Things were going smoothly, and, seeing that we were apparently trying to swim against the tide of progress, it was looking all too easy to accomplish. Then quite suddenly, and with little explanation, the guys we were working with to develop the natural dyes said they didn’t want to carry on. As we were the first people they had worked with who were demanding rather high ethical standards, they didn’t believe that these issues were of growing concern in the west. Where are the orders? they wanted to know. We can’t get orders until we sort the dyes out, we answered. This, it turns out, wasn’t good enough, and so they pulled out.

I can understand their reluctance to spend time developing something that no-one else appears to be asking for. In fact western rug traders have been so clear in their demands for cheaper rugs, woven at speed and using consistent dyes where colour can be precisely matched and repeated, that they had some trouble even understanding our reasons for not doing it that way. That 2007 was the UNESCO year of natural dyes, and 2009 is the UNESCO year of natural fibres means not a thing in an industry that has bent over backwards to try to compete with the cheaper and poorer quality rugs produced by their Indian neighbours.

In a “fast food” market that values speed over quality, progress has meant mechanisation, and rug companies not up to these changes have disappeared. The growing demand for environmentally friendly products over here has yet to make a great impact over there. A change might be coming, but as the Nepalese are still trying to reach the previous goal, it’s difficult for them to grasp why they might need to turn back now.

So, they are on board with everything else (see previous article) because we are paying for the extra time it would make to complete each rug, and people still have the skills, but we parted ways when we attempted not just to use natural dyes, but bring natural dying up to a standard where they could be used with confidence to meet our rather picky western demands. The up-front time required to do this, even with our help, was a step too far. It would mean changing the way the dying is done to make it less of a health hazard to the dyers (although they thought their new chemical dying vats had already achieved this); changing some of the dye stuffs (some of them are poisonous, some come from endangered plants and trees, like red sandlewood which needs to be cut down to get the heartwood suitable for dying, and some are the byproducts of animals or the animals themselves). It also means changing the water that’s being used. The water is so unreliable because of the varying chemical and mineral content (which changes the colour of the dyes), not to mention all the other stuff that gets dumped into it, that we needed to find a way to use a consistent (and consistently clean) water source. Quite prepared were we to invest in the necessary water collection and purification, introduce new natural dyestuff to compensate for the colours we were would need to remove, and pay for the R&D in general. However given the history of rapid industrialisation of the rug industry, they simply don’t (at this point) believe the effort it would take from their side is at all worthwhile. After all, no-one else has ever mentioned these things to them before.

Reaching this rather unscalable brick wall in our development, and after spending a peaceful week when we stopped doing anything to do with rugs and imagined how easy life would be if we were to just give the whole thing up, we decided nonetheless to persevere.

However taking on board the issues the Nepalese raised, we decided it might well be a good idea to test the meerkat first, before we go for full world domination. So we’ve gone back to basics and decided on a very cut down, rather purist approach. Since we cannot possibly engage in anything to do with the chemical dye ‘scene’ as it is in Kathmandu, and we will need to prove ourselves first before we can hope for any dye house to agree to the kind of R&D that would make vegetable dying a real alternative, we are relying on the sheep to come up with their own colours and going dye free. Simples.

Self coloured rugs are a venerable Tibetan tradition and the antique ones we have seen are beautiful in their simplicity of tone. (Plus neutral colours are the most sold colours in the rug industry anyway).

So, for the sake of our suppliers, here’s where you can help us test the meerkat.

When you’re witnessing your world going slowly but surely down the tubes, and big business doing its best to keep the deadly status quo, (the recent bail out of the motor industry in the same week as the UK govt encouraged everyone to opt for electric cars springs to mind), it’s fairly easy to get discouraged. The best we can do in our own little lives is stuff like changing our light

bulbs for energy efficient ones, which is great, but it really doesn’t form a credible challenge to Npower and the like who would prefer us not to find solutions that make us less dependant on their energy. As a pack they are large enough to lobby the government, and they can pretend to be as green as they like, but the fact remains that enabling people to sustain a high-energy lifestyle is like a drug dealer drip feeding an addict cocaine. Its seems like a good idea to the addict for now, but it’s not helping them kick the habit – something they must ultimately do if they want to survive.

Our little tweets of protest aren’t going to do much to destroy this Trojan horse, which is why its such a relief to go to the occasional conference. It gives you a bit of a boost listening to people who seem to have some access to both big money and clever engineers, and who are doing their best to make everyone see sense. I can highly recommend it.

A week or so ago I went to the Beyond Kyoto conference at Said Business School in Oxford (living in Oxford is quite lucky – there is a lot going on. In fact some people are trying to make Oxford the place for the development of green technologies).

The conference was held for the main part in the Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre, which was great, because it happened to take place on the day South Africa was voting. (although hiding the speaker’s water bottles behind Madiba’s bust was an interesting touch.)

Not being a journalist, I’m not equipped to make witty flowing summaries of the various speakers input, so I think I’ll just copy out the notes I took on the stuff I found interesting. Please don’t use these points as quotes, as I’ve rephrased some of it so it makes more sense in my dramatically cut-down version of the day. (My apologies to the speakers – I cannot hope to do them justice). I’ve put my own comments in brackets.

My favourite quotes of the conference :
“we need to build this ship while we are sailing it”
“Its only when you’re looking at large theoretical policies of climate change and global emissions that one uses these big terms, however the real stuff is always the local stuff, that’s where carbon is being emitted.”

Opening keynote address:
Michael Liebreich, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, New Energy Finance.

• Oxford university prides itself as being the foremost university looking into environmental issues and social entrepreneurship as well as new technologies (told you so).

• It’s a very interesting time, exciting things are happening. A real transition in the energy sector.

• Clean energy grew very rapidly from 2004 – 2008, a five times increase over that period, but it has since started to stall.

• When Lehman Brothers went, a lot of clean energy investment went as well. Because clean energy is in its early stages, a lot of research is still needed, therefore there is a lot of re-evaluating of risk.

• These clean energy companies are cash hungry as they invest heavily in R&D and establishing new infrastructure, like wind farms.

• As all the investment needed is front-loaded it makes for a risky investment model. Typically investors need to see good returns within five years, developing technologies can’t survive in this environment.

• Because of this, there has been a 44% drop this quarter to last quarter in clean energy investment.

• Obama has made a promise to establish a low carbon economy as a major gear to his campaign.

• The UK is quite low down in the list of how much money countries have put aside for clean energy.

• Industry is facing real stress after some very good years.

• Each Brit owns £60 of wind farm debt because the Royal Bank of Scotland was the biggest investor in wind farms.

• Liquidity has left the market.

• Three major areas of clean energy at the moment.

• 1. Wind (see above)

• 2. Photovoltaic’s: the price is about to come down big time. At the moment solar is not competitive, so governments are not investing. It makes no sense economically, as it is divided into individual components. However, supply is going to outstrip demand and prices will come down. Silicon is the key bottle neck item. When this is corrected there will be an enormous drop in the price.

• 3. Bio fuels. This has absolutely soured, because of the US dotcom-like hysteria to produce ethanol from corn (anyone see the television show about Cubans in Miami called “Cane“?). Company after company has now gone bankrupt in the corn/ethanol thing. Now, sugarcane ethanol mainly from Brazil is on the rise. However a squeeze on funds has effected the rollout of some projects. The Brazilian government is starting to help out this industry.

• Three-quarters of all venture capitalist funding in next generation bio fuels is coming from America.

• Google is now also investing in the energy space

• There needs to be a new way to do energy. Data driven smart grids will change the way we get our energy. They like to call it data energy – digital energy because all this is based on data sources.

• The recession does reduce emissions because it reduces economic movements and business, but it doesn’t change the trajectory in the long term.

• We still need to reduce carbon, rather than financing failing companies.

• We need to make sure carbon emissions not only level off, but also start to decrease. The technology is there, but the investment isn’t at the moment.

• Climate change, energy security and oil and gas depletion: these are the three drivers for clean energy. Climate change is still critical, energy security is still a big issue, and oil and gas is still being depleted. So good news (much laughter).

• In energy, half of available finance has to go to the developing world.

• We have to build this ship while we’re sailing it.

• There is an obvious difference between investing in clean energy and investment in developing energy infrastructure in emerging and developing countries.

• Investment in clean energy is front loaded in a way that fossil fuels aren’t, and this makes it very sensitive to capital investment markets.

• If you want economic growth of 2%, you need to reduce carbon by 4%. If you try to reduce the energy on each item – printers, kettles etc, that’s a good start.

• Digital energy: using text messages to control energy by switching things on and off is an area feasible for start-ups. But don’t go up against incumbent suppliers. These data mining services will decide in the middle of the night whether to start using clean energy, wind turbine or fuel energy.

• Aggregating the billing service will lower costs. Look more into what digital energy and what it means, this is a 50 year solution.

