Accenture, Activia, Adobe, ADT, Aetna, Aetna, AIG, Airbnb, Alitalia, Amazon, Amex, Amex, Amore Pacific, API, Bancomer, Bank of America, Bank of the West, Belvedere Vodka, Ben & Jerry’s, Blackrock, Bleeker Street, BMW, BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, Bottega Veneta, Brighthouse Financial, Bulgari, Business France, CA Tech, Cadillac, Canon, Capital One, Cartier, Cathay Pacific, Chanel, Charles Schwab, Chaumet, Chevron, Chobani, Cisco, Citi, Citigold, Cleveland Clinic, Club Med, Cocovia, Cole Haan, Columbia Business School, Con Ed, Costa Rica, Credit Suisse, Crown Royal, CTCA, Dell, Delta, Destination Canada, Diageo: Johnny Walker, Diane Von Furstenberg, Discover, Docusign, Embassy of Japan, Emirates, Enterprise Florida, Ernst & Young, Esurance, Exxon, Fairlife, Fairmont, Farmers Insurance, Fidelity, Fidelity Retirement, Florida Keys, Focus Features, Fontainebleau, Ford, Franklin Templeton, Gates Foundation, GE, Geico, Girls’ Lounge, Glenmorangie, GMCVB, Goldman Sachs, Google, Google Waze, Grey Goose, Gucci, Guinness, Hennessy, Herradura, History Channel, Holiday Inn, Home Depot, Hong Kong, HP, HPE, HSBC, Huawei, Iberostar, IBM, Invisalign, J&J, Janssen, Juniper, KIA, Land Rover, Lincoln, Longines, Macallan, Mass Mutual, MasterCard, Max Mara, Mercedes Benz, Merrill Lynch, Method, Metlife, MetLife, Mexico Tourism, MilkPEP, Minh Long, Moet, MTV, Muzo, NAR National Assn of Realtors, NCAA, Nest, Nestle Waters, Netflix, NetJets, Nike, Nordstrom, Northern Trust, Northwest Univ. Kellogg School of Business, Norton, NRG, Nuclear Matters, OnePlus, Oppenheimer, OWN, P&G, Pacific Life, Park Hyatt, Park West Gallery, PC Hub, Perrier Jouet, Peru, Pfizer, Philips, Prada, Prego, Prodigy Network, Pure Storage, Purina, Real is a Diamond, Reuters, Ritz Carlton, Royal Caribbean, Salesforce, Shell, Shire, Slack, SoFi, Sotheby’s, Spotify, Sprint, Stanford, Starbucks, Starz, Statoil, Stella Artois, Switzerland Tourism, Synchrony, Tanium, TCS Marathon, TD Ameritrade, Texture, Thai Airways, Thailand Elite, The New School, TIAA, Tiffany, Titos, TNT, Tomorrow Sleep, Toyota, Tropicana, Tylenol, U.S. Virgin Islands, UBS, UC Davis, United Airlines, University of Minnesota, University of Phoenix, Vacheron, Vanguard, Veritas, Verizon, Veuve Clicquot, Visit Norway, Volvo, Voya, Walmart, WEAR, Weinstein Co., Wells Fargo, Wendy’s, Western Digital, Zegna.
All posts by Adam Aston
HOW Blue-Zone Technologies Cuts THE CLIMATE TOLL OF Anesthesia | Corporate Knights
Anesthesia is a medical miracle, but it’s costly and poses a surprising threat to the climate
Operating rooms are sites of some of our most advanced health technologies, where bodies are healed and lives often saved. Yet for the climate, operating rooms are surprisingly unhealthful.
The culprit: gaseous anesthesia. When anesthetized, patients only absorb about 5 per cent of an administered dosage. The leftovers – roughly 95 per cent of the original volatile anesthetic – are routinely vented to the outside world where they act as greenhouse gases thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide.
“It’s a risk to the environment, and a terrible waste of money,” says Dusanka Filipovic, who for 10 years has been building a business to fix this twin-barreled problem. The Toronto-based firm she founded, Blue-Zone Technologies, is poised to begin large-scale commercial implementation of its Deltasorb technology, which captures and recycles anesthesia emissions.
When retrofitted onto the exhaust line of a conventional anesthetic gas system, the filter recaptures and absorbs the scavenged gases. In roughly 300 pilot sites in hospitals across Ontario, the service is already helping the planet by preventing these emissions from adding to our GHG problem.
And later this year, Blue-Zone will begin to help hospitals’ bottom lines as well, by using the captured excess gases as a raw material to make and sell a generic, lower-cost supply of anesthetics, says Filipovic.
Inhaled anesthesia gases – the most common are desflurane, isoflurane and sevoflurane – are a miracle of modern medicine. They evolved from and replaced ether, the first form of inhaled anesthesia pioneered in the 1800s. Yet ether was so dangerous, it was a common cause of death during surgery.
Modern anesthesia gases, by comparison, have largely eliminated those risks, explains Stephen Brown, corporate chief of anesthesia with William Osler Health System, which operates two hospitals in Ontario.
“They allow a far finer degree of control,” he adds, “lowering patient risk during surgery. And they cut the side effects and hangover afterwards,” says Brown, who has overseen the installation of Deltasorb systems in three dozen operating rooms.
Though healthier for humans, modern anesthesia is making the planet sick.
Desflurane, the most widely used anesthesia, has global warming effects some 3,700 times greater than CO2. The gas inhaled typically includes a mix of similar agents, and is delivered via a flow of a mix of oxygen and nitrous oxide, which is also a potent GHG.
