How old are you?
38
What’s your occupation and who do you work for?
Graphic Designer – my own company
How long have been doing this?
11 years
What is it about your job that makes it ethical?
Lots! We have a NICE transport policy – i.e. No Internal Combustion Engine – we cycle and/or use public transport to all work meetings. We recycle all our waste paper and promote recycled paper to our clients (one of our clients made a 5 tonne carbon saving in one magazine issue just by switching to 50% recycled paper). Our drinks are fair trade, and our Macs are powered by a renewable energy tariff.
What’s the best bit about your job?
The creative bit. Coming up with designs that communicate clearly and have the ‘wow’ factor
What’s the worst thing?
Admin and tax.
What have the last 12 months been like for you?
Steadily busy.
What were you doing before this?
I worked for 3 years as a water engineer in Uganda running a team of well installers providing clean drinking water for rural villages.
What was your very first full-time job?
The above.
What advice would you give to someone wishing to embark on the same sort of work as you?
Start! And make the most of your existing contacts. Be keen and willing to work. And not too fussy to start with.
Have you got any plans for the next 12 months you’d like to share with us?
Go even greener with the business – more heavily promoting recycled stock and it’s real benefits.
What do you do to relax?
Read and cycle.
Who do you live with?
My wife and our 6 month old baby girl.
Whereabouts do you live?
In Birmingham
If you were Prime Minister, what’s the very first thing you would do?
Introduce Feed in Tariffs – whereby anyone who generates power from sustainable sources (solar, wind etc) can sell their surplus back to the grid for up to 4 times the price they pay for power from the grid, guaranteed for 20 years. This bonus is financed by charging regular grid customers a little extra (a mere £1 a year seems to do it in Germany). This has kick-started the German solar industry and made Germany one of the largest suppliers of solar power in the world, with 12% of the power coming from renewables. It seems like complete no-brainer to me – the fastest way to kick-start a renewable economy.
As cheap and easily available oil is expect to run out in the next couple of decades, what do you think will be the predominant form of transport in 2027?
Train and bike.
Have you got any guilty carbon secrets?
We do fly but we’ve limited ourselves to once a year.
What have you done that you were most proud of?
Switch my business to cycle-only transport.
What single issue are you most concerned about in the world at large?
The increasing size and reach of Government and it’s apparent inability to legislate for anything long-term – like Feed-in-Tarrifs. Everything they do seems to be short-term and populist.
Which person in the public eye do you most admire and why?
Zac Goldsmith for his environmental proposals
What’s your website address?
www.morsebrowndesign.co.uk
What are your three favourite other websites of the moment?
http://www.treehugger.com/
http://www.howies.co.uk/
http://www.whitepod.com/
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