All posts by Adam Aston

GreenBiz

How Best Buy makes money recycling America’s electronics | GreenBiz

Retailing giant Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) has seen its recycling take-back program grow from a costly gamble into a fast-growing business that’s making a little bit of money. “It’s profitable. But just barely,” said Leo Raudys, senior director of environmental sustainability at Best Buy. “People still don’t believe it.”

The skepticism comes from the fact that the program is not only free to consumers, but they can also drop off just about any kind of junk that runs or ran on electricity. A dead tube TV? Check. The cell phone you dunked? Of course. That leaky washing machine? Yep. Best Buy takes appliances, too.

So how does the company cover its costs and a bit more? I had the chance to catch up with Raudys last week during the Sustainability Operations Summit in New York City, where he spoke on a panel titled “Successfully Tackling Waste.” Afterward, Raudys talked about how Best Buy turned the potentially thorny problem of collecting recycling into a self-subsidizing operation.

At its launch in 2009, the chain required consumers to buy a $10 store card to drop off recycling. But last November, Best Buy dropped that fee.

Today, the program generates two streams of revenue. First, Best Buy takes a cut from its recycling partners. When truckloads of old TVs, PCs and dryers go to its processing partners, the plastic, gold, lead, nickel and other materials recovered from the dismantled waste is sold to be remade into new materials. And while volatile, the prices for all of these commodities have generally been heading up over the past few years, raising the share that comes back to Best Buy. A very small percentage of the waste, Raudys estimates, ends up recovered and refurbished.

Secondly, Best Buy collects revenues from its partners: big, well-known electronics brands. “25 states have rules requiring that manufacturers recycle some share of what they sell every year,” Raudys said. “Our network can deliver efficiencies that [the electronics makers] can’t match, so they buy access to it.”

Best Buy has also been able improve its margins by steadily lowering the costs of collecting and transporting the consumer waste by improving workflows and boosting volumes, he said. Higher volumes of waste let Best Buy win more competitive rates from its recycling partners as well.

But does Best Buy see any extra sales from customers lured in by the recycling service? After all, when faced with roughly similar prices for a flat panel TV from a number of retailers, many customers would opt for the vendor who can take away the old set. The benefit of the program remains unclear, however. Raudys explained it’s difficult to identify sales that happened because of the recycling policy. “We see this as a service to our customers,” he said.

It could have been a costly, unsustainable service, though. “The program was projected to cost $5 million to $10 million in the first year,” Raudys said. “We didn’t know what we were getting into.” If costs stayed that high, he said, the program might’ve been scrapped.

The program’s most tangible overhead costs are labor and storage space, to process the waste at its stores. There’s also the cost to truck pallets to recycling sites. Less visible costs for Best Buy include auditing the processes of its recycling partners. Raudys said the company hires third-party inspectors to enforce a corporate recycling policy that aims to match or exceed state and federal guidelines. To avoid the export of hazardous materials to low-income countries, Best Buy’s program includes physical inspection of shipping containers and paper auditing.

E-waste handling practices remain a controversial challenge. Scrutiny of e-waste practices increased in the wake of embarrassing revelations — most famously a 2008 investigation by CBS’ 60 Minutes program — that exposed recyclers who were sending e-waste to be dumped or processed in primitive, dangerous methods.

Experts say the problem has improved but still persists. “At least half of the e-waste collected in the U.S. for so-called recycling is exported to Asia and Africa where it is often smashed, burned, dumped or processed in conditions that endanger the health of workers,” said Jim Puckett, executive director of Basel Action Network, an e-waste watchdog group.

Three partners handle Best Buy’s e-waste. In the western U.S. materials go to Electronic Recyclers International (ERI) in Fresno, California. In the Midwest, old gear flows to Regency Technologiesin Cleveland, Ohio — and in the East, E Structors in Baltimore, Maryland handles the e-waste. Appliance recycling is done by Regency and Jaco Environmental in Snohomish, Washington.

Puckett would like to see all of Best Buy’s e-waste handlers meet the e-Stewards certification, a program co-developed by BAN and other environmental groups. “Only e-Stewards is consistent with international agreements barring export of hazardous e-waste to developing countries and forbids using municipal landfills or incineration for hazardous e-waste,” he said.

Of Best Buy’s three e-waste handlers, only ERI is currently e-Steward certified. But all three meet the R2 code, an industry-backed standard.

In the absence of federal or state regulations for e-waste, Best Buy’s take-back program is one of only a small number of options available. Just 25 states have e-waste rules, although Best Buy accepts recycling nationwide. “There are many places in the country where there are no alternatives,” according to Puckett.

The program’s growth, meanwhile, suggests there’s a big need. Since the program began, Raudys said, Best Buy has collected half-a-billion pounds of recycling, including both appliances and e-waste. And given that the volume of recycling is growing by 10-15 percent per year, Best Buy is likely to hit its goal of 1 billion pounds of consumer goods soon. Last year, some four million customers dropped off nearly 86-million pounds of electronics and 73-million pounds of appliances for recycling (see table, below).

Best Buy’s global recycling operations

Best Buy’s efforts come against a backdrop of intensifying efforts to improve e-waste recycling nationwide. Last week,Staples announced a deal with HP to take back all sizes of computers, monitors, desktop printer/scanner/copier devices, handheld electronics and various other retired gizmos.

The number of recycling drop-off locations for consumers nationwide grew to nearly 7,500 from just over 5,000 in 2011, according to the First Annual Report  of the eCycling Leadership Initiative (ELI), a program created by theConsumer Electronics Association, a consortium of major electronics manufacturers and retailers.

ELI participants arranged for the recycling of 460 million pounds of consumer electronics last year, a 53 percent increase over the 300 million pounds recycled in 2010. And the group is aiming to drive that figure to annual rate of 1 billion pounds by 2016.

Photo of Best Buy store sign by Lynn Watson via Shutterstock.

GreenBiz

Cheap natural gas drives manufacturers, energy companies to shift gears | GreenBiz

Last week, Joe Nocera reminded me of how disconnected and angry the debate over fracking — the process of injecting fluids into deep, dense rock formations to fracture them and release natural gas — has grown. At The New York Times Energy for Tomorrow conference, Nocera moderated a series of panels that were focused on a broad variety of energy issues, but repeatedly returned to the hot button issue of fracking.

In a rhetorical question, he asked if the tradeoff in environmental harm and public health one we just have to accept. The answer is no, of course. But, as Nocera added, the fact is that fracking is already happening in a very big way. For those not following this issue, he’s an op-ed columnist for the Times who supports fracking as an innovation that, done responsibly, can lead to game-changing new supplies of energy, job growth and economic expansion.

Nocera’s position crystalizes much of the debate around this energy technology. His writing has drawn ire, especially in greater New York City and its hinterlands, where proposals to drill for natural gas in the city’s upstate watershed have sparked enough protest to turn the Hudson Valley into the epicenter of national anti-fracking efforts.