For every hour of surgery, the effects of these gases add up to the equivalent of hundreds of miles of driving. Taken together, worldwide emissions of inhalation anesthetics have a climate impact on par with a single coal-fired power plant, or more than 1 million passenger cars, according to a 2010 study in the British Journal of Anaesthesia.
Blue-Zone is already helping to tug that toll down thanks to its bread-loaf sized canisters. Retrofitted onto the exhaust pipes of anesthesia systems, the reusable canisters are filled with a proprietary material that absorbs the volatile anesthesia gases exhausted by the anesthetic system. Blue-Zone technicians routinely pick them up from the hospitals and replace them with refills.
The fee? About $150 per month. At less than $5 per day, that’s “not a significant cost barrier,” says Brown. Hospitals receive a monthly report on the amount of gas recaptured and what that works out to in terms of CO2-equivalent GHG emissions.
Returned to Blue-Zone’s facility in Concord, Ontario, the filter packs are processed to recover accumulated anesthesia, which is then processed into generic anesthetic agents and packaged for resale.
Filipovic is excited by the opportunity to offer a lower cost alternative for gaseous anesthesia, for which the market is highly concentrated. Worldwide, just two factories – in Japan and Puerto Rico – produce these life-saving gases, which makes them not only costly but vulnerable to supply disruption.
As yet, however, there are no regulations in Canada or other major countries forcing hospitals to curb anesthesia emissions.
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- View a PDF of the original article, here: Blue-Zone.
- Photo courtesy of the NATO International Security Assistance Force.
The 60-Second Interview: Adam Aston for The New York Times’s T Brand Studio | Politico
By CAPITAL STAFF — 06/27/2014
CAPITAL: Can you walk us through the process of how a paid post gets made? Do you generally approach companies with post ideas, or is it the other way around?
ASTON: It’s a collaborative, iterative process. After clients come to us with an opportunity and specific goals, the team brainstorms and returns with concepts, which we then evolve further along with the client. For a successful execution like Netflix’s Paid Post for “Orange is the New Black,” trust and cooperation are key catalysts.
CAPITAL: The “Orange is the New Black” ad made waves in media circles. Digiday called it “The Snowfall of Native Ads.” Were you surprised by the reaction? Has that success opened up new business opportunities?
ASTON: We’re a young studio, with a lot of energy, talent and ambition. “Orange is the New Black” was the first project on which we were able to fire-up all of our talents in parallel — journalism, video, design and storytelling. We were hoping it would raise the bar, and it did so. Nothing illustrates the potential of a Paid Post like a real-world example like this, so we’ve seen some increased interest from new potential projects.
CAPITAL: Referring to the Netflix ad, Times media columnist David Carr wrote, “All brand-sponsored journalism does not suck.” Do you find yourself trying to challenge that perception on a regular basis? Why do you think people seem to have lower expectations for brand-sponsored content?
ASTON: Like David, we recognize that this kind of content faces real headwinds. Media watchers are rightly concerned that this content could potentially confuse readers. That’s why The New York Times has labored to demark T Brand Studio’s work from newsroom content. That said, marketer content can be just as valuable as content coming from a newsroom. All content — whether news or advertising — works best when it’s of a high quality.
CAPITAL: A lot of your editors and contributors seem to have journalism backgrounds. Is that something you look for? Is there a big difference between writing a news story and writing a paid post?
ASTON: Journalistic sensibilities and experience are vital to execute high quality content, so when were were staffing up we were definitely looking for experienced journalists to join our team. Writing a news story and writing a piece of sponsored content both require solid reporting and writing skills, as well as a focus on facts.
CAPITAL: There’s obviously been a lot of discussion about how to integrate native advertising; specifically, about how it should be differentiated from news content. Do you think it’s important for paid content to be clearly labeled as such? And do you think there’s a reader appetite for well-written paid posts?
ASTON: Sponsored content is not about tricking your readers, it’s about adding value to the conversation. As I mentioned, we want to avoid confusing readers at all costs. In turn, we want to provide them with thought-provoking, engaging content in the form of infographics, video, images and of course, written narrative. Examples like the success of Netflix’s Paid Post show that readers do welcome well-written sponsored content that offer a fresh perspective on interesting topics. Readers respond enthusiastically when compelling, clearly-labeled content enriches their interest in a topic related to the brand.
View the original here: https://www.politico.com/media/story/2014/06/the-60-second-interview-adam-aston-editorial-director-for-the-new-york-times-t-brand-studio-002456
Yulex and the Art of Making Greener Rubber | Corporate Knights
How Yulex is commercializing “green” rubber made from a drought- and disease resistant dessert shrub |
With a name like “natural” rubber, one might think the stretchy, waterproof stuff would have unassailable green cred. After all, humanity has been harvesting rubber for millennia. The ancient Mayans converted the fluid weeping from Hevea brasiliensis into the world’s first sports balls used in ritual games.
Yet more recently, industrial scale farming has tainted natural rubber’s reputation. As Ford’s Model T ushered in the automotive age, demand for tire rubber soared. Intensive plantation farming of Hevea – the dominant variety of rubber trees – emerged as an early cause of tropical deforestation.
Today, with demand exceeding global supply, Hevea is facing a host of new worries. Pressure to boost the yield of natural rubber has inflated the use of harmful pesticides, and disease is a rising worry. More than 90 per cent of natural rubber is grown in a few East Asian countries, leaving growers vulnerable to the sort of catastrophic blight epidemic that had swept away Latin America’s plantations by the 1950s. Rubber trees are also water hogs, making them vulnerable to climate change-induced drought.
