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Vans are extremely useful things. They are big, spacious and can fit all manner
of stuff in them that you would never get in the back of your little hatchback
Corsa. I played a lot of music gigs at school and trying to fit two guitars,
two amps and an entire drumkit into a car was no easy feat and I wish I had had
the prescience to try and rent a van. There are plenty of companies around and
provided you can find satisfactory van insurance then you are pretty much away.
However, if you are one of those unfortunate souls who feels rather guilty about
the fact that the human race is slowly poisoning the planet, then the idea of
hiring a gas guzzling two ton monstrosity may not be high on your to-do list.
This is a conundrum. The enviro-friendly eco music festival you and other members
of your greenpeace-affiliated hippy commune have organized for the summer solstice
weekend needs to have all the equipment taken to it and as you don’t believe
in cars none of you has one big enough. Also, balancing an amp on one of your
bicycles wont cut it, the last time you tried getting a drumkit on a bus the
driver told you to take a running jump and the trains just disturb you as it
is just unnatural for all that metal to be moving so fast.
You need a van. Now, Unlike car manufacturers, van manufacturers are not required
to publish CO2 figures for their models so it’s not easy comparing them
and working out which ones are green. The best place to go, if any of you have
mentally moved out of the seventies is online. One company that has extracted
some of this emission information from the motoring industry and used it to operate
an eco-friendly van and car hire company is Green Motion (greenmotion.co.uk).
‘ Mercedes and Volkswagen have declined to give CO2 emissions for their
vans’,
says Richard Lowden, the managing director of Green Motion, ‘but Ford,
Renault and Citroën have been transparent’. From these figures Lowden
found that one of the Citroën models, the Citroën C2 Enterprise (113g/km
CO2 ), came out top.
Green Motion set up shop four months ago and so far there are only three bases,
in Oxford, Palmers Green, in North London, and Milton Keynes. There are grand
plans to spread to 11 more locations this year. Another possibility is ‘Go
Green’, based in Cheshire, which is another car and van rental company
that takes its environmental commitment seriously (gogreencarandvanrental.co.uk).
Right up your hemp-lined street.
While there is nothing particularly pea-green about its vans, it invests 1 per
cent of its annual profits in environmental education projects in the local area,
a means of offsetting its emissions. Despite advances in biodiesel technology,
progress has been slow to turn vans green, with most still guzzling unwholesome
quantities of diesel. There are simply not sufficient provisions to include biofuel
vans in a rental business, according to Lowden. ‘It’s an empty gesture;
there are only 14 filling stations that sell biodiesel in the UK.’
While you may feel some sort of affinity with the two men from Dorset who returned
earlier this month from a 2,600-mile trip to Timbuktu, in a lorry that ran on
waste chocolate, the sad fact is that most people aren’t bothered. But
you are, and that’s what counts. All power to you saving the world and
your ethically sourced green and eco-friendly method of transport.
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