There’s good reason for alarm. ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative journalism entity has — in my opinion — amassed the best work documenting the environmental harm done by fracking. Here are just a few of the key environmental harms associated with the practice:

These issues make a strong case against the practice, and explain why Nocera’s “develop responsibly” position is controversial. The mixed reactions to his endorsement of the practice highlight the schisms dividing interest groups, coming between neighbors who are fighting over whether to frack or not and between national environmental groups who disagree about the environmental pluses and minuses of the practice.

For example, Nocera draws some of his analysis from work done by the Environmental Defense Fund, which is also pushing for tightly regulated fracking. Nocera’s approach has drawn heavy fire from climate activists such as Bill McKibben, a writer and scholar who backs a moratorium, arguing the risks of fracking are simply too high, as well as from Joseph Romm, a former Clinton-era energy official and now an influential climate commentator at Climate Progress.

Putting aside the fight over whether fracking should extend into new areas, Nocera’s talk drew my attention to a facet of fracking that gets less attention. Away from the main boxing ring where the issue is being fought out, large-scale industrial investment is rapidly reorganizing based on the long-term promise of low-cost gas. In short, industry is betting that fracking is here to say. Here’s where fracking already is impacting industry:

Power generation

The fracking binge has already altered the outlook for the U.S. power and manufacturing sectors. More than the rise of renewables, cheap natural gas has paved the way for the retirement of more than 100 coal-fired powered plants, too aged to meet federal clean air rules.

Efforts to build new coal plants are constrained too. Because natural gas power plants are cheaper to build and fuel, the natural gas boom has radically lowered the count of new coal-fired plants being proposed. According to data tracked by the National Energy Technology Lab and Sierra Club, plans for more than 160 coal plants have been shelved in recent years, partly due to natural gas’ cost advantage, as well as soft growth of demand for power.

“Natural gas has done more than other legislative initiative to push coal out of the equation,” said panelist Michael Levi, a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the center for foreign aaffairs, and by my reckoning, one the smartest observers out there on this issue.

Manufacturing

Cheap natural gas is rewriting the rules for other manufacturers too. Less than a decade ago, natural-gas-reliant manufacturers were decamping from the U.S., transplanting operations to the Arabian Gulf, Latin America and other gas-rich regions.

Now many are returning. Makers of chemicals, fertilizer and pharmaceuticals, all of which use natural gas as both an energy source and a raw material are returning stateside, lured by natural gas for under $2.50 per thousand cubic feet, less than fifth of the price in Europe or East Asia.

As Jim Motavalli reports in The New York Times, Nucor, which uses natural gas to make steel, is building a $750-million facility in Louisiana, just eight years after shutting down a similar plant in the same state and shipping it to Trinidad, to tap the island’s recently-developed natural gas supplies.

The cost advantage provided by cheap natural gas is even sharper for companies that use methane as a raw material — to make plastics, for example. Kevin Swift, chief economist at the American Chemistry Council, tells the Times that because European chemicals companies use oil-based raw materials derived to make plastics, the U.S. has a 50-to-1 advantage. “‘Shale gas’ is really driving this,” he says. “A million [British thermal units] of natural gas that might cost $11 in Europe and $14 in South Korea is $2.25 in the U.S. Partly because of that, chemical producers have plans to expand ethylene capacity in the U.S. by more than 25 percent between now and 2017.”

Add up the impact of investments like these and high rates of shale gas recovery could result in a million new manufacturing jobs by 2025, according to a 2011 PricewaterhouseCoopers study cited by Motavalli.

Transportation

Compared to current petroleum prices, natural gas costs $1.50 per gallon equivalent, nearly two-thirds less than current pump prices for gasoline or diesel. Large fleets of heavy-duty vehicles — from buses to garbage trucks to delivery vehicles — have been among the earliest converts. One-quarter to a half of Navistar’s new vehicle sales in these markets opt for natural gas.

Long-distance highway trucking may be the next to switch. Speaking with the Times, Navistar chief executive Dan Ustian, predicts that natural gas could capture up to a fifth of sales of highway tractor-trailers within a year.

The need for on-road refueling infrastructure remains a constraint. There simply aren’t many publicly accessible natural gas refueling sites. The count is under 1,000, less than 1 percent the number of gas stations. Last month, GE and natural gas producer Chesapeake Energy inked a joint venture to build 250 natural gas refueling points around the country.

Policy

Industry is clearly digging in even as environmental opposition gains momentum. Complicating the politics of this debate is that fracking is an intensely regional issue. State-level cultural perceptions of energy vary, for instance. Some families in Texas welcome gas rigs in their backyards, while some landowners in New York are suing to prevent nearby drilling.

Geology is different everywhere too, of course. So what was done safely in Oklahoma may not be replicable in Pennsylvania. “Local conditions matter significantly,” said Mark Brownstein, a panelist at the Times event and chief counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund’s energy program.

These polarizations have driven the debate to unproductive levels of ire, the panelists at the NYT event argued. “This is the perfectly dysfunctional fight,” said Levi, from the Council on Foreign Affairs. “There are environmentalists who believe this cannot be done safely. And there are those in the industry who say regulations will destroy their business.” The loudest voices amount to an all-or-nothing proposition, Levi added, which makes the process of brokering a solution to the fracking question very difficult.

There is a web of substantial existing regulation covering fracking, Brownstein explained, including the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act. “The fundamental question is whether they are sufficient,” he said, and how to improve them if not. Another weak link he pointed to is variations in state level rules and enforcement of well construction, where one poorly built well, after all, can do enormous environmental damage.

Indeed, pointing to these weakest links, Levi made a case for the role of federal regulation. If one state underinvests or underenforces, a single disaster could stir up a far-reaching political backlash that could ultimately slow or halt development.

Some state-level policies, such as Texas’ tough disclosure rules on what frackers inject into the ground, can be cut and pasted to other state or national rules. New York State’s rules are also shaping up to be a benchmark in this respect. And some rules, such as the “Halliburton exception,” which excluded fracking from Clean Water Act standards for what is injected into wells, can only be fixed by an act of Congress.

With the scale of fracking rising, the stakes to get regulation right are growing — and making the fight harder to resolve. Some in the industry are beginning to welcome tougher regulation, recognizing that it could help level the playing field. If tougher regulations could ensure fracking can be done safely, but added 10 or 20 percent to unit cost of gas, the fuel remains cheap, Levi pointed out. “If I were a fracker, I’d rather have 20 cents extra charge” than the environmental and political risks facing the energy today, he said.

Check out Nocera, Levi, Brownstein and others here at The New York Times Energy for Tomorrow conference.