Jeffrey Martin, chief executive and co-founder of Yulex, sees the answer to natural rubber’s proliferating problems in a low-growing shrub named guayule – pronounced why-YOU-lee. A native to the arid U.S. southwest, guayule thrives with little water and zero pesticides, and can be made into latex that doesn’t trigger allergies.
In studying the plant, Martin unearthed a cache of research reaching back decades. Guayule, he found, had been temporarily commercialized many times. In the 1910s, during World War II and again in the 1970s and ’80s, industrial and government labs pursued large-scale guayule cultivation as an alternative to Hevea rubber. Each effort collapsed, however, in the face of lower-priced supplies of natural or synthetic rubber.
These mishaps didn’t daunt Martin. He used them to develop a business plan designed to avoid the mistakes of those earlier ventures. So in 2000, Martin started Yulex in Chandler, Arizona, armed with $20,000 in patents and 20 guayule seeds.
Unlike earlier efforts, which targeted the tire market from the get-go, Martin is putting off sales to high-volume, low-cost markets. Instead, he’s lowering costs and scaling production by first selling into high-margin, niche markets and plowing the proceeds into technologies that can help grow capacity. “You can’t just go straight after a commodity market like tires,” says Martin. “You have to sell the benefits of the technology first.”
California-based Patagonia, a manufacturer of performance gear, is among the first to commercialize a product made from guayule rubber. Following a four-year search for alternatives to petrochemical-based neoprene for its wetsuits, Patagonia found a match in guayule.
The company liked that growing and processing guayule had less impact on the environment in terms of water use and chemicals used in processing. Plus, “its performance is great,” says Todd Copeland, environmental product specialist for Patagonia and an avid surfer.
This winter Patagonia planned to release a wet suit made of a 60:40 blend of guayule and conventional neoprene. Yulex is also exploring new product lines including latex mattresses, athletic shoes and yoga mats.
Looking ahead, Martin is focusing on a variety of ways to scale up production and lower costs. Developing a more productive strain of guayule is at the top of this list. To that end, Yulex has teamed up with California-based SGB, an agri-biotech company, to apply advanced crop science methods that will accelerate the natural process of breeding more productive strains of guayule.
Already, compared with data from the 1980s, when the crop was last intensively grown, Yulex has tripled yields. Yield improvements are on track to double again by 2020, says Martin, and will match or better today’s average output of Hevea rubber trees, which can yield about one metric ton of latex per acre.
The company is also looking to dramatically expand the area of guayule being cultivated. Today, farming is limited mostly to Arizona. But given the crop’s suitability to arid regions, it could be grown on every continent, save Antarctica, says Martin.
Fields of Yulex-licensed guayule will sprout next in Southern Europe, thanks to a $270-million deal with Versalis, a global leader in biomaterials and a subsidiary of Italy’s Eni.
Since Yulex’s incorporation, the company has raised $75 million in private equity. Last March, it signed a deal with Italy’s Pirelli Tire to help develop guayule polymers and resins for tire applications. That deal could, in time, pave the way to the very tire market that foiled earlier efforts to commercialize guayule.
In the Yulex boardroom, Martin keeps a souvenir from one of those earlier failed eras: a faded, decades-old tire made from guayule. It serves as a reminder of the huge potential market opportunity if Yulex can get volumes up and pricing down.
Martin is convinced it’s achievable. That at the right price, guayule can win a major share of the $50-billion-plus market for tire rubber now split between Hevea and synthetic rubber.
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- Check out the original article here:
http://www.corporateknights.com/article/yulex-and-art-making-treehugger-rubber?page=show - View a PDF of the story here: Yulex’s greener rubber
- Image courtesy of Yulex.
Winter Olympics 2014: Missed Opportunities to Advance Sustainability | The Guardian
Beyond Dow’s commitment to offset the games’ carbon footprint, big sponsors are doing too little to advance sustainability |
The Sochi Winter Olympics, which opens 7 February, was meant to be the greenest Olympics ever. The budget was certainly there: Russia has doled out more than $51bn, an all-time record, to make the event happen.
Yet reports of serious environmental problems have been piling up for months. The UN and World Wildlife Fund have called out Russia over construction practices that damaged the region’s pristine natural ecosystems.
And in October, the Associated Press reported it had found mountains of construction debris in an unlicensed landfill, indicating Russia had broken its promise to make the games zero waste. And, ominously, environmental activists have reported being harassed by officials. It’s a discouraging prelude to the games.
Yet I wondered if there might be a silver lining to be found amid the sustainability commitments made by the game’s corporate sponsors.
After all, while the credibility of the Russian organizers’ on these issues has all but melted away, the corps of 10 worldwide sponsors includes major global brands, many of which have made deep, long-standing commitments to sustainability.
My findings? With one dramatic exception, the games’ deep-pocketed sponsors have done too little to promote sustainability as an element of their efforts at Sochi.
The games’ worldwide sponsors are a familiar lot, including six iconic US brands, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, General Electric, McDonald’s, Procter & Gamble and Visa; two Asian electronics giants, Japan’s Panasonic and South Korea’s Samsung; and two European companies, France’s Atos and Omega from Switzerland.
This top-tier level of sponsorship, rumored to cost at least $100m per four-year cycle, is far from trivial. And given the International Olympic Committee’s growing emphasis on sustainability – the past two games in London 2012 and Vancouver 2010 are considered the greenest ever – these sponsorships seem an ideal platform in which to mix a high-profile sustainability push.
