainability’ at the University with conversation moving from the website, to fridge magnets, to computer games, staff and student engagement and potential competitions for our students to get involved with. Speaking of students getting involved we have found a space on the brand new shiny Biodiversity Group for one lucky student who lives at Avery Hill to assist with the direction we want to take our biodiversity projects. I’m hoping that this is going to lead to new era of environmental understanding and diversity on the Campus here at Avery Hill and there already seems to be interest for restoring the dingle, reinvigorating the part of the River Shuttle that runs through the campus, creating a wildflower meadow, building an allotment and planting fruiting trees.

On the subject of fruit I am delighted to announce that I have been reaping the benefits of being based here at Avery Hill and have spent at least two lunchtimes wandering around picking the delights the campus has to offer. On the menu last Thursday was a dish I have never tried cooking before – Quince Crumble. It’s delicious but a very different ingredient to any that I have used before. The quince has an incredibly sharp taste which you must compliment with buckets of sugar and cooking for long lengths of time, once this is done however you have an unforgettable flavour which reminds me of the taste of the Toxic Waste sweets! Not a great name for a sweet but they are delicious if you like that sort of thing.

Quince Crumble (Mine wasn't quite as beautiful!)

If you want to give the Quince Crumble a try here’s the recipe I followed. The next quince dish I will try will be Quince Membrillo, which the Spanish like to eat with cheese.

Tonight I will be attempting something a little bit different with another fruit I have found on the Avery Hill Campus. Tonight is Sloe Gin Night! I have picked roughly 50 sloe berries which have been placed in the freezer (Sloes you traditionally pick after the first frost but I am inpatient so I’m creating a fake frost by putting them in the freezer) they will be removed this evening, will go through the torment of being meticulously pricked with a needle and then placed into a big bottle of cheap gin. No need to go for an expensive gin here, the sloes will overpower the flavour anyway. Add a little sugar and then place in a dark cupboard until Christmas. Christmas Day, get the gin out and serve to all your friends and family. Boxing Day, stay in bed!

Sloes, Sugar and Gin - A recipe for success!

In other news I have been working hard on the preparations for the launch of our Sustainability Champions Network which is looking like it will be on the 9th of November. To go hand in hand with this we will also be launching our Green Impact workbook so our Champions will have a great project to get going with right from the onset. Next week we have the first meeting of the aforementioned Biodiversity Group, a visit from Joanna Romanowicz from the NUS, LUEG meetings, the GET Opportunities Recruitment Fair and a whole load of other goings on. Looks like it’s full steam ahead for little while longer then.