I was just thinking this morning about how much longer I would have to wait for a reply to this email to Ocado about their claim to be ‘as green as walking to the supermarket’ when early this afternoon a response plops into my inbox…
Dear Sim-O,
Thank you for your e-mail.
The claim that ?Ocado is greener than walking to the supermarket? was a conclusion that was reached by an independent Carbon Footprint Assessment agency called Greenstone and not by Ocado.
The centralised warehouse which every order is picked from means a small supply chain and massive energy/resource efficiency at every level of the business.
Greenstone compared our unique picking model to several well known supermarket chains. These chains emit huge amounts of carbon as they have countless stores around the country, all consuming electricity, using chillers etc. All of these stores have long supply chains from suppliers driving up and down the country. Building new stores generates high amounts of carbon, while Ocado can still grow within one Warehouse.
The most recent comparison in May 2009 of Ocado to ?traditional supermarkets? across the same detailed categories showed that we had a lower carbon footprint. This did not take into account the huge additional carbon footprint of traditional stores from customers traveling to them each week by car.
Hence it was concluded independently that Ocado is greener than walking to a supermarket
For more information on the survey itself, you can contact Greenstone in the following ways:
Ocado, online grocery home delivery service, claim on their vans that they are ‘as green as walking to the supermarket’ and on their website has the statement…
With such a lean, efficient operation, we’ve been able to lower our carbon emissions to the point where each Ocado delivery now has a lower carbon footprint (CO2 per £ of sales) than walking to a supermarket.
I’m buggered if I think how driving a van can produce less CO2 than walking, especially as at the moment they are using biodiesel and not something like hydrogen fuel cells which produce only water (not counting all the CO2 produced in the ‘manufacture’ of the hydrogen). I wouldn’t have given it much thought if the claim had been nearly as little as walking, but less…?
So I sent them an email…
To: ocado@ocado.com
from: Sim-O
Subject: your CO2 output
Sri or Madam,
On your vans you claim…
We’re as green as walking to the supermarket
and your website also carries the statement…
With such a lean, efficient operation, we’ve been able to lower our carbon emissions to the point where each Ocado delivery now has a lower carbon footprint (CO2 per £ of sales) than walking to a supermarket.
Could you substantiate that claim, please. It is a big claim and it has to be true otherwise you would not be able to make it, but I am puzzled as to how.
What are you counting as producing CO2 in each type of journey? How far back through the delivery chain are you going? What, exactly, are you comparing for each type of journey?
What are the figures and the maths that enable you to make such a claim?
Kind Regards
I’m not trying make a point, get some info so I can point my finger and yell ‘Cpaitalist Charlatan Pigs!’, but genuinely puzzled. Just by the fact that the van has a driver puts the van on an equal footing with the pedestrian. Doesn’t it?
I applaud the society of Chiropodists for pointing out to me the dangers of this; however, having done so I now respectfully ask them to leave it me and every other high heel wearing woman in the land to decide whether or not we wear high heels in the workplace..
[and yes. Dorries did put a double full stop at the end of that sentence. Probably the equivalent of ‘hrumph’]
I realise that aborting a feotus(sp?) and wearing heels are slightly different but the principle is the same. It’s about autonomy over your own body.
Via Pickled Politics I find out the news that a man has been charged with incitement to commit religious hatred for distributing the following leaflet…
Heroin was first synthesized in 1874 by C. R. Alder Wright, an English chemist working at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London.
…
Wright’s invention did not lead to any further developments, and diacetylmorphine only became popular after it was independently re-synthesized 23 years later by another chemist, Felix Hoffmann. Hoffmann, working at the Aktiengesellschaft Farbenfabriken (today the Bayer pharmaceutical company) in Elberfeld, Germany
Those Islamist have been invading for very long time, haven’t they.
As a sufferer of mentally bad hayfever as a kid, of which nothing worked to alleviate it, I used to eat local honey. It worked, half of me used to tell myself… and most other people.
The sceptic told me it was bollox. I didn’t know why, just a hunch, y’ know.
Now that last little bit belief has been shattered. I have to own up that maybe, just maybe it wasn’t the honey that did it. Maybe i just grew out of it.
I still get hay fever now and again, just not as bad or for as long. Good job I don’t need my little comforter any more.
Chiropractors. Now that’s a different box of frogs. I’ve had instant, long lasting, positive results from a chiropractor (one that to my knowledge didn’t profess to cure all manner of ills and ailments from coughs to loss of labido, malaria to cancer. There weren’t any leaflets like that anyway), so it’s a little unsettling to read all this stuff about them.
Would I go again? Probably, but I would very very careful about which one.
Several times this week I ‘ve had people email me with a rather urgent tone telling me I have up until this week to opt-out…
This has come from our legal department, please see below!
Early next week all UK mobiles will be on a directory which will mean that anyone will be able to access your numbers. It’s easy to unsubscribe but it must be done before the beginning of next week to make sure that you are ex-directory. You may want to suggest it to all your friends and family who have UK mobiles or they could be swamped by unsolicited messages and calls. Removal is recommended by the BBC – see link below.
(That particular quote was from a friend, I don’t know if that was his ‘telephone voice’ or not but it doesn’t sound like he’d written it. Too alarmist.)
First , lets just deal with the email message then, the directory itself.
The email says anyone will be able to access our numbers. Anyone can at the moment. You’ve seen the little boxes in the small print that you’ve either got to tick or leave blank? Well, that ticking or leaving blank gives the company you’re dealing with permission to take your phone number (or postal address or emaill address, depending on what the form/company/product) and pass it onto ‘partner companies’ or ‘companies we think you may be interested in’. To translate, they can sell your numbers. Your number is in the public domain. It can be bought and sold. You are no longer Ex-Directory as far as direct marketing is concerned.