Yet that doesn’t seem to be happening. For this exercise, I mined online press material and related documentation and emailed each company. Only Dow replied with detailed information. Here’s what I found:
Dow: Sochi’s “official carbon partner”
In a first for the games, chemicals giant Dow has pledged to offset the organizing committee’s entire direct carbon footprint – including greenhouse gas emissions from operating the games’ venues, as well as from travel and lodging for all athletes, staff and volunteers – as well as the estimated travel footprint of all spectators and media attending the Olympic events and the Paralympic Games, scheduled for March.
Dow estimates it will offset emissions equivalent to 360,000 metric tons of carbon-dioxide for the organizing committee, plus 160,000 metric tons for spectators and media. For perspective, the total estimated 520,000 metric tons is equivalent to removing approximately 102,000 cars from US roads, or neutralizing a year’s worth of direct and indirect emissions from 10,800 US homes.
Dow is offsetting these emissions with a mix of completed and ongoing projects, principally in Russia, but also in Brazil and South Korea, which will host the next two Olympics, and other regions. These include farming enhancements, such as low-till farming methods; building efficiency gains via better insulation and other technologies; and industrial upgrades. In the US, Dow is deploying a share of the verified offsets generated from capturing and recycling methane at a waste dump in Georgia.
The broad portfolio of projects, Dow claims, meets international standards and the International Carbon Offset and Reduction Alliance Code of Practice, the global benchmark for offsets. “Dow’s initiative represents a significant step forward in terms of sustainability for one of the world’s main sporting event,” according to a company statement.
GE and turbine power
The only other sponsor with a clear environmental angle to its Olympics pledge is GE. The conglomerate is supplying two very high efficiency “aero-derivative” gas turbines to help power the games. The units, which will provide both base load and peak load power to the Olympics village and venues, feature GE’s latest emissions technology.
Evolved from airplane jet engines, the model is designed to ramp up and down in less than 10 minutes, which makes it well suited to pair with the variable output of wind turbines, solar panels and other renewable energy systems.
That’s not to say that renewable energy will be powering Sochi. Despite early estimates of promising potential for geothermal, solar, hydro and wind and some building-level projects, there is scant evidence that any substantial new renewables capacity has been built.
Everyone else
From there, evidence of sustainability efforts by other corporate sponsors tapers off sharply. For their part, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, both long-time Olympic sponsors, have focused on health – but details are scant. Coca-Cola Russia said it plans to launch a traveling showcase of activities promoting an active, healthy lifestyle during the Winter Olympics.
A survey of news and press materials of the remaining half dozen top-tier sponsors (Atos, Omega, Panasonic, P&G, Samsung, and Visa) turned up no explicit sustainability goals in their Sochi commitments.
To be sure, I hope there are other sustainability efforts afoot that I missed. I welcome information on other programs in the comments below.
Big platform, big responsibility
But the overall direction of the Sochi games is discouraging. It’s a pity that more companies aren’t using the Olympics to up their sustainability efforts, not least because the event offers such far-reaching visibility.
As the Natural Resource Defense Council’s eco-sports guru Allen Herskowitz says, only about a tenth of the public follow sciences, but nearly two-thirds follow sports. This means that sustainability actions in sporting arenas have supersized potential to normalize greener practices.
And, lest we forget, lurking beneath the immediate question of sustainability is a deeper worry about climate change, particularly as it impacts the viability of future winter sports.
In winter playgrounds around the world, climate change is already degrading the seasonal conditions that skiers, boarders and others depend on. In Vancouver 2010, unseasonably warm weather forced the games to resort to extreme measures, such as hauling in stored snow.
Sochi 2014 also has been stashing snow, and is ready to deploy an army of energy-intensive earth-movers and snow-making systems to make ready for the games. It’s good to know Sochi is prepared for a potential shortage of the white stuff.
Still, it would be better to know the games and their partners are working today to avoid climate troubles and warmer winters tomorrow.
Policing Toy Factories to Avoid Worker Harm: International Council of Toy Industries | Corporate Knights
Mortally dangerous conditions remain a grim reality for workers at factories around the world.
In September 2012, some 300 workers died in a garment factory fire in Pakistan, many because they were trapped behind locked emergency exits. Six months later, another 1,100 seamstresses were crushed to death when an eight-storey building collapsed in Bangladesh, despite warnings it was unsafe.
As the multi-trillion-dollar textile industry struggled to respond to these tragedies, the much smaller global toy industry was able to call on a resource no other consumer product industry can match.In short order, big toy brands and retail members of the International Council of Toy Industries (ICTI) were able to tap into a one-of-a-kind database they have built over the past decade known as the ICTI CARE (Caring, Awareness, Responsible, Ethical) Process (ICP).
The trove of data, which includes wage rates, hours worked, worker age and 200 or so other metrics at thousands of toy factories, allowed big toy buyers to rapidly identify manufacturers located in the areas affected by the recent labour disasters for focused follow-up. Within weeks, industry executives started to develop and roll out tougher rules to all of the factories in the ICP network, guiding inspectors to enforce stricter requirements for fire escapes and building integrity.
The quick response was made possible by a combination of ICP’s carefully cultivated industry collaboration together with a recent decision to port its unique database onto a web-based platform provided by Enablon, a supply-chain software service provider founded in 2000.
“Not long ago, this sort of information was considered proprietary. A single factory might have two dozen clients, but they didn’t want to talk to one another, for fear of competitive disclosure” says Philippe Tesler, co-founder and CEO of Enablon North America.
A combination of factors has rewritten these habits. There’s a growing recognition that risks can be lowered and costs minimized through collaboration. “Reporting has gone from a defensive response to a more proactive process,” says Tesler.
