This column on the British pre-occupation with green issues was published beginning of this month in the Polish magazine Businessman.

Eco Crowd

The British are jumping on bikes – in the last 3 years the number of bikers in London grew by over 100%. The supermarkets are hiding plastic shopping bags from the shoppers. There are green leaves and flowers coming out of cars’ exhaustions, if one believed in advertising. Season of ecology officially stated in Great Britain. And, although huge part of this fashion are marketing self-compliments, the British manage, on occasion, to introduce some real changes.

The idea to use people as sources of energy is not new – in Wachowskis brothers’ movie Matrix from 1999 the humanity is kept on earth by a bunch of machines, utilising the energy produced by its everyday practices. And although Wachowskis weren’t particularly interested in researching eco-friendly sources of energy, the idea is coming back today in the green context. There are plans to install special flooring  on the London’s Paddington station, one of the most crowded in the city, which will collect the energy created by people’s steps. the so called “Crowd Farm”, brain child of two Massachusetts Institute of Technology students, relays on translation of movement-generated energy into electric impulses. Thanks to being partially elastic, the crowd farm allows stepping to move blocks installed under it’s surface. The blocks rub against one another and so create the energy. After translating it into electricity the energy can be used to, among other things, power the lights at the station – or even move a train.

The idea has other, broader implications – the makers stress that it is designed with integration into urban space and spreading knowledge about green energy in mind. This knowledge becomes, indeed, more and more popular in Britain. 2008 London Design festival, which took place in September, showcased mainly wide range of eco-friendly products – from energy-generating gyms to mobile phone chargers powered by bike riding. Slowly but surely Londoners come to accept that the likes of decorating city with thousands of reindeer-shaped lamps for Christmas are becoming traditions of the past. Even major political parties agree on the issue of planned limitations in CO2 emissions (currently reduction by 60% till 2050).

The practical decisions aren’t, however, always easy. Despite protests against building of the 3rd runway on the Heathrow airport, British Airways stresses that  delays in building work will cause businesses to move out of the capital – and even sabotage of British economy in general. This isn’t the only problem of fashion for ecology. Guardian’s journalists decided to organise an action entitled “Green Wash”, which aims at bringing to light many lies about supposed green character of products, companies and public figures. The idea is to protect consumers from more or less evident lies in this matter, which sometimes become quite absurd in the general fever of eco-friendliness.

At the moment it is difficult to estimate whether carring about environment in Great Britain is only a temporary fashion, or whether the country – having sold many leaves-emitting cars and bottles of water consisting “300% more O2″ – will atually manage to change consumption patters of Britons.

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