NRDC OnEarth

Meet the Change Makers: PUMA’s Sustainable Track Record | OnEarth

The sportswear giant is first out of the starting block with an aggressive effort to track environmental performance

PUMA has a long history of winning in dramatic style. At Beijing’s 2008 Olympic Games, Jamaica’s Usain Bolt savored his world record-setting victories in two sprints by holding up his golden PUMA track shoes in a victorious archer’s pose. In 1970, Brazilian soccer legend Pele drew TV close-ups when he interrupted the opening whistle of the World Cup to bend down and tie his PUMA soccer shoes. For the exposure, PUMA reportedly paid $120,000. Decades earlier, some of the first-ever spiked track shoes helped Jesse Owens sprint to quadruple gold-medal success at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The shoes came from PUMA’s forerunner, founded in Germany in 1924. All along, PUMA has remained a formidable contender in the devilishly competitive business of sporting gear. While continuing a tradition of high-profile athletic endorsements, a steady stream of alliances with leading designers — including Jill Sander, Philippe Starck and Alexander McQueen — has helped the German company resurrect its brand in the U.S.

The man credited for its resurgence, and for driving sales to $3.6 billion last year, is Jochen Zeitz. Appointed to run PUMA in 1993 at age 30 — at the time, this made him the youngest-ever chairman of a listed German company — Zeitz, a German native, has also distinguished the company as a sustainability pioneer, especially in the self-assessment and publication of its environmental impact. In 2008, he established a foundation to support innovative, sustainable solutions that balance conservation, community, culture and commerce. Last year, 48-year-old Zeitz worked with Anselm Grün, a Benedectine monk, to co-author Prayer, Profit & Principles – Monk and Manager, a book about how to confront pressing social and environmental issues.

Earlier this year, PUMA published the results of the first ever “environmental profit and loss” statement (EP&L) released by a major corporation. Building on the convention of corporate sustainability reporting, triple-bottom-line assessments, and more recently initiativesto report greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, PUMA’s EP&L attempts to put a dollar value on environmental damage not typically captured by standard financial measures. For the exercise, PUMA assessed the cascade of impacts caused by producing shoes and sportswear: from raw material production, such as cotton farming and oil drilling, to raw material processing, involving leather tanneries, the chemical industry and oil refineries.

Working with accounting giantPricewaterhouseCoopers and data firmTrucost, in May PUMA pegged the ecological costs of its operations for GHG emissions and water use at $124 million for 2010. Of the total, $9.5 million is due to PUMA’s direct actions, and the remaining $115 million are incurred in the chain of suppliers that deliver finished goods to the company. The approach is controversial. Critics have argued the system is too abstract to trigger meaningful change. But by putting a dollar value on the environmental impact of its production process, Zeitz contends PUMA is playing a “catalytic role” in helping to shift the way companies measure and record their costs, and ultimately reduce them. OnEarthcontributor Adam Aston recently spoke with Zeitz, who now serves as chief sustainability officer of PUMA’s parent company, PPR Group, as CEO of its Sport & Lifestyle Group, as well Chairman of the Board of PUMA about how the EP&L can help improve sustainability.

The corporate sustainability report is, for most companies, the most detailed assessment of their environmental impact. At PUMA, you took the process considerably further. What’s the benefit?

We’re moving away from the traditional sustainability report. Such reports are fine for senior management to chart broad efforts. But from the perspective of designers or buyers trying to understand the impact of their decisions on the environment, that approach isn’t specific enough.

That’s where the EP&L comes in. Used across the entire supply chain, it offers a better tool to look at product development and design decisions, to understand the impact of what raw materials we use, how the materials are processed, where our products are made, how they’re shipped, how we package, stock and sell them, and how we dispose of or recycle them.

What variables did you measure in your first EP&L?

The first two we focused on were carbon and water. In the next phase, to be announced shortly, we aim to add other environmental indicators, such as the precursors of smog and acid rain, waste reduction and land use impacts. Eventually, our goal is to track about 90 percent of our environmental impact. Beyond that, the final 10 percent, I think, will just get too complicated.

In phase two, we plan to assess the social impacts in sustainability, such as changes in standard of living, security and health of the communities where we and our contractors have impact.

Finally, in phase three, we want to broaden the scope to look, holistically, at the economic positives of business. If we’re truly comprehensive in this effort, we shouldn’t just look at negative things. The fact is that companies also do good things — creating jobs, paying taxes, fuelling economic growth, increasing wealth and improving quality of life. That’s also something that we want to start valuing.

What surprised you in your evaluation?

The real eye opener was how much of our impact happens so early in the supply chain. That’s when most of the carbon emissions are created and most of the water is consumed.

We estimate that over half of our carbon emissions happen in the production and processing of raw materials, in the raising of cattle for leather and treating that leather, for example.

That means that the second you decide what raw materials to use in your product, you’ve set in stone the bulk of that products’ environmental impact, no matter what happens later.

How are you using the EP&L findings to alter the way you do business?

These numbers show you where you can start to turn your product development in a better direction, by looking for alternative materials, investigating how they’re made, where and by whom. So the findings are influencing product design and development day-to-day, as well as manufacturing, sourcing, even marketing to a point. We’ve begun to share these findings with our suppliers, to help them understand why we’re strict about certain materials or processes.

Are consumers starting to see these changes?

In some cases, yes. For example, to cut the amount of cardboard in our shoe boxes, we worked with Yves Behar to create Clever Little Bag. It’s a design that cleverly combines a reusable bag with a cardboard frame. The approach does away with about two-thirds of the paper used in regular boxes — this saves trees, of course, but also huge volumes of electricity and water, given how paper is made. And since it has a built in handle, the design also eliminates the need for an extra bag at checkout. That makes it more convenient for the consumer. The process of designing this required that we coordinate with our suppliers in Asia to ensure the new approach didn’t cause troubles with how our shoes are packaged at the plant, then shipped and distributed.

Given that you don’t own most of the factories that supply PUMA sportswear, is it a challenge to push through these kinds of sustainable design decisions?

While we don’t own the factories or suppliers, we are deciding who our manufacturers will be, who our raw material suppliers are, where we buy our raw materials from, and so on. We have the ability to tell a factory: “Stop buying from that supplier.”

But, of course, there are cost implications. The full costs that we identified in our EP&L exercise are borne by all of the participants in our supply chain. Though we’re at the end of that chain, PUMA doesn’t pay the full cost of that EP&L.

That’s a reason we’re working to educate our suppliers. If we identify that the footprint of cushioning in our shoes, for example, is predominantly with the chemical industry, we can say to that industry and its suppliers: “Okay, guys, what can you do to shrink your footprint?” It’s got to be a joint initiative.

Do you worry that these efforts will drive up prices, and that higher price tags could turn off consumers?

Look, very little that we buy today is truly sustainable, but this effort has to start somewhere. I believe that brands have significant power to change consumer behavior. Consumers are starting to understand that, ultimately, we’re living on one planet and we have to look after it. There’s a natural survival mode that kicks in, where we are starting to realize that things are broken and we’ve got to change it.

For PUMA, the key is that we don’t over promise, and are very transparent and true to what we do, with honest communication about what we’ve accomplished and what we haven’t. Communicating these efforts is important: we don’t want to lose our customers’ trust by getting it wrong. Nor do we want to sell a greener product that is ignored.

We’re trying to sell a solution that is desirable in many ways­ besides its environmental impact — its design, materials, and its style. This effort has to include the consumer. Otherwise it’s not going to change things.

What have been the greatest challenges in deploying this method?

It’s not totally black and white, for sure. Data collection is a challenge, given how many suppliers feed materials into our products. But it can be done if the rules are set, and everybody plays along.

Then, of course, is the question of valuation. For example, there is not just one method of measuring the value of water or the cost of carbon.

For us, this meant being on the cautious side when it came to valuing environmental costs, generally opting for the higher cost estimate. So, for carbon, we take its social cost, around $90 per metric ton, many times the cost of a ton of carbon offsets in EU markets. The higher social cost of carbon reflects estimates of the future costs of climate change. [For background on how this value is calculated, check PUMA’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions Valuation Model.]

