Savings in waste management are one of the most commonly achieved efficiencies through GI. Newcastle City Council redesigned waste management collections using a combination of Ordnance Survey data, GIS software and vehicle tracking. The OS MasterMap Integrated Transport Network Layer helped the Council reduce the number of required vehicles for weekly collections and introduce weekly recycling collections. Total savings of around £250,000 were achieved through fleet management and fuel reduction amongst other areas.
A similar exercise at Daventry District Council generated efficiency savings worth over £100,000 per annum, diesel costs dropped by 12% and their carbon footprint was reduced. East Riding of Yorkshire Council saved £160,000 a year and tonnes of carbon emissions by analysing their waste management strategy – and many other councils are achieving similar cost and environmental benefits.
Daventry County Council has also won an environmental award for their “Walking Bus” scheme, providing an alternative to parents who would usually drive their children to school, again underpinned by our data. Many councils also use GI to help make local planning decisions and share them with local residents. Similarly, GI is used to show residents their nearest recycling facilities, local wildlife reserves and much, much more. GI and the environment are already becoming inextricably linked.
Aside from benefits being demonstrated in local government, people are being encouraged to think about the environment and GI through the GeoVation® programme. The GeoVation Challenge, run by Ordnance Survey, is asking entrepreneurs, developers and community groups to address three challenges this year, with a potential prize fund of £175,000 for winners. The first two challenges have had strong environmental themes. In July, people were asked “How can Britain feed itself?”, allowing them to decide how geography could play a vital role in helping to connect people to farming and locally produced and sustainable sources of food. Submitted ideas included urban rooftop allotments and creating a “real” Farmville, where people could share and buy real produce.
The second GeoVation Challenge asked how geographic data could make travel more environmentally sustainable and improve public transport services. Helping people to travel smarter has never been more achievable following Government data releases and this is a great opportunity to improve public services.
|130| ENVIRONMENT INDUSTRY MAGAZINE
© David Newham- Alamy
We have already seen websites like Transport Direct demonstrating the power of location. People can plan their journey and see options for car, public transport and cycle routes and even compare the carbon emissions for each option. Further work into environmental travel could drive reductions in both congestion and carbon emissions.
Ordnance Survey’s launches of OS OpenData™ and OS OpenSpace® have made it increasingly simple for people to get involved in GI and even build their own apps. The OS OpenData online mapping portal allows users to view, download or develop from a range of datasets at the click of a button. The develop option takes users to OS OpenSpace application programming interface (API), which is free to access and lets developers create amazing web applications and online projects with Ordnance Survey maps. A range of Ordnance Survey raster and vector mapping datasets are available including, 1:10 000 Scale Raster, OS Street View®, Boundary-Line™, OS VectorMap™ District and Meridian™ 2.
The uses of OS OpenData have been wide and varied, from plotting the locations of fraud to mapping the place of pharmacies and train stations across Great Britain. Businesses have also used OS OpenData to show environmental benefits. Spatial Geographic Services and Applications Ltd (SGSA Ltd) used OS Street View as a base before adding road routing information, which could be vitally important to our emergency services, and could also save businesses and people time and money and reduce their carbon footprint as a result. By incorporating traffic calming data, one-way streets, gates and fords, it could help countless people in planning the best routes to travel. More unusually, Lovell Johns created a user-friendly
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