Back in 2002, the toy industry was facing a series of relatively small-scale labour mishaps at overseas factories. “Pressure was building from retailers, from consumers, NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and investors to boost regulation,” recalls Christian Ewert, president and CEO of the ICTI CARE Foundation, which oversees the supply chain program.
Instead, the industry group pushed for self-regulation and established the ICP, a framework in which toymakers would share and compare information towards the end of “ensuring safe and humane workplace environments for toy factory workers worldwide,” says Ewert.
Notably, the ICP was established as a standalone not-for-profit, overseen by a board that includes NGO and civil-sector experts, and on which active toy industry executives are in a minority.
Streamlining inspection efforts has been a central priority from the beginning. When Ewert started in the toy industry in the 1990s, he worked with a manufacturer that faced 64 audits per year, each asking for similar information. “I’d much rather have seen those auditors inspecting 64 different factories, rather than the same factory 64 times,” he says.
The move to Enablon’s platform has helped transform this process from a cumbersome paper chase into a more scalable, easier to use and fast-evolving technology. On a factory floor in China, auditors and factories can input data wirelessly. On the other side of the planet, ICP members can log in and tweak standards on the fly, and do deep data analysis across the factories they are working with.
Today, the system tracks data on roughly 2,500 factories that employ some one million workers. Most are based in China, home to a vast majority of the world’s toymakers. Just 1,600 factories are currently certified as meeting ICP’s criteria. New factories join each year, but year to year about 13 per cent lose their approved status.
The most frequent causes for such a loss? A lack of transparency about whether workers are paid correctly or companies are demanding too many hours of work, says Ewert. Picking up such malpractice early can nip bigger problems in the bud, lowering the risk to corporate reputation.
“Companies don’t want to be named and shamed,” says David Metcalfe, CEO of Verdantix, an independent analyst firm focused on energy, environment and sustainability issues.
Over time, Metcalfe adds, the best employee health and safety plans can evolve to do more than protect workers. They can also proactively improve supply chain operations by identifying potential trouble spots, focusing corrective responses and avoiding the cost and hassle of switching factories following a crisis.
ICP, for example, goes beyond simply tracking auditors’ reports. It reaches out to workers directly. Factories are required to post a hotline to which workers can anonymously phone in problems. The organization receives up to 350 such calls per month. When the software detects a spike in calls from a given factory, ICTI CARE can increase its training efforts with both staff and management, before a crisis breaks.
And if early action doesn’t work, the threat of being de-certified is a potent motivator, says Ewert. After all, it’s not a single buyer pulling out, but the entire ICP network. Ewert is confident the transparency will continue to grow as technology advances.
“Workers can call us today,” he says. “In time, they’ll be able to send pictures of dangerous conditions too,” as smart phones emerge as another tool to help the industry identify and repair risks before they become tragedies.
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- Check out the original article here: http://www.corporateknights.com/article/tech-savvy-international-council-toy-industries
- View a PDF of the story here: ICTI.
Designing for Sustainability: Facing the Challenges Behind Green Materials | The Guardian
Sustainable materials are gaining ground, but long development time frames and gaps in knowledge make commercialisation tricky |
Learning to surf in California’s frigid breakers, Todd Copeland, a design guru at the Patagonia clothing company, concluded that wet suits weren’t cutting it. Sure, a traditional Neoprene suit could keep him warm, but the suit’s material could be synthesised only from non-renewable, energy-intensive resources such as petroleum or kiln-baked limestone.
In spring 2008, Copeland blogged about the need for a truly green alternative. And, later that summer, his cry found its way to Yulex, an Arizona-based company working to resurrect a low-energy, low-toxin recipe for rubber from guayule, a desert shrub native to North America. Research on the plant peaked during the second world war but was then was shelved. Yulex had restarted the work around 2000 and was making hypo-allergenic surgical gloves, but was seeking a new market. It saw Copeland’s post, and soon its reps came knocking.
Yulex’s efforts are set to pay off later this fall, when Patagonia releases a full wetsuit made from a 60:40 blend of guayule and conventional Neoprene, five years after Copeland initiated the search. “We hope to get that to 100% [guayule], but it takes time to learn a new material,” says Copeland, now Patagonia’s environmental product specialist.
This serendipitous match between designer and material maker is, unfortunately, a rare exception. Speaking to Copeland recently, I wondered how many misses Patagonia has evaluated for every successful innovation, such as Yulex, it brings to market. “100? Probably more,” he speculated. “And many, many more don’t even make it that far.”
The tale of Patagonia’s eco-wetsuit offers a parable of the larger challenge facing green materials on the path from lab to market. The process remains a maze that few materials survive. But a recent survey of design leaders reveals that while eco-materials still face a tougher journey than their conventional counterparts, the process of green technology transfer is gaining momentum.
Sales of green materials are surging
Though spotty, statistics on green materials markets are all pointing up. The building industry is one of the largest shifting towards lower-impact practices. In the US, the green construction market is worth roughly $100bn, a ten-fold rise since 2006, according to the 2013 Dodge Construction Green Outlook. As a share, green construction now accounts for 44% of total US commerical and institutional construction, up from near zero a decade ago.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that big corporations are deepening their commitment to these priorities, as well. In 2006, Du Pont set out to double sales of products made from “non-depletable resources” to $8bn by 2015. The US chemicals giant blew by that mark four years early, racking up $10bn in green-materials revenue in 2011 (most recent data).
Green adoption has been accelerating at Ford, too. A decade ago, engineers at the No2 US automaker were skeptical of the cost and performance benefits of alternatives. Today, following a flurry of successful material substitutions, design engineers are required to evaluate and opt for green candidates where they equal or exceed conventional materials.
