THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

This social aspect of how our retail products that we pack in North Yorkshire for sale in urban and rural shops across the UK and elsewhere, connects to internet customers almost everywhere, and links back to the Wynad region of Kerala in India or the Uva Highlands in Sri Lanka or Mananara in Northern Madagascar is hugely important to Sophie and me.  And while paying a premium of around one-third for our spices, herbs and teas generates profits that enables people to earn a living wage and reinvest into their businesses and communities, we are not sure that this is enough.  After all Steenbergs is at its heart a social enterprise and while we have very limited resources, so we cannot make much of a difference through our financial capacity, we can reach out wider to the community of people who buy our products.  We feel we must try as if we don’t make even a few small steps then the journey is never started.

We tried this once before with Peace Tea and Green Tea but it did not work because the products were not successful enough, so we would like to retry to generate a social dividend from sales at Steenbergs and believe that the best way to do this is via paying out a fixed amount from each web shop sale via www.steenbergs.co.uk to relevant charities.  We are fixing this at 20p for each web sale and will not make any adjustments to costings for this, i.e. it is a straight cost to Steenbergs and not our customers, which we will backdate to the start of 2011 – if we had done this for 2010 it would have been well over £1,000.

At the outset, as we have only really just firmed up the idea after our own flood, we are thinking of two charities – Practical Action or Water Aid.  However, in the future we would like to consider other more homegrown and smaller charities or projects, particularly those run locally and that foster genuine development like microcredit schemes rather than those that create aid dependency and those without any political or religious agenda – with smaller charities, we can make more of a difference whereas for mega-charities our donations will be just a drop in their ocean of income .  We also would like the charities to be active where we are linked with for our purchasing, so enhancing this context for Steenbergs products.  For example, from our quick scout around, we like ideas such as the Asha Trust, Grameen Bank and the Women’s Bank in Sri Lanka and Zahana in Madagascar.  But in the end, we want to hear from you what charities we could support as every year we are looking to our customers and supporters to choose one to benefit from this social dividend.

With this co-operative spirit in mind, we want people to tell us which of Practical Action or Water Aid we should all support this year and ask that you email your choice to charity@steenbergs.co.uk or tell us via Twitter or Facebook, where we will also explain the choices in a little less depth.  Every year we will hold a similar collective decision, so you can help us choose possible organisations and then make a choice openly and together.

In outline, here is something about the 2 possible charities this year or you can go to their websites for more gen.

Practical Action grew out of an idea from the economist E. F. Schumacher in the 1970s that people in poverty needed technology that met their context rather than grandiose schemes coming out of the developed world.  The founders termed this Intermediate Technology and technology as being “physical infrastructure, machinery and equipment, knowledge and skills and the capacity to organise and use all of these.”  They work closely with communities and at their scale and relative to their power, knowledge and available resource and using sensible, practical ideas like treadle pumps for irrigation, zeer pots for refrigeration and nanotechnology ideas such as filters to remove contaminants and pesticides from water.  These small steps enable communities to lift themselves out of their poverty and then hopefully move out of dependency to build their own wealth.  Practical Action works in (amongst other places) India and Sri Lanka, our major two countries for supplies of spices and teas, including Biofoods and Greenfield in Sri Lanka.  There is lots more information at their website at http://practicalaction.org/.

Water Aid on the other hand focuses as its name suggests on water and sanitation, seeking to improve communities lives by removing the scourge of contaminated water and poor sanitation which are major causes of premature death amongst infants and vulnerable adults throughout the world.  Water Aid’s vision is to transform “lives by improving access to safe water, hygiene and sanitation in the world’s poorest communities.”  They use sustainable technologies like rainwater harvesting, spring protection and hand dug wells, together with dry pit latrines and ventilated improved pit latrines.  Water Aid is active in many countries including India and Madagascar, where we get our fantastic Fairtrade vanilla from in Mananara.  Their web site is a great source of information and awe inspiring – www.wateraid.org/uk

Please take some time to think it all through, then come back to us for your choice and let’s try and make a difference, however small that may be.  Email Steenbergs at charities@steenbergs.co.uk or call Sophie or Axel at 01765 640 088 and tell us your thoughts.

Both of these seem to sum up two of the underlying themes of my thoughts and ideas over the last 10 or so years.  However, my riposte would be that at least my trains of thought do come in and I am still thinking about things, while mistakes only arise because I keep trying out new things and ways of looking at the world.  Who knows, one of these days the train of thought might be correct and come in on time or even early!