PANEL DISCUSSION: Kyoto and Beyond: Climate Change Policy in the 21st Century

Steve Rayner

• The mid century goal (500 – 550 part per million carbon stabilisation) is unachievable.

• No-one did a cost to benefit analysis when bailing out the Fannies, Freddies and others.

• Carbon tax isn’t realistic.

• Reconceptualise the carbon issue as a technological challenge.

• Climate change is a Christmas tree upon which you can hang all sorts of glittery ornaments as policies.

• Not really a question of science, but a question of values. We don’t expect war to break out every day, but we keep a large navy, army and air force none the less. We should do the same for energy.

• We shouldn’t have emissions targets, we should have technology targets. This isn’t a climate challenge, it’s a technology challenge.

Dave Frame

• Sustainable development can help as a mitigation policy. For instance studies show that educating women reduces fertility, which reduces population growth, which has an overall effect on climate.

• Targets need to be revisable to keep up with new sciences, and to understand when hopes are not met. We can never sit still and say “now we’ve done it”.

• Penalising is one thing but in a place where there are no alternatives, you end up with a lot of environmental bads that are never re-explored.

• The more you burrow down to a local scale the more you realise you’re looking at resource management and sustainable development.

• Its only when you’re looking at large theoretical policies of climate change and global emissions that one uses these big terms, however the real stuff is always the local stuff, that’s where carbon is being emitted. (This is really empowering).

Chris West

• We have a duty of care in the developing world. The impacts of climate change has been our own doing.

• The environment which has been victim for decades, is now turning round and biting back.

• Now it’s stopping us from doing what we want to do.

• It’ll have life and death impacts for millions of people in the south. (he talks in terms of north and south, rather than ‘west’, ’developed’ and ‘developing‘).

• In the north we’ve become efficient, but often at the expense of resilience.

• We have a difficult time adapting to the impact of an ailing climate.

David Henderson

• A dissenting voice at the conference in the interests of balance.

• He disagrees that businesses should play a leading roll in creating a green economy.

• Policies should be evolutionary and not presumptive.

• There is smoking gun evidence that climate change is happening.

• Lots of the arguments layer uncertainty upon uncertainty.

• The green lobby is too alarmist as there are so many unknowns, however the basis that this is a problem that warrants a response is not really in question.

• What the figures and projections are or should be, or how heating will progress is all quite unknown, and we should not presume that we‘ve analysed it correctly.

• There are many studies that don’t seem to prove the extreme crisis scenarios the scare mongers describe.

• Climate change as an issue is a political issue, but one that should be really connected at a local level.

Points that came out in the subsequent discussion:

• There is a difference between business opportunities in sustainable development as opposed to businesses developing sustainably.

• The carbon markets are the next sub prime waiting to happen.

• Getting dirty technology out is as much a problem as getting clean technology in. We buy a new energy efficient fridge, what do we do with the old fridge? Put it in the garage and put the beer in it. Same for all industries, for example cars. No matter how advanced new cars are, if we carry on using old cars we’ll fail.

• The only fuel we have stopped using in the history of humankind is sperm whale oil. The difficulty lies in trying to get rid of old technologies, not finding new ones.

• The new move to “declare war on carbon” is crazy. Because it’s a moral problem it’s a good rallying cry. It says you should be concerned over the lives of others, and their conditions, which is correct. But you can only declare a “war” when you can describe what the victory scenario will be. With carbon, we can’t say what the victory scenario is. That’s an unknown.

• Is it international policy or national policy that’s most important? It’s the coupling between the two that’s important. The interplay between the two. The coupling between policies are becoming really important in terms of trade, carbon agreements etc.

• There is an understandable desire for elegant solutions, however the problem is inherently messy. You can’t really solve it. You can simply either manage it well, or manage it badly.

• Think messy, don’t try to solve it elegantly as a primary goal, and you’ll be able to make good decisions. Otherwise you’ll not reassess previous bad conclusions.

SECOND PANEL DISCUSSION : Doing well and Doing Good — Business Opportunities In a Low Carbon World.

Moderator: Pamela Hartigan, Director, Scholl Centre
Harish Mandel, MD, SELCO-India
Martin Chilcott, 2 Degrees Network
Nick Eyre, Head, Low Carbon Futures, Environmental Change Institute

• If you have a good idea go and do something without money, somehow finance it in small stages. Money will always follow you.

• When developing for the rural poor don’t take away rural poor money, but take money from the profits that is created through what has been developed in a community.