Sustained internal commitment is vital
Ford’s shift didn’t come quickly. “We were kicked out of conference rooms,” laughs Debbie Mielewski, technical leader for Plastics Research at Ford Motor Co, recalling her efforts in the early 2000s to pitch bio-based plastics to the car maker’s internal development engineers. “They saw only risk and additional cost,” she says.
But thanks to the protection of Bill Ford Jr, the company’s then CEO, Ford’s bio-plastics R&D program had the time and funding to mature new offerings to the point where today soy-based polyurethane foams are used in the seat cushions, backs, and headrests of all vehicles built in North America.
A focus on value and performance has helped reverse early skepticism. “Our goal has always been to match the price and performance of any material we’re hoping to replace,” she says.
To cultivate and scale production of new materials, suppliers will need help
Internal approval of new green materials isn’t always enough.
For strong, smooth plastics used to make bins and liners, Ford has successfully replaced glass fibres with wheat straw – the fibrous waste left when wheat is harvested – to reinforce the plastic.
Yet as Mielewski points out, ensuring consistency of the straw’s strength posed a new challenge, as did ensuring uniform size of the material, which must be milled into identical short lengths to be blended into plastic. “In Canada, wheat straw used to be burned,” she says.
To change that practice, Ford collaborated with farmers and third-tier suppliers to develop a supply chain to recover, test and standardise the processed straw. Without Ford’s commitment to the end product, the investment wouldn’t have happened, says Mielewski: “A third-tier supplier had to invest in and build a mill to meet our demand. That takes real confidence.”
Recovering waste takes patient, innovative collaboration with vendors early on
As its commitment to recover and re-use waste carpet materials started to take root in the 1990s, Atlanta-based Interface, a $1bn-per-year manufacturer of carpet tiles used primarily in commercial spaces, recognised it could push this goal only as quickly as a key fibre supplier, Italy’s Aquafil, was able to develop and scale-up processes to harvest fibers from recovered carpets and to then re-melt them for use in new carpeting.
“This was more of us pushing [recycled materials],” by Interface, “rather than a pull” from the market, says Nigel Stansfield, Interface’s vice president and chief innovations officer. “We had to overcome a perception that recycled was more costly, or performed less well.”
Interface also faced a reverse logistics challenge: it had to work with existing and new partners to learn how to capture and truck tons of carpet back to its partner plants. “To make this work, we’ve had to focus on all parts of the product’s life cycle at once,” Stansfield says.
At the installation phase, for example, this has meant educating flooring installers to abandon long-standing practices of gluing carpets down, which damages the material at the later recovery stage. Interface instead relies on gravity and strong adhesive patches to link its carpet tiles and keep them carpets locked down.
And at the end-of-use stage, the move has meant developing reverse logistics flows, to steer carpet waste away from landfills, and back to re-processors such as Aquafil.
Vetting green materials remains a weak link
Designers are widely frustrated by a lack of consistent, reliable services that can authenticate green materials’ virtues. The industry needs a “greenwash monitor,” Patagonia’s Copeland says. There has been some movement toward this goal, with efforts including Nike’s MAKING app, Material ConneXion, and the Sustainable Packaging Coalition.
Green materials can fail an evaluation for many reasons. A few years ago, Patagonia became interested in bamboo-based fabrics. The cultivation of fast-growing bamboo was appealing as a sustainable raw material. But on deeper investigation, Patagonia passed on the new fabrics because the process to convert bamboo into fibres proved just as toxic as the standard viscose method.
Likewise, PLA, a bio-plastic made from corn sugar, has attracted interest both as a renewable resource and because the end product is biodegradable. But in a car’s cockpit, durability is paramount, and Ford found that in tests, the stuff didn’t hold up. PLA plastics would “begin to compost in the car,” Mielewski says.
Resist the bias toward replacing old with green
“Most clients think that sustainable design is simply a case of switching existing material for a greener option,” says Chris Sherwin, head of sustainability at Seymourpowell, a London-based design advisor. “Same product, new material: that’s wrong on many grounds.”
Sherwin argues that its critical to understand that the stuff from which a product is made often accounts for only a tiny fraction of the impact of the use-phase of a product’s lifetime. Hence, it’s smarter for laundry soap makers to improve the performance of their detergents in cold water rather than focus solely on revising packaging.
“We should start with more fundamental product redesign,” Sherwin says. “We must start by asking, how will the consumers’ needs best be satisfied, and design accordingly.”
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Check out the original at http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/designing-sustainability-challenges-green-materials
HOW CARBONCURE TECHNOLOGIES IS Lowering Concrete’s Enormous Climate Impact | Corporate Knights
Injecting CO2 into concrete as it hardens is helping slash its towering toll on the climate
Concrete is a conundrum. It’s the world’s most heavily consumed manmade material, with nearly three tonnes used per person, every year. Yet for the climate, baking limestone into cement does more harm than practically any other industrial process.
To help cut cement’s supersized carbon footprint, Halifax, Nova Scotia-based startup CarbonCure Technologies is tinkering with the age-old recipe for how cement cures into concrete, its final rock-like form. The company’s answer: carbonated cement.
“Every day millions of tonnes of concrete is produced globally,” says Robert Niven, chief executive and founder. “Every tonne is a lost opportunity to sequester carbon dioxide.”
Devising greener concrete is no easy task, in part because the recipe is deceptively simple and has proven to be such a remarkably good building material for so long.
It is, quite literally, the stuff from which civilization has been built. Today’s cement traces back to formulations first used 7,000 years ago. Some Roman-era structures, such as the domed Pantheon, are as sturdy today as when they were erected two millennia ago.
