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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

GreenBiz

Despite naysayers, green energy keeps growing | GreenBiz

Despite naysayers, green energy keeps growing Clean-energy programs find themselves squarely in the cross hairs of the GOP this election season. After pillorying the White House over Solyndra’s collapse, the House has been griping about everything from military spending on renewables to Obama’s failure to lower gasoline prices. So it may not be the best of times to crow about green energy success.

Or maybe it is. After all, while the past year may be remembered for cleantech’s struggles, green-energy companies turned in another banner year in the humdrum businesses of generating renewable electric power and biofuels.

All together, solar PV, wind and biofuel markets expanded by 31 percent last year to $246 billion globally, according to Clean Edge’s 11th annual edition of Clean Energy Trends 2011, a wrapup of key green-energy indicators. The expansion caps a five-year run during which these markets have grown by roughly a third each year.

To be sure, the market issues facing solar PV manufacturers, wind turbine makers and biofuel producers are very different, so I want to be cautious about generalizing. But the three share similarities. All are gaining sales in established markets dominated by fossil fuels. All have matured beyond startup stages and are, accordingly, seeing the emergence of sophisticated, large-scale players.

And, of course, all three have faced souring public support in the past year. Solar subsidies retreated in Europe. And in the U.S., tax benefits were eliminated for corn ethanol, while the wind industry is once again fighting for the renewal of its production tax credits.

Last year, “the industry became a modern-day whipping boy,” Ron Pernick, Clean Edge co-founder and managing director, said in a press statement. “The attacks… overlooked the fact that many clean-energy technologies are becoming increasingly cost-competitive, central to the expansion of energy markets in places like China, Japan and Germany, and a critical hedge against more volatile forms of traditional energy.”

Despite these headwinds, Clean Edge expects the markets to grow steadily — albeit more slowly — in the decade to come. It projects the clean-energy market will expand by 4.6% per year (compounded) to $385 billion by 2021. In all three technologies, falling prices will spur further growth.

Solar photovoltaic: Sales of PV panels globally surged to $91.6 billion in 2011 from $71.2 billion in 2010. The surge is all the more remarkable because it comes amid fast falling unit prices for solar panels. Put another way, dollar sales rose by 29 percent, while the volume of watts installed soared by 69 percent to more than 26 gigawatts worldwide last year from 15.6 gigawatts in 2010. Clean Edge projects that the cost to install solar PV systems will fall from an average of $3.47 per watt globally last year to $1.28 per watt in the next decade. The falling price will make solar PV cheaper than the grid average price in about a dozen U.S. states in that period.

Wind power: The volume of new turbines coming on line also hit a record last year, with 41.6 GW of wind capacity installed. Assuming, as a rule of thumb, that windmills produce about a third of their rated capacity, that’s the equivalent of more than a dozen nuclear reactors. The total spent to build that new capacity hit a record: $71.5 billion, up 18 percent from $60.5 billion in 2010.

Biofuels markets also established a new high in 2011, with $83 billion in global sales, up from $56.4 billion the prior year. Unlike the markets for solar and wind technology — where falling prices were the rule – per-gallon prices for ethanol and biodiesel rose through the year, reflecting the higher costs of feedstocks such as corn and plant oils, as well as higher fossil-fuel prices.

Venture capital. U.S.-based venture-capital investments in cleantech grew by 30 percent to $6.6 billion in 2011, from $5.1 billion in 2010, according to data provided by Cleantech Group. Clean Edge analysis found that cleantech deals accounted for a record 23 percent of the total U.S. venture-capital investments last year.

Just in time for GreenBiz’s VERGE meeting in Washington, Clean Edge’s report also focuses on several key trends highlighting the way that energy technologies, efficiency and infotech are converging to transform business and government practices. These include the potential for “deep” retrofits in commercial buildings; the growth of waste-to-resource business plays; the promise of energy storage on the grid; the U.S. military’s growing emphasis on clean technology and efficiency; and Japan moving into its post-nuclear future.

Check out the Clean Edge’s full report at http://cleanedge.com/reports/charts-and-tables-from-clean-energy-trends-2012 (click on “Download full report” on the left).

