Cambridge City Council consults with environmental groups on Climate Change

Bev Sedley, Kati Preston and James Smith at the Climate Change Strategy Workshop

I am always impressed when I have dealings with Cambridge City Council officers on climate change issues because they care just as much as we do and are always keen to work with us where we can. Right now the council is in the closing stages of the five yearly review of their climate change strategy and I was delighted when David Kidston (Strategy and Partnerships manager) picked up our idea for a workshop to discuss the plan and ran with it. The date was set for 2nd Feb and in the end there were about 30 people there room a whole range of environmental groups in Cambridge including 38 degrees, Pivotal, Cambridge Past Present and Future,  Cambridge Carbon Footprint and of course Transition Cambridge.  Fortunately the Guildhall has some good sized rooms.

It was a bit of a rush, trying to review the whole strategy in 90 minutes but we did a valiant job. David asked for our comments and ideas on each of the 5 objectives and there were council experts to answer questions and explain. So, for example, the reason why the strategy calls for electric taxis but not electric buses is because there are no electric double decker electric buses on the market yet - and single decker buses can’t handle enough people. Emma Davies said she was delighted that we supported their idea to use planning rules to promote energy saving measures as consequential improvements. (So for example, if someone has plans for a home extension they would be required to take measures to reduce energy use in the rest of the house at the same time, where feasible). But mainly the council wanted to hear our new ideas, of which there were plenty. Suggestions included the council buying electricity from a green energy supplier, adjusting the park and ride bus services to improve uptake in those services, running an Open Eco Office event along the lines of CCF’s Open Eco Homes, and many more.

In fact the council has already achieved significant carbon savings from previous projects such as switching to LED lighting (Corn Exchange and some car parks), upgrading heating and cooling equipment (various swimming pools and leisure centres and offices) and even a heat recovery system at the crematorium. However, most of us didn’t know about this and there was a general feeling that communicating these successes to more people would change perceptions and raise aspirations across the city.

Also there will soon be a ‘Cambridge Sustainable Housing Guide’ that will set higher standards for sustainability and energy efficiency than current building regulations. Unfortunately this will only apply to new social housing sites and developments owned by the council because the council is not allowed to apply it more widely.

We covered a lot in a very short space of time, and David Kidston said that all of our captured comments would be included in their report to councillors.

Home insulation targets in sight

It has been a very long and eventful journey from April 2014 when the Cambridge Green Communities fund was first announced but the target 1000 'hard to treat' homes to be insulated is now in sight. The deadline for registering is the end of March so if you are still thinking about it you need to do so quickly. More than 950 homes have already signed up and nearly half of those completed.

I heard the latest news yesterday from Justin Smith, home energy officer at Cambridge City Council. We were both at a workshop discussing the Cambridge City Council Climate Change Strategy (consultation now closed). The strategy is for the whole city, not just managing the council's own carbon footprint, and the Green Deal Communities funding has been a significant plank in the actions for objective 2 'Reducing energy consumption and emissions from homes and businesses in Cambridge and tackling fuel poverty, ...'.

Homes are classified as 'hard to treat' because they are unsuitable for cavity wall insulation, typically because they don't have cavity walls. Cambridge and the surrounding areas have an awful lot of homes with solid walls and also homes with 'system build' constructions that don't have fillable cavities. Insulating them makes a big difference: improving the comfort of the residents, and reducing energy use and carbon emissions. There are also grants for a variety of energy saving measures for houses in the private rented sector. The total funding provided was  £7.8 million.

The TC energy group have done our best to support this project from the start. Soon after the launch we ran a forum on Thermal Comfort in Older Houses and put links on our advice pages to encourage people to sign up. Also there have been several events run by Cambridge Carbon Footprint. At each one there were experts to answer questions on solid wall insulation issues and Justin Smith explained the funding on offer. However, in the initial stages it was slow going. It was a learning experience both for the council team and for their Action on Energy delivery partner, Climate Energy. To be fair, Climate Energy were very experienced working with social housing but for private home owners the requirements are a bit different.

