Welcome to the blog edition of our fortnightly newsletter roundup.
This month we would like to tell you about our Regenerative Workforce programme, highlight two blogs contributed by friends of HALO.eco and ask for your thoughts on what is an easy to recall measurement for plastic pollution. As usual we'll be nudging you towards stuff we've found interesting to read and watch.
Firstly, however, a reminder of our new Starter Plan.. and the free 30 Day trial we're offering.
A New Plan - £4.50 per Month
We received lots of requests for a lower cost plan - so here it is... The Starter Plan at £4.50 per month. Over the course of a year we hope this will create a HALO that:
cleans up 42 kgs of plastic (the average UK household footprint)
plants 120 trees
purchases 6 tonnes of carbon offset certificates (the average "Scope I" carbon footprint of a UK citizen).
Free 30 Day Trial - get your first month as a Starter at no cost. It's free and on us...
HALO.eco Regenerative Workforce
We've been working hard on our new corporate product - the Regenerative Workforce.
Aimed initially at SMEs up to 250 employees and using the HALO.eco membership approach companies can make a conscious and easy to implement step to address the personal environmental footprint of their employees as part of their benefits package.
Over the course of a year offsetting 1 times the personal carbon footprint of an individual, double their plastic footprint and planting a lot of trees for £10 per month seems to us a cost-effective and impactful way for SMEs to take the steps that many surveys indicate employees increasingly demand from their employer.
We support Regenerative Workforce subscribers through the year with marketing material for their social media accounts and stakeholder communications.
If you know of any SME that might be interesting prospects, please let us know. To learn more you can also download the Regenerative Workforce presentation here.
We've Been Writing
A Letter to My Daughter on Climate Change - One of our friends, Nick Martin, was moved by his teenage daughter's involvement in climate activism to research climate change for himself. Nick allowed us to publish his letter which is a great read and a guide for the uninitiated explaining how we got where we are today.
Blue Carbon: "Natural Corn Flakes" - The UK government waits for the G-7 to announce an new £500 million "Blue Carbon Fund" - details are as yet sketchy and the question remains whether this is new money or a diversion from the ODA budget. In the meantime why not read again the blog by Perses Billimoria "A look at how we could use 'corn flakes' to aid the ocean in sequestering carbon" as it looks at one innovative approach to harnessing the potential of Blue Carbon.
Searching for a Plastic Pollution Benchmark
One kg of plastic pollution is equivalent to 20 plastic ducks.
Your monthly plastic footprint is more than 50 plastic ducks (the number in the photo above).
An annual £10 per month HALO.eco subscription will remove the equivalent of 1,600 plastic ducks from the environment (80kgs).
Imagine 1,600 plastic ducks bobbing serenely out to sea.
Why does this matter?
We find that when discussing the impact that a subscription has it is very easy to become blase about the sheer magnitude of the environmental mess we're making. We believe this is also a product of the benchmarks to which everyone is now accustomed.
For carbon footprints we're all conditioned to being told that 1 tonne of carbon is equivalent to x flights to New York or y miles driving a reasonably priced car. We happen to believe that the sheer familiarity of these measures breeds contempt or rather their mundanity leads to a level of unquestioning acceptance.
Some may recall our early work on how many sausages you could cook with a typical annual carbon footprint - it's a lot... revisit the blog here.
In the case of plastic we've all become accustomed to use the measure of plastic water bottles. Everyone's used to a plastic water bottle - easy to visualise, one can easily imagine a few plastic bottles littering a beach.
It's no longer incongruous - and that's a problem.
If it's not striking a discordant mental and visual note we become inured to it .. (that's partly why turtles struggling with plastic bags is the "classic" plastic pollution trope).
So for plastic pollution we've decided to gauge the "plastic duck" impact.
Other ideas for arresting visualisations of our HALO impact would be welcome.
We've Been Reading
Moby Duck: When 28,000 Ducks Were Lost at Sea - Apologies for continuing with the duck obsession but a funny read about the true life story of what actually happened when 28,000 bath toys were lost from a container ship in the North Pacific. There's a podcast too.
We've Been Watching
Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet - (Netflix) At HALO.eco we're massive fans of Rockstrom's Planetary Boundaries work. The concept that all systems of our planet are inter-connected and interdependent. In this Netflix film Johann Rockstrom is joined by David Attenbrough to explore the wonders of this inter-connectedness and the perilous position in which we find ourselves as we threaten to breach these boundaries. The Planetary Boundary theory is why in our own modest way we believe in the HALO approach, being Humanity, Air, Land and Oceans, as opposed to a narrow carbon-centric view of the world.
Thanks for reading, that's all for this fortnight.