Today’s megastructures are likewise possible only because of concrete’s peculiar mix of performance and affordability, from the biggest dams to our tallest towers.
The problem? The manufacturing of cement emits 5 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases, on par with about half of all emissions from car, truck and other road transport. Among industrial sources of CO2, the industry trails only the much larger petrochemicals sector.
Making cement emits roughly equal shares of CO2 at two stages: first, from the fuel used to heat a mix of limestone and traces of other minerals to 1,450 degrees Celsius; and second, from the resulting chemical reaction, where limestone breaks down into lime, giving up nearly half its mass as CO2.
Unless better recipes are devised, emissions will keep growing. A building binge across the developing world is expected to more than double global cement production this decade, according to the Carbon War Room, a London-based think tank.
CarbonCure is tackling that problem by focusing on how cement cures into concrete. The company’s proprietary process injects anthropogenic CO2 – captured from big industrial sources such as natural gas reformers – into the mix as concrete is being formed into an array of masonry products, including blocks and pavers.
As the CO2 percolates through the mix, it triggers a chemical reaction, remaking microscopic bits of limestone in the concrete matrix, permanently locking the gas into a rock-like structure. The resulting concrete block is not only greener; it turns out stronger than the standard stuff.
The carbon savings can stack up quickly. As a rule of thumb, every standard concrete block made using CarbonCure’s recipe sequesters around 30 grams of CO2. Thus, some 3,000 of them can lock up as much CO2 as a mature tree does in a single year.
The first U.S. structure to be built with CarbonCure’s green blocks was completed at the University of California, Davis in the spring. Exterior walls of the Jess S. Jackson Sustainable Winery Building, a one-storey, 8,500-square-foot research facility, were built with more than 2,500 specially manufactured blocks made by Basalite Concrete Products, based in Dixon, California. The result, says Niven, is the lowest-carbon concrete-block wall ever built in the U.S.
CarbonCure is currently working with four partners in North America that are producing its low-carbon blocks, pavers and other masonry products. Atlas Block, a major Canadian concrete manufacturer, is in negotiation to supply the low-carbon blocks for several sports complexes being built for the 2015 Pan Am Games in Toronto. “This is easily the most exciting technological improvement I’ve seen in years,” says Atlas chief executive Don Gordon.
Another dozen partners are in the pipeline, says Niven. In time, he hopes to expand the company’s reach to China – where more than half of the world’s concrete is currently being produced – and other global markets.
He also hopes to see CarbonCure move beyond masonry to apply its process to larger precast structures and ready-mix, the wet slurry of concrete and aggregate delivered in big mixing trucks.
Given that roughly 12 billion tonnes of concrete is produced every year around the world, if CarbonCure can adapt its technology to all concrete types, “the potential to reduce carbon is huge,” Niven says.
Indeed, green efforts are advancing in other aspects of concrete production. Industrial waste, such as fly ash or slag, offers a low-carbon alternative to cement. And major manufacturers such as Lafarge and Holcim are using more low-carbon or carbon-neutral fuels, such as biomass, to replace fossil fuels used in cement kilns.
Taken together, these green steps suggest that concrete could someday be “carbon neutral, or even carbon negative,” says Niven.
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- See the original story here: http://www.corporateknights.com/article/tech-savvy-carboncure-technologies
- View a PDF of the story here: CK45.
Can a new architecture revive the UN Global Compact? | The Guardian
As business enthusiasm wanes, the UN Global Compact unveils new investment opportunities. Will it be enough to attract more participation?
In collaboration with some 1,000 business allies, the UN today issued an updated “architecture” aimed at intensifying companies’ role in advancing economic development, improving human health and reversing environmental degradation.
At the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit in New York City, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon emphasized the growing need for private companies to coordinate their market efforts with UN’s long-standing development goals.
The business engagement architecture is designed to “drive and scale up corporate actions to directly advance United Nations goals,” Ban said.
The blueprint, Building the Post-2015 Business Engagement Architecture, marks a high point in the UN’s ambitions to engage with business. When it was launched in 2000, Ban said, “there was no clear agenda for business”.
Today, the GC is the world’s largest voluntary organization of its kind, comprising 8,000 companies and 4,000 civil society organizations from 145 countries.
“For the first time in the history of United Nations, UN goals, sustainability development priorities, are directly linked to long term corporate goals,” said Georg Kell, executive director of the Global Compact. “This is a genuine innovation and brings a strategic level of collaboration to the effort. We offer, for the first time, a comprehensive and integrated menu of opportunities for engagement.”
The architecture that the UN released today, in collaboration with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and the Global Reporting Initiative, formalizes three broad new programmes focused on education, agriculture and peace.
The new Business for Peace platform, for instance, aims to help companies invest in conflict-affected and high-risk areas. Long-term job creation, economic growth and infrastructure restoration are vital to nurturing peace in often-fragile conditions of post-conflict regions, said Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, vice chair of the UN Global Compact board.
These three new programmes join an existing pool of efforts focused on women’s empowerment, children’s rights, climate, water and anti-corruption.
Re-firing commitment
The new plan – 13 years after the GC’s founding – comes as the clock runs down toward the 2015 deadline to achieve the Millennium Goals.
Enthusiasm seems to be ebbing. A CEO survey released by Accenture during the conference found that most companies aren’t integrating social, environmental and governance issues into their core strategies. (Download a copy of the report here or get more information from Accenture here.)
The poll of more than 1,000 global executives found that 45% of CEOs believe that sustainability will be “very important” to the future success of their business, a decline of nine percentage points from a similar study in 2010.
