Toby Roscoe | Sustainability Consultant

Toby is a sustainability consultant at Sustainability Solutions Ltd, a sustainable management consultancy, who specialise in integrating sustainability into businesses, from offices and retail, to mining and heavy industry. Toby is also a Low Carbon Futures Advocate for the British Council and is a founding member of LoCEM and EcoHub Ltd.

Toby studied Resource and Environmental Management at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra. He became Operations Manager of a wildlife research project at the School of Resources, Environment and Society at the ANU in 2004. In 2007 he returned to the UK to continue sustainability and environmental consulting.

Toby’s motivations are driven by preventing species loss as a result of  climate change. He was was part of a team from the ANU who conducted a biodiversity survey in Namadgi National Park after it was devastated by bushfires in 2003, he was also in Cairns conducting joint research with the Australian Rainforest Foundation in 2006 when Cyclone Larry destroyed much of the area, and has recently been fortunate enough to work on sustainability in the Skaergaard - Mikis Fjord area of the Tunu region of East Greenland.

Contact Toby Roscoe by clicking here

Extraordinary energy :: Geothermal UK?

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All energy on Earth, whether fossil fuel, wind energy, solar thermal, biomass or photo voltaic comes from the sun, right? Wrong! Well, in a way. What about all that energy within the Earth, geothermal and nuclear? Well, actually they come from the same source as the energy and matter as our Sun and the rest of the solar system.

As the swirling cloud of gas matter condensed to form our solar system- 4.3 billion years ago the nuclear material and, heat were trapped and insulated by the crust of the planet. We have to remember that each planet was pulled together by gravitational force from many molten blobs of magma type material. The lighter parts floated to the top and formed the crust which cooled, solidified, and began to act as a duvet that insulates the hotter, denser magma below.  Difficult to think of rock as a light floating duvet, isn’t it? But it is in comparison to the denser material below. 

There are groups of extraordinary people who’ve used this potential energy source to make the arctic habitat habitable-they even heat their roads with it!- and get oodles of energy (electric) – nearly free, once the system is installed.

Watch this short vid: For a multimedia version of this blog entry click here

The idea is simple, drill two holes close together in the Earth’s crust, to a depth that the surrounding rock is super hot. Pump water down one, and hey presto- steam comes up the other, which you can use to drive a turbine to move electricity, or use directly to heat your home, roads, or whatever you need. The Icelanders `are lucky though. Their icy land is formed of solidified magma from a mid-ocean ridge, meaning they don’t have to dig deep at all to get the energy they need. This means drilling costs are lower than in areas where the hot rocks deeper. 

In other places around the world modern technology is increasing the technical feasibility of geothermal power plants in less accessible locations. Geodynamics, an Australian company based in Queenland is piloting geothermal drilling technology in the Cooper Basin. There they have drilled to a depth of around 4,300m, where temperatures are up to 250 degrees C.

So what potential is there in the UK for this relatively clean green energy source? Can we follow the lead of the Icelanders and the Australians? We have geothermal springs, the hot spring in Bath is about 47 degrees C, which means that the hot rocks are certainly down there. The British Geological Survey say that our geothermal gradient is 25-35 degrees per Km of depth. 

This means we’d need to drill some 7.5Km before we reached temperatures similar to those found by Geodynamics in Australia. Although this is not yet technically feasible, there may come a time in the future when when we are both technically and economically able to drill to such depths.  However, in the meantime, there are ways of using lower temperature heat available at shallower depths, not to produce electricity, but to heat our homes and offices. Ground source heat pumps allow concentration of lower energy heat for space heating purposes and are becoming widely available. For more information click here

Toby Roscoe (EcoHub | Sustainability Solutions)

Recycling Facilities added to Google maps

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For those of us who would rather do a little research on the web before we leave our houses, rather than waste extra time and fuel on finding where we’re going, Google Maps is a great tool.

While Worcestershire County Council’s waste management website is a great tool for finding out what to do with your rubbish and what can be recycled and when, its use of the term “Waste Sites” is quite misleading. I think they should be renamed “Recycling Centres” or “Resource Recovery Facilities”. 