Are you open to sharing these methods with your peers, to help them spread?

Yes, absolutely. For those that are serious and want to associate themselves with what we are doing in an open manner, we will also be open with them. We have already had a number of requests from the automotive, chemical and beverage industries, as well as from one of our competitors.

Sidebar – Truth Squad: A more environmental balance sheet

Why would a public company such as PUMA bother to report costs it isn’t required to? After all, tracking down water-use and carbon-emissions data for far-flung factories manufacturing countless products is a costly, complex effort, demanding time from top management at PUMA and its partners.

The goal is to turn transparency into a competitive advantage. In fact, while PUMA’s particular EP&L methodology is unique, it’s one of an emerging set of related standards for corporations to recognize, measure and report the non-financial impact of their activities. “Call it triple bottom line or sustainability accounting or CSR [for corporate sustainability reporting], dozens of standards are being developed that attempt to capture elements of companies’ environmental impact,” says Alisa Valderrama, a finance policy analyst at NRDC’s Center for Market Innovation. Some of the leading players in these efforts include Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the Carbon Disclosure Project and CERES.

PUMA’s first effort, recording water and carbon costs on a profit and loss statement, may sound like a trivial bookkeeping shift, but the company is going a step further than most: Puma is not only disclosing impacts, but working to integrate what they learn into their bottom line. This means going beyond getting management to trim disproportionately high environmental costs. In the long term, such efforts can also help reduce the “material” risks to financial performance that companies are required to report. Energy shortages or toxic spills at a sub-contractor are examples of risks that could dent the annual returns of a company like PUMA. Lastly, share price could eventually benefit since some studies suggest that fuller disclosure of non-financial factors correlates with better investment returns.

“PUMA’s efforts sophisticated, a really holistic example,” Valderamma says. “This is costly, hard stuff: assessing your toll on the environment is not as easy as counting widgets coming of the assembly line.”

Yet she is frustrated with the broader state of reporting, because until such voluntary standards are incorporated into mainstream accounting and financial practices, their impact will be limited. “You want to get to the point where this is no longer rare and voluntary, but commonplace and expected, where Wall Street analysts are asking about EP&L in quarterly calls,” she says. “That will be the bellwether of real market change.” — Adam Aston

Global CCS Institute

From fighting coal plants to fighting for carbon capture and re-use: Q&A with Laura Miller (Part II of II) | Global CCS Institute

Yesterday we heard the start of Laura’s story, and the progression of the Texas Clean Energy Project. This is the second and final part of the Q&A with Laura.

You have a competitor that’s following a similar technology path?

Yes, that’s Hydrogen Energy California (HECA). They’ve gone through a complete transformation. One of the original backers, BP, dropped out after the Gulf spill.

Like us, HECA also got Department of Energy (DOE) money as part of the Clean Coal Power Initiative. They got $408 million, we got $450 million. They’re also at 90 per cent capture. Their original design, I think, was using petcoke, rather than Wyoming coal.

When the project nearly died, in an effort to keep it alive, DOE went out and solicited other companies to come in and take it over. SCS Energy, in Concord, Massachusetts took over HECA in September.

I joked when I called the head of HECA because they have the same tax problem that we have right now in congress. I called the man who was negotiating to buy the project, the chairman of the company, and I said, “Hey, I hear that the project now is modelled after our project, that we have the same configuration,” and he said, “Yep. We like to tell everyone we meet that we taught you guys everything that we know.”

Is there sufficient demand for urea and CO2 to repeat this model in other facilities?

Right now, the United States imports about five million tons a year of urea and the US domestic production is 3.5 million. When we go online, we’ll be boosting urea domestic production by 20 per cent.

There’s obviously a finite amount of urea that can be produced worldwide, but the beauty of the syngas is that it makes lots of other products. You can make methane out of it, you can make ammonia out of it, you can make gasoline out of it. The Germans used coal gasification to fuel their entire war effort during World War II.

We picked urea because we did a very thorough look at the different markets for various products that could be made from a syngas and decided that urea was a profitable strong market because of this imbalance between domestic output and international production.

The plant has taken longer than you anticipated. What have been the delays?

We’ve had some shifts in the ownership of the project. Summit always builds for owners – so far, gas, solar and wind projects, never coal. We contract to do a turnkey power project, we build it, we hand over the keys, they give us a success fee, we move on to the next power project.

In this case, we developed the project and then Babcock & Brown became the owner of the project in 2008. But they had to give the project back to us because in the economic downturn, they went bankrupt and couldn’t afford to build it.

That was, obviously, a big setback and we kept the project going even though if we’d have been a gas plant, we just would have stopped working on it and moved onto the next project until we found a new owner and the economy improved.

But we have a strong philosophical belief that if coal’s going to be used in this country for power production in the future, it’s going to have to be done this way – in an incredibly clean way – and the time is now while the world is trying to find ways to reduce carbon emissions We decided it was worth holding onto the project because we thought we had a good business model and that if any of these projects was going to succeed, ours had a good chance to succeed.

Are you bearing the full development cost of the project now?

We added one key investor in the project, and it’s Clayton Williams out of West Texas. Had he not entered the project, we probably would not have been able to continue. He came in at a really critical time just before we got the DOE award, putting in money along with Summit.

Williams is a very colourful oil man in West Texas—a real character and a sweet man. He just turned 80, and he ran for governor against Ann Richards some years back.

Knowing oil, he immediately saw the value of the CO2. He understood how we put this together and how it could work and how it could be attractive to investors and so he became a minority owner.

Since then, we’ve talked to other investors, who will need to put up about $1 billion for financial closing. We have a checklist of things that these investors need to see in order to make their final decision and we’ve been, one by one by one, checking off all those milestones. Now we’re down to just a handful of things that need to be completed.

What’s done, and what remains to be completed?

Here are the milestones we’ve already passed.

We kicked off the front-end engineering and designing in June of 2010 and we finished it in July 2011. We got our air permit in December of 2010 with no opposition. That was a very big milestone for us.

We got our record of decision from the Department of Energy, which puts us in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act. We have pre-sold all of the urea, CO2 and sulfuric acid. And we are about to sign our interconnection agreement that will connect our project to the state’s electricity grid.

What about the electricity?

Ah yes. Last but not least, we have sold all of the electricity to the city of San Antonio.

CPS Energy in San Antonio is the largest municipally-owned utility in the country, led by a CEO named Doyle Beneby. He’s been incredibly visionary in terms of where he wants the utility to go. He is shutting down one of his old coal plants early and buying all of our power, and building solar farms and wind projects.

Working with the mayor of San Antonio — who notably is the youngest mayor of a big city in the country, by the name of Julian Castro – they have joined up, so that every single power deal that they’re making is for green power, and includes an economic development component requiring companies they do business with to create jobs in San Antonio.

We, as an example, are opening an office in San Antonio for customer relations, and for media. And we’re forming a carbon management advisory board with environmentalists, industry experts and scientists on it, to be on the inside of our construction process so that they learn how the gasification process and carbon capture work. Then they can go out and tell people that clean coal with carbon capture does exist.

You’ve gone from fighting coal to selling a very complex coal project, and have been successful at both. How have you been able to sell others on the vision of this plant?

It can be difficult. It’s so funny. I was at a dinner party and someone asked me what I’m doing since I left being mayor, and I said, “Oh. I’m building a carbon capture power project that uses the carbon for enhanced oil recovery in the Permian Basin.”

The guy literally closed his eyes. And he said, “Oh. Wow. Huh.” and then he turned to a person on the other side of him to find more interesting conversation.

Whenever that happens, I always say, “But, I want you to know, I’m going to save the polar bears and make the planet safe for your grandchildren.” Sometimes that gets their attention.

The irony is that I’ve always been a communicator who used my communication skills to win journalism awards and get elected mayor of Dallas, but you start talking about gasification and compressed CO2 and everyone just goes to sleep on you.

It can be too abstract for the public to connect with. How do you get around that?

When I was fighting TXU’s big coal plant proposal, I kept losing in all these debates with them because they’d bring their engineers in to talk about how coal gasification didn’t work, and carbon capture didn’t work.