NRDC OnEarth

Meet the Change Makers: Starbucks’s Quest for a Better Cup | OnEarth

Starbucks didn’t invent the disposable coffee cup, but few other brands are as tightly married to their container. From Brooklyn to Bangkok, the Seattle-based roaster’s white cups are instantly identifiable. More than four billion containers crossed the company’s counters last year, and only a small percentage were recycled.

The person charged with finding a way to increase that share is Jim Hanna, Starbucks’s director of environmental impact. He joined the company in 2006 and has tackled a host of issues, from improving coffee farming, harvesting, and processing techniques to greening the chain’s 17,000-plus stores. He has a lot of success to show for those efforts: Starbucks hit its goal of buying half of all the energy for its North American stores from renewable sources in 2010, years ahead of schedule, for example. But cups, especially the amount of virgin paper they consume, are proving to be one of his greatest challenges.

The company is tackling the problem with its own version of the three R’s: recycling, reuse, and reinvention. Starbucks has piloted recycling efforts city-by-city, working out kinks with trash haulers and paper mills. It has run a nationwide contest to design better reusable mugs. And it has worked to share its findings with the industry, bringing together McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts, for example, at a series of Cup Summits. But the heat is on. Starbucks has pledged to have cup recycling available in all of its North American outlets by 2015. Modest as this target may sound, it requires that Starbucks more or less remake the paper recycling business.

Hanna, 43, holds a degree in environmental science and has worked in environmental consulting. He says the long-term costs of corporate inaction on pressing environmental issues can be enormous, which is why Starbucks’s hunt for the perfect cup is a voluntary, but critical, initiative. By moving aggressively, the company hopes to win and retain customers, boost employee morale, and maybe even outflank competitors. On March 21, Starbucks released its2011 Global Responsibility Report, documenting both its progress and ongoing challenges. Recycling efforts made gains: the share of North American stores that can recycle hot cups has more than tripled since 2010 to 18 percent. Yet the push to avoid paper use, by spurring more consumers to use tumblers or in-store ceramic mugs, saw almost no improvement.

Hannah spoke with OnEarth’s Adam Aston about Starbucks’s successes and its struggles to solve the coffee cup problem.

What steps has Starbucks taken to lower paper use? It wasn’t so long ago that Styrofoam was the standard.

Our effort goes back to the company’s earliest days, in the 1980s. There was a period, for instance, during which customers would always get two cups to prevent them from burning their fingers. In late 1990s, we introduced the sleeve, which is made of Kraft paper. It is made from recycled content, plus it uses far less material than a whole cup. And because it doesn’t touch the beverage, it can be more easily recycled.

Why not make the whole cup out of that material?

This is where you see how the business side of the paper industry, as well as food safety rules, really complicate this challenge. It is possible to make cups out of unbleached Kraft paper, but there are a couple of limitations. First, most Kraft paper is made from recycled content and, to maintain consumer safety, the Food and Drug Administration regulates the use of post-consumer recycled paper in packaging that comes into contact with food.

Second, whatever sort of paper you use, it has to be made waterproof by lining it with another material. Wax is used in some food applications. Along with most of our competitors, we use a thin lining of food-grade polyethylene plastic.

I’m guessing that the plastic lining complicates the recycling process?

To recycle beverage cups, the cups have to be ground up. From that pulp, the plastic lining is separated using a combination of mechanical force and heat. All of this adds complexity, and cost, to the recycling process. If a paper mill has a cheaper source of fiber — one that demands less processing — it is not going to want beverage cups. And paper mills vary wildly in their abilities. Some are six months old and can handle a wide variety of materials; others are a century old and are easily gummed up by impurities like plastic. So if Seattle, say, has a modern paper mill, you may be able to recycle cups, but if New York has an older mill, or no mill, you can’t.

Working with GlobalGreen [a sustainability focused non-profit established by Mikhail Gorbachev], we ran a trial in Manhattan in 2010, sending poly-coated paper cups from a number of stores to a paper mill on Staten Island. We had mixed results: When we introduced the cups, they generated more unusable byproduct and really slowed down the mill’s processes. When we ended the trial, we had learned a lot. But we’re still looking for paper mills near New York. In other cities, we’re seeing more promising results, and in time we hope to copy and adapt those success stories elsewhere.

This suggests there are a lot of economic factors driving what can be recycled.

Yeah, the New York City pilot illustrates this point. Quite often, it’s not strictly a question of whether the process is possible, but whether there’s enough economic incentive for various parties to take on the challenge. That’s why our challenge is not only to come up with a better recipe to make the cups more easily recyclable, but also to help develop viable markets for the resulting paper.

Where are you having success with these trials?

In Chicago, we’re doing a test where we’re sending all of our paper cups to a mill in Wisconsin that makes our napkins. So the cups come back as another Starbucks product. We’d like to scale that up and test it out elsewhere. We’ve also got an industry group, the Food Services Packaging Institute, to take on this effort. By doing that, it evolves from being a Starbucks-centric project to an industry-led initiative with a much bigger potential for change.

And recycled paper can’t be used to make new cups again, right?

The FDA has rules strictly controlling the use of recycled materials in food-grade containers. The idea is to prevent impurities or disease that could sicken the public. But it dates back to a period when waste handling and paper processing technology was less advanced. Starbucks started working with the FDA about 10 years ago. We were able to make a case to use recycled paper in our coffee cups by showing that the mills we were working with could consistently make sanitary recycled containers. In 2006, we got the FDA to OK a cup with 10 percent recycled content, and that’s been our standard ever since. Ten percent may not sound like a lot, but it was a big step. Given the billions of cups we use, it saves a lot of trees from the mill.

That leads to another solution you’ve tried: getting customers to use fewer cups in the first place, especially since so many of them carry their cups out the door, rather than drinking and discarding them in stores where your recycling receptacles would be located. Yet the share of beverages you sell in reusable containers, such as tumblers that customers bring in, is surprisingly small: just 1.9 percent in 2011. That amounts to a savings of about 34 million cups, but the rate has been growing very slowly. What makes this such a challenge?

It’s harder to shift customer preferences than you might expect. We’ve always sold reusable mugs. And we offer customers a 10 cent discount if they use a tumbler. That’s more than the unit cost of a paper cup. Yet, in practice, we see that people value the convenience of having a cup when they want it and may not always want the hassle of handling and cleaning a tumbler.

Consumers are famously fickle. Attachment to plastic bags and plastic water bottles lingered for years before efforts to get rid of them caught fire. How are you trying to spark these changes?

We’re exploring many approaches to help consumers opt for alternatives to paper cups. In 2010, for instance, we ran a contest. Called the Betacup Challenge, entrants included everything from better designs for collapsible cups [such as the Cupup] to fully biodegradable designs [such as the Betacup]. The finalists stood out by including social networking and reward features that help shift behaviors. The Karma Cup, which was the overall winner, encourages customers to bring in reusable mugs by offering rewards and public recognition of the benefits of doing do. But when we tried some of these techniques out at a Seattle test store, we found there was less enthusiasm than we had seen in the online community.

We’ve increased our focus on shaping behaviors as a way to lower cup use. For example, this year we’re working to redesign stores to make ceramic wear more visible to customers, by positioning it in sight, right behind the baristas. Customers who want to enjoy their drink in the store will be reminded that they can do so in a ceramic mug that we wash and re-use. This is something that’s widely available today, but opted for less often than we’d like.

Are others in the industry collaborating with you on this challenge?

Yes. Big as we are, Starbucks still accounts for a tiny share of the 500 billion or so cups used industry-wide every year. So we’ve convened three “Cup Summits,” the first in Seattle, and the others at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to bring together manufacturers, government officials and retailers — including our competitors — to devise solutions that have the potential to shift the industry.

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TRUTH SQUAD — Checking industry claims with NRDC’s sustainability experts

Starbucks got America hooked on Venti lattes. The problem, as NRDC’s Darby Hoovers sees it, is that we’re also hooked on the paper cups they come in. To lower its paper consumption, the coffee chain’s most effective option is to steer customers toward reusable cups, saysHoover, a senior resource specialist in NRDC’s San Francisco office.

Easier said than done, though, she acknowledges. “The reality is that Starbucks is working in a disposable culture,” says Hoover, in which consumers’ habits are tough to change. Accordingly, the coffee chain is focusing its efforts on recycling. By 2015, it has pledged to make front-of-store recycling available in all of its company-owned stores in North America.

But it’s not as simple as putting out more recycling bins. Although, technically, a growing share of recyclers can handle the challenge of processing the plastic-lined cups, a small amount of plastic can downgrade a batch of recycled paper, making it harder to process and less valuable, Hoover explains. So Starbucks has been working with select mills to improve the economics of the venture. In its Chicago stores, for example, it buys back napkins made from the paper that is recycled from used cups. The efforts are bearing fruit. During 2011, Starbucks extended the availability of in-store recycling for cups to more than 1,000 stores, largely in Canada, Chicago, and southern California, more than tripling the count from the prior year.

Starbucks’ most important role could be as an industry leader, Hoover says. If the company hits its 2015 cup recycling goal, it may trigger wider change throughout the restaurant industry. — Adam Aston

GreenBiz

What’s keeping electric vehicles from the mainstream? | GreenBiz

Advancements in electric-vehicle technologies have made them increasingly viable for consumers, fleets and car-sharing services, but they’re still not mainstream alternatives to conventional gasoline-powered cars.

One key missing link is more infrastructure and support services, but investors are wary to plunk down the cash for these pieces until there are more EVs on the roads. It’s a classic chicken-or-egg problem. Which should come first: EVs or infrastructure, like charging stations?

This question took center stage last week at GreenBiz’s VERGE DC event. The thesis behind VERGE — the convergence of energy, information, technology and transportation — fits the long-term vision for EV expansion, yet so far EVs haven’t integrated well with other networks, said the panel’s moderator, Beth Lowery, a principal with GreenOrder and a former General Motors executive.

To help explore how, where, and when the EV ecosystem is evolving, Lowery spoke with:

NRG is betting big by building the only privately funded EV recharging network in the country, including the largest network of “fast” chargers, which use high-voltage DC current to slash recharge times drastically. In Dallas, Houston and elsewhere in Texas, NRG is partnering with Walgreens and other retailers to install recharging hubs.

And in California, the company announced Friday that will spend approximately $100 million to build, own and operate a comprehensive EV charging network, including at least 200 publicly available fast-charging stations. (The deal is part of a settlement with the state’s public utilities commission over a dispute during California’s energy crisis more than a decade ago.)

Instead of range anxiety, “EV drivers should have full range confidence,” Banskota said.

Meanwhile, Eaton has seen growing convergence in the commercial vehicle space, where it has been developing hybrid and EV technologies, Wirtz said. The trend has yielded hybrid systems not yet seen in passenger vehicles, such as diesel electric hybrids and hydraulic-hybrids, which recover braking energy as mechanical energy.

“We’re trying to imagine what the world will look like when 75 percent of vehicles are EVs,” he said.

For Greenlots, convergence means using the data cloud to better integrate EVs, homes and renewable-energy sources into the grid. “In Germany, we’re taking wind power and matching that with EV battery storage,” Mahabir said. “In the U.S., utilities don’t yet know when EV drivers are going recharge.”  That lack of transparency can unnecessarily tax the grid.

Another challenge includes a lack of public understanding about EVs, even five years after their rebirth. When NRG surveys consumers if they’d buy EVs, Banskota recounted, typically around a third are inclined. “But after we show them how it works, where they can recharge, and the cost benefits, that share doubles,” he said. “Education is critical.”

Despite the press coverage they’ve attracted, EVs are so rare — just 17,000 GM Volts and Nissan Leafs have been sold so far — that few drivers have had hands-on experience. Getting the public to have more direct experience with EVs can be a game changer, Wirtz said. “First-time EV drivers always find the experience exhilarating,” he said, because the driving experience is so quiet, powerful and smooth.

In terms of policy, Mahabir believes that support should be focused on the battery problem. “Korea, Japan, and China are investing billions in batteries, and we need to do the same” he said.

Eaton’s Wirtz concurred: If the industry can get batteries right, charging networks will follow.  That means lowering battery prices, boosting their capacity, and shrinking their charging times. For EV adoption, we’ll see a “top up” strategy where, everywhere you go, drivers will want plug in — that’s different from gas driving, where folks are comfortable letting their tank get near to empty, Wirtz said.

“People talk about this being a chicken and egg problem,” he added. “We firmly believe if you get the battery price down, the infrastructure will come.”

Banskota replied that the lifetime cost of ownership of EVs is something consumers don’t yet understand properly. The Nissan Leaf, for example, is already the lowest-cost vehicle in terms of lifetime costs, including maintenance, fuel and sticker price. “EVs are already competitive,” he said.

One way to help lower EVs’ costs and drive adoption would be to standardize chargers, Wirtz said. “We’ve identified 11 protocols for vehicles to communicate to recharging points,” he said. That creates costly complexity and deters economies of scale.

Another barrier: EVs don’t necessarily fit well into legacy car retail channels, Mahabir pointed out. Dealers don’t love the financial impact of EVs on their profits, since battery-powered cars are relatively expensive, leaving a thinner margins. What’s more: EVs need less maintenance, which hurts shop income.

In terms of federal incentives, the focus ought to be on early-stage research and development, said NRG’s Banskota, in order to drive progress in the basic battery science.

Locally, giving EVs access to HOV lanes and preferential parking are low-cost ways for cities to stir interest in EVs. “It would provide a huge boost for EV owners,” Banskota said.

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View the original story at: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/03/23/whats-keeping-electric-vehicles-mainstream

GreenBiz

Making cities sustainability centerpieces | GreenBiz

At the heart of GreenBiz’s VERGE initiative is the thesis that the coming together of economic and technological factors is driving innovation. During a lunch session as part of the VERGE DC event, we focused on how cities are emerging as hothouses where these dynamics are unfolding most quickly.

Increasingly, the 21st century is likely to be dominated by cities, with dense gatherings of capital, technology and skills where public and private players can collaborate at high speeds. In a physical sense, cities are where technologies—energy, information, building, and transportation—are hybridizing most quickly and most productively, driving economic growth, creating jobs, and spurring competitiveness.

To spark this roundtable discussion, we looked to a recent report exploring these trends. Titled “Citystates: How cities are vital to the future of sustainability,” and produced by SustainAbility in partnership with GreenBiz and sponsored by Ford Motor Company, the report lays out seven characteristics, or states, that drive growth-nurturing synergies between cities and business. Click here for a PDF of the report.

As an overview of its analysis, SustainAbility shared a video:

Citystates from SustainAbility on Vimeo.

The Seven States

The report defines seven characteristics that SustainAbility concludes can help cities and business thrive symbiotically. Here’s how co-authors, Chris Guenther and Mohammed Al-Shawaf describe these “citystates” and the opportunities they open to businesses:

1. The Connected City: Growing technological sophistication and traditional social connectivity provide opportunities for greater awareness, trust and collaboration among stakeholders. How can business both bolster and create value from this essential connectivity?
2. The Decisive City: Cities often have the urgency and accountability to act decisively. For example, cities lead state and national efforts in the areas of climate change mitigation and adaptation. How might companies improve their own decisiveness, and/or leverage that of cities, to drive sustainability?
3. The Adaptive City: Cities are among the most adaptable structures in society. How can business grow more adaptive while collaborating with cities on their mutual survival?
4. The Collaborative/Competitive City: The healthy tension between peer-to-peer collaboration and economic and brand competition among cities has potential to drive precompetitive sustainable innovation and rapid diffusion of solutions. How might industries exploit this tension in their own parallel drive for sustainability and competitiveness?
5. The Visceral City: Urban living is shaped by numerous real and potential feedback loops. As urbanization progresses and its impacts become more pressing. How can companies beneficially tap into these feedbacks to drive both value creation and sustainable development?
6. The Personal City. The influence of shared identity and values — in cities and elsewhere — is a particularly powerful driver of individual and collective action. How can businesses connect with citizen-consumers’ values to drive demand for more sustainable products and services?
7. The Experimental City: Cities are inherently creative, experimental social systems. This opens up links between R&D and low barriers to entry for nontraditional actors. How can business embrace the growing democratization of innovation and leverage cities as laboratories to test and scale sustainability solutions?

In the discussion that followed this presentation, it became clear that companies and cities face an increasingly co-dependent future. Businesses are agile, quick to innovate and develop sustainability technologies. Cities meanwhile, face pressing needs to improve urban environments, and to boost the efficiency and sophistication of city services.

Given the right mix of markets, public policy, and economic potential, businesses can help cities tackle problems ranging from transportation congestion to water treatment, and from energy efficiency to building and infrastructure upgrades.

Compelling as this vision is, participants shared many examples of the fundamental limitations that slow down city programs, or that stymie public-private interaction—budget, manpower, politics, and the like.

Here are some key ideas that caught my attention. We covered more in the 90-minute session than I’ve captured below, so I hope participants will weigh in below, via comments, to share other ideas and reactions, as well as expand the discussion.

Racing to beat election cycles. The long-term, multidecadal nature of many city sustainability plans can be stymied by the relatively short-term tenures of elected officials. City leaders face pressure to institutionalize programs before elected leaders move on. The private sector can help by helping to cement successful practices into city operations.

Private-sector’s bully pulpit. City leaders emphasized that private-sector leadership on sustainability and climate issues can help sway politicians and bureaucracies who remain shy or averse to tackling these topics. Indeed, where “environmentalism” can be a politically tainted phrase in some circles, “sustainability” has positive connotations that can catalyze change. “I consider urban sustainability the third wave of the environmental movement,” said a city leader, adding: “Our future is one of Manifest Density.”

Open-source efficiency. Nonprivate, noncopyrighted software projects, such as those pioneered by Code for America, can be more cost-effective laboratories to develop, test and trial software services. By sharing code between cities, services can evolve faster and deliver effective solutions for a tiny fraction of the cost of using conventional contracting methods. The lower cost and quicker deployment, in turn, makes it easier to experiment with a greater variety of ideas, and to explore even small-scale initiatives.

Sensing cities. The falling cost of hardware, especially the growing smarts of sensor networks, promise substantial gains. Lost-cost monitoring of public infrastructure such as storm water systems can help identify problems and lower damage, by sending repair crews to the right place, sooner.

Un-silo information and expertise. It’s a problem within any large organization: siloed expertise and misaligned interests can stymie public-private interactions too. For example, moving a Zip Car a block close to highly-trafficked area might benefit the city, commuters and the company. But getting all the parties involved—company execs, transportation department managers, and property owners—can make otherwise easy fixes hard to execute.

Tour de Sustainability? Just as cities have developed walking tours of historical sites, they should also offer sustainability walks: paths that could take residents, visitors, and students on a journey to see green buildings, storm water features, grid infrastructure, white roofs, and the like. Given that sustainability can be an abstract idea for non-experts, such tours could normalize sustainability, inspire and educate.

Cultivating failure. The private sector has developed a tolerance for failure, some even appreciate the lessons unsuccessful efforts can teach. Yet in the public sector and especially among elected leaders, failure is deeply feared. This can lead to bad projects being pushed past failure, at great cost. Is it possible to cultivate a more experimental, failure-tolerant culture in the public sector?

Image courtesy of RATOCA via Shutterstock.

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Check out the original post here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/03/22/why-cities-are-hotbeds-innovation

GreenBiz

Starbucks’ green scorecard: A few full cups, two half empty | GreenBiz

Starbucks' green scorecard: A few full cups, two half empty

Starbucks’ latest self-assessment of the impact of its operations on the globe — measured in terms of energy, the environment, communities and agriculture — reflects healthy progress, moderated by a dash of frustration on some challenging fronts.

Call it: A few full cups and a couple half empty.

The good news is big gains on renewables, energy efficiency and cup recycling. Water consumption rose, however, and use of reusable cups has barely budged.

At its annual shareholders meeting today, Starbucks released its 11th annual Global Responsibility Report, detailing the coffee giant’s performance in 2011. Check out the report at www.starbucks.com/GRreport. I got an advance look at the report, along with the opportunity to speak with Ben Packard, Starbucks’ vice president of global responsibility.

Here’s my take on what’s full, half full, or half empty in the 2011 report.

Full cups

Front-of-store recycling. Starbucks has been chiseling away at a commitment to boost the recyclability of its cold and hot beverage cups for many years. It has set interlinked goals of developing “comprehensive recycling solutions for our paper and plastic cups by 2012” and implementing “front-of-store recycling in our company owned stores by 2015.” (Starbucks has nearly complete recycling rates for cardboard packaging from its receiving, replenishment and other back-of-store operations.)

The goals are daunting: About 80 percent of the Starbucks’ containers leave its stores and, of the share that can be re-captured on site, recyclers have shown little love for the hard-to-reprocess plastic-lined paper cups. (The chain’s plastic cups, made of No.1 plastic, are proving somewhat easier to sell into recycling flows.)

Boosting recycling of paper cups, in particular, has required near herculean efforts — not just putting out a bin in the front of a store, but ensuring that haulers and recyclers in a given market will take the cups and process them into new materials. The chain has piloted recycling in a variety of cities, including New York in 2010, an effort profiled by Jonathan Bardelline in GreenBiz here.

As one of a series of city-by-city trials, Starbucks has run a pilot in Chicago area stores, for example, to take used cups, and remake them into napkins that come back to the store. To lick this problem, the coffee chain has instigated three industry wide Cup Summits, inviting competitors, peers and service providers to collaborate on recycling solutions.

The efforts are showing progress. In 2011, Starbucks saw a big gain in the share of its stores with front-of-store recycling, to 18 percent of company-owned stores in US and Canada, up from 5 percent in 2010. The number of sites where you can drop your white and green cup into a recycling bin now exceeds 1,000.

The fastest progress, Packard said, has been in “big markets where conditions were right in terms of hauling, recycling infrastructure and demand for end products.” These include most of Canada, Chicago, and parts of Southern California.

Energy per store and LEED. After resetting its energy efficiency targets in 2010, the chain made big gains over the past year. Working towards a goal of cutting its energy intensity by 25 percent by 2015 against a 2008 baseline, the coffee giant’s progress is gaining momentum.

It notched an improvement of 7.5 percent, bringing down to 6.29 kwh the average electricity used per square foot per store per month in company-owned stores in the U.S. and Canada. In 2008, that figure started out at 6.8 kwh

The biggest slice of those gains, Packard explained, came from replacing in-store lighting with LEDs.

.The next frontier of efficiency, he explained is wiring up stores to enable real time remote monitoring and control of HVACs, ice makers and other big energy users.

In a related development, Starbucks reported that three quarters of its newly built company-owned stores (121 of 161) have achieved LEED certification. That share is constrained, Packard explained, in part because Starbucks has limited control over the environment of some its buildings it leases space in.“

Renewable energy. Towards a 2015 goal of buying all of its electric power from renewable sources, the coffee chain reported a big increase in the total volume of green power it bought in 2011: 873 megawatt hours (mwh), up from 580 mwh last year.

Yet despite that big uptick, the share of renewables of total power the company reported appears to have retreated to 50 percent, from 58 percent last year.

What gives? Previous data covered U.S. and Canada only, while for 2011 the coffee chain tallied up its global purchase of renewables — a good move.

Half full

Water. In past years, Starbucks has made laudable gains cutting the volume of water used in its outlets by, for example, by shutting off the all-day flow of water through “dippers,” used to rinse kitchenware.

From 2008 through 2010, those efforts cut water use by nearly a fifth, to less than 20 gallons per square foot of retail space per month.

But in 2011, that figure edged back up by 5 percent. While some of the culprit was higher sales of beverages, the main culprit, Packard told me, are revisions to the way pitchers are cleaned.

That’s under close scrutiny for next year. Plus, “We’re working with equipment vendors to see what we can squeeze out there — from water filtration, to ice makers, it all adds up,” said Packard.

Half empty

Re-useable cups. One of the biggest steps Starbucks could take to lower the impact of its operations would be to get its customers to switch to reusable tumblers. Even though its cups are made of 10 percent recycled pulp, the billions of hot beverages it serves annually translate into virgin trees being cut, pulped, cooked and formed into paper — a very energy intensive process.

Yet breaking customer’s cup-to-go habit remains one of the most stubborn tasks on Starbuck’s eco-punch list. GreenBiz first highlighted the slow progress in 2010.

The chain served just 1.9 percent of total beverage sales in reusable containers last year. That figure has barely budged since 2009, when it debuted at 1.5 percent. That same year, the chain set out a goal of serving 25 percent of beverages in “reusable serverware or tumblers” by 2015.

With this report, Starbucks has revised that target: To serve 5 percent of beverages in “personal tumblers” by 2015.

Packard explained that the goal has proven elusive for a number of reasons. Given that about a fifth of sales are consumed on the premises, “We thought we could effectively boost the use of in-store ceramics,” he said, to make up the bulk of that 25 percent goal. Yet that’s proven challenging: Shrinkage from breakage and theft of the mugs is another barrier.

Spurring the use of tumblers isn’t much easier. Starbucks trialed some behavioral incentives to boost tumbler use in Seattle test sites, but found the response lower than it hoped for. Starbucks currently offers customers a dime discount if they bring their own mug.

For 2012, Packard said, the chain is rebooting efforts to encourage the use of ceramic-ware in store. The latest store designs position reusable mugs in plain sight behind baristas, cuing customers to opt for ceramic and accelerating order processing.

Increasing the value of the 10-cent cup discount isn’t something Starbucks is likely to tinker with. “I don’t think it’s the amount, necessarily” said Packard, “Charging 5 cents for plastic bags wasn’t what triggered the big switch there. It was part of a larger behavioral shift.”

Fair point. But I’m not sure Starbucks should let go of that lever. In the case of plastic bag fees, the value of that nickel charge was probably less important than the repetition of the message that the bag comes at a cost.

Makes me wonder: Perhaps a similar tact could drive greater change at Starbucks? Rather than only reward the virtuous behavior of bringing in a tumbler, why not also identify more clearly the cost of each paper cup in an order.

Without changing prices, the chain could, for instance, simply break out a nickel “cup cost” charge on every receipt. It’d be critical to communicate to consumers that this isn’t an extra fee, but an existing cost they can avoid — and then some — by bringing in a tumbler. It’s worth a shot, or two.

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I’ve focused mostly on resource use and recycling here. Starbucks has also reported progress in its coffee farming and processing program, labor and community issues. Here’s the company’s summary of its work:

Youth Action Grants: Starbucks exceeded its 2015 community goal to engage 50,000 young people in community activities by engaging more than 50,000 in 2011.

Coffee Purchasing: Increased purchases of coffee sourced under C.A.F.E. Practices from 84 percent to 86 percent in 2011.

Farmer Support: Starbucks provided $14.7 million to organizations that make loans to coffee farmers, working toward a goal of $20 million by 2015.

Forest Carbon Programs: Continued work in coffee-growing communities in Chiapas, Mexico, and Sumatra, Indonesia, through Starbucks partnership with Conservation International, demonstrating how coffee farmers can adapt to and address climate change while increasing their income.