Gillette Fatboy With Case And Blades

I bought a 1950s Gillette Fatboy razor about a month ago, which cost me a relative fortune.  It came swiftly from an Ebay seller in the USA with blessings from god which was mildly spooky.  It was really well presented in an original box with some original Gillette blue steel blades still in the packet; it had been cleaned and disinfected and looked in great condition.

The Gillette Fatboy is a legend with an iconic status amongst many old style shavers like me.  I am now owner of an increasingly silly number of razors, including the Gillette Red and Blue Tips, plus now the Gillette Fatboy.  But would it live up to its awesome reputation?  The quick answer is yes, except for my only minor frustration with the shape of the classic Gillette razorhead.

Gillette Fatboy And Blue Steel Blades

The Gillette Fatboy weighs in at a heavy 80g, a full 14g heavier than the Gillette Red Tip.  It is, also, 85mm long, so 1.5cm longer than the Gillette Blue Tip and Red Tip razors.  The razorhead is the same, sleekly engineered butterfly action razorhead as in the Blue and Red Tips but the heavier weight makes for a much better balance and hand feel than these other razors.  The balance is perfectly poised for a great shaving action, bringing the razor to the face with excellent control, whereas the lightness of the Gillette Blue Tip, for example, forces the shaver to be a bit more cavalier with the blade. 

Gillette Fatboy Showing Butterfly Mechanism

 The Gillette Fatboy is awesome and commands great respect, and has a sleek and masculine engineering that is more like a Harley Davidson or even a Dodge truck or rather than a fast car like a Porsche.

This advanced razor, also, gives you the ability to change the angle of the blade to suit your shaving action or you can tweak it and so have a tighter shave over the face and then loosen the blade as you go over your neck.  I have used it for a few weeks now and have settled on a setting of about 4, which seems to work all over the face.  The shave is close and precise, without any extra aggression despite the comments of many others.

Adjustable Head On Gillette Fatboy

My only complaint is simple and it is a fault of all the Gillette’s I have tried so far – the head is so big that you cannot get in close around the nose, so I need to use my original Gillette with a Contour blade to sort out the fine detail.  Similarly, the Gillette blue steel blades are period pieces but the blade is too flimsy and can make for an uncomfortable shave, so I prefer my normal Wilkinson Sword blades that have more strength.

Overall, this is a master of the shaving art, a really great piece of kit and worth the expense.

I am not Prime Minister, or even Deputy Prime Minister, I have not won Wimbledon, nor am a hedge fund manager earning bazzillions, nor a multi-squillionnaire Internet entrepreneur and I have still not written that book or painted a beautiful picture, and I will never play for England (at any sport) and so on.  But who really would want to be those in any case; let’s leave all that to those with the tunnel vision to succeed in shaping our world.  I just enjoy life, living and become randomly interested in things that will never make money, nor help you rule the world, but nevertheless keep me pottering on. 

Anyway, at the same time, I started trying to piece together my LinkedIn Profile, which was in a sorry state as I have never touched it nor accepted anyone onto my page, hence I look a lonely, unloved individual.  So while struggling to cobble together my disjointed career path (still a work in progress so anyone who remembers what I have done over the years please fill in the blanks), I became reflective on what I had actually achieved since university and where it is going.

In the end, this is what I came up with:

Massive Positives: love of a good woman (Sophie), 2 fantastic children, wonderful parents, siblings, lovely mother-in-law (yes really) and a lovely little cottage in a beautiful part of the world (North Yorkshire).

Achievements: setting up Steenbergs with Sophie and starting that on its tortuous path.  It’s like being on a small bicycle rickshaw in Mumbai that’s slowly, gathering its pace while manoeuvering around the gas guzzling juggernauts that speed past us trying to knock us out of the way.  But it’s a good ride and we’ll get their in our own time, on our own path and without damaging anyone on the way.

Regrets: only one surprisingly, being I wish that I had continued with Microbiology/Molecular Biology for longer than the degree at Edinburgh University.  I was quite good at it and actually enjoyed the nerdy science.  At the time, all I wanted to do was get out of education and conquer the world, but I did not let that path run for long enough.  In fact, I realised this about a year ago and is most of the reason that I have started doing a degree at The Open University in Environmental Studies/Science, so perhaps I will be able to overcome this one.

Mistakes: loads and loads of them, and still going on collecting more.  They say you learn from your mistakes – well, I have got a PhD’s worth already.  In fact, there is only one that I would count as truly bad and that was leaving investment banking to join Teamtalk.  The mistake was not Teamtalk itself, even though the experience still runs shivers down my spine and wiped the smile from my face and laughter from my body for many years afterwards.  It was more that I was too young and “wet behind the ears” for the tough corporate situation that it became, so while leaving investment banking was right I should perhaps have waited until I was older, stronger and more experienced or moved into a bigger corporate where I could have matured in a more protected environment.

