High hopes of the eco visionaries

The Sunday Times
February 8, 2009
Former City workers are getting a new lease of life with ideas that help the planet
David Smith and Emma Smith

IS a new crop of eco-entrepreneurs emerging from the wreckage of the financial crisis? That may not be what Shriti Vadera, the business minister, meant when she claimed to see the green shoots of recovery last month, but in an increasingly bleak economic climate they may represent one of the few areas of new growth.
For many, going green is also a smart business move: Gordon Brown has spoken of 25m jobs worldwide by 2050 in the low-carbon energy sector and of the government’s aim to grab a significant slice of them for the UK. Before he was replaced as business secretary by Lord Mandelson, John Hutton forecast 1m “green” jobs over the next two decades. He has moved on to the Ministry of Defence, but the official target remains.
Kresse Wesling is something of a poster girl for the new movement. She started out working as an analyst for a Hong Kong-based venture-capital firm. Deciding that the outlook for financial services was bleak, she branched out and set up her own company, recycling unwanted materials into consumer products.
Today, aged 32, she has already started up three successful companies and collected a hatful of awards, including Entrepreneur of the Year at the Shell Women of the Future Awards 2007.
Since last April Wesling has given guidance to other budding eco-entrepreneurs at the British Library’s Business and Intellectual Property Centre on how to combine going green with making real money.
She says her time in Hong Kong primed her for the challenges in the cutthroat world of commerce. Her first business, started when she was 24, was Bio-Supplies, which sold environmental packaging. It was followed by Babaloo, which sells ethical products for parents and babies. Her latest venture – Bournemouth-based Eako – was started two years ago. Already profitable, it bucked the trend and experienced a bumper 2008 Christmas.
Eako’s products range from belts, bags and wallets to garden benches and chairs that are all made from recycled materials. For example, its Fire-Hose range of products are made from condemned fire hoses that are collected from fire brigades across the UK. As a thank you to the fire brigades for supplying the material, 50% of profits from the range are donated to The Fire Fighters Charity.
Eako’s latest innovation is the recycled coffee-bean bag that is now being sold in Sains-bury’s supermarkets. Wesling said thousands of tonnes of sacks are used to import coffee beans into the UK every year, and there’s value in the discarded jute that would otherwise find its way into landfill.
“I don’t see how nonsustainable business models will survive during the next 20 years,” she said. “Time is running out for exploiters and polluters.”
Wesling may be young and idealistic with lessons still to learn from the hard-knocks school of business, but there are veterans of the City who have turned over a new, green leaf. Andrew Hamilton worked for 20 years in the Square Mile, including a lengthy stint as corporate-finance director at SG Hambros.
While other City workers are facing shrinking bonuses and the threat of redundancy, he is now behind a ground-breaking method of burning household waste to create clean, renewable energy, as well as a company on the verge of huge expansion.
“I could see that with the political pressure to promote environmentally friendly solutions, this was going to be a very exciting growth area,” said Hamilton. “That was evident four or five years ago.”
Perhaps sensing the impending doom, Hamilton, 49, set up Advanced Plasma Power (APP) in 2005, and has spent the past three years investigating more efficient ways to make energy from rubbish that would otherwise end up in landfill.
The system his team has devised produces less than 1% waste (the ash is converted into a harmless building material), compared with about 25% for conventional incineration. He now hopes to set up the first of several APP power plants by 2011, which will provide enough renewable energy to power 12,000 homes for a year and “at a very competitive price”.
The thing that Wesling and Hamilton have in common is that they are pushing at an open door. Already, Britain has an environmental goods and services sector officially estimated to have annual revenues of £25 billion, and to be a net exporter. A third of all Europe’s venture-capital investment in clean technology since 2001 has been in the UK.
A study by Ernst & Young, Comparative Advantage and Green Business, suggested that there were green opportunities in most sectors of the economy.
Ernst & Young identified opportunities in computer software, electronics, pharmaceuticals and chemicals, as well as aircraft manufacture and electricity generation.
Ministers and officials are also trying to plan so there are “British jobs for British workers” in the expansion of nuclear power. Seven new stations, ata cost of at least £3 billion each, will be needed just to replace existing stations as they are decommissioned. Worldwide, 60 new stations are expected to be built over the next 10 years.
The government intends to learn from the experience of the 1970s, when North Sea oil first came on stream, by ensuring there is a UK skills base. There will be the equivalent of an Offshore Supplies Office which, according to the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, “led to the birth of a globally competitive, offshore-supplies industry which is still a global leader and export earner for the UK”. A £100 billion investment programme in renewable energy over the next 12 years will be a significant generator of jobs.
Some experts believe the recession offers an opportunity to step up the pace of creating green jobs in Britain.
“With the sharp downturn in the housing market and the construction industry in crisis with widespread job losses, a golden opportunity has opened up for a substantial investment programme that largely decar-bonises existing UK homes by 2020 through the retro-fitting of energy-efficiency measures and technologies,” said Sudhir Junankar, associate director of Cambridge Econometrics, a con-sultancy specialising in energy, environmental and climate-change issues.
“Such a programme, if it is rolled out over the next decade, will create green jobs, cut carbon emissions from UK homes by 80% by 2020 and help to meet the UK’s ambitious target of a 80% reduction in all greenhouse gases by 2050,” he said.
For green pioneers, it’s a challenge waiting to be met.