Environmental

With an ever expanding world population increasing the amount of environmentally damaging pollutants, be that greenhouse gases or other chemical products of civilisation in the wrong place it is essential that we all take practical steps, often individually small, to limit and hopefully reduce our negative environmental impact.

Marcus Fincham believes that everyone can contribute – even measuring out tea cups into a kettle to minimise wasted water and electricity when making tea is a sound start and if employers can look to generate electricity from solar panels on the roof of the building in which you work so much the better.  I recognise that for many the practicalities of  rainwater harvesting to minimise destruction of acquifers is impractical but at a country level ambitious projects such as this and better management of our natural resources are essential.

One larger project Marcus was involved, through his being the sole director of Gulf Environment & Waste FZE in the UAE, was the recycling of oily wastes (sludges and slops) primarily from shipping – this kept the seas around Fujairah cleaner and whilst still not environmentally perfect made the best utilisation of what would otherwise become another pollutant.

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Whilst a goal to install solar panels, on all buildings is laudable it isn’t always practicable and one alternative approach with a development of offices in listed buildings in Hampshire was to utlilise a neighbouring farm barn to install a biomass boiler, fuelled by waste sawdust from local carpenters.  The boiler in blue is just about visible on this photo of the boiler room with its adjoining grey hopper for the sawdust.