What have I learnt? to be good and tolerant, to persevere with those things you believe in whatever the obstacles and to carry on smiling, laughing and dreaming.

Where’s that leave me: content in the most important family part of life and where I live, plus a lifetime still left to enjoy all of them, while nudging Steenbergs ever onwards and time to complete an Environmental Studies degree, and research my family history.  Sounds good enough to me.

* As an aside, I reckon we can only think in chunks of about 7 years maximum in normal living and about 41 years for life planning (or 29, 31, 37).  These are purposefully prime numbers as this is how humans have become hardwired through evolution.  So for relationships, investors and politicians, 7 years is long term and 41 years forever.  That random idea is perhaps for another day.

Our biggest problem has been that Ecover has the largest and most easily accessible range, but their products are everywhere from Tesco through to small health stores, plus they do add some less than brilliant things into their products and are not vegan anymore.  We’re down to a few pots of Ecover Stain Remover and then we’re done with them as a brand.  Finally and this is a big one, the performance has to be decent as I have found some of the green Household Cleaning products pretty rubbish so you may as well not bother with them – your clothes go grey, your floor never gets clean and they sometimes even curdle in the bottle!

Steenbergs has now got a good range of alternative brands that we feel gives you - our customer – a decent choice of green and ethical alternatives.  You may not like all of them or might find some do not perform as well as you would dream, but you must remember that our choice of Household Cleaning products will never be as aggressive in their action as the traditional high street brands like Domestos or Flash or Cif as these are packed full of industrial chemicals that we just don’t want.  But we use these greener products at home and some of them – for example the Alma Win range – got me positively excited as the floor cleaner actually worked as I worked my mop around on our tiled floor.

The range is now based around cleaning kit from Alma Win , Earth Friendly and Ecoleaf (Suma’s brand of cleaning products).  In addition, we’ve got natural incense based fresh smells from Colibri (incense sticks, shoe odour neutralisers and wool protectors), soap nut washing balls and dryer balls from Ecozone , natural fibre nailbrushes, vegetable washing brushes and washing up brushes and scourers made from luffas and coconut shells that do a pretty good job, plus recycled scourers and clothes pegs from Ecoforce – the clothes pegs are brilliant and come from recycled plastics while Traidcraft’s Fair Trade rubber gloves really got me jumping up and down for joy – loved them but then I am a bit sad about these things.  Then there’s Veggi Wash to get all those nasty chemicals and waxes off your fruit and veg that you didn’t manage to grow in your allotment or garden.

For me, it was Alma Win that got me truly excited and finally happy that our range had become pretty much sorted.  A few samples just came randomly in the post, so I tried them at home and found that they were better than most of the other brands we had come across and their range slotted in nicely, allowing us to drop Ecover dishwasher tablets that we had been finding a sticking point in our range. 

Alma Win is a range of German products – in fact some of the things we’re selling only come with German labels so apologies there – and they’re biodegradeable and suitable for vegans and vegetarians unlike Ecover, and they’re kind to the skin and should over time help to reduce the UK’s high rates of allergies like hayfever, asthma and eczema.  They’re also certified as organic by EcoGarantie in Belgium which none of the other ranges are yet, being based on organically grown plant ingredients and not made in a massive chemical plant in Ellesmere Port or somewhere like that.  So their products don’t have any of the following nasty gunk in them that you will find in many of the high street brands – optical brighteners, parabens, petrochemicals, phosphates, chlorine, bulking agents, silicone, borium, colour additives, ethoxylated raw materials and genetically modified enzymes.

Please tell us what we are missing in this range and we will see what we can do.

“Thanks for your email.  I have looked into the issues you have raised and have found Sainsburys did not directly compensate Fairtrade supliers [sic], or farmers during the Volcanic ash disruption period.

We did however try extremely hard to get the flowers into stores and we looked at every possible travel option to get products into stores.  At the beginning of the flight ban we had flowers flown into south Spain, as the ban didnt apply there and we then drove the produce by truck into the UK.

We thoroughly enquired into every possible supply route to get these items into store.  We are not aware of any products being destroyed due to the flight ban.”

Which conflicts with all the reports about the impact of the ash on Fairtrade flower farmers in Kenya where Benjamin Gatland of South African Fairtrade Network said “Kenyan Fairtrade rose growers alone lost approximately one million flowers a day” – see http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=51229.