Photo courtesy of Vaclav Volrab  via Shutterstock.

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View the original article here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/03/14/despite-naysayers-green-energy-keeps-growing

GreenBiz

Are green buildings safer? | GreenBiz

Are green buildings safer? Everyone knows that green buildings use less energy to operate. And studies show they’re healthier for occupants, which makes for happier residents and more productive workers.

But safer and more durable? Seems so. A study released this week suggests that greener construction can advance building resiliency.

To me, this link seems intuitive: green buildings are generally designed and built more carefully, with better materials and tighter finishes. It turns out that efficiency-focused features may also help green buildings and their occupants ride out long-term climate shifts — such as droughts or heat waves – and even give an edge in short-term disasters, by staying dry in floods and well sealed during high winds.

The report, produced jointly by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, outlines ways to extend the inherent resiliency of green buildings. Titled “Green Building and Climate Resilience: Understanding Impacts and Preparing for Changing Conditions,” it sets out adaptive strategies that green building pros can deploy. It follows that, like higher efficiency and health benefits, improved durability could boost the market appeal of green structures.

The enhanced quality of a newly built green home or office can be a visceral experience. Doors and windows shut tightly, with an audible “thunk,” like an insulated fridge door. These tight seals are a huge plus for energy insulation: little heat leaks out during the winter, while cool stays in during the summer.

Better sealed, less drafty buildings are a big plus in wind storms too. When tornadoes or hurricanes rake a community, some of the most costly, serious damage is done when wind and water infiltrate a building, sending water deep into hidden cavities. A small opening — whether a missing shingle or a poorly sealed window –can set off a domino effect of damage.

This analysis reminded me of how devastating the impacts of poorly sealed, shoddy construction can be. In 1993, The Miami Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for a Hurricane Andrew-related investigative series, which revealed that some homebuilders had systematically ignored building code to save money. On roofs, for instance, a builder used fewer nails than required by code to attach shingles to plywood or to connect roof beams to walls. The cheat saved pennies but cost billions. During Hurricane Andrew, the builders’ homes were disproportionately devastated when the roofs gave way, leaking disastrously or lifting off completely.

Water is another realm where green design can both protect buildings and enhance the environment. Permeable surfaces that let rain water soak into urban surfaces can dramatically lower the incidence of flash flooding, or overflowing from the storm water system when heavy rains overwhelm sewer systems. In drought-stricken areas, green buildings can capture rainfall, conserve fresh water and reuse grey water.

“In the wake of last year’s disaster activity, with tornadoes across the southwest, flooding from Hurricane Irene and even an earthquake on the East Coast, it is important that we develop and enforce safe and sustainable building codes to make our communities more resilient, and to protect lives and property in times of disaster,” Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said at the National Leadership Speaker Series on resiliency and national security this week.

He called on leaders from major corporations, government, academia, the scientific community and civil society to help advance green building as a complementary strategy to address pre- and post-emergency-management situations, ultimately forging more resilient communities, he said at the event.

Today’s building codes are designed to meet specific regional weather conditions, including the hottest summer days, the coldest winter nights, the highest wind speeds and the risk of floods. “Climate change has the potential to undermine some of these assumptions and potentially increase risks to people and property,” Chris Pyke, vice president at USBGC said in a statement. “There are practical steps we can take to understand and prepare for the consequences of changing environmental conditions and reduce potential impacts.”

You can download a free copy of the report at USGBC. The main body of analysis is only about 40 pages long; the report also includes another 200 pages of reference work on the impacts of climate change in different US region.

Image courtesy of Iakov Kalinin via Shutterstock.

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View the original story here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/03/02/green-buildings-could-be-safer-regular-buildings

GreenBiz

Will Greener Shoes and Uniforms Bring Nike More Olympics Gold? | GreenBiz

Will Greener Shoes and Uniforms Bring Nike More Olympics Gold?Nike hopes to win both green and gold at this summer’s Olympics in London.