The most important thing I did at that time was to go to Tampa, Florida, where I had been told there was an advanced IGCC – gasification — plant operating. I had to fly there to go touch the plant, to be able to come back to Dallas, and stand up to them in the debates and say, “You are not being truthful. Gasification works, and it’s working in Tampa, Florida, and I saw it.”

They said, “Well, but that plant has a history of problems. And they use a very specific high-quality Appalachian coal. It’s the only kind of coal that can be used in gasification, and otherwise it just doesn’t work.”

So I said to them, “Really? Well, look at this,” and I opened my hand in the debate to show what looked like a shiny, black rock. I said, “Since you keep telling me this, the first question I asked the plant manager in Tampa is what kind of high-quality Appalachian coal do you use? He said, ‘We use pet coke from Houston”.

Then, I turned to the audience, and I said, “That’s basically sludge off refineries in our own backyard.”

So then the debates turned because then people said, “Oh my God, they haven’t been telling us the truth about what’s technologically available.”

My point is that offering real-world examples – when people can go and see and touch the cleanest coal plant in the world, which ours will be – it will really move the debate. Until then, it’s just conversation.”

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Global CCS Institute

From fighting coal plants to fighting for carbon capture and re-use: Q&A with Laura Miller (Part I of II) | Global CCS Institute

Laura Miller seems an unlikely champion for a project that’s on track to become the first financially self-sufficient carbon capture and sequestration project in the United States.

After all, it was only five years ago that Miller, then Mayor of Dallas, emerged triumphant in a David-vs-Goliath showdown with energy developer TXU to block the construction of 11 new coal plants in Texas.

Once Miller learned about the proposal that, along with seven others proposed, would double the number of coal plants in Texas, she cobbled together a coalition of three dozen cities, counties and school districts to block the deal. Following a marathon process, Miller’s coalition was instrumental in getting TXU to retreat from its plan. Embattled by critics, TXU became a buyout target as its stock dropped, and the new owners negotiated with national environmental groups to build eight of the 11 coal plants.

After her term, Miller was asked by a variety of environmental groups to carry the anti-coal flag. Convinced that simply obstructing new coal plants wasn’t a solution to the climate challenge, Miller instead went on a mission to learn about alternative technologies.

Her odyssey ended at Summit Power Group, a Seattle, Washington based developer that’s developing a carbon capturing, coal gasification power plant with a new kind of business model. Summit’s so-called ‘poly-gen’ plant will make money by selling CO2 and other by-products for multiple uses.

It will sell CO2 to the oil patch for enhanced oil recovery. And the plant will convert some of the extra syngas it produces into valuable chemicals. Taken together, Summit believes it can build and operate a coal plant with 90 per cent capture that makes money, without a price on carbon.

Miller has spent the past four years pushing plans to build the 400-megawatt Texas Clean Energy Project in Odessa, not far from the New Mexico border. When completed, TCEP will be the cleanest coal-fueled power plant in Texas.

In an era where cancellations of CCS projects in the US are outnumbering successful start-ups, TCEP has come a long way. Despite the bitterly polarised politics around energy, Summit’s $2.4-billion project won bi-partisan support in Texas’ state-house.

Its secret? Summit’s process offers something to supporters of both green energy and fossil fuels. It captures and reuses CO2 emissions, which pleases the Greens, and it sells the CO2 to the oil industry, which boosts oil recovery from ageing wells. In December, TCEP was granted an air permit with no opposition.

In September, Miller and I met in New York. She was in town for ClimateWeek, where she took part in a roundtable discussion hosted by the Global CCS Institute. More recently, we caught up for a longer talk about her project. What follows is Part 1 of our conversation. Part 2 will be published tomorrow.

Would you characterise your personal transition as one of being anti coal to pro coal within certain conditions?

When I left being mayor, the environmental community asked me to go out and teach other mayors how to fight dirty coal. And I said, “You know, I think it would be more worth our while to go out and build the cleanest possible coal-fuelled plant in the world and then raise the bar”.

So for four years, all I have done is work on what we believe and what a lot of the environmentalists believe is going to be the cleanest coal plant: 90 per cent carbon capture, extremely low emissions on all the other pollutants.

Given recent cancellations of CCS projects in the US and Europe, your project is a stand out. What’s holding things back?

There’s a lot of uncertainty around where these projects fit in, which makes it harder for the private sector to move forward. Even some Greens are luke warm in their support for CCS, wanting to spend more time on promoting renewables. And a lack of popular conviction on climate issues means it’s safe for politicians to go slow.

In the face of this indecision, our saviour is really enhanced oil recovery. There’s a growing appetite for the CO2 in Texas and other oil-producing states, regardless of climate discussions, or a price on CO2.

We have the ability to take all this CO2 that we can capture off the industrial projects and sell it to bring more oil out of the ground out of wells that already exist.

Summit was awarded $450 million from the DOE to scale up this process, and one of the reasons we got the award was because of our financial model to sell CO2 and other products.

Are you vulnerable to the backlash against renewables energy funding simmering in the US Congress?

Four years ago, when we proposed this project, we had no plans and no need to ask for any federal money because we had a good business plan. Not only will we sell electricity, we’ll also get revenue from the CO2 we sell for enhanced oil recovery. And lastly, we also make a whole lot of urea fertiliser. We’re planning more than just a power project. We call it a poly-gen plant.

The focus of the renewable controversy right now is on a large government loan that was made to a company that took the money when it was financially troubled and subsequently declared bankruptcy. We, on the other hand, have a cost-share agreement for the $450 million in which we only get the money as a 50 per cent cost reimbursement after we spend private funds during construction.

And construction won’t begin in 2012 until all of the private money is committed up front. So there is no risk like there is with the loan guarantees. And at $2.5 billion in capital costs, the $450 million federal award only accounts for 18 per cent of the total cost of our project.

How long do you expect the project to take?

Back when I started I was optimistic that we could start construction within a year, by end 2008, or maybe 18 months at the most – but then, I knew nothing about the power plant construction business. Well, it’s four years later, and we really are close to being ready to break ground, but I’ve learned that things work more slowly in the power sector than elsewhere.

And there’s an irony here. Erle Nye, the former chairman of TXU — but who wasn’t responsible for the coal build-out I was fighting, that was his successor John Wilder — as soon as Erle heard that I was involved with this project, he said, “Babe…” — because he’s old school — “Babe, you’re a very impatient woman, and you’re going to be frustrated because building a power project takes a lot of patience, takes a lot of time.” And I said, “Oh, no, no. We’re going to get this done right away”.

So here I am, four years later. Erle occasionally sends me an email and congratulates me when we get another milestone for our project.

What are the roots of this project and of Summit Power?

Let me start with Summit. The brilliance of this project comes from Don Hodel and Earl Gjelde, who founded Summit Power Group. Don was Energy Secretary for Reagan, and Earl was his number two. Then Don became Interior Secretary and Earl was his number two there again. In time, they left Washington DC and started this company. Previously, they’ve built natural gas plants and solar and wind.

They were interested in figuring out a way to use coal for national security reasons. They knew, because they have built a lot of plants, that you couldn’t finance a power plant with very low emissions that also captures carbon. That’s been the weak link for other CCS projects, I think: they were proposed with the confidence that there would be a price on carbon, which would help CCS become financially viable.

But Earl and Don did not favour cap and trade or a price on carbon. Because they’re political conservatives, and from the start, they thought that you’d need to put together a business plan that is financially viable without that kind of safety net.

So the genius of this project, in my opinion, is that they came up with a financial plan that made this power plant more than just a provider of electricity. They wanted other revenue streams to make it more profitable.

They wanted to create multiple by-products that would bring the project maximum revenue.

How does the process work?

You take the coal, you make a syngas. Then, with the gas, you make multiple products. You burn the gas to make electricity, but you also take quite a bit of the syngas and make urea fertiliser. So you have a separate manufacturing facility on the site next to your power generation.

The process also removes almost all of the bad sulphur. And we’re using a low sulphur coal to start with. We capture more than 99 per cent of the sulphur and put that into a separate manufacturing facility on the site to make sulphuric acid, which is also sold. Sulphuric acid is used in the farming community and by industry.

Finally, we capture 90 per cent of the CO2 off the syngas, compress it into a liquid form and put that in a pipeline and move it to oil producers, who send it down into wells to drive out more oil.

How do the economics break down?

Originally, we modelled that the project would generate a third of its sales from power, a third from urea, and a third from CO2. But because the economy isn’t getting much better, and construction prices aren’t getting any lower, we’ve decided that we’d make a little bit less electricity and make more urea, to improve the financials of the project.

The shift means that we’ll boost urea output to 720,000 tons per year, up from 500,000. That will drive urea to over 40 per cent of our total sales.

The irony of all this, and the reason why it’s so hard to build a power plant that captures carbon, is because the least profitable revenue stream we have is from electricity. You get much better returns on your CO2 and your urea than you do on your electricity.

But the point of building this project is to show the world that you can build a power plant that captures this carbon. Hopefully, after these first few get built and people see that it’s possible to do a privately owned and funded project like this, you’ll see improvements in efficiency as you do with any new product, and this super-clean model will become the standard, and it won’t need any government assistance to be replicated worldwide. That’s the dream, and we are close to helping it become a reality.

Thank you Laura. We’ll pause here for now and return tomorrow with Part 2 of this Q&A.

Read part 2 of this interview here.

* Fighting Goliath: Texas Coal Wars is a film, narrated by Robert Redford, that documents the efforts by Miller and others to block TXU’s project. You can learn more about the documentary at FightingGoliathFilm.com, or view the full film here.

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NRDC OnEarth

Meet the Change Makers: How Verizon is dialing in efficiency | OnEarth

Greening fleets, mining copper cables and tweaking data centers at Verizon

Verizon can trace its technological roots back to the 1880s, when Alexander Graham Bell’s invention first relayed voices between Manhattan and Boston. Now, as then, the New York-based company still connects old-fashioned phone calls. But these days, digital business services are emerging as big telco’s main focus, from tending corporations’ high-speed networks to building advanced mobile cell services that keep us connected everywhere.

As demand for these digital services grows, Verizon finds itself in a tight race for the top spot in the U.S. telecom market. With $107 billion in revenues last year, it trails only AT&T, which posted $113 billion in sales.

Verizon’s first chief sustainability officer, as well as vice president of supply chain, James “Jim” Gowen believes that focusing on green technology will offer Verizon a way to close the gap with its rival. The company’s efforts, Gowen points out, are already improving Verizon’s efficiency and reducing its environmental impact. In time, he says, they’ll open up new markets, too.

Verizon’s commitment to sustainability is still in its early stages. It was just two years ago that the company formally wove together a variety of ongoing eco efforts that were happening across its far-flung operations. Gowen, who is a long-time veteran of Verizon’s supply-chain operations, was promoted to his post in September 2009. Outside the office, he sits on the sustainability council at Penn State University’s school of business.

One of the biggest challenges to scaling up green efforts, Gowen admits, is Verizon’s enormous size. But that also means the impact of Verizon’s choices is proportionally large, he says.

OnEarth contributor Adam Aston recently spoke with Gowen to learn what lessons Verizon can offer other corporations greening their operations on a large scale.

What’s the scale of your global operations?

Verizon is bigger and broader than many folks realize. We have more than 190,000 employees globally, and have followed our customers overseas, so we’re doing business in more than 150 countries, with more than 90 million retail customers.

In terms of facilities, we have approximately 30,000, ranging from remote equipment sheds to very large data centers. To keep our cellular network humming, we operate approximately 40,000 cell towers.

Only a few dozen U.S. companies listed on the stock exchange, out of more than 7,000, have appointed chief sustainability officers. What led Verizon to take that step?

It was a long time in coming but was really formalized in 2009, when we surveyed green efforts across the company. Verizon was already doing a lot of work in sustainability, but our efforts were separate and often unaware of related work elsewhere in the company.

When we looked at our two big divisions — wireless and conventional wire-line services — it was amazing to me how much was going on. But it hadn’t been brought together yet. So the decision was made to create an office of sustainability, led by a new chief sustainability officer.

The next decision had to do with what the main focus of this role would be: more operational or more policy and marketing? And that affected where the new sustainability office would be based. Some companies opt for Washington, D.C., which implies more of a policy focus. We chose to emphasize operations, so the role was put into the supply chain area, under my watch, at our operations center in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.

Why now?

The pressure was coming from both outside and inside. From our corporate customers, the number of requests to document our sustainability practices as part of quotes for new business was growing steadily. Some of our partners are documenting their carbon footprints, for example, and need us to be able to estimate the impact of the services we provide to them.

Internal pressure was rising, too. There was a groundswell of employees eager to see change move faster. I was getting very frank calls, with folks telling me things like, “I work in Tampa and we don’t recycle.” That caught my attention right away. Green practices are becoming more and more important to attracting and keeping top people.

You mentioned that Verizon operates a huge fleet of vehicles. Is it a target for your green efforts?

The fleet is a major focus. On the road, we operate the third-largest private fleet in the United States, with more than 39,000 vans, trucks, and cars. Keeping them running requires 56 million gallons of fuel every year. Right now, about six percent of our fleet runs on alternative fuels. We’re aiming to boost that figure to 15 percent by 2015.

In 2010, for instance, Verizon added 1,600 alternative-energy vehicles, including specialized vehicles, such as our aerial trucks, which use a hydraulic arm to lift up a worker in a bucket and access overhead wires, as well as hybrid pickup trucks and sedans. As fuel supplies become more reliable, we’re boosting our use of biodiesel and ethanol as well.

It can be simple stuff, too. By discouraging idling by our fleet drivers, we estimate that we saved 1.7 million gallons of fuel in 2009 — roughly the same amount used by 2,800 average cars over a year.

We’re also working with other big fleet operators. In April 2011, Verizon was among five charter members of a new National Clean Fleet Program initiative by President Obama. Some of the other participants are our day-to-day competitors, but by working together, if we go to the auto industry to request greener features, its more likely those changes will happen.

How are you improving the environmental performance of your network and data centers?

Verizon is continuously upgrading our network of cables. The oldest parts of our network were built more than a century ago. There are many wires and switches that date back decades, all of which are being replaced with lighter, smaller, more energy-efficient digital systems. For example, in recent years, we’ve been replacing miles and miles of aging copper cables — some of the older ones are enormous, as thick as an arm — with fiber optics. Given the high value of copper lately, recycling this copper has been a significant source of revenue. It’s like mining our own cable network. These upgrades all deliver improvements in energy use.

Replacing conventional networks with fiber optics can deliver big savings. At a lab in Columbia, Md., Verizon is developing ways to use optical fiber in local area networks, to and from buildings on a campus or to homes in a neighborhood. To date, these have used conventional, older cable technology. Making a switch cuts the amount of power needed to send data between buildings by up to 75 percent and can deliver signals as far as 12 miles without the need to amplify them.

And within our data centers, we’re pursuing ways to lower energy use. We’ve set energy-efficiency standards for the gear we buy from suppliers of network equipment. These standards have saved some 90 million kWh of power consumption and avoided approximately 115 million pounds of CO2 emissions.

Speaking of greenhouse gas emissions, many companies have announced targets they’re working toward. Verizon hasn’t done that. How are you approaching this problem?

We are looking to lower emissions, but our focus has been on what we call an Environmentally Neutral Engineering Policy: for every kWh of demand we add to the network, we aim to remove one or more somewhere else. This has helped us cut emissions. We focus on the energy consumed by our network because electricity accounts for about 90 percent of Verizon’s overall carbon footprint. Of the remainder, about seven percent comes from fuelling our fleet, and most of the balance from operating our buildings.

Company-wide, the push to cut carbon really began in 2009. By the following year, we had lowered our CO2 emissions by a bit more than two percent. That reduction came despite double-digit growth in our network: the volume of data we moved grew by about 16 percent, to nearly 79 million terabytes. Measured this way, our “carbon intensity” efficiency improved substantially: we produced about 16 percent less CO2 for each unit of data we handled. In April, we announced our commitment to reduce our carbon intensity by another 15 percent and I’m happy to tell you that as of the third quarter we are on track.