Who’s correct? I think I know who…

“At Steenbergs, we were one of the first people in Europe to start with Fairtrade spices before any of the supermarkets or other major spice brands.  We hate the fact that such a small amount is being on the high street for commodities that mean the difference between a sustainable living and real poverty and hunger for families in the developing world, including child labour on a big scale; a few pence saved by Tesco or Sainsbury translates into a huge difference back on the small farms in Madagascar, India and Sri Lanka.  When Axel Steenberg (that’s me) and Sophie Steenberg (my wife) started buying and selling organic spices back in 2003, there had been a few bad crops of vanilla in Madagascar so 90% of world supply disappeared overnight and the price of vanilla shot up to $500. We worked hard to pioneer Fairtrade spices and became one of the first to do these in the world.  As for vanilla, small farmers in India borrowed money and started planting vanilla plants to “cash in” on the boom, only for Madagascan supply to come back and the prices on the world market to collapse to below $20 now, leaving farmers in India with unpayable debts and suicides rising.  That’s where Fairtrade comes in, as it put a floor on the vanilla price purchased from source at $45 per kg of vanilla plus $6.50 as a Fairtrade premium, as well as having rules on using child labour and educating children and so on.

Fairtrade rules state that no child below the age of 15 may be employed (contracted) and any work may not interfere with schooling, or jeopardize “the social, moral or physical development of the young person”.  Also, the people involved must work under the Small Producers rules of Fairtrade and cannot be big industrial concerns.  This is audited annually by auditors working for Fairtrade as there is a fine line between a bit of casual work on the family farm (which is permitted and cannot be policed) and employed work which could drift to become like the article above.  The minimum price of $45 per kg is the price that is paid by our exporters of vanilla, whether from Madagascar or India, to the farmers groups plus the various costs of getting it here to Ripon in North Yorkshire.  We pay more for the gourmet high quality beans that we use for Steenbergs products or sell to people like Crazy Jack’s and a bit less for extract grade Fairtrade vanilla beans that go into Steenbergs organic Fairtrade vanilla extract, so when you buy these products we have paid minimum prices way above the world market price, as well as adhering to the rules of Fairtrade and a chain of custody that ensures money gets down to the people who matter.  We are currently redesigning our vanilla packaging and you will be able to get two Steenbergs organic Fairtrade vanilla beans for less than the price of non-organic vanilla in a supermarket – about £4.50 for two.

One of the things to look out for is that the vanilla in the your chocolate bars is actually from a Fairtrade vanilla.  So I am not convinced that your Fairtrade Dairy Milk Bar from Cadbury’s contains any Fairtrade vanilla, so it’s a bit of a swizz, just like the Green & Black’s Fairtrade Maya Chocolate Bar that does not include Fairtrade vanilla just a straight old organic one.

Find out more at http://www.steenbergs.co.uk/category/22/fairtrade-products for fairtrade products and about our ethics at http://www.steenbergs.co.uk/article/show/48/steenbergs-business-social-and-ethical-principles and about how Fairtrade works at http://www.steenbergs.co.uk/blog/2009/09/fairtrade-spices-standards-a-reprise/“

However, one of the key issues for old houses, and in our case very old house, is that they have not been built with the benefit of modern technology that has invested much time, effort and legislation to make housing more heat efficient and so retain much of the heat within the building rather than to radiate it out into North Yorkshire – it’s a godforsaken task to heat up Northern England.

So as a start, you need to keep as much heat in as possible.

So my theory has been simple work down from the roof to the ground floor slowly but surely insulating the house.  We will work from the top downwards, as hot air rises so you want to capture it as it tries to escape upwards first rather than worrying about the ground levels at the outset.

The first thing, we felt, was to get insulation laid in the roof between the joists.  This had been done using old fashioned roof insulation over 10 years ago, insulating to 100mm in depth.  But we decided to insulate again with a cross layer of 200mm recycled glass mineral wool blankets.  For the first attempt at this, we bought recycled mineral wool – each pack of this Knauf Insulation Space Blanket contains 2.4 wine bottles (it was a 200mm thick roll of 1.48m2) and has a R value of 4.50m²K/W.   Government advice is to get insulation to about 300mm.

I liked this because it comes in a roll and encased in fire retardant polyethylene film, so does not need all that cutting and special equipment that normal loft insulation needs, and even more important it’s currently subsidised by e.on under some Government scheme to mitigate climate change so it was half price at Homebase, costing just £5.74 per roll.

It has got a metallic coating which Knauf Insulation claims reflects heat and so keeps more heat in – I think this sounds a bit spurious!

That means that the 35 rolls that I bought cost £143.50; this should mean that we recoup the energy savings within 2 – 3 years (assuming that we will save 10% of our fuel bills and that we had covered the whole roof void with the same insulation, i.e. multiply cost by ³/₂; 25% of heat loss in total is through the loft and we already had 100mm in place, so I reckon 10% would be a good estimate for additional savings).

It was pretty easy to lay it and took me about 5 hours over the other weekend to buy the kit and lay it over two-thirds of the roof void.

Typically, however, when I got into the roof, I discovered that the heating engineers (or plumbers as I would have known them) never completed the lagging of the pipes nor the insulation of the water tanks, which was okay as they never relaid the insulation so the heat from the house kept the area around the tank warm – so muggins here had to finish that off as well.

Now feeling a bit good about myself, I bought something last week that’s a bit less simple to lay but definitely a greener alternative.

There are two main alternatives: one from newspapers (Warmcel) and the other from British sheep’s wool and recycled polyester (Thermafleece).  These both have the same levels of insulation capability as mineral wool, but I chose Warmcel and bought 15 bags of this from £165.27, costing £11.02 per bag inclusive of transport to us.  The Thermafleece is roughly double Warmcel again for the same price per m² for the same depth, i.e. four times as expensive roughly as the recycled mineral wool insulation and so tripling the payback period.

So going back to my payback calculations – Warmcel has a payback of 4 – 6 years, which I am happy about, but Thermafleece has a payback of 8 – 12 years, which is too long for me.  Basically, I think for the cost-reward, it’s probably best to go with either the Space Blanket or (to give you a greener feeling about life) go with the Warmcel.  I cannot see the point with going for Thermafleece unless you feel romantically attached to lining your house in a woolly jumper.

But you do need to put the insulation down yourself as it’s pretty simple, and if you get a builder to do the work, you will blow any meaningful chance at getting a payback.

To buy these greener insulation materials, try these to web sites:

• Green Building Store
• NaturalDeco
• Natural Insulations
• The Natural Collection

To start with, I need to give some background about us. 

We live in an old three bedroom cottage in a rural location.  The house is built of brick and the core of the house was built between 300 and 400 years ago, so (to repeat what was unhelpfully said in the survey when we bought the house) the house does not meet modern building standards, which (of course) was one of its key attractions to us.  It is also grade 2 listed which creates additional problems.  We are a family of four – two adults and two children who are not yet teenagers.  Both Sophie and I work together in our own small business 9 miles away.  Also, I absolutely hate doing DIY so we were never going to cleverly improve our house all by ourselves.

As a household, we now have total estimated greenhouse gas emissions as 9.2 tonnes CO₂e per year, compared to the UK average of a total of 12.4 tonnes CO₂e per year,  based on a carbon calculator provided by The Open University and stats that they use – different methods give different answers. 

The first thing we did was tackle all the easy things that we were terrible at.  Here are some of our howlers and some of those things that we have improved on very quickly:

1. Changed the timing on the central heating from all day to 2 hours in the morning and the evening;
2. Reduced temperature on thermostat by 3^oC from 18^oC to 15^oC;
3. Putting curtains up in every room and started closing the curtains at night or (in this cold winter) upstairs during the daytime;
4. Changed all our light bulbs from old fashioned incandescent bulbs to low energy lamps;
5. Switched off electrical appliances at the plug when not in use, especially computers, TVs and radios, i.e. no standby and computers and TVs are not on when no-one is around;
6. Reduced, reused and recycled more of the packaging we get and unwanted  stuff like clothes, toys and books – friends and our local Oxfam have been very happy about this;
7. Halved the number of fridges and freezers we had – we used to have two of each and have reduced that down to one of each.  Both were given to friends of friends rather than being chucked;
8. Put low energy plugs onto the fridges and freezers reducing the general levels of electricity being used by the remaining appliances – not sure that these really work but they sounded neat;
9. Share car journeys whenever possible, which as we work together means five days out of seven can be done in the same car – this reduced our car movements by ten every week.

And that’s about all we did.  We do not have a tumble drier and only iron rarely (a karate gi and my shirts but only so very rarely); we do not use mobile phones (I don’t actually have one, but Sophie does have one for emergencies) or similar things like Blackberries.  We already cooked most of our food from scratch, buying organic & Fairtrade, as well as local where possible.

For more on saving the world, there’s good information at:

• Department of Environment’s List of Things You Can Do
• Twelve Practical Way to Green Up Your Autumn from the Lighter Footstep Blog, which is a useful resource 

What have other people done when getting started on being green?