Making every meadow count

Environmentalist Ed Crowther is on a mission to raise awareness around reducing carbon usage and the importance of encouraging more wildflower meadows. Interview by Kate Chapman.

Passionate environmentalist Ed Crowther has turned his love for wildflowers into a planet-saving business and is keen to help more people understand how they can take steps to support biodiversity by offsetting their carbon usage.

Ed, who lives in Lincoln, says carbon usage extends beyond petrol mileage and paper and is encouraging businesses to micro-offset the effects of using digital tools like emails, Zoom, streaming and social media.

He launched My Square Metre three years ago. It uses a carbon calculator and wildflower planting to help people offset their carbon usage and has so far (at the time of writing) offset 7,655kg of CO2 by planting 3,559 square metres of meadowland containing 1,279,735 wildflowers.

The venture was recently B Corp registered and it’s Ed’s aim to plant one million square metres of meadowland across Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk by 2030.

“Our passion is to increase biodiversity – carbon offset is an added bonus,” says Ed.

“We plant about 25 to 30 different varieties of wildflower along with some grasses. Our first meadow is complete and we’re about halfway through meadow two, both of which are around 5,000 square metres in size. They were bare a couple of years ago, now we have crickets, bees and butterflies visiting and there’s a considerable increase in worms, it’s wonderful to see. We’ve had a lot of businesses contact us about planting wildflowers and are really starting to see some traction now.

“We’re here, especially for the smaller and medium-sized enterprises, to give them a chance to do something in a similar way to the bigger businesses – this means everyone can join in and we have a greater impact.”

Creating My Square Metre
Ed, who grew up in Southwell in Nottinghamshire, has always been surrounded by nature. He loves being outdoors and previously worked on an organic farm. It wasn’t until he took a decade-long sabbatical, when he worked as a DJ in clubs and bars, and even moved to London, that he became more concerned about the planet’s biodiversity, or lack of it.

He explains: “I’ve always been around nature, never very city-ish. But living in London you can go for miles and miles without seeing much greenery or biodiversity. This was really the main reason that My Square Metre happened.

“I naively assumed that corporations and governments, and those kinds of bodies, would sort out issues like biodiversity, along with other carbon-related issues. But then I realised that wasn’t happening and that they’re actually very big, slow machines to get moving in a particular direction.

“It’s a very small group of people who are doing most of the biodiversity work. They are the ones making it happen, but I wanted to do something that was a bit more accessible to anybody UK-based.

“I had to find a lot of things out and while researching I noticed that overseas there’s a lot more accessible and commercial options. All of those inputs came together, and My Square Metre was the solution that I came up with.”

That was three-and-a-half years ago. Ed’s next step involved extensive research and he joined up with experts in Lincoln University’s botany department. It provided him with 20 days working with ecology lecturer Dr Lan Qie, who helped him develop My Square Metre’s protocols, talked through how he might develop an environmental and ecological strategy and put him in touch with other useful contacts. Ed also looked at what other companies were doing to help biodiversity.

“We examined various products, there’s a lot of different carbon calculators which will calculate how many wildflowers are needed to offset carbon out there, but we’re getting there now. We still have a few more things to launch on our website, but more businesses are getting involved. We initially started with a much broader scope, but we’ve narrowed that down now.”

Digital impact
My Square Space now focuses on offsetting the carbon footprint of phones, emails, websites, social media, payments, Zoom calls, streaming, premises and other digital services.

Even unsubscribing from emails you no longer wish to receive can make a big difference says Ed, who adds that even though an email may seem innocuous, its environmental impact is more significant than meets the eye.

While using AI can also have a big impact on carbon – especially if someone is repeatedly pressing a button to regenerate ideas, Ed explains.

“Each time you hit send on an email it’s stored in multiple locations worldwide for safekeeping. Moreover, whenever you retrieve an old email, it’s downloaded from a server, further contributing to its carbon footprint. On average, an email’s lifetime emits approximately 4g of CO2,” he explains.

“We want people to think about these things. Our message is to reduce, reuse and recycle and when people cannot do any more of these things, that’s the time to have a look around our website, and then give us a call to see how we can help them further.”

My Square Space is planting up previous brownfield sites and areas of poor-quality land with a variety of native British wildflowers and grasses, after carrying out surveys to see which varieties would be most beneficial to them.

As well as buying their own square metres to plant as a one-time purchase or monthly subscription, businesses and individuals can also join the company’s wildflower planting campaign by sending a Plant it Forward gift card. This gives the holder one square metre to their name, bursting with biodiversity building and carbon sequestering potential.

Ed adds: “This is all quite long-term – we plant and look after the meadow for 30 years. It’s all cut once a year. With flowers we want to make sure the ground is as nutrient poor as possible, if its rich it then becomes covered in thistles and nettles, which are all still great, but cutting it allows us to create a more diverse range of flora – that’s how we need to do it.

“It’s going OK but getting the word out is by far the hardest thing. On Instagram, fashion is posted about 34 times more than biodiversity. Getting more people involved, understanding and enjoying the natural world around us, is a vital step in safeguarding and restoring nature.”

For more information visit mysquaremetre.co.uk

Photographs: My Square Metre

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