On Tuesday in New York City, the sporting-goods giant unveiled a new line of sportswear designed to help Olympians go faster, farther and longer. Nike is manufacturing its 2012 Olympic kits using less material — and more recycled plastics — than in the past.

The announcement came as part of a series of “cutting-edge, lightweight performance innovations designed for the track, the basketball court and beyond for this summer,” CEO Mark Parker said.

To me, the most visibly different ecoinnovation is Nike’s Flyknit shoe design.

Instead of the conventional assembly of fabrics, rubber, leather and other materials, the Flyknit comprises a single piece of a flexible mesh knit, a strong yet pliant fabric that fits like a sock over a wearer’s foot.

Eliminating so much material cuts each shoe’s weight by approximately 20 percent to about 160 grams. That may not sound like much, but multiplied by the 40,000 steps it takes to run a marathon, that totals about the weight of a car — a ton or so — that elite marathoners will no longer need to lift, said Martin Lotti, Nike’s global creative director for the Olympics.

U.S. Olympic team members Carl Lewis and Abdi Abdirahman discuss Nike's Flyknit shoe.Less material also means lower environmental impact. It’s an example “that sustainability can improve performance,” Hannah Jones, Nike’s vice president of sustainable innovation, told me.

Nike is rolling out two versions of the Flyknit: a racing flat and a training shoe. Athletes from Great Britain, Kenya, Russia and the U.S. plan to wear the Flyknit at the games. At the event this week, 10-time gold-medal winner Carl Lewis spoke with 2012 Olympic team member Abdi Abdirahman (both pictured at right) about the Flyknit shoes.

A similar idea helped shape the company’s new line of Olympic uniforms. Here, Nike has boosted its use of recycled polyester to produce lighter fabrics for a variety of shorts and tops – and even a wearable racing skin called Nike Pro TurboSpeed. It’s basically a speed suit that’s covered in dimples, which act like the surface of a golf ball, reducing drag by creating a thin layer of turbulence as an athlete cuts through the air.

By making the fabrics from discarded plastic bottles, the recycled polyester fabrics cut energy consumption by roughly a third compared with virgin materials.

Next page: How recycled plastic helps athletes as much as the environment

The national basketball teams from Brazil, China and the U.S. will wear Nike Hyper Elite uniforms made from plastic reclaimed from 22 recycled bottles (pictured below). The shorts are ethereally light, weighing just about 5 ounces, a quarter of the weight of uniforms worn by today’s NBA pros.

Lighter uniforms translate into less fatigue, more comfort and better performance, said Deron Williams of the New Jersey Nets, who endorses Nike and is expected to play for Team USA in the 2012 games.

These products, the USA Basketball tank top and Nike Pro TurboSpeed track suit, are made from recycled plastic bottles.Soccer players tend to be a bit smaller than basketball players, so just 13 bottles are necessary to make each of their kits. Still, it adds up: Nike’s reuse of plastic bottles has diverted more than 82 million of the containers from landfills.

Speaking with me after the announcement, Lorrie Vogel, Nike’s general manager of Considered Design, told me how competitive Nike’s designers are.

“It’s a company full of ex-athletes, where we’re constantly scored on our performance, and green-design benchmarking is no exception,” she said.

I wondered if that competition makes Nike protective of its proprietary-materials innovations. The recipe for an ultra-lightweight shoe that may be worn on the Olympic podium this summer is worth protecting.

The company shares sustainability know-how strategically, Jones told me. New product or new material design recipes are typically strictly confidential, but design tools and shared materials knowledge is just the opposite, she said.

Jones, pictured at right, believes that among the many industries pushing the sustainability frontier, sports gear makers are among the most collaborative. For example, Nike and its competitors, Adidas and Puma, “recognize the benefit of sharing the recipe for green rubber with our suppliers,” she explained. “We know that if our competitors start ordering it too, the price will fall, supplies will improve, and that will lead to the faster change on a larger scale.”