• At SELCO-India 5% of their time goes to the actual product. 95% goes onto financial organising. An onion vendor buys per day, a teacher buys per month, a farmer buys per year or twice per year. For an onion street seller who trades daily buying an energy solution for £10 a day is cheep, but paying £300 a month is expensive. A new way of financing fit’s the payment scheme to the buyers needs.

• For an entrepreneur its good to make mistakes at the beginning, you have no money and no-one knows you. Later, when people know you and you’ve made some money, you’ll have learned from your mistakes. However, thinking in terms of mistakes is not suitable for an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs’ ALL have difficulties.

• Always work with people who think differently from you.

• The people who will change the world the most won’t be people who are making huge technological advances. They’ll be small companies simply working in a different way. We should look at working in a completely different way. Activist communities will change stuff most. It drives development and policy.

• Social entrepreneurship uses a model that benefit’s the end user, not the bottom line. But developed in a financially sustainable way.

• The environmentalist community is now an exclusive club, it‘s not always open to new developments, new ideas. Communities, friends and family will share information if its valuable, not businesses and governments. When the green movement was bottom up people listened and changed, now that its been taken over by governments and businesses it has become top-down and people are less inclined. The momentum locally has slowed. Getting some momentum back will take decentralised initiatives.

Here we are at the first post. It’s taken us years to get to this point (are all start-ups so laid back?), and now the actual work will begin. We’ve decided on our product, we’ve found a great supplier (in a place we like to have holidays…), we’re building a pretty cool website, and now we just need to get the whole thing together.

We’ve decided to be really transparent, and to use this blog to document the trials and tribulations, discoveries and joys of establishing an ethical start-up. We’ll use it as our sounding board where we investigate the options, debate the ethics of one approach over another, and where we’ll no doubt also rail against the muppets of the world. (Ourselves included). Feel free to join in! We will do our beta testing (with all the relevant offers and goodies to entice some beta-testers…), and finally we’ll launch, although to be honest that seems like a distant mountain at the moment.

What ethical means will be a journey of discovery, no doubt even in our shiny new global world ethics changes from one country to another and from one culture to another. Perhaps at the end we’ll be able to answer whether ‘ethical’ can ever be reduced to a simple excercise of ticking the boxes. At the moment, we think not.

We’re hoping to get some help from people who have looked into these things before us and who have their own opinions on such things as compostable ‘plastics‘, printing and dying, fairtrade and organics to name a few.

We’ve decided not to tell you what our company does initially, as the issues we’ll face and the decisions we’ll have to make will be applicable to many diverse and varied situations, and we don’t want to limit the focus and the opportunity to receive your input too early on. Suffice to say we will be selling actual physical products that are not made in Britain (where we live at the moment), and so we will have to investigate the whole gambit of suppliers/ raw materials/ packaging/ air miles etc as well as how we structure the company and how we deal with admin, marketing and sales etc. As we gear up it’ll be difficult to hide what we’re doing, so perhaps we’ll run a competition: first person to guess most accurately will get a free one… (I can promise you’ll like it) obviously this excludes those who already know what it is – friends, family and the like…

One thing is absolutely clear to us, we will not be able to use many ‘off the shelf’ business solutions, if any. We want to investigate everything and to use better solutions for the environment, for animals, and for fellow humans no matter where they may live. We understand we may need to compromise in some areas, and we will look into the reasons for choosing one solution over another. There may be difficult choices ahead, but we’re going to be transparent in how and why we make them, and we’re open to being influenced by others who may have differing opinions. We’ll also need to investigate some unquestioned ethics: of Fairtrade, organic growing, sustainable solutions, and what these things actually mean.

So, at the outset, here is a preliminary brainstormed list (and in no particular order) of what we think we’ll need to investigate. (Those of you who have been down this road before us – feel free to add to the list…we’ll keep it updated)

• Packaging, including reusable and plastic packaging
• Couriers, transport and air miles
• Warehousing and stock
• Systems of delivery
• Hosting and website
• Suppliers of products and services
• Raw materials
• Banking
• Office equipment and supplies
• Work/life balance for us and our suppliers
• Shareholders
• Whether ‘organic’ and ‘fair trade’ organisations are the same as being organic and fair trade.

In a nutshell in order to avoid the greenwash: spurious social and environmental policies and arguments made by companies as a cynical marketing ploy, we want to be able to stand up to scrutiny – both yours and ours. As we look into these and other issues, together we’ll build up a body of knowledge that we hope will be of benefit to others as well.