The email also states that you must unsubscribe (which is also wrong, you need to be ‘removed’ from the directory) by the end of next week to be sure of that you are ex-directory.
Well, the end of next week could be any time depending on when the email was sent. Considering the BBC article is date 9 June 2009 and in it, it states that the directory site is going live ‘next week’, I would say 9th July is a bit late and we’re all buggered.
It sounds like if you weren’t ex-directory by 16th-ish june that’s it, you’re in for life. But you’re not.
It may be a nice thing to do to make family and friends aware of this directory, but a month after it going live, I’m not drowning in window sales men, pollsters and heavy breathers. Are you?
I fucking hate these fucking circular emails that are just wrong in the first place and have an unneccesarily alarming tone to them.
Removal is recommended by the BBC – see link below
Um. No it’s not.
I doubt my buddy wrote that. I hope he didn’t.
Apart from the issues surrounding where 118800 got the 15 million or so numbers it claims to have, what is the problem with an opt-out directory? I’m normally of the opinion that opt-in is the best thing, but for some reason, I don’t have a problem with this. No more than the landline directory, and infact I’m a little surprised it’s taken so long to come about.
Where the numbers have come from, although not stated specifically which brokers and lists these numbers were on, somewhere there is a little box that signifies that the numbers can be used for commercial purposes. If there isn’t, there is a problem with the data controllers of a company somewhere and not with the idea of a directory.
Remember, this directory and the company behind it are no different to any other direct marketing organisation. If you have a problem with this directory then you should also have a problem with the whole way data is bought and sold.
This directory is probably more accurately reflects peoples’ wishes than the landline directory, which the phone companies have to give their numbers to.
The issue of privacy is also dealt with rather simply and admirably.
They directory contacts you and tells you someone is trying to get in touch. If you are contacted by phone, you tell them no, if you don’t want to accept the call. If you get sent a text, ignore it. That has to be better than just being listed in a book ready for anyone, including teenagers skyving off school and finding people with funny names to abuse down the phone. Again and again… and again…
The opt-out is also still there, with no time limit on it. Apparently, the first time the directory contact you, they also give you an option to become ex-directory. And of course you could got to 118800 and opt-out there. Anytime.
Four weeks to get off their list is a bit much though.
Whether this directory actually works in practice and are as ethical as they reckon they are will remain to be seen, but the idea itself a mobile phone number directory, should be a cause for concern and they way they are doing it to try and ally peoples’ privacy concerns, should be should be welcomed. It could’ve been so different.
Jim Barker pointed out a No. 10 Petition (this one, “Maybe this petition explains why ex-pats make such bitter comments on the Daily Mail website”) and after signing it A. Bollockhead, had a look at some more.
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Permit Qualified Aromatherapists and Wiccan Practitioners To Treat Animals.
Why not allow Woo-ists to practice on animals, eh?
Well, in the ‘more detail’ bit the originator of the petition does indeed go in to a bit more detail, but doesn’t really give aromatherapy any more relevence to animals…
The practice of aromatherapy is recorded from Egyptian times, so we can assume that it is probably older than that. References to aromatherapy appear in the famous Ebers Papyrus, which dates from the eighteenth dynasty. The Holy Bible contains many references to the use of oils, in Israel.
All those qualified to us it should be permitted to practice it with animals also.
I don’t doubt the truthfulness of anything that the Karen Stapleton has asserted there, especially as I can’t be arsed to find out, but I don’t think that she or her co-horts in witch-doctory have taken in to account, not just robust investigation in to the effects of their sugar pills, smelly oils and water with memory, but also the ability to fool ourselves which we cannot do to animals…
[Q]uackery might just about be justifiable on humans on the account that the placebo effect might give some relief (although I would argue against taking this position). But an animal cannot experience the placebo and will gain no benefit whatsoever from homeopathy, reiki, or ear candling for that matter. The only person who will gain is the carer, thinking they are doing good for the prickly little fellow. Placebo Effects work on humans. It’s a cultural thing. Hedgehogs do not cotton on to the significance of the psycho-suggestive shamanistic healing rituals involved in homeopathy. They would just prefer to curl up into a pin cushion. Many go on about homeopathy tests on animals proving the case for homeopathy think they do not need to have randomised blind controls, since animals cannot have a placebo effect. But this dodges the fact that it is their carers and owners are reporting the animals’ health improvements – the placebo works on the carers. Blinded trials on animal medicines are still absolutely necessary. For more details on homeopathy, placebos and animals see the excellent British Veterinary Voodoo Society.
I also feel that one of the five other people to sign the petition may have missed the point a little as they’ve signed as…
At present, GM rice is not grown commercially anywhere in the world. But Bayer, the German chemical giant, has genetically manipulated rice to withstand higher doses of a toxic pesticide called glufosinate, which is considered to be so dangerous to humans and the environment that it will soon be banned from Europe.
In just a few weeks, the European Union will decide whether or not this GM rice can enter EU countries, appear on supermarket shelves and end up on our dinner plates. If the EU approves the import of Bayer GM rice, farmers in the US and elsewhere may soon start planting it.
Naked “Page 3 Girls” have helped Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid The Sun sell papers for 40 years now, but they’re not helping the paper break into the mobile marketplace. The Sun was set to be included in Newspaper(s), an iPhone app that allows readers to browse the content of over 50 newspapers, but Apple banned the app from their iTunes store on the grounds that the provocative “Page 3 Girls” are “obscene.”
The page 3 girls are obscene? They should’ve read some of the stories too!
“Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success,” says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. “It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.”
Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal’s drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.
The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.