One problem was that Climate Energy were rather limited in their expertise. They could supply external wall insulation but if you wanted anything else done at the same time - such as insulating a flat roof or doing maintenance on the eaves, then that was difficult if not impossible to arrange. In the beginning, when Climate Energy was the only approved installer these limitations were a serious problem but gradually other local installers have won approval and now there are nine with a wide range of expertise including other types of insulation and windows as well as wall insulation.

Then in October last year Climate Energy went into administration causing consternation for Justin and the council team - and hundreds of home owners who had already contracted with Climate Energy and paid their deposits but not yet had the work done. Fortunately Climate Energy had subcontracted installations to other firms such as Thrift Energy and they have been very flexible about taking over the individual household contracts - sometimes even honouring the deposits already paid if they could not be recovered.

The deadlines for completing the installations is still tight and there is very little money left now (so if you want to take advantage of the £4000/home grant still available you had better get to it right away). The whole project has been a nightmare to administer and Justin definitely has a few more gray hairs than before. However the benefits will be felt for many years. The residents of the homes that have been insulated will appreciate the extra warmth and lower bills - and the installers who have been involved in delivering those schemes have gained experience in delivering insulation to difficult homes. These skills will be invaluable in the future as there are a lot more houses to retrofit as we transition to a low carbon economy in 2050.

Running a repair café - an interview with Chris Möller

Mending a saucepan at the Royston repair cafe

What is a repair café? How did you get involved?
It’s a place you can bring stuff that is broken, and there are people there like me that like to fix things – and if we can we do. They started in the Netherlands: there is an organisation, www.repaircafe.org. They have about 200 registered there and 100s more across the world. You give them some money and they give you an information pack and logos you can use.

I went to one first in Royston to see what it was like, and then I started one in Cottenham. We have a community centre that has a café and a room behind that you can hire. I asked if I could have it for free and they said yes – because there’s always lots of waiting around and while people are waiting they will sit in the café and have some coffee, so it works for them too. Now I also help with the Cambridge ones, organised by Transition Cambridge and Cambridge Carbon Footprint. So I do 10-12 a year, something like that.

What sort of things do you mend?

Electrical appliances are the bread and butter.

Small electrical appliances are the bread and butter; also computers and computer peripherals, phones, toys, bikes, pushchairs, a parasol - anything that turns up.

The most common job is a toaster with a burnt out element. They have a nichrome wire and it gets a hot spot and breaks. You could put a new element in but they are very specific to each make. So my standard technique is, typically the wire is wrapped around a mica sheet so you drill a little hole in that, push the tail end through and join it up on the other side.

Also thermal fuses – lots of things have a thermal fuse, like a hair dryer – put your hand over the end for a few seconds and it gets too hot, blows the fuse and it’s a write-off. But a new fuse costs about 20p. You put that in and it’s as good as new.

I have a checklist of all the tools and bits I need to bring. It takes me about an hour to get it all together in boxes before I go – it weighs 80 kg and I keep adding new items every time I find I need something I don’t have with me.

Isn’t it a bit scary, taking someone else’s stuff apart?
Well if it was worth thousands of pounds it would be! But most of the things people bring in they’ve already written off. You say to them I’ll do what I can. I’m not an expert and I may make it worse. They say fine – have a go. Then you explain what you are doing. You might open it up and say, I don’t understand this, do you mind if I experiment? and they say OK.

There is a legal issue too, but the way I see it is, if you asked your neighbour to fix something for you and they damaged it, you wouldn’t sue them would you? Well the repair café is a way of meeting some new neighbours. Asking someone to fix your thing at a repair café is like asking a neighbour.

You do need a good grasp of what you can and can’t do. You need to understand about safety, including your own safety - like with microwaves you need to be a bit careful you don’t fry yourself. I have some advice for repairers that covers some of those issues.

