La France et l’écologie

La France et l’écologie
October 18, 2007 by sylvain

Enfin !

Après avoir considéré les écologistes comme des soixante-huitards marginaux pendant de nombreuses années, les Français prennent enfin conscience de leurs responsabilitées.

L’industrialisation, puis la société actuelle de consommation égocentrée, ont caché  le plus important malaise de notre pays, la dégradation de notre environnement, en le classant  à  la dernière place des préoccupations politiques et économiques.

Aujourd’hui, enfin, la France relativise et s’aperçoit petit à  petit que le conditionnement dans lequel elle végète contient une denrée périssable, l’homme, qui même très riche et sur équipé, sera dans quelques temps l’égal de l’animal devant l’agonie de notre planète s’il continue à  ne pas la respecter.

Cette prise de conscience intervient car chacun se sent concerné, mais j’espère simplement que cet engouement collectif ne sera pas éphémère et qu’il permettra à  la France de réellement modifier sa vision de la nature, pour que l’ensemble des Français change  leurs habitudes de vie et pour que l’on puisse envisager un avenir meilleur, voir un avenir tout court, pour notre pays, pour notre planète, pour nous même et pour nos enfants.

Sylvain Houziaux

Note from Imre
We asked Sylvain to give WordPress a spin…. and to find out the french language capabilities…
Not bad.

April 4th

April 4th was come off it day. You can read the full story here for the Dave Hampton inspired event. We as a family participated fully. There were two things that needed to be done.

a) Switch something off that would normally be on.

b) Replace an old light bulb with an energy efficient device.

Well, we switched off the telly which had the added bonus of improving family communications and we actually replaced two light bulbs. So there you have it we did our bit.

Now check this out! Real time, well near enough, energy consumption graphs.

Well that was one good action…. here is another. Imre Ltd are proud to help The Childless Widows and Orphans Charity If you visit their site you will see that they have hearts of gold and are very active in helping the homeless. The site has numerous newspaper clippings. They are genuine, authentic and are thoroughly decent.

Electrisave

The Electrisave is an amazing little portable electricity consumption monitor. It consists of two units, a transmitter that you clip onto your incoming mains and a receiver that you can carry with you.  We have been using this for the last couple of months. In general when most things are switched off our house seems to run at 4 pence per hour in terms of energy usage. Now if we switch on the kettle or immersion heater we see this shoot up to about 23 pence an hour. WOW!  This is a great tool for the kids. They can immediately see the impact of switching things on and off. Buy the Electrisave from 4ecotips.com here.Apart from the Electrisave being a nifty little gadget there is actually another reason to mention it here in terms of an e-commerce solution.

For any small business to embark on an e-commerce project is not an easy thing. Very quickly the story becomes complicated… You need pictures, descriptions, a database, a shopping cart, a payment collector, integration, set up, testing and finally go live. But going live is not the end of the story. You then need to make the website work by promoting it. SEO, sponsored links etc etc. All of this can take time, money and lots of energy and you still will not be sure if you are going to sell any of your products. You probaby will, but boy is it damned hard to get there…….

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could test the waters? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could find out if your project had some chance of success? Well guess what? You can now set up a pilot and test the idea thanks to Paypal.

Until now, if you wanted to test the waters you really did not have many options. You could either sign up to World Pay, Protex or Barclays etc…. with the associated committments or you could go via Paypal or 2CO. Until now both had drawbacks. With Paypal your customers were forced to become members and with 2CO you were forced to add disclaimers on top of disclaimers and then they sit on your money until you hit their release level…. pah! all rather working against the small and humble business who just wants to pilot a project.

Well Paypal have finaly woken up. Now they will take money off anyone with a credit card and you are not forced down the road of divulging all your details! The whole process is much simpler and guess what? It works a treat.

To see this in action visit the Electrisave and you will see the Paypal bits……….

Call or email us if you would like advice on your e-commerce project. 01494 819900 or sales@imre.co.uk

Recent projects? Yes. Visit www.asdltd.com and here is the quote from the client: “It has been a real pleasure to work with you and your colleagues, painless  and fun at the same time.  We will certainly be recommending your services. Best Regards Ela and the rest of the gang !”

Other stuff? Yes, as part of our assistance to the www.4ecotips.com project we do meet very interesting people. One of these people is Dave Hampton. Want to know about Purple day? Read his weblog. carboncoach.typepad.com

Global Warming

If you read Frank J Rumbauskas “Cold Calling is a waste of time” you will get an education. You will learn lots and you will have a new strategy for winning new business.  This blog is a result of me reading his work.However if I had read Frank’s ideas in January 2004 then I would not have met Andrew Leech as Frank is not too impressed with Breakfast clubs. I was introduced to Andrew at the Gerrard’s Cross business breakfast club.

Andrew Leech is an amazing gentleman and has many years experience of ferreting around and finding out good stuff that only a top journalist could uncover. This talent for finding information is now being put to good use through the 4ecotips.com website. If you have an eco-side to you you will be familiar with some of the topics. The website aims to tackle the issue of global warming with practical suggestions on how you can make informed choices. For this and other reasons the website stays formal and clinical. But there is another side to Andrew and this can be seen on his blog. His postings always put a smile of my face.  I think Andrew is a swashbuckling Errol Flynn type eco-warrior at heart and he does not hold back the punches. Ouch! Mr Bush and others do get a verbal bashing or two….

Imre Ltd is proud to be associated with Andrew Leech and the 4ecotips project.

Cheers,

Paul

P.S. Turn off the TV – (why? see some ecofacts)