Even as electronic gizmos become more efficient, they seem to be multiplying at our homes and offices. What is Verizon doing about its customers’ environmental impact?

In April of last year, Verizon launched two new energy efficient set-top boxes, which reduced energy usage by about a third for our customers. Then in January, we were certified as an Energy Star Service Provider for set-top boxes, and we’re now installing four different Energy Star models.

Beyond energy we realize that there are many other “green” opportunities with consumer devices. We’re working to reduce packaging and suspected toxins in our electronics. Working with cell phone makers, we’ve rolled out handsets with greener features.

Motorola’s Citrus, for example, is free of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs), chemicals that are believed to pose health hazards. The handset is manufactured from 25 percent post-consumer recycled plastic. Likewise, the packaging is four-fifths recycled, and the user manual is made from 100 percent recycled paper. And as a whole, the cell phone is certified CarbonFree through a deal with Carbonfund.org.

Verizon has played a big role in the Internet revolution, a shift that has on one hand lowered paper use and travel, but on the other has spurred the spread of power-hungry electronics. What’s that next big transformation that will affect energy trends?

The smart grid and electric vehicles are just beginning to emerge. We expect that in the long term they will significantly cut the use of fuel for transportation. Verizon is positioned to play a big role in this shift, by developing information technology, security, and communications services to help the utility sector speed the rollout of the smart grid.

For example, our Internet Protocol and wireless networks are a good match for the sorts of billing, tracking, and management challenges that utilities and car owners will face in re-charging electric vehicles at home and while traveling. By the end of last year, we had contracted with more then 20 utilities to wirelessly connect more than one million meters back to the smart grid.

Sidebar: Truth squad

NRDC’s Samir Succar on the prospects for telcos to pave the way for a smarter grid 

In the realm of sustainability, it’s common for companies to point to future green goals, whether reduced emissions or planned product lines. This can make assessing their eco-progress more of an art than a science.

Consider Verizon’s big green bet on the smart grid, the next frontier in telcos’ efforts to shape the energy impact of their customers. The need to wirelessly link digital power meters and smart appliances to the grid promises huge energy savings. Verizon, like its peers, is tackling this opportunity, but it stands out with ambitious goals to operate smart grid applications on behalf of utilities, relying on its deep expertise with data centers and complex wireless transactions.

“Digitizing the grid holds enormous opportunity,” says NRDC’s smart grid expert Samir Succar, “but it remains to be seen if Verizon will be just a neutral party relaying information to the utility, or if it can really play a role shaping customers’ habits.”

To deliver savings, Verizon and other network operators will have to alter their emphasis on performance over efficiency. Consider a recent NRDC study that revealed that by not enabling energy-savings settings on set-top boxes, cable, satellite, and data providers were costing consumers $2 billion per year in wasted energy. Verizon and the others have responded to those criticisms by rolling out lower-energy devices. 

It’s tough to gauge who’s winning in the telcos’ race for sustainability. Both AT&T and Verizon appointed chief sustainability officers in 2009, but the third-place carrier, Sprint Nextel, beat its peers in a recent green ranking of U.S. companies. Sprint was first out of the gate with four environmentally responsible cell phones. It has also committed to a 90 percent rate of collecting discarded phones, taken steps to lower its junk mail output, and is targeting cuts of 15 percent to its overall emissions by 2017. 

–Adam Aston

URL for original story: http://www.onearth.org/article/meet-the-change-makers-verizon

GreenBiz

What’s Next for PUMA’s Groundbreaking Sustainability Plans? | GreenBiz

Jochen Zeitz has had a busy year. I recently caught up with the long-serving Chairman and CEO of PUMA, the sports gear company where Zeitz blended an evangelical commitment to sustainability with smart branding to return the nearly defunct brand to the top tier of global sports fashion.

As a business story, Zeitz’s success is nearly legendary: he pulled PUMA out of the basement and up to a podium position in the global sportswear market, while boosting share price by 4,000 percent.

Among sustainability watchers, Zeitz has won plaudits for his commitment to develop an environmental profit and loss (EP&L) statement. By estimating a dollar figure on the value of its use of ecosystem services — any resource provided by nature, from clean water, to crop production, wildlife habitat, storm surge protection and so on — PUMA is expanding on the precedent set by carbon footprinting efforts and other self-assessment techniques.

The tool can identify where in its supply chain these costs are highest, and help PUMA develop responses to address these hot spots.

The first results of PUMA’s effort were unveiled last May, when PUMA announced a price tag of $133 million for its toll from water use and greenhouse gas emissions.

As the company outsources the bulk of its manufacturing, it follows that PUMA’s direct operations accounted for about only $10 million of this total. Its supply chain made up the balance. By impact, greenhouse gases (GHGs) and water were split evenly. The top culprits: Cotton farming, cattle ranching for leather, and rubber production accounted for more than half of water use, and about a third of GHG emissions.

Shortly before PUMA released these landmark results, Zeitz revealed he was moving up at PUMA’s parent company. In March, after 18 years of service Zeitzpassed the mantle on to a 32-year-old successor, Franz Koch. Notably, Zeitz was even younger — just 30 in 1993 — when he took over PUMA’s top spot. The move made him the youngest-ever corporate chairman of a listed German company.

Now 48, Zeitz’s new post will let him focus on sustainability more broadly. Zeitz’s new joint role at PUMA’s owner, PPR SA, straddles two titles: He is both chief sustainability officer as well as head of the company’s sport & lifestyle group. PPR, a $19.4-billion apparel empire, includes a variety of luxury fashion brands such as Bottega, Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent.

As Zeitz’s focus shifts to a broader set of brands, his immediate challenge is whether he can repeat his successes at PUMA in developing sustainability practices and metrics. Developing the framework and practices for the EP&L at PUMA spanned a decade or so. “We wanted to get it right internally first before going public,” Zeitz told me. PUMA worked with PricewaterhouseCoopers and Trucost to develop the first version of the EP&L assessment.

Zeitz told me the challenges PUMA faced in developing its EP&L measurement were internal and external. Behind company walls, the process involved incremental, disciplined reinforcement of sustainability as a value.

“It needs to be clear that it’s must be a part of the everyday decision-making process,” Zeitz said. When people are accustomed to established practices, changes in workflow, remuneration, priorities and so on can be difficult, and can’t be rushed.

External aspects of the projects are complicated by a lack of direct control over trading partners and suppliers. To collect critical data from PUMA’s network of external suppliers, the exercise demanded similar shifts of business cultural and practices among PUMA’s partners. “Data collection is a challenge,” Zeitz says. Difficulties surfaced in terms of different standards in different markets, difficulty in securing cooperation from second and third tier suppliers.

With that foundation built, the next stages may come more quickly. Where the first EP&L measured water use and greenhouse gas emissions through PUMA’s supply chain, the next phase — due in 2012 — will include dollar assessments of social impacts as well as broader environmental measures.

In the third phase, sometime after that, “we want to look holistically, at the positives of business,” Zeitz said. Business brings benefits that aren’t well measured either, he added, such as improving health, education and quality of life. “That’s something we want to start valuing,” Zeitz says. “At the end of the day, we have a new method of accounting, really, that looks at the world more holistically.”

Zeitz concedes the process will take time. After all, it’s taken a half-century or so to evolve today’s accounting standards. “This may go quicker, with modern technology,” Zeitz said, but until then, this is one tool among many to help develop greener solutions.

Meanwhile, Zeitz is open to sharing the intellectual property — the methods, standards, and processes — behind PUMA’s EP&L with other companies, including other sports gear players. “Yes, absolutely. For those who are serious and want to associate themselves with what we are doing in an open manner, we will be open with this process,” he said. “We have already had a number of requests from the automotive, chemical and beverage industries, as well as from one of our competitors.”

Eco-initiatives are gaining momentum in the sports apparel biz. In September, Adidas joined PUMA and Nike in a commitment to “detox” its supply chain and production processes by 2020. BusinessGreen reported that Adidas has been negotiating with suppliers, rivals and peers to create an inter-industry standard for toxicity reduction, following Greenpeace’s “Dirty Laundry” report, which revealed the use of and pollution from hazardous chemicals in textile production.

Photo courtesy of PUMA.