How did you learn to do all this?
The trite answer is I have three sons and they were good at breaking things so I got a lot of experience. Right from my childhood, my Dad would never dream of throwing anything away until he had mended it at least twice and I’ve inherited that from him. It wasn’t the money so much, it was more that he didn’t like to be dependent – we have so much stuff these days that we have no idea how it works and we rely on other people to keep it going. My Dad would hate that.

What do you like about doing a repair café?
Well honestly, the look on someone’s face when you bring their whatever-it-is back from the dead – it’s just priceless. That alone is ample reward for my time. Last Sunday I was at Royston and someone brought in a broken DVD player. Unfortunately I hadn’t brought my TV with me so I couldn’t test it but I did the usual maintenance and said let’s hope – well apparently it worked first time and I got this gushing email, they were so thrilled - it is very satisfying.

And also its fun, and you get to look inside all sorts of things that you wouldn’t normally come across. For example, the other day I was given an astronomical telescope sight to fix. I’d never seen one before and I’m never likely to do so again. I took it apart and there was a wire that was broken so I fixed that and it all worked.

People know I fix things so if they knock on my door and ask me to look at something it's quite useful to be able to say – why don’t you bring it along to the next repair café!

How much does it cost to do these repairs?
Well a screw doesn’t cost much, or a fuse, or a bit of insulating tape. Most of the repairs are things like that. But we do say to the repairers, if they have expenses then we will pay for them from the donations. We usually make a profit.

Are there any repairs you’ve done that are particularly special for you?
The thing that tickles me most, was a couple that brought in the press button from the igniter for a gas hob. They couldn’t find a replacement and they had looked everywhere – even in India when they went to visit family. The switch was held together by two rivets, so I drilled them out and took it apart and inside there was a little phosphor-bronze spring that was broken. So I soldered a piece of wire across the break and put it back together again with two screws to replace the rivets – and hey presto it worked! They were so thrilled – I had achieved the impossible as far as they were concerned.

Of course like most of the repairs we do it made no sense at all commercially – the switch probably cost 20p new and it took me 20 minutes to fix it. You couldn’t run a business like that.

Also I remember a 7 year old boy came in with a radio-controlled car that was broken. His Dad was very clear – he said you are going to show this boy how to repair this and he will do it himself. I have to say the boy did a cracking good job. There were a few broken bits inside that we managed to glue back together. My experience with my own son’s things has taught me which glue to use in which circumstances.

Sometimes people bring things that aren’t actually broken, especially if they’ve been donated so they don’t know much about it. A lady came in with a couple of kids and a pushchair she’d been given and it would only go round in circles. Well the truth was one of the wheels was locked in position and she needed to be shown how to unlock it.

What sort of people volunteer as repairers?
Oh all sorts: mostly retired, but we also get undergraduates who like repairing computer equipment, and we have a husband and wife couple who are both very good. It’s a mix.

What would you say to someone thinking of volunteering as a repairer?
Come along and make somebody happy – and have good fun yourself! Surprise yourself that you can fix things you didn’t know you can fix.

When is the next repair cafe near here?
The next one in Royston will be 1st November - look out for it at https://www.facebook.com/roystonrepaircafe. There may be one before then in Cambridge - if so it will be in the Transition Cambridge newsletter.

Why are there hardly any Passivhaus homes in Cambridge?

Would you like to have heating bills of only a couple of hundred quid a year? You can - if you buy a Passivhaus home. This energy standard is so impressive, homes are heated almost entirely with just the energy from the people and appliances running in them. You don't need more than just a couple of small radiators for backup, so you can use that wall space for other things. Norwich has just announced £300 million funding for Passivhaus starting with 237 homes to be built this year. Passivhaus is proven technology in this country - so why isn't it being done in Cambridge?

The energy group discussed this at our last meeting in May. First, Margaret Reynolds explained about the standard. The fundamental requirement is that the building is designed to use no more than 15 kWh/m2/year for heating. This is about a sixth the normal for new homes. It means a 100m2 property - a wee bit bigger than average - using electricity for heating would cost no more than £210/year for heating. Passivhaus homes generally use electricity because there isn't enough for a gas boiler to do. If the electricity is renewable that means they are very low carbon too.