Hannah Jones, vice president of sustainable innovation at Nike, discusses the company's Olympic innovations.Consistent with that collaborative approach to competition, Jones reminded me that today’s announcement follows a burst of intraindustry green-design initiatives that Nike has announced in the past 18 months. These include:

  • Waterless dyeing. Earlier this month, Nike announced it was rolling out a water-free dyeing method. Though limited in application for now, the approach has the potential to radically reduce the enormous volumes of water the industry consume using conventional methods to color textiles.
  • Zero toxins. The waterless dyeing fits into a broader push to cut toxic emissions to nil. Last fall, as part of a coalition that also includes Adidas, C&A, H&M, Li Ning, and Puma, Nike released a roadmap toward a goal of achieving “zero discharge of hazardous chemicals for all products, across all pathways in our supply chain, by 2020.” The initiative ties together separate efforts in water reduction, organic cotton, green chemistry and materials traceability and sustainability.
  • Design tool sharing. Throughout 2011, Nike launched a series of proprietary tools to help designers speed up their selection of sustainable materials. Nike released its Environmental Apparel Design Tool, a data set and calculator incorporating more than a decade’s worth of knowledge about material attributes. The company uses a similar tool for its Considered Design methodology to assess the impact of its products.

As part of her ongoing “How She Leads” series on women in sustainable businesses, Maya Albanese interviewed Hannah Jones for GreenBiz.com earlier this month. Check out their conversation here.

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View the full article here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/02/23/will-greener-shoes-uniforms-bring-nike-more-olympics-gold

GreenBiz

Green Gamification Takes Root in the Big Apple | GreenBiz

Green Gamification Takes Root in the Big Apple

In my green lexicon, “gamification” gets a special prize: it’s among the clunkiest words to enter the sustainability conversation, yet may just have some of the greatest potential to alter the behavior of consumers, employees and households.

Businesses are fast picking up on the promise. Gamification has unique synergy with green behaviors, with a knack for turning virtuous green actions — such as carpooling or switching to CFLs — from worthy but kinda joyless chores into tasks that earn rewards, gain recognition, and can turn ambivalent consumers into eager eco evangelists.

As part of Social Media Week‘s sprawling, 12-city lollapalooza of digital media events, the New York series included a panel entitled “Gamification: Combining Social Media & Game Mechanics to Promote Sustainability” that I caught late last week.

The panel brought together two recently sprouted startups with two established green brands.

Practically Green and The Mutual are both building businesses predicated on the power of gamification to alter green behavior, attract advertisers, and help organizations spur change.

Joining them were two groundbreaking companies, each born from innovative new approaches to recycling,Recyclebank and TerraCycle, each of which is increasingly using gamification to extend its reach.

Here’s a quick run down of how these companies talked about how gamification is changing their businesses.

A Social Media Approach to Greener Behaviors

Practically Green helps organizations become greener by using technology and social networking to educate, motivate and reward people for making green changes to their work and home life.

Conceived in 2009, founder Susan Hunt Stevens took her inspiration for the Boston-based company from LEED, the exhaustive guide to designing and building greener buildings.

But instead of LEED’s focus on building insulation or low-flow faucets, Stevens’ approach tallies up over 400 green behaviors, from commuting by bike to buying local produce.

Speaking on the panel, Stevens described the program as “LEED meets Weight Watchers,” for its blend of points and behavioral reinforcement through peer groups.

One of the challenges with sustainability, Stevens said, is that communicating how and why to do it is tricky. “The content can be technically complex. Some of it is political for some folks. And much of it is preachy.” Gamification breaks down the complexity into small, learnable steps, and depoliticizes the issue, she added.

Working with large organizations including NBC Universal, Eileen Fisher and the Seattle Mariners, Practically Green customizes workplace programs where staff sign in, and register their green behaviors, earning points and badges along the way.

For companies looking at ambitious sustainability programs, Stevens said, the program offers a easy-to-deploy, web-based solution that can quickly speed up employee involvement with green programs. This, by the way, is one way Practically Green earns revenue: charging a dollar or so per month per employee to companies it engages with.

(For more, Practically Green’s Stevens spoke with Chrissy Coughlin for Nature of Business Radio here at GreenBiz last September.)

‘Groupon for Good’

Not yet a year old, The Mutual is a Brooklyn-based startup that has been called “The Groupon for good.”

To join, a member picks a pledge level — say $10 per month — and a charity to steer the donations towards: options include think tanks such as World Resources Institute, conservationists such as Oceana, and climate groups like Carbonfun.org.

The Mutual, in turn, relays four-fifths of the donation to your charity, and uses the remainder — a share that’s on par, or less, than the take of a typical charity fundraiser for overhead — to grow its network of members and business partners.

Members, in turn, are rewarded with perks from business members looking to connect with a big pool of green-minded consumers.

For example, using FourSquare, I checked into a recent Mutual event at Brooklyn Brewery, and thereby qualified for a contest, discounts at the brewery, and earned points online at themutual.com.

“I describe us as a social enterprise that rewards people for donating to charity with Perks from great brands,” said founder and CEO Dan Vallejo.

The startup is scaling fast, with the bulk of early participants from the Bay Area, New York and Boston.

Green Gamification’s Greatest Success Story

Now eight years old, Recyclebank offers one of the best known success stories in the power of green gamification.

Recyclebank’s original business — and still its core offering — is an ingenious system that rewards household recycling. It does so by tracking and identifying how much recycling a given household is putting out on the curb.

In around 300 cities in the U.S. and U.K., public garbage trucks automatically weigh recycling bins, use radio tags to identify which home the material came from, and records the transaction to a web site. Consumers can then track the volume of their recycling online.

That’s all well and good, but the real carrot is the points that the recycling earns for the household. The more a home recycles, the more points they earn.

Consumers can convert those points with a network of scores of well known brands that participate in the tracking program, offering perks that can be redeemed for products and services from the likes of WalMart, Coca Cola to Procter & Gamble, to Bed Bath & Beyond.

The model has proved scalable and increasingly adaptable. Cities like it because it boosts recycling rates, which lowers their landfill costs since more trash is diverted to reuse. Consumers, and especially households where kids get highly involved, like the rewards scheme. And the marketing partners are on board for access to consumers who have proven be top quality prospects, with a high likelihood of redeeming the perks, using the products, and spending more.

That was just the beginning though. In recent years, as Samantha Skey, Recyclebank’s chief revenue officer, told attendees, Recyclebank is proving its business model works for more than just recycling.

The company is expanding its business model, marketing partnerships, and web technology to extend to many other frontiers of green behavior, such as e-waste recycling, responsible junk disposal, and energy reduction.

Growing from Worm Poop to Packaging Reuse

TerraCycle, the Newark, N.J. based brand has evolved into a $20 million-a-year operation, since it was founded in 2001 by Princeton University dropout Tom Szasky.

In a few short years, the company has pivoted but not abandoned its original focus on “worm poop” fertilizer — the innovative organic plant food, packed in recycled bottle, that was brewed from worm-rich compost piles — towards a broader focus on packaging reduction and reuse.

Partnering with schools and numerous major consumer packaged good companies, TerraCycle is capturing both pre- and post-consumer packaging waste to upcycle it: such as converting Capri sun bags into satchels, pencil cases, and other merchandise.

What’s the gamification angle here? Albe Zakes, TerraCycle’s global vice president, media relations, explained: Since TerraCycle’s community skews heavily towards kids and moms, a teachable-game fit the bill.

Partnering with Manhattan-based Guerillapps, TerraCycle developed Trash Tycoon. Played in Facebook, players earn points, and privileges by cleaning up a small town, and building sustainable businesses from the trash. It works like a mash-up between SimCity and Farmville, but with a decidedly green wrinkles. Treehugger.com, for instance, provides real-time news feeds of eco-current events that appear in the game.

Customized to help kids learn about waste and recycling, Zakes explained the game is being customized so that virtual activity mirrors and reinforces the real-world efforts of its classroom brigades, the groups of school kids who raise funds — and compete with other class groups — by recycling packaging materials.

Balancing Real and Virtual to Boost Sustainability

Threading through the discussion was a concern that converting virtual do-gooderism into real world action is a challenge. The panelists acknowledged that there’s a risk that they may be able to induce a player to click a mouse — say, to “like” a green action, or to win a badge — but may not be able to actually spur that person to do the deed.

In Practically Green, Stevens explained, finding the mix of virtual incentives and balancing them against real world programs in the workplace is as much art than science. What’s more, she said, the workplace is a powerful arena in which to educate and stimulate such behaviors, because many people are driven more by peer perception in work environments than they are in their private lives.

This spurs competitive behaviors and, interestingly, lowers the risk of false claims where folks claim to have completed a green task, such as recycling their office paper: “Their friends and colleagues know, and they notice, and will call out their friends if they’re cheating,” explained Stevens.

For TerraCycle, which built its business in part from the fabric of social dynamics at schools, Zakes explained its game actually complements and extends an existing foundation of existing actions.

Still, at the splash screen of the game, there’s this encouragement: “Trash Tycoon is great, but make sure to get outside and collect some actual recycleables once in a while.”

Held in collaboration with Baruch College’s Robert Zicklin Center for Corporate Integrity at the City University of New York (CUNY), the panel was curated by Ashok Kamal (a graduate of Ziklin’s MBA program) who co-founded Bennu, which provides social media marketing for green businesses.

For a broader look at the origins and breadth of gamification, check out Kamal’s overview of the gamification phenomenon here in GreenBiz.

Last but not least, you can watch a video of the full panel presentation from Social Media Week through the group’s website. Scroll to the very bottom of the page, where you’ll find two video links. The lower of the two is the first 90 minutes, including the four company presentations. The video above that is the final half hour, comprised mostly of Q&A.

Joystick photo via Shutterstock.

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Read the original story here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/02/22/green-gamification-takes-root-big-apple

GreenBiz

Venture capital investment in cleantech shrank by 4.5% in 2011 | GreenBiz

Why Sinking Cleantech Investment Data Aren't the End of the World

In cleantech, as in most realms of emerging technology, venture capital acts as a sort of incubator for the youngest, most promising technologies. That’s why it’s a cause for concern when venture capital investment slows or shrinks.That’s just what happened last year. In 2011, venture capital investment in early-stage cleantech companies fell by 4.5 percent, to $4.9 billion, compared with the 2010 tally, according to a round-up of full-year data by Ernst & Young published Feb. 1, based on data from Dow Jones VentureSource.Whether this downtick is cause for concern is open to argument. The question links to hot-button issues being debated in Congress, on the campaign trail, and in the media. I, for one, believe that given the headwinds facing cleantech, the numbers are cause for optimism. They’re good news, but I wish they were better.figure 1To make my half-full case, note that cleantech venture capital investment has been resilient despite both economic and political headwinds. Last year’s funding remains 29 percent higher than its 2009 total, when overall venture flows crashed in the wake of the global financial crisis.

What’s more, cleantech is nurtured by other streams of capital. As I reported last month, global investment in mature renewable energy technologies — new wind farms, solar panels, and the like — expanded by 5 percent, to $260 billion last year. That rise helped put total investment in renewable energy, efficiency, smart grid and related technologies over the trillion dollar mark last year.

Still, I’m a worrier. And there are reasons to furrow my brow at these numbers.

However promising cleantech may be, venture capitalists are finding more alluring options in other sectors. Cleantech’s decline comes despite a 10 percent rise of overall venture capital investment. Globally, for the year, investors placed $32.6 billion into 3,209 venture deals, according to Dow Jones Venture Source.

So while cleantech retreated, investment in healthcare and IT startups remained roughly steady. The big winner? Consumer information services — think Twitter, LivingSocial and Zynga — pulled in $5.2 billion, up 23 percent from the prior year.

But before I complain any further that clean technology shouldn’t be losing out to Twitter, let alone Facebook, here’s a bit more on what went down in cleantech over the past year.

• Battery technology is hot. Energy storage continues to attract interest, and growing flows of money. Venture investment in batteries rocketed up by 253 percent. And this is bound to accelerate. Growing volumes of electric vehicles, plus the graduation of wind and solar from emerging-tech status to mature technology, are all driving demand for energy storage, in a dizzying array of niches.

And while some segments of battery manufacturing are mature — increasingly subject to the sorts of commodity price dynamics driving down prices of solar PV — there is arguably bigger potential for scientific discovery to upend today’s batteries.

• Investment is tilting towards more mature plays. Cleantech companies already generating revenue garnered 69 percent of the funding, up from 50 percent in 2010.

• M&A exits dominate. Given the parlous state of IPO offerings, mergers & acquisitions continue to be the main path to maturity for cleantech players. In 2011, a total of $2.9 billion in M&A deals involved cleantech startups, some 79 deals, according to Ernst & Young’s analysis.

• IPO drought lingers. Just five companies IPO’d in 2011, not many more than the three that listed a year prior. Biofuels dominated last year’s public debuts, with Solazyme, Gevo, and KiOR. Intermolecular, a semiconductor R&D company focused on cleantech listed in the final quarter, as did Rentech, a clean energy solutions provider. The five raised a total of $688 million.

The low count of IPOs for cleantech is an indicator of a growing backlog and is one reason why new cleantech investment may be slowing. Without a clear line to exit, venture funders will steer their money to sectors where it’s easier to cash out.

Thus, Facebook. Good things may yet come of Facebook’s super-hyped IPO. Perhaps it will improve the atmospherics around cleantech IPOs?

But on balance I find the din disheartening. The very big IPOs by Twitter et al. smack of hype. To emphasize my point: Facebook’s pending IPO is likely to raise around $5 billion, more than was invested by VCs in the entire cleantech sector last year. Indeed, Facebook’s valuation is verging on speculation, maybe even magical thinking. The offering is slated to value the total company at $100 billion.

Compared with the foaming enthusiasm for all-things-Facebook, it can feel like cleantech has drifted into a period of backlash, however undeserved. Investment continues apace to be sure, but the narrative around cleantech is growing more polarized.

Long-time cleantech investor Ira Ehrenpreis put it this way, as quoted in GreentechMedia.com: “While I’ve never been more bearish on U.S. cleantech, I’ve never been more bullish about global cleantech.”

Blame domestic politics for the widening gap in cleantech prospects here compared with global markets. Leading the negative push—recklessly so—are House Republicans, who seem intent on vilifying federal support of renewable energy, using Solyndra’s failure as a political bludgeon against President Obama. Likewise, the GOP presidential aspirants have retreated on cleantech: far-right opposition of climate change is so dogmatic, even discussions of cleantech have become off limits despite the fact that practically all the Republican candidates have championed renewable investment in the past.

Meanwhile, media find it hard to resist the counter-intuitive appeal of the “cleantech is failing” tale, and are amplifying the meme. Picking up on the GOP’s talking points, the tally of stories of Solyndra’s failure far outpaces coverage of the fact that it’s been a record year for solar capacity growth in the U.S. Or that plummeting solar prices are a windfall for buyers of the technology, enabling even energy-poor regions such as India to light up.

Witness Wired magazine’s February story “Why the Clean Tech Boom Went Bust.” While its author, Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin, actually offers a reasonably measured take on the impact of cheap natural gas and the Solyndra scandal, you’d have a hard time figuring that out from the headline or the explosive artwork illustrating the story (at right, by Dan Forbes).

Lurid pictures of exploding wind mills, fiery biodiesel canisters, and a shattering PV panel left me thinking that John Doerr must be on the verge of switching back coal heat for his mansion. Meanwhile, elsewhere on Wired.com, the breathless all-technology-is-pretty-much-cool coverage of green developments continues apace.

Wired’s schizophrenic take on cleantech is not unique, but it deserves special attention because the magazine has been such a vocal, effective champion for innovation as a driver of economic growth. The editors’ tabloid take on cleantech is sure to gather clicks: scores of contrary comments and irate tweets suggest the story has generated a lot of attention.

But in gunning for controversy, Wired goes off target, loosing sight of the bigger, better idea that cleantech is a near-ideal innovation catalyst for U.S. economic growth. That’s why we should keep our fingers crossed that venture capitalists will keep steering more money into the sector too.

See the original story here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/02/06/why-sinking-cleantech-investment-data-arent-end-world