What Happens to a Smart Meter After It Leaves Your Wall?
Helen Woodcock came to sustainability through risk management, and a refusal to accept that anything is simply the way it works. Over a career in energy services, she worked inside a major UK organisation installing smart meters, heat pumps and other household energy technology, responsible for their whole life cycle. She now works independently in Northern Ireland, helping smaller organisations understand their supply chains. She talks about the ripple effect and how if we can help small businesses understand their own story, values and operations, and ask better questions of its suppliers, those suppliers go on to do the same
Her argument is simple. We keep digging for new material when huge amounts of copper, steel and precious metals sit in the technology around us. A smart meter, as Helen calls it, is a board in a box. Trace its materials back and the picture turns woolly by the third or fourth tier, as suppliers, mines and sites keep shifting.
It also follows the same product the other way: why a meter can be almost entirely recycled yet not easily remade from a recycled one, why a single radiator becomes an ownership grey area the moment a heat pump goes in, and why doing the right thing depends on the system around it.
Visit Helen’s YouTube Channel, ‘Finding My Place’: https://www.youtube.com/@finding-my-place
Contact Helen at helen@purpull.com or visit www.purpull.com
Produced by Critical Productions. Sponsored by Satarla.
Listen Now:
