This is a tough one, the subject is open to as many opinions as there are bands appearing at this weekend’s V Festival (where the fcuk did that come from?).
The story in bullets:
* Wiltshire student (Tom Tapper)
* Aiming to cycle John O’Groats to Land’s End
* On-board solar panel will recharge their gadgets
* Aiming to make the journey zero-carbon
But this isn’t right, is it?
By discounting the carbon footprint that the build/manufacture of everything he wears, rides, uses and cycles upon, isn’t Tom Tapper distorting the true picture?
Otherwise it’s like the situation of an astronaut standing on the International Space Station throwing a small metal box at the sun and making a declaration that the journey of the box (from ISS to the sun) is a zero-carbon journey.
Whereas if we consider the process by which the box and the astronaut came to be on the ISS in the first place, the journey is far from zero-carbon.
Tom Tapper (and his team) are using modern bicycles made in an intensive industrial process. The ingredients include carbon fibre. The tyres are made from various manufactured materials and will include rubber – tapped in and transported from trees in far-away, exotic forests before being transported thousands of miles and put through an industrial process. His clothes will also have been manufactured in industrial processes (and probably manufactured in and transported from foreign countries).
And – oh boy – let’s not even think about the carbon footprint that the manufacture of solar panels produces!
Hmmm…
So not a very zero-carbon journey at all.
My point here is nothing to do with the carbon/zero-carbon argument.
I’m just having a little poke at the misrepresentation of a story and the obscuring of some fundamental facts.
B.
Hi Brennig,
Just picked up on your blog via Google. I’m Tom, one of four of the guys behind the Carbon Cycle.
As a group we’ve never proclaimed to be ‘zero-carbon’. As you have rightly pointed out this would be near-on impossible as every produce we use/consume has an embedded carbon content. We decided to use the term ‘zero-carbon’ to distinguish ourselves from the barrage of companies that proclaim to be carbon-neutral by planting a few trees elsewhere in the world. We believe this is a half-assed approach – see http://www.cheatneutral.com for a quirky analogy. So although ‘zero-carbon’ may have been a little misleading, we felt it differentiated ourselves from the mass of green-washing.
We challenged ourselves to try and live a low-carbon lifestyle. This meant that we didn’t just use a solar panel (and other wind-up devises) to provide our light and power our electrical equipment, but we endeavoured to source all our food locally (to reduce food miles) and to minimise the hot showers we took etc…In addition to this (as we realised we would be open to criticism from people such as yourself) we also handed out energy-saving light bulbs as we went. Each of which would save 70kg of CO2¬ per year if used in place of a standard bulb. As we handed out 100 bulbs we technically offset around 7 tonnes of CO2. This far outweighed any of the embedded carbon within our equipment or during the journey by a significant margin.
In getting too bogged down with the term ‘zero-carbon’ I think you’re missing the point. The journey was a challenge cross the country on a low-carbon budget, to raise awareness to a broad spectrum of society of some of the positive and simple things that can be done to reduce carbon footprint at the individual level. We wanted to visit many of the positive initiates that are active throughout the UK, to step away from the doom-and-gloom approach taken by many.
I think that you (like myself on occasions) are getting frustrated as the vast array of crap that is being pumped out by companies and the media who are desperate to jump on the eco-bandwagon. We were trying to take a step away from this.
We’ll be releasing a short documentary via the internet soon. I would be interested to know your opinions after seeing the doc.
Tom