Friday, February 20, 2009

Short Film

We've got a student in today who's making a short film about what we're doing, he's out with Luke at the moment (following some recycling) and will be out with me later to film some cargo, then later on today he'll be back out to film the pedicabs in town.

Lets hope it's good, he's working hard!

WE GOT THE GRANT!!

A VERY BIG THANK YOU FROM ALL OF THE STAFF AT HEREFORD PEDICABS TO THE TEAM AT RE:THINK
It means that for us there are going to be some fantastic changes, we'll be able to disconnect from the grid and rely on just the sun and the wind for our power. We'll have sunpipes to light the offices and batteries to store all the energy we need to run computers and power lights when it gets dark.

For us it is also part of a much bigger project, if this is successful it will mean we have shown that if you start with the right ideas that you can create working profitable businesses which produce no carbon. It also means that as we expand we'll have a great modular root for our expansion that dramatically reduces the business overheads of electricity and gas. This means we need less money to run which in turn means we can charge our customers less than our competitors!

Great times at the moment! We're still progressing quickly, lets hope we can keep it solid in the coming months.

Friday, February 13, 2009

Finger Crossed

So next Tuesday we will know whether or not we are receiving a grant for 50% towards the cost of making our own energy for the business.

We've been doing some really interesting work with the marches energy association, they sent out some energy assessors and over some time we've been establishing if it will be possible for us to produce enough energy so we don't have to draw any from the grid for our office based operations (computers, battery charging, lights, heating, that sort of thing).

The plan is to instal some of these..One of these (not sooo big..).. and then we can keep this chap here on top of the ice and not swimming in the water..

It's not been as simple as we thought it might have been in the first place in fact we are going to have to change everything at our offices, so we use less energy and thus need to produce less to meet our needs. But that is a small price to pay for doing things the right way. Very soon we'll be pretty much Carbon Neutral. We already help lots of other people reduce their carbon footprints and we are somewhat in credit, the last piece of the jigsaw is to find out power from the energy which surrounds us.

It's a great project, so fingers crossed for next Tuesday when we find out if we have the grant or not!

Have a great weekend.

Will

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Whatever the weather..

I snapped this photo yesterdayI thought it was an opportune moment to snap a bit of 'Pedicab Spirit, out riding in the blizzards, on the snow, snaking through stationary traffic, making our deliveries and collecting our recycling, nothing holding us back, no cold engines, no snowed in vehicles, just efficient bikes and procedures being operated by a team of dedicated staff determined to get the job done whatever. So whilst out and about we noticed a lot of trade waste around, uncollected, when I got back to base I checked the web and sure enough, the Council had cancelled:

Maybe we could teach them a thing or to about seeing a job through!