Alexis’s first career was as a BBC journalist from 1989 to 1998, mostly reporting on the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall. After completing an MBA at INSEAD, he then worked in business development for media technology companies in the UK and France until his concern about climate change led him to set up his own sustainability consultancy, cuttingthecarbon.
From 2006 to 2010 Alexis was a councillor in the London Borough of Camden and Chair of the council’s all-party Sustainability Task Force. In February 2010, Alexis won “Sustainability Councillor of the Year” at the national Local Government Association Councillor Awards. Later that year, he wrote a book about his experiences called Communities, councils and carbon – what we can do if governments won’t. He also set up the UK Passivhaus Conference to promote low energy buildings.
From 2012 to 2014 Alexis was News Editor and Managing Director of Transition Free Press, a quarterly newspaper produced by the Transition movement. Since 2014 he has worked full-time and part-time as Business Development Manager at Joju Solar, a British company that designs, installs and maintains solar PV, energy storage and electric vehicle charging systems.
Alexis has post-graduate diplomas in journalism from the Centre for Journalism Studies in Cardiff and the Centre de Formation des Journalistes in Paris; an MBA from INSEAD business school in France; an MSc in Food Policy from City University, London; and an MSc in Experimental Psychology from the University of Sussex.
It sounds so easy - to go zero waste you just have to stop buying things that can’t be recycled or reused. Of course the devil is in the detail. But let’s deal with the easy stuff first. Our food waste mostly goes into our wormery, hosted by Blanche’s mum in her...
Inspired by My Zero Waste Life (Ma Vie Zéro Déchets), a French TV programme about a Parisian who tries to eliminate waste from his life, which we screened in our local bar, we decided to try out life in the zero waste lane. We are Alexis, an Anglo-Scottish (!)...
“Water, water every where, Nor any drop to drink.” Coleridge’s words have a prophetic ring to them. We humans need water for life, we love it for leisure, we make art out of it; yet we also waste it, dirty it, privatise it, use it as a weapon and, most dangerously,...
More than four million people have switched bank account in the UK since the beginning of 2012, according to the Move Your Money campaign. That’s revolutionary in a country which has traditionally had a low switching rate for banking. For the ethical saver there are...
How often have you heard people say: “There’s no point in me doing anything on carbon reduction – look at China”? Or “Don’t you know the Chinese are building two new coal-fired power stations a week?” But what if China were to go it alone on cutting carbon? Would it...
With the coalition government ready to allow fracking companies to quite literally blow up Britain’s countryside in search of a replacement for dwindling North Sea resources, the evidence from the US is increasingly that shale gas is a bubble about to burst rather...
If climate change was the global crisis which drew many into the Transition movement, then 2012 was the year it became almost impossible for the rest of the world to ignore the link between extreme weather events and climate change. There was of course Hurricane...
Here's me back in my councillor days in a short film designed to promote food growing in Camden.