Passivhaus standard is achieved by careful design and high quality construction standards with particular attention to:

• High standard insulation for walls, windows, roof and even the floor, with no thermal bridges where the heat can leak out by bypassing the insulation
• Very good air tightness
• Mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, giving you fresh air in every room, but with the minimum of heat loss.

There is also a slightly less stringent standard for Passivhaus retrofit (EnerPHit) and there are examples in this country but they are much more rare. It is a huge job to make an existing house properly airtight and to insulate it all the way round without leaving any thermal bridges. For example, you often need to raise the roof a bit to leave room for insulating round the eaves properly! EnerPHit isn't usually financially viable, but some of the measures may be. For example, external wall insulation, Passivhaus standard triple glazed windows, loft insulation and as much air tightness as possible will get you some of the way.

So, back to the original question - why isn't anyone building Passivhaus homes here in Cambridge? Some of the new developments are being built to reasonably high standards. For example, all homes on the North West Cambridge site are being built to Code for Sustainable Homes level 5. That is, or was, a government standard which covers carbon emissions, water use and runoff, waste management, biodiversity, sound insulation and pollution. It doesn't require particular standards for energy use directly and you can offset carbon emissions from energy use by generating renewable energy. So this standard isn't quite as stringent for energy use though it covers lots of other areas. In any case, our government has scrapped it and is introducing a simpler 'zero carbon homes' standard instead. This isn't fully defined yet but it will come into effect next year. It looks like this will also have provision for carbon offsetting through renewable energy generation or 'allowable solutions'. Also small sites will be exempt (though exactly what that means is not yet defined either).

Our local council does not have the powers to require that new homes and other buildings are built to Passivhaus standard. Developers could choose to use it, and there is evidence from other parts of the UK that Passivhaus homes are in high demand. However, in Cambridge the housing market is so over-heated that there isn't any price premium for energy efficiency. (A lot of homes are bought by foreign investors and empty most of the year anyway).

Developers may not be interested but self builders are. We know of one home already and we understand this will be taking part in OpenEcoHomes in September this year so you will be able to visit it then. We know that the K1co-housing development are considering it too. Passivhaus certification is quite expensive to get simply because of the extra documentation required, but you can use Passivhaus planning tools and technology to get a home that is at least in the same league. If you are interested in this, contact Margaret and she will point you in the right direction.

Wildlife Wanderings - Cherry Hinton Chalk Pits 21/03/15

Our wildlife wanderings trip to Cherry Hinton Chalk Pits, was incredibly cold, but 17 of us joined together to take a look at the site and compare East Pit to Lime Kiln Close, both of which are at different stages of nature recolonising after human activity.

Wildlife Wanderers heading into East Pit.

East Pit and Lime Kilm Close were quarries providing lime and chalk to build some of the Cambridge University colleges.  Lime Kiln Close closed 200 years ago and is now a woodland site dominated by Ash and Field Maple.  East Pit on the other hand only closed in the 1980s and was reprofiled in 2009, providing more exposed space for chalk loving plants and insects to colonise.

Chalk was quarried from the site, to build the Cambridge University colleges.

The site is designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and contains Glow worms, which you can come and see on an June and July evening.  There is also an increasing population of the rare Moon Carrot, which is only found on two other sites in the whole of the country.

Ian pointed out which plants were being encouraged on the site.

The site is being managed to encourage chalk grassland plants, without introducing them purposefully. Ian Harvey a conservation volunteer who helps record and monitor the wildlife at East Pit, as well as helping pull up any unwanted plants, joined us for the walk.  He told us which plant species were being encouraged on the site and which were actively pulled up, such as Buddleia, Rosebay Willowherb, Ragwort.

Carline Thistle is one of the key species being encourage on the site.  This plant is a remnant from last year.

Although not a key species being encouraged, Colt's-foot is one of the first plants to flower at the pits.

I'm not sure what plant this is, but its a beautiful photograph of the seed heads. Thanks Axel.

March is right at the very beginning of the flowering season, but May through to August is the best time to come and see the chalk grassland plants.  If you fancy popping onto the site to find some, here is a list of the 'positive indicators' for chalk grassland, which you might be able to spot this spring and summer.

• Wild Thyme
• Wild Basil
• Milkwort
• Wild Strawberry
• Bird's Foot Trefoil
• Kidney Vetch
• Salad Burnet
• Fine-leaved grass
• Perforate St John's Wort
• Mignonette
• Weld
• Common Centaury
• Field Scabious
• Fairy Flax
• Harebell
• Restharrow

Simply google the names to find pictures of what to look for, or get hold of a British plants guide.

East Pit from the far end of the site.

Whilst visiting the site also keep an eye out for a pair of Peregrine falcons, that have been breeding on the cliffs over the last few years.  If you see them and their nest, please don't get too close, as they are easily disturbed.

Photos courtesy of Axel Minet.

 

 

Wildlife Wanderings - Paradise LNR 22/02/15

Last month Wildlife Wanderings visited Paradise Local Nature Reserve,

Here a few photos from our visit.  Thank you to Axel Minet for taking the photographs.

Paradise fen is a mixture of water loving woodland and some large pond areas.

This is the flowering body of the Butterbur (Petasites hybridus), which was recorded on this site by John Ray in the 17th Century.

Wildlife wanderers taking a closer look at lichens.  Lichens are both algae and fungus living together in a symbiotic relationship.  Symbiotic meaning that both provide some benefit to the other organism.  The algae photosynthesises creating the food and the fungus provides shelter.

The snowdrops were in wonderful clusters through the wood.

Have you ever looked inside a snowdrop flower?  Many of us hadn't, until one of our younger wanderers opened one up to show us.

We were surprised to find some beautiful fungus on the site, as we thought the season was over.  We've been struggling to I.D the fungi on our walks, we think this one could be a glistening inkcap (Coprinellus miceus).  Is anyone able to help offer a positive identification?

This one however we did manage to identify.  These were rock hard black balls growing on a large tree trunk.  Daldinia concentrica

As spring arrives we see the last of last years seed heads, this is simply beautiful.

Thanks again to Axel Minet for taking the photos.  Looking forward to posting some more about our walk at Cherry Hinton Chalk Pits in the next week.

The dangers of TTIP

Food Group focus concern on TTIP

The Transition Food Group met Julian Huppert MP recently to discuss concerns about the Transatlantic Treaty and Investment Partnership (TTIP) which aims to increase free trade between the EU and USA in a few years’ time.

Why are we at the TC Food Group so concerned? In one sentence, TTIP could lead to lower environmental standards, higher carbon emissions, and a threat to democracy. TTIP aims to reduce barriers to free trade by harmonising trading rules and standards. There is widespread concern that “regulatory harmonisation ” will erode or weaken rules and standards that protect the environment, food, workers, privacy, human and animal health, and financial stability.

An increase in global trade with more production and transport of goods stands in direct conflict with the urgent need to reduce global carbon emissions. One report suggests that TTIP could increase annual US motor vehicle exports to the EU by $84.7 billion by 2027­ that's 650% up on 2012 exports. European manufacturers would also benefit. Between 2 and 4 million vehicles per year would be shipped across the Atlantic in both directions, contributing to an extra 11M metric tonnes of CO2 emissions, according to a European Commission Impact Assessment Report on the future of EU­US Trade Relations.

Food Group members share widespread public concern about the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), international courts where corporations could sue governments for laws passed by our Parliament that ‘impede trade’ i.e. threaten the profits of multinational companies. This threatens democracy, and has been demonstrated by recent cases to restrict the ability of governments to legislate in the interests of their citizens. The Mexican government was forced to pay $96.4m because it imposed an import tax on products using harmful high-fructose corn syrup. Similarly, Syngenta and Bayer have been involved in a high-profile lawsuit to try and reclaim lost earnings from the ban on neoicitinoids in the EU.

The Food Group has a  Facebook group for discussion of TTIP