With land fill taxes spiralling upwards and even though energy prices are remaining steady for the moment, it just doesn’t make economic or environmental sense to make big holes in the ground in one part of the Wold, process the ore, refine it, smelt it, ship it to another part of the World, then manufacture the goods ship them again, use the product and then bury it in another hole on the other side of the Planet from where the raw material originally came from once we’re finished with it. Exhausting just thinking about it isn’t it? Just imagine the energy that it takes, almost entirely provided by fossil fuels, which are, of course, emitted as that famous greenhouse gas CO2. 

Most of our metal and mineral resources come from big holes in the ground like this, Northparkes mine in NSW, Australia. While mine site management has progressed massively towards the goals of sustainability, they are still among the deepest of our ecological footprints. It makes far more economic and environmental sense to repair, reduce, reuse and recycle our resources within our society than look deeper and deeper into our environment to sustain our needs. 

With the pressures of modern life we all have limited time on our hands, so if we are to make the transition to a sustainable future, we need the process to be as simple and painless as possible.  While the official Waste Sites website is useful, there are bound to be times, like when we’re clearing out a loft or garage, when we have a little more to “junk” to throw out than can be squeezed into our fragile recycling bags, and then we have to find one of 11 recycling centres in Worcestershire, or 5 in Herefordshire. This is where the Councils’ website become a bit clunky, with dodgy maps that are not easy to understand. This is why I spent this morning finding where each and every recycling centre is across the two counties and adding them to Google Maps, which can be used to find the location, telephone number and website address of each specific centre, as well as directions to and from your home, so you can use it to find out which centre is closes to you.

Here is a fully functioning map for the Bilford Road Recycling Centre in Worcester:

If anyone is interested in adding your local recycling centres to Google Maps and would like to know how, or you’ve added other eco-useful content at a place  near you, please let us know!! Contact us here

Toby Roscoe (EcoHub | Sustainability Solutions)

A meeting with Georg Kell, Head of UN Global Compact

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Working towards social and environmental sustainability can be testing, a long day of meetings out of the office can, at best, mean  a barrage of questions on technical details, at worst environmental professionals still face Bush-esque climate change denying Luddites gunning for business as usual. I often feel like grabbing them by the lapels and shouting “wake up and smell the carbon!”. 

The meeting with Georg Kell held at Elsevier’s London office was quite the opposite. Despite getting a little hot about the unnecessarily air-conditioned temperature of the offices, there was a refreshing breeze of coherent social and environmental responsibility blowing through the room of like-minded individuals. In a way, it was like stepping into the future, into a time and place where everybody gets what we’re aiming for. That is, of course, sustainability in business management that leads to continued growth in economic and human capital, without unnecessary resource depletion and consequential negative environmental impacts. Georg rather succinctly termed this “risk interconnectedness” in a way that he and only a few others can describe the fact that some multinationals have found their poor environmental performance can bite their economic backside.

When the UN talks, big business listens. Especially in these times when even the most successful of them are prepared to believe that they may have got things ‘just a little wrong’. They are also vying  against one another for a competitive claw-hold at the top of the financial hole in which we have found ourselves. Many of them realise (but some have not quite got it yet!) that green and responsible is the way to go if they want to be on the leading edge of economic recovery. Georg again cut through the waffle of business B/S’ers, “(climate change) will change the business landscape in the most fundamental way” and “early movers are always in a better position than late comers.” How else is there to think when we are sharing Earth’s dwindling resources between a growing population, especially when (happily) the economic situation is that even the poorest of developing counties have their fair share of talented and wealthy businessmen who can compete with the North (or West, depending on which model one uses) for the best of the resource extraction and supply systems that capitalism has created. 

The vocabulary for discussing how to treat other human beings in the workplace or how to incorporate management of Earth’s natural  resources and life-supporting ecological systems is rarely uttered in the business arena. But in order to once again talk about the ‘strongest growth ever, this quarter’ around the board table, the focus must be on churning out business managers who have both the walk and the talk to fulfil the demands for sustainable growth of environmentally and socially responsible business in the coming years. There are around 200 MBA courses either currently available or about to be rolled out which incorporate the UN’s Global Compact systems management processes, designed to integrate the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) philosophy into mainstream business management. CSR is not just a “moral postulate”, but a reality brought about by discerning clients who are looking for a lot extra from their suppliers, because they are increasingly cognitive of the world around them. 

Written by Toby Roscoe (EcoHub | Sustainability Solutions)