As GSB’s Jo Confino pointed out in his assessment of this study, these findings bookend a pair of two earlier studies (from the UNGC and CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), that find progress slowing – or even backsliding – in corporate efforts.
US players missing
North American companies, which make up roughly a third of Fortune’s list of the 500 largest global companies, comprise only 18% of Accenture’s respondents.
With their high visibility and deep resources, more US players would help. Yet US companies have been somewhat hamstrung by concerns over legal liability if they commit to the compact’s 10 principles.
The UNGC is working to help legal counsels separate and neutralize these perceived risks from conventional contractual liabilities and open the door for more US entrants, Kell told me in a Q&A following the launch.
“We want to grow from 8,000 to 20,000 hopefully by 2016, but we can grow only with quality,” said Kell, who last year took steps to prod and shed inactive GC members.
Finding the right balance – and meeting the goals – is critical, said John Ruggie, Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, during the launch:
Look around you and you will already see signs of some of the consequences. They take the form of resource nationalism, increased protectionism, sectarian violence, extreme populism on the left and right, xenophobia, homophobia and generally rolling back globalization out of fear of the other and by anger at fear of being left behind. That would not auger well for people planet or profits…. The stakes are high, the time is short, the cost of getting it wrong is incalculable and the opportunities to getting it right are legion.
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See the original article here:
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/un-global-compact-architecture
Responsible investment has a vital role in securing peace post-conflict | The Guardian
A new UN initiative aims to help spur recovery in post-conflict regions by guiding companies to invest responsibly
War and peace are linked inextricably by economic development. Often, even when the shooting stops, long-term peace is impossible without economic development. Yet investment will not flow where conflict lingers.
This grim Catch-22 has resurfaced lately with the unfolding catastrophe in Syria. Day by day, the death toll, physical destruction, and refugee displacements mount. The disaster is creating countless long term, chronic woes too. The destruction of 3,600 schools, for instance, in Syria has swelled by two million or so the global tally of young people forced out of school by armed conflict to some 50 million overall.
In Syria and elsewhere this creates a pool of underemployed youth, and a potential time bomb of social unrest.
Once conflict ends, if there are no jobs for young people, rebels and soldiers, “The guns will come back out… In the absence of economic development, peace is difficult to achieve, and harder to maintain,” Sir Mark Moody-Stuart told me. From his tenure as Chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell Group, Moody-Stuart is familiar with the challenges, and opportunities, facing investment in conflict-afflicted regions.
Data on the economic toll of the loss of peace is difficult to come by, but an analysis by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), estimated that had the world been completely peaceful in 2011, global GDP would have been roughly $9tn higher — almost equal to the German and Japanese economies combined.
These days, as vice-chair of the board of the UN Global Compact, Moody-Stuart is working to get the private sector to reconsider these opportunities. “Not so very long ago, divestment from troubled areas was the goal,” he said.
Today, however, former critics are increasingly willing to “sit down with investors and senior management to engage constructively and work together on strategies that both develop business and contribute to peace and development,” he said.
I met with Moody-Stuart in New York at a midtown hotel where he was unveiling a new UN effort to help guide private-sector investment into regions where they can help peace was taking root. The platform, Business for Peace (B4P), will be formally launched today by the UN secretary-general at the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit. B4P builds on a decade’s worth of earlier efforts that are documented in areport, Responsible Business Advancing Peace, also released today.
The cases documented therein — and discussed at today’s meeting — are a reminder that the path peace via development is a highly local challenge, where solutions vary by context.
Peaceful cheese, fewer guns
Cheese is the focus of a long-running effort in the Caucasus. Starting a decade ago, cheese makers from regions spanning Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey came together under a single brand that has developed strong export sales.
The shared interests prevented the alliance from collapsing during the Russia-Georgia war of 2008. “It was one only regional alliances to survive,” said Diana Klein, conflict advisor at International Alert. Peace and development have their own momentum, she added, “If it’s working, it’s much harder for a single participant to act out.”
Some efforts can run counter to conventional wisdom. In the Philippines’ a subsidiary of Swiss cement giant Holcim set up a plant north of Manila where communist rebel group was active.
In 2005, the group attacked the facility, taking weapons from guards and causing $120,000 of damage. Rather than boost its guards’ firepower, Holcim took a slower, more complex path, meeting with community members to learn more why its plant — a large local employer — was targeted.
Their surprising findings? The guards’ firearms were part of the target. Rather than meet threat with force, Holcim opted for un-armed guards, a change which required careful community education.
“They had to convince their own staff they were safe, to convince the community that the guards are truly not armed,” said Sir Moody-Stuart, otherwise the guerillas may come back. Since this “social fencing” approach began, not a single incident involving firearms has happened.
A marathon effort
Building companies and attracting investors in the wake of conflict is a “very, very hard challenge,” said Klein of Conflict Advisors. “It requires a marathon mentality.” These investment efforts are reaching into some of the most challenging conflicts in recent memory.
In Sudan, still recovering from genocide in Darfur and the subsequent bifurcation of the nation, a team of B4P-affiliated investors with stakes in Sudanese oil services companies find their most difficult issue — company affiliation with human rights violations — impossible to resolve.
But while some strata of the market remain opaque, others are opening. Bit-by-bit the economy is coming back to life. Telecoms provider Sudatel, partially government owned, has emerged as the young country’s first multinational, operating in five neighboring countries. With 60% of Sudan’s population under 20 years of age, the company is focusing on serving young consumers. “To live together, people need to communicate,” said Ehab Osman, Sudatel’s CEO.
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See the original article here:
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/responsible-investment-role-peace-post-conflict