Big Green Coach have announced a number of new partnerhips with music festivals in the UK and Europe offering a low carbon solution to festival travel including Kendal Calling, Sonisphere and Global Gathering. Kendall Calling in the Lake District combines contemporary music and art with traditional rural entertainment, Wakestock is Europe’s largest wakeboard music festival for the thrill-seeking music lover and Sonisphere will keep the metal fans happy. End of the Road Festival provides an intimate and friendly festival. Big Green Coach will also take you to the biggest dance festivals including the ever-popular Global Gathering, Creamfields and Glade Festival. For those wishing to go further afield for their festival fix, Big Green Coach are traveling to the fabulous Pinkpop in Holland and for more underground musical tastes – Dour Festival at the heart of Europe in Belgium. Especially for students is the unstoppable force that is Beach Break Live, having found a beautiful new home on the South Wales Coast.Having already sold out their V festival ticket and coach travel packages, Big Green Coach is also offering a ‘40 for 40’ fares for direct services from London and Birmingham to the Glastonbury Festival for existing ticket holders, with the coach trip priced at only £40. Manchester fares are £50 all with an exclusive drop off point close to the festival entrance. What’s more, if you are traveling from London your journey may be reduced by up to an hour with coaches picking up from Hatton’s Cross in West London and cutting out the central London traffic.
Coach travel is widely accepted as the most environmentally friendly way to get to a festival and Big Green Coach is making it even greener with their commitment to plant a tree for each full coach that goes to a festival. In 2010, their unique transport offering was spotted by student travel company Outgoing and Big Green Coach has now become part of the Outgoing family who own Snowbombing, Beach Break Live and Summer Break to name but a few.
Last year’s Great Big Green Ideas had a massive response of ideas to make festivals greener – and can we say thank you again to our friends at T-in-the-Park, Glastonbury, the Big Issue and Virtual Festivals for making this happen. In fact it was so good we are going to run it again – with a two fantastic goodie bags up for grabs – each stuffed full with exclusive festival crew T-shirts, CDs, DVDs and other festival memorabilia. 
Edie.net reports that organisations and business do not ‘understand’ and are ‘unprepared’ for the launch of Britain’s carbon trading scheme. The Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy (CRC) Efficiency Scheme is a huge rating system, or league table, offering benefits to low carbon businesses and hitting high emitters with more costs. However, corporate responsibility consultants Acona believe ‘numerous revisions’ early in the scheme’s life have created ‘confusion’ amongst businesses, while information from the bodies responsible for it, originally the Department of Energy and Climate Change and now the Environment Agency, has been slow to filter out. Acona say that few companies seem to have people in place who really understand how the scheme works and that “Despite it being billed as a light touch piece of legislation, the logistics of making it work are quite complex. However, Head of climate change and sustainable development at the Environment Agency, Tony Grayling, said: “The league table is a very public judgement on how seriously you take your environmental responsibilities adding “Carbon reduction doesn’t need to be complicated or expensive, there are simple and inexpensive steps every organisation can take to cut their energy consumption – from motion sensors for lighting in offices to higher efficiency motors in manufacturing.” Mr Grayling added that analysis for the Environment Agency suggests the scheme could reduce CO2 emissions by up to 11.6M tonnes per year by 2020 and that it is also expected to save organisations money through reduced energy bills – benefiting the economy by at least £1billion by 2020. More than 20,000 organisations will have to register with the Environment Agency by the end of September this year. Around 5,000 of these organisations – those that used at least 6,000 Megawatt hours (MWh) of half hourly metered electricity in 2008 – will have to report their emissions and, from 2011, buy allowances for every tonne of CO2 they emit. During the introductory phase in 2011 and 2012, allowances will be sold at a fixed price of £12 per tonne of CO2.
There was an interesting article in the ‘Eureka’ section of the Times (April, 2010) where Ben Webster looked at how people respond to green messages. The article starts with an interesting story from Ben’s trip to a garden centre where his partner insisted on buying a large sack of peat – even though she is a keen birdwatcher and fully aware of the fact that peat extraction devastates the habitats of birds like hen hariers, golden plovers and skylarks – and that extracting peat releases millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Replacing the 75 million bags of peat sold each year with the (often better) peat free alternatives would be the same as taking 350,000 cars off the road. The Government does know this and in 1999 it agreed a voluntary target with retailers to replace 90% of all growing media with peat free products by 2010. Hooray. The problem is that the peat free share had only only reached 53% by 2007 and is probably about 60% now – so that is still a lot of peat being dug up. Ben reports that B&Q, whilst professing to be ‘working towards eliminating peat in line with the Government target’ actually still stocks peat based products, that 46% of its compost sales last year were peat based, that it uses peat as the medium for the plants it grows and uses peat in ladscaping.