Community Service: Starbucks put a special focus on community service for its 40th anniversary celebration. In 2011, Starbucks more than doubled the number of hours from the year before with 442,000 hours contributed. Starbucks is working toward its goal of generating one million hours annually by 2015.
Photo of a latte via Shutterstock.com. Infographics courtesy of Starbucks.

GreenBiz

Can Lit Motors’ self-balancing electric motorcycle succeed where Segway couldn’t? | GreenBiz

What rolls on only two wheels, but can’t be toppled? No, it’s not a Segway. But it does look a little like a Tron-inspired light cycle. The answer is Lit Motors’ C-1 virtually uncrashable electric motorcycle.

At GreenBiz’s VERGE DC confab last week, Lit Motors founder Daniel Kim made a case for why this super-stable electric motorcycle may just succeed where the Segway failed – and why it has the potential to accelerate our breakup with internal-combustion-powered four-wheelers.

What makes Lit’s C-1 so VERGE–y is that it’s a mashup: It combines old-school motorcycle design with cutting-edge sensory and stabilization systems.

The stabilization systems evolved from the digitally controlled gyroscopes first used to stabilize the Hubble Space Telescope. The C-1 uses a pair of advanced gyros as the foundation of a covered, electric motorcycle that — for all intents and purposes — can’t be knocked over. Sounds ridiculous? Well, check out the scale models in this video to see how it works:

Here’s how Lit explains the techno-mojo behind all that stability trickery:

Utilizing electronically controlled gyroscopes located under the floor (putting out over 1,300 lb/ft of torque), the vehicle balances at a stop and stays upright in the event of a collision. In-wheel electric motors (40 kw) provide the power and regeneration, while hub steering keeps you pointed in the right direction. With a top speed of over 120 MPH and battery packs providing 200 miles per charge, the C-1 is perfect for commuters and city dwellers alike.

Since 2010, Kim’s team of nine has logged nearly 20,000 hours developing the C-1 and its constituent technologies. In the process, they’ve applied for 13 patents and designed for a compact manufacturing operation — all on a budget well south of $1 million. Talk about lean innovation.

Kim is aiming for something that transcends slick electric motorcycles. Like a growing generation of transportation thinkers, he sees traffic as a vicious problem that’s seen very little real innovation during the century-long reign of the car. Given that three-quarters of vehicles are driven alone, converting them into the smaller footprint of single-passenger C-1s could effectively free up half of our existing road capacity.

Lit Motors founder Daniel Kim talks about the C-1 electric motorcycle.

Daniel Kim, founder of Lit MotorsThe gains could go further, too. Imagine if the C-1 were mated with the autonomous vehicle systems being developed by the likes of Google and Audi, which promise to reduce congestion by optimizing vehicle behavior. The result could be agile, self-driving robot cars whizzing along fast-moving, jam-free roads. That is, at least until the inevitable robot rebellion.

Back to the C-1. As a motorcycle and bicycle-loving technophile, it’s hard for me not to enthuse about this tantalizing technology. But in truth, the transportation world is littered with achingly smart gizmos that crashed and burned. High atop that list, of course, is Dean Kamen’s Segway, a two-wheeled, self-balancing scooter packed with such blinding promise that Time magazine judged it a “reinvention of the wheel.” Yet these days, Segways are exiled to duty on Paris’ lazy-tourist circuit.

To be fair, the C-1 gets right much that was wrong with the Segway. The Segway promised to revolutionize urban transportation, but was quickly mired in legal wrangling over whether it belonged on sidewalks or roads. The C-1 clearly belongs on roads. The Segway was open, exposed to the weather, while the C-1 is sealed like a car.

Another problem was that the Segway offered a costly solution for shortish journeys, for which plenty of perfectly good, cheap alternatives exist – feet, bicycles and buses, to name a few. In contrast, the C-1 looks to be a true alternative for distant commutes. Kim emphasized that its range would more than cover the average U.S. daily commute.

And don’t underestimate the cool factor. Aside from the above-mentioned reasons, the Segway also was doomed by a chronic case of “I’d be embarrassed to be seen on it” design. It screamed park ranger. Conversely, the C-1 stirs science-fiction dreams. In a chat after his presentation, Kim explained that the fab shop that produced the Tron lightcycle for the recent remake of the sci-fi film helped to build the first C-1 prototype.

Of course, the C-1 has a long way to go to reach the market, and many speed bumps, detours and dead ends can crop up on the road from lab to factory. Passing federal safety and classification standards are costly obstacles. Then there’s the marketing challenge: It will still have to overcome the Segway curse.

Yet, really, it all comes back to one basic question: Who wouldn’t want to commute on a light cycle?

You can put down a deposit on one for as little as $250 at http://litmotors.com/reserve/. Kim is hoping the first commercial models will roll out on U.S. roads in 2014, priced in the neighborhood of $24,000.

Photos from VERGE DC taken by Goodwin Ogbuehi for GreenBiz Group.

GreenBiz

Amory Lovins on ‘Reinventing Fire’ with convergence and innovation | GreenBiz

Amory Lovins on 'Reinventing Fire' with convergence and innovationFor energy visionary Amory Lovins, the antidote for America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels is convergence on the grandest of scales.

His recipe: We must cease engaging the nation’s energy challenges one by one, as we have long tried. Rather, companies, planners and experts must devise hybrid solutions that solve parallel problems facing the U.S.’s most energy-intensive sectors — buildings, electricity, industry and transportation.

Speaking with Joel Makower on stage yesterday at GreenBiz’s VERGE conference in Washington D.C., Lovins reviewed some of the ways this can be done, as laid out in his latest book, “Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era.” The culmination of four decades of work by Lovins and theRocky Mountain Institute — the think tank he founded and chairs — Reinventing Fire maps out an radically ambitious vision to expand the U.S. economy by roughly 2.5-times by mid-century, without using coal, oil or nuclear energy.

Cutting the fossil fuel use is only part of the benefit. By combining efficiency gains — and reducing energy use — Reinventing Fire foresees a much larger economy while saving some $5 trillion in net present value costs, compared with business as usual.

And this can all be done with no new technologies, no acts of Congress, with administrative decisions and led by business, for profit. Lovins explained: “None of these strategies required an Act of Congress. They could all be done administratively or at a state level.”

An example: The majority of states still reward utilities for selling more power, rather than cutting the bill. Reversing this is critical to enlisting utilities in the push to improve efficiency. Altering rules to encourage fair interconnection and open competition on the grid is controlled by FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), and needs no legislative overhauls.

Lovins has been thinking very big for a long time. Getting to these goals, he argues, is about scaling up our thinking — a tough challenge for policy makers and technicians trained to think incrementally. “If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it,” said Lovins, quoting a line attributed to Eisenhower. “Sometimes a problem can’t be solved not because it’s too big, but rather because the values were drawn so narrowly that it didn’t encompass enough options, degrees of freedom and synergies to make it solvable.”

Another unique element of RMI’s strategy is how Lovins and his team approach the process of innovation. Rather than focus on technology and policy, Lovins said his team factors in design — with deep understanding of process technologies, such as how carbon fiber can be used to radically cut vehicle weight, and business strategy. By getting competitive rewards right, he explained, there is scant need to regulate many of these transformations.

The triumvirate of buildings, cars and the grid offer an example of the synergies has RMI identified. Buildings consume three-fourths of our power, yet neither buildings nor the grid have meaningful ability to store energy. Vehicles meanwhile are electrifying, with the development of hybrid and battery-powered cars. By converging electrified vehicles with buildings and the grid, Lovins explained, the car’s battery pack can provide both transportation and back-up abilities: The grid can feed renewables to it and buildings can draw from it. “It’s much easier to solve the automotive and electricity problems together than separately,” Lovins said.

Indeed, remaking the grid from its original centralized design, Lovins explained, represents one of the greatest challenges ahead, but that comes with enormous rewards.

“Networked island-able microgrids” is a mouthful, but describes Lovins’ vision where energy is generated locally from solar, wind and other resources and used by hyper-efficient buildings. When each building, or neighborhood, is generating its own power, with links to other “islands” of power, the security of the entire network is vastly improves.

As our grid becomes increasingly vulnerable to faults from equipment failure, willful attack or even sunspot activity, the risk of a cataclysmic national scale grid failure is rising. In the face of hundreds of blackouts in 2005, Lovins said, Cuba reorganized its power transmission into networked island-able microgrids and cut the frequency of blackouts to zero within two years — limiting damage even in the face of two hurricanes. (Check out this case study for more on Cuba’s efforts.)

Perhaps best of all, and given the location of this discussion in the nation’s politically polarized capital, Lovins’ approach is nonpartisan.

“It doesn’t matter whether you care most about profits, jobs and growth, or about national security, or about health and environmental stewardship,” he said. The best solution for any of these individual problems is the same. So whether or not one believes in climate change, the imperative to boost economic growth justifies the same approach. By focusing on outcomes, rather than motives, Lovins said, disagreements should disappear.

For more on this work, check out Lovins’ recent Q&A with Joel Makower: Amory Lovins’ Burning Quest to ‘Reinvent Fire’

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View the original article here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/03/16/amory-lovins-reinventing-fire-convergence-and-innovation

GreenBiz

HOW GREENER cities are leading the way | GreenBiz

Convergence is often be intangible. The technologies of data, communications, buildings and transportation are rapidly merging, steadily enhancing one another in subtle ways. But convergence can also be tangibly real. For instance, humanity is inexorably concentrating in cities, enabled by many of those invisible technologies.

Discussions of the interplay of these trends — invisible technology and visible cities — took center stage Wednesday at GreenBiz’s VERGE conference in Washington, D.C. Private and public sector leaders mapped out the scale of these dynamics, offering examples of how technologies are evolving to serve the ongoing conglomeration of we humans.

Starting a few years ago, homo sapiens officially become an urban species. Home to over half the world’s population, cities are scaling so fast that by 2050, roughly 70 percent of the global head count will live in urban areas. Compared with the developed West, where most of the population is already urbanized, practically all the growth in the coming decade will happen in the developing world, especially in China and Africa, explained Manish Bapna, Interim President of the World Resources Institute.

Bigger cities are only half the story, though. Urbanization is inextricably linked to income growth, Bapna explained. So while there are roughly 1.8 billion people in the middle class worldwide today, another three billion will join their ranks in the next 20 years. “The pressure this places on resources — water, electricity, food, fuel, and so on — will be unprecedented,” he said.

The scale of these needs, as well as the size of urban markets, are driving corporate strategy to focus new services and products offerings on cities, explained Daryl Dulaney, President and CEO of Siemens Industry. Last March, to tap this potential, Siemens reorganized key operations, totaling $23 billion in revenues, into a new unit called Infrastructure & Cities.

Cities are dense ecosystems that foster innovation and connectedness, and do so with great efficiency, Dulaney said. Pointing to ambitious urban sustainability programs in Philadelphia, New York and Chicago, he said, “I like working with cities. Mayors are focused on getting things done. Politics comes second.”

It’s a similar story in China. Despite Beijing’s reputation for powerful central leadership, WRI found that city mayors were more responsive to efforts to upgrade energy and environmental practices. “The demographic pressure is front and center. Plus, mayors have a lot of authority in China, and they care about seeing their cities succeed,” said Bapna.

By that measure, the mayors of Tsingtao, China, and Philadelphia have much in common. Both see greening their cities as a competitive imperative. Tsingtao’s mayor wants the city to be the most economically attractive in China, and he knows that means he has to attract the best. To do so, he wants to be the greenest city possible.

Philadelphia is rebounding from an era when the City of Brotherly Love had a larger population than today. That’s left the city with amble infrastructure, but a challenge to maintain and optimize it. Green programs can do so, while also making the city more livable, said Alex Dews, Policy and Program Manager in the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability of the City of Philadelphia.

Public-private partnerships are playing a crucial roll in the effort, Dews explained. The city is working with The Dow Chemical Co. on an initiative to test the advantages of installing white roofs on homes.

During hot summer months, bright white roofs are substantially cooler that conventional black tar roofs. The Coolest Block program is re-coating roofs using Dow products and tracking the long-term performance of the converted homes to tally up the benefit. “We look for solutions that are beneficial to government, the public and business,” said Dews.

In another example, Philadelphia has seen recycling rates more than triple in neighborhoods where it rolled out Recycling Rewards, a collaboration with RecycleBank. Philadelphia’s program tracks household recycling by weight, using a system of barcoded bins.

Households earn rewards based on the overall performance of their neighborhoods — the more everyone in a neighborhood recycles, the more each house in that area is awarded at an online account. Credits can be redeemed through RecycleBanks’s network of affiliated brands, ranging from T-Mobile to Subway.

Getting the messaging right took time, Dews explained. Initially there was an epidemic of bin theft. Residents believed that credit was being awarded house-by-house, rather than as a neighborhood average. The city benefits by lowering the volume of waste it sends to dumps.

Looking ahead, cities will remain hotbeds of sustainability innovation. Rising affluence and growing populations will only boost the need for greener ways to house, feed, and care for urban populations.

For cities that are pioneering green programs, the challenge is maturing green efforts, Dews said. The next priority is to deepen pilot environmental programs so that they are institutionalized in city policy.

While much of Philadelphia’s sustainability work has been linked to Mayor Michael Nutter, said Dews, the next step is to make those shifts permanent, so that practices carry over to future administrations, as well as other cities.

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View the original article here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/03/15/why-cities-are-leading-way-green-efforts