Adam Bastock has brought together a global community of people inspired to make change through Small99 People, Planet, Pint, an event that spans over 120 cities and has more than 20,000 attendees. He is also an Oxford Brookes Entrepreneur in Residence and founded Small99 in 2020. He has engaged over 50,000 businesses in taking small steps for big impact towards carbon reduction.
I met Adam when I heard him give a talk on a Small Business Britain Course that I attended. He is so passionate about educating us all about carbon reduction fundamentals via real-life examples of the footprint of our daily activities. This helps us to visualise and see our impacts better so that we can make informed choices about the activities we need to do to help reduce CO2 emissions and the others that we do more of to help positively impact the planet.
You can find out more about his work here – Small 99
I was asked to give a 15-minute talk at a networking meeting recently, and I decided to engage the attendees in one of Adam’s tools, a game where people decide where our everyday activities and associated CO2e emissions sit on a scale from lowest to highest.
First of all, what are CO2e ( CO2 equivalents ) ?
This is a metric / unit of measurement that is used to standardise the climate effects of various greenhouse gases. So think of it as all the greenhouse gases being combined as a metric or all currencies being made equivalent to the £.
Lowest – Highest game
So there were 10 activities and the participants had to decide where they should be placed on a sliding scale of CO2e from lowest to highest. Before they did this I explained each one and gave some stats as clues and then each participant was tasked with deciding where they thought the activity sat on the scale.
The activities ranged from
1 year of heating your home with gas heating
Consuming lkg beef
Sending 100 emails
Being in an online meeting for 1 hour
Taking a return flight to Glasgow
Making a cup of tea with dairy milk and so on.
The participants chatted between themselves and decided where each item should sit and there were some great discussions.
The results showed that they were correct in guessing where the lowest emissions were but the higher ones were not so obvious and sometimes they knew they were high but didn’t know which was higher.
I wanted to capture in this blog some of the fabulous feedback from the attendees as this was the first time that I had presented this game. I was delighted at how much everyone enjoyed it and it made them think about their impacts and what they may change and implement as a result.
“Great presentation. We each have to be aware of our personal impact and take charge of it as opposed to only doing it because everyone is….as in business ‘lead not follow’. Thank you for the reality check, Alex.“
“I thought it was a great and fascinating presentation, which certainly made me think about what I can do to improve my sustainability”
“Great presentation a real eye-opener!“
“Thank you so much for the informative game Alex Hughes It’s great to know we can all make a small difference from our own homes”
Networking host “Brilliant presentation Alex Hughes, really showing off your passion and knowledge on the subject!!”
“Thanks Alex – you’re always such an inspiration & champion of all things good! I think the amount of CO2e from food waste was the biggest surprise for me, hope they are teaching this in schools!”
“Brilliant spotlight speaker session on sustainability with the one & only sustainability queen – Alex Hughes loved the game!“
“What a fab event!! Loved Alex Hughes sustainability game!! “
“A big hats off to you for your presentation-cum-game today, Alex. It really got us all thinking… & meant that certain pennies were so much more likely to drop (than they might with a ‘straight’ presentation.)”
“Great to see everyone, learn more about sustainability – Alex Hughes had us all thinking about our impact on our own environment…great event!”
A fellow consultant who presented this game said “Fantastic Alex. I’m glad it went well! There are always surprised faces after learning about the emissions of some activities.”
From Adam Bastock himself as he saw my Linkedin post about this event “This is good to see! Really reassuring when it works and gets conversations going!”
If you would like to know more about how your activities impact your CO2e emsiions or you would like me to present this game to your audience, then do get in touch.
Alex Hughes
Auxilium Business Consulting Ltd
e: alex@auxiliumconsulting.co.uk