Global CCS Institute

Wedges reaffirmed: Robert Socolow updates his ‘wedges’ analysis of emissions reductions | Global CCS Institute

Remember ‘wedges’? For the broader public first learning about climate change – and even many energy industry insiders — back in the early 2000s, a single chart visualizing how the growth of global warming emissions could be reversed in ‘wedges’, helped to clarify the daunting complexity and scale of climate change.

That chart was created by two Princeton University scientists, Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, back in 2004 when they co-authored a paper in Science. The power of their interpretation — however simplifying — helped push forward the discussion of climate change into wider public circles.

Seven years later, Socolow has written an update to the analysis, reaffirming and intensifying the duo’s original message: that available-today technologies, including broadly-applied carbon capture and storage (CCS) have the capacity to reverse emissions growth. Socolow was stirred to re-visit his analysis because “[Our] core messages are as valid today as seven years ago, but they have not led to action”.

For CCS watchers, Socolow’s update is worth digging into for a couple of reasons. First, the exercise offers a grim reminder of how quickly the climate challenge is worsening. Where his 2004 estimate called for seven gigatonne-scale wedges of emissions reductions, Socolow’s update predicts we’ll need nine, if we started today, and it will take longer.

And, second, the muted response to Pacala’s ominous update is a worrying sign that the data is having less impact at a time when it should be attracting more attention. Pacala address why this is so, and how to respond.

To help illuminate both points, let me step back to review the content and context of the first paper. When the first wedges analysis was published in 2004, officials in the Bush White House were resisting climate change policy, making the argument that, even if the science is valid, there was no available technology to fix the problem.

Against this backdrop, the two Princeton scientists’ succinct paper, including the cannily clear ‘wedges’ analysis, made the case that, “humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problem for the next half-century,” as Socolow recently recounted.

Here’s his description of their methodology:

“In a widely reproduced figure, we identified a ‘Stabilization Triangle,’ bounded by two 50-year paths. Along the upper path, the world ignores climate change for 50 years and the global emissions rate for greenhouse gases doubles. Along the lower path, with extremely hard work, the rate remains constant. We reported that starting along the flat emissions path in 2004 was consistent with ‘beating doubling,’ i.e., capping the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration at below twice its ‘pre-industrial’ concentration (the concentration a few centuries ago).

The paper is probably best known for having introduced the ‘stabilization wedges,’ a quantitative way to measure the level of effort associated with a mitigation strategy: a wedge of vehicle fuel efficiency, a wedge of wind power, and a wedge of avoided deforestation have the same effect on the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Filling the stabilization triangle required seven wedges.”

Among some 15 or so other wedges that Socolow and Pascala mapped out, three looked to CCS for reductions on the order of one gigatonne per year, to capture CO2 at present and future plants generating baseload power plants, H2 and/or coal-to-synfuel.

To be sure, the graph had its critics. Charles Petit at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker reminds us why it was also so catalytic, so much so that it perhaps encouraged false hope about the ease of fixing this problem:

“It was oversimplified, but for goodness’s sake, that’s what your typical members of Congress and White House senior staffers require. Wedges, for a while, were the currency of climate mitigation conversation. Yet since then emissions have gone on shooting up. Some critics said the Princeton pair so simplified that task, however abstractly, that it got translated subconsciously as an easy job. And easy jobs don’t get emergency attention. Thus for mapping a route away from climate peril Socolow and co-author Pacala got pinned, by some, as a reason policy makers lost their fear and, without it, did hardly anything.”

(To wit, earlier this year, Socolow was drawn into a brouhaha when a blogger reported he actually regreted writing the first wedges paper. Socolow responded to the contrary immediately and repeatedly since, and does so again in this publication.)

The update, while more alarming, has made less of a splash. The formal publication of Wedges II, if you will, was published simultaneously in two sites: the formal research paper appeared as ‘Wedges Reaffirmed’, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; a more shorter adaptation can be found at the Climate Central website.

Following both versions, there’s a fascinating trail of comments filed by high-level climate experts and global warming pundits such as the likes of Nicholas Stern (Chairman of the London School of Economics Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and member of the Global CCS Institute’s

International Advisory Panel), Natural Resource Defense Council’s director of climate programs David Hawkins, and even physicist Freeman Dyson, a climate change ‘heretic’.

Further afield, however, very few media outlets have paid attention to this update, as Petit points out. This is partly due, to be sure, to the recession and global anxiety, but it also reflects the ways in which climate messaging has backfired. Even Socolow, in the less formal write-up of his research at Climate Central, acknowledges that the first wave of climate analysis made mistakes:

“I submit, advocates for prompt action, of whom I am one, also bear responsibility for the poor quality of the discussion and the lack of momentum. Over the past seven years, I wish we had been more forthcoming with three messages: we should have conceded, prominently, that the news about climate change is unwelcome, that today’s climate science is incomplete, and that every ‘solution’ carries risk. I don’t know for sure that such candor would have produced a less polarized public discourse. But I bet it would have. Our audiences would have been reassured that we and they are on the same team – that we are not holding anything back and have the same hopes and fears.”

It is not too late to bring these messages forward.

He concludes with an assessment that many in this carbon policy and energy fields have likewise come to — that changing public opinion about climate policy will take more than science: “To motivate prompt action today, seven years later, our wedges paper needs supplements: insights from psychology and history about how unwelcome news is received, probing reports about the limitations of current climate science, and sober assessments of unsafe braking”.

Important as his revised analysis of the ‘wedges’ is, Socolow’s ruminations on the challenge of how to frame and communicate about the solutions is sage advice to help guide thinking about the CCS policy agenda as well.

Additional resources related to the stabilization wedges are available online at Princeton University.

Read or comment on the original post here:
http://www.globalccsinstitute.com/community/blogs/authors/adamaston/2011/11/03/fighting-coal-plants-fighting-carbon-capture-and-re-use 

GreenBiz

Building Efficiency, Batteries Drive Johnson Controls’ Record Growth | Global CCS Institute

Green is proving to be a good bet for Johnson Controls, Inc. Despite the anemic condition of its two key markets — automotive and construction — JCI recently announced record sales and profits for 2011. And the record run will continue next year, too, company executives predicted at an analysts meeting in New York this week, with green technologies providing much of the lift.

With overall GDP growth inching along at close to one percent and talk of a double dip recession echoing widely, Johnson’s rapid resurgence and bullish guidance came as a surprise. Based on preliminary figures, JCI’s revenues hit a record $40.7 billion, growing by 19 percent as net income climbed by 24 percent, to $1.7 billion, in its 2011 fiscal year ending Sept. 30.

Looking out to next year CEO Steve Roell predicted revenue would expand by another nine percent to $44 billion, while earnings per share would surge by some 20 percent. Long term, Roell anticipates 10 to 15 percent annual sales growth, a pace that if realized, could double JCI’s size in five years.

How is JCI growing so quickly when the overall economy is stuck in neutral? There’s a hint in the breakdown of where JCI expects growth next year.

Sales will expand by about 10 percent next year in its Building Efficiency unit, spurred by accelerating spending on retrofits and efficiency upgrades. Likely to expand faster still is the Power Solutions unit, where revenues will rise by around 12 percent, stoked in part by rising demand for batteries for hybrids and electric vehicles.

The company’s largest unit, Automotive Experience, will grow by 6 percent, supplying interior components and subsystems to auto makers — think seats, dashboards and doors.

Roell made the case that while broad pessimism was probably overstated — there’s a risk that the market will “talk itself” back into a recession, he said — JCI’s green focus is part of the reason it’s well positioned to grow in emerging markets and to grab share in slower-growth developed markets.

“Our market strength, product technology, and global distribution make us uniquely positioned to take advantage of the global mega-trends of energy efficiency and sustainability, and growth in emerging markets,” said Roell.

The green tint to these rosy results stems from JCI’s growing bets on building efficiency and electric vehicles. While VC-backed start-ups, and exotic new technology tend to attract the spotlight in discussions about the potential of clean tech, JCI’s outlook offers evidence of how methodically developed green offerings, coupled with strong execution, can mine huge growth from both established and emerging markets.

Panoptix and Bending Company Culture to the Cloud

Consider JCI’s last building efficiency initiative. Long a market leader in building control hardware, earlier this month JCI announced plans to push into the software services space. At Greenbuild, on Oct. 4 JCI unveiled Panoptix, a suite of cloud-hosted applications that promise to improve the collection and management of building performance data.

Building management software is complex challenge that has attracted, and spat out, quite a few players, such as Cisco, as I was reminded by Dave Myers, JCI’s president of building efficiency after the meeting. It’s a tricky space for pure IT experts to understand, so while they may “get” the challenge of connecting varied building systems, they often lack a deep fluency in the insular world of building control technology and practices, a world where Johnson Controls is a 125-year veteran.

“We have the presence in the market, the intelligence to operate buildings, and our gap was more of the connectivity,” Myers said.

To fill that gap, Johnson Controls built an in-house software development lab, importing coders from outside the building industry, specifically to cultivate a very open sensibility about standards. Doing so also meant bending corporate culture that the system must be open to communicate with competitors’ offerings. “It’s essential that Panoptix be able to talk with building control systems, including our competitors,” said Myers.

JCI’s entry into this space comes at a time when building owners are pressing harder for verification that investments in green technologies and retrofits deliver a payback. As critics of the USGBC’s LEED green building standard have emphasized, design standards don’t guarantee more efficient performance.

Better building performance data, Myers added, will not only spur programs like LEED, but should make it easier to finance retrofits too, by giving lenders clear data about improved operating costs.

The second green growth area that JCI emphasized was batteries — but not, to my surprise, the lithium-ion type that rule the roost in most advanced electric vehicles (EVs). Rather JCI sees big promise in old-school lead acid batteries, the sort cars have relied on for a century or so to start, for lighting and ongoing ignition.

In an era of space-age EVs packed with thousands of exotic li-ion power packs, where do lead-acid batteries fit in? JCI’s answer: start-stop systems for conventional cars.

While maybe not as sexy as Chevy’s Volt or Nissan’s Leaf, these lower-cost systems can stop a car’s engine when at idle, then fire it back up when the gas is pressed. At a premium that pays for itself in a year or 18 months, car makers can deliver 5 percent to 7 percent fuel savings.

Those mileage gains may be modest, but Alex Molinaroli, JCI’s president of power solutions explains, given its affordability, start-stop systems will have a deeper impact on the industry, and overall mileage, far sooner than advanced EVs. In the coming decade, Molinaroli said, advanced electrified vehicles — from plug-in hybrids to pure battery EVs — will make up only a few percent of sales. In the interim, the true “mass market” approach to EVs will come from start-stop systems added to conventional cars.

“It’s the math. Let’s say EVs mean 5 percent of cars improve their mileage by 100 percent,” said Molinaroli. “You have more impact improving the mileage of 100 percent of cars by 5 or 10 percent.” Already widely adopted in Europe, start-stop systems will make their way into the majority of U.S. models in coming years, Molinaroli added, as automakers begin the push to hit new federal 54.5 mpg standards by 2025.

In parallel, li-ion batteries will grow continue to grow, as well, and JCI rationalized its control of its advanced battery operations. On Sept. 30, JCI completed the $145-million buyout of its joint venture with France’s Saft, gaining ownership of Li-ion battery technology, rights to licenses and a recently completed plant in Holland, Mich.

JCI currently supplies Li-ion batteries to Azure (which makes electric trucks for FedEx and others), BMW, Daimler, Ford, China’s Geely, Jaguar/Land Rover, Odyne (another truck maker) and VW.

Lead acid batteries were recently at the center of a dust-up at JCI’s plant near Shanghai. Built by and acquired from Delco, JCI had to shutter its lead-acid battery plant in Pudong New Area last month when authorities requested the factory halt operations after exceeding its quota of lead emissions.

Molinaroli said the closing came despite the fact, in the past, JCI has been solicited by Chinese authorities to transfer practices to help local plants lower their lead emissions. The Shanghai plant, Molinaroli emphasized, operates at the same standard as JCI’s facilities in Europe and the Americas. JCI has the right to resume operations at the plant on Jan. 1, and is developing four additional facilities elsewhere in China.

NRDC OnEarth

Meet the Change Makers: Maersk Gets Shipshape | OnEarth

How the world’s largest shipping line orders up efficiency. Maersk Line executive Jacob Sterling tells us how.

If global commerce has a circulatory system, it’s the network of thousands of container vessels that ply the world’s oceans, moving goods from port to port. On a typical run, one of these floating juggernauts might pick up thousands of tons of the latest e-gizmos from Shanghai, then a load of toys from Hong Kong to deliver to U.S. consumers. On the return trip, it might haul grain and other commodities from the Midwest, along with recycled paper and metal scrap harvested from New York City’s trash. Over the past half-century, the worldwide adoption of neatly stackable, truck-sized container boxes has driven down freight costs by 99 percent while spurring growth in global trade nearly 100-fold. Without the humble container ship, your glossy iPad would still be a figment of some designer’s imagination.

The dark side of this oceanic trade boom is pollution. Because they burn “bunker fuel” — the dirtiest and therefore cheapest type of oil  — the world’s floating freighters emit staggering volumes of black, sooty pollution. Recent EU estimates suggest that in a single year, a single gargantuan container ship vents the same amount of smog-forming sulfur oxide (SOx) gases as 50 million cars annually. By that count, it takes less than two dozen of the largest container vessels to belch out the same amount of pollution as the world’s entire stock of roughly one billion vehicles. In fact, the world’s freighter fleet is responsible for about 3.5 percent of global warming emissions, about twice the share of the aviation sector.

In the face of these numbers, Maersk Line, the world’s largest operator of container vessels, is taking steps to green its operations. This isn’t an entirely altruistic effort on Maersk’s part — it knows new air-pollution rules are soon tightening in both the EU and the United States and wants to get the jump. Last February, the Copenhagen-based company announced that it plans to build the largest, most energy-efficient container ships on the seas. In a deal with Korea’s Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, Maersk inked plans to buy 10 new energy-efficient vessels, with options for 20 more, to be delivered by 2016. They ain’t cheap: At around $190 million apiece, and more than 1,300 feet long, the new ships will carry 18,000 containers apiece — 16 percent more than today’s largest vessels. Maersk says they will emit 20 percent less carbon dioxide per container, and featuring advanced new engines, consume 35 percent less fuel per container.

OnEarth’s Adam Aston talked with Jacob Sterling, Maersk Line’s head of climate and environment, about how the company’s very big boats can make a smaller impact on the environment.

Freight ships are among the largest mobile objects in the world. How do you decrease the environmental impact of their operations?

One way is what we call “slow steaming.” In a vessel as big as a freighter, if you cut speed by 20 percent, we found you cut fuel consumption and CO2 emissions by as much as 40 percent. We don’t run all lines 20 percent slower all the time, but we aim to do it as much as possible. For example, we may run slow on a delivery of low-value scrap metal and paper going from Europe to China, but boost speed on the return trip when we’re moving more valuable, time-sensitive fashion apparel. Also, if you slow a given vessel down by 20 percent you might need to add more ships to that route to ensure reliable service for the customer. Overall, though, we see 5 to 15 percent savings in fuel and CO2 emissions on routes that are slow steaming.

Are your big shipping customers asking for greener shipping options?

It’s growing in importance and is part of a mix of services they are seeking. But it can be challenging for them because the push to save energy and cut costs runs counter to many years of trying to make supply chains more efficient. That means that until now the paradigm has been: faster, faster, faster. So much so that in 2007, we took delivery of new, super-fast freight vessels — compared to regular freighters, they’re practically speed boats — that could go almost 30 knots [35 mph]. Conventional vessels cruise at around 25 knots [29 mph], and slow steaming is 20 knots [23 mph].

But now we’re selling off the speed boats because they’re so inefficient at slower speeds. Instead, the vessels we will take delivery of this year will have wide hull shapes and advanced engines that recapture waste heat, to be more efficient, not faster.

Is there any promise in efforts to replace the pollutant-heavy bunker fuel with biofuels?

We’re looking into it. But the volumes we need mean it’s a ways off still. The first generation of biofuels has been disappointing. Often these fuels don’t score well in terms of how much CO2 they actually save [over their entire life cycle] relative to fossil fuels. And the quantities, so far, are too low for our needs. But we’re optimistic. Unlike jets, which need very pure biofuels that remain stable at very low temperatures, our engines could work on biofuels that are less refined. It would certainly help with the challenge we face of getting sulfur out of our fuel supply, because biofuels have close to none.

In port cities such as Los Angeles, Seattle and Hong Kong, freighters are a major source of air pollution. How can you change this?

While in port and while approaching them, we’ve already begun to switch to cleaner marine diesel fuels. In Hong Kong, one of the world’s busiest ports, we led this effort, voluntarily, in a way that led about a dozen other shipping lines to do the same.

In port, the cleaner marine diesel we use is closer to automotive diesel. In Hong Kong, for instance, the fuel we’re using has just 0.1 to 0.5 percent sulfur, whereas regular bunker fuel has up to 20 times more. Bunker fuel isn’t like normal oil. It’s more like asphalt. It has to be heated first before it can be pumped into engines to be burnt.

What about using plug-in electric sources in port, as are offered in Los Angeles and other ports? Are those a factor in cutting pollution, and are they spreading in use?

Shoreside power is certainly a way to cut pollution — but it’s only an option in ports. We are looking into shoreside power, but it does have the downside that we then become dependent on the power sources available locally. Most often electricity production is based on fossil fuels, so it is not a silver bullet.

How well is the global shipping business prepared for the inevitability of rising oil prices?

Higher and more volatile fuel prices have become the new normal in the shipping industry. Increasing fuel prices increase the price on transportation, but they also has the effect that those shipping lines that are best at saving energy and fuel save a lot of money and are more profitable. So increasing fuel prices can actually drive development of cleaner shipping.

Step back and consider the full scope of Maersk Line’s efforts to green its operations. What has been the overall impact?

Since 2007, we have reduced our relative CO2 emissions by more than 14 percent per container moved. This is due to the introduction of slow steaming, as well as our continuous focus on running our vessels more efficiently. In terms of changing the culture of our company, it’s difficult to say. It has always been in the values of Maersk Line to protect the environment and try to be a good global citizen. But now environmental performance is a key element of our business strategy. I think that we as employees will become more aware of the role we play in driving Maersk Line and the shipping industry towards better environmental performance.

How do you feel the industry as a whole is responding to this challenge?

I think that the industry could step up its efforts to develop CO2 regulations for shipping. And Maersk Line strongly supports the goals of the International Maritime Organization to develop them. But without global CO2 regulations for shipping, the sector as a whole risks being seen as a laggard even though it has real potential to drive the transition toward an economy that uses fewer fossil fuels and produces less CO2.

Sidebar: Truth Squad

NRDC’s Rich Kassel weighs in on the pollution challenge facing the world’s shipping lines

Last June in Belgium, Maersk CEO Eivind Kolding told leaders of the world’s great shipping lines that if they are to maintain their role as primary carriers of the world’s goods, the industry must change. As environmental concerns multiply and technology improves, he said, the industry must reduce emissions and clean up operations.

Prodding its peers toward greener practices is nothing new for Maersk. The company “has consistently been ahead of the pack on a wide range of environmental issues,” says Rich Kassel, senior attorney and director of NRDC’s clean fuels and vehicles project. “It has continually signaled where environmental performance will go next.”

Maersk voluntarily lowered sulfur levels in its fuel at U.S. ports years before rules required it. Other industry players resisted the move, arguing that the use of high-sulfur bunker fuel was the only way to stay profitable. But emissions from the dirtier bunker fuels take a huge toll, both on nearby communities — typically low-income communities of color, which bear the brunt of the harm — and nationally, causing tens of thousands of premature deaths every year, as well as increased asthma emergencies and other serious health problems.

Maersk proved that it was possible to use cleaner fuel and still make profits. And its move made it easier for the International Maritime Organization and government regulators to require its competitors to follow suit. “When Maersk shows that something works, it’s easier to advance policies that change the entire industry,” Kassel says.

In the wake of Maersk’s switch to cleaner fuel, the IMO adopted new rules that will soon require all ships to use cleaner fuels whenever they are operating within 200 miles of U.S. coasts. Starting in 2015, ships in this zone will use fuel that contains 97 percent less sulfur than today’s average. This switch will translate into 14,000 fewer premature deaths and $110 billion in health care savings per year by 2020, Kassel says.

—Adam Aston

Original URL for story: http://www.onearth.org/article/meet-the-change-makers-maersk-gets-shipshape

NRDC OnEarth

Meet the Change Makers: Steering Ford Toward Sustainability | OnEarth

A focus on efficiency helps Ford pull away from the Detroit pack. Executive Sue Cischke explains how.

In the long history of U.S. automakers, green strategy and profitability have rarely gone hand in hand –until, that is, Henry Ford’s great-grandson made them a centerpiece of his tenure as the company’s president and CEO. But by 2006, in the face of larger woes in the U.S. auto sector, Bill Ford had to step down from day-to-day management of the company (he now holds the title of executive chairman). Just two years later, in 2006, Bill Ford’s green vision looked cannily prescient. With gas prices spiraling skyward that summer, U.S. drivers stampeded away from gas-guzzlers. Soon after, the financial crisis leveled the economy, and car sales collapsed. Unlike its Motown rivals, Ford was able to steer clear of bankruptcy, thanks in large part to savvy financial moves by Bill Ford’s successor, Alan Mulally.

Today, with auto sales looking up again, Sue Cischke (pronounced SIS-key) believes that extending Ford’s commitment to green corporate practices and energy-efficient vehicles will help it outpace global rivals. Cischke entered the auto biz as a mechanical engineer at Chrysler in 1976, in the aftermath of the Arab oil embargo and as high-mileage Japanese imports began to fundamentally reshape the business. These days, she is Ford’s senior-most executive focused on environmental strategy, reporting to CEO Mulally as group vice president, sustainability, environment and safety engineering. One of her top responsibilities is steering Ford’s long-term vehicle development, a vital part of helping the company meet its commitment, unique among its peers, to cut the greenhouse gas emissions of all new Ford vehicles by 30 percent by 2020 (based on a 2006 baseline).

OnEarth contributor Adam Aston recently caught up with Cischke in Detroit to hear how Ford’s green push is unfolding.

Discussions about automakers going green tend to focus on vehicles. But Ford’s been pushing sustainability in its internal operations, too. How do you measure that?

We recognize that our manufacturing operations, in terms of energy use and the materials we consume, have an environmental impact. So our strategy includes increased energy efficiency in both our products and our manufacturing.

Since 2003, we’ve seen energy consumption at Ford’s factories around the globe fall by 29 percent. We’ve won a series of Energy Star awards from the EPA recognizing these efforts. We’ve undertaken countless steps, from small to big, to make these savings. On our assembly lines, for example, thepneumatic tools used to assemble cars have been made smarter, so that they power down quickly when not in use. We’ve also upgraded factory heating and lighting systems. And at some of our paint shops, we’re also converting fumes into fuel to make electricity.

Water is another concern. From 2000 to 2008, we have reduced our water usage by 56 percent. At our Cleveland plant, for example, a program to lower the amount of water used in the casting process, together with efforts to filter and reuse water thoroughly, cut fresh water use by 35 percent in 2009, on top of a 27 percent reduction the prior year. Each year, that’s saving the plant more than $1.2 million in city water costs alone. Worldwide, those kinds of efforts have saved more than 9.5 billion gallons of water at our factories. And we work aggressively to recycle the water in our plants for reuse in manufacturing.

And what about your vehicles?

Ford’s largest environmental impact comes from our products, which is why we have made the commitment to increase fuel efficiency and cut CO2 emissions in every new vehicle we produce. Ford now offers 12 cars, trucks and utility vehicles that lead their segments in fuel economy, including four with certified ratings of 40 mpg or more.

At the 2010 Detroit Auto Show, Ford announced an ambitious range of electrified vehicles. What green technology do you see as having the greatest impact?

In a car, to eke out mileage improvements, it’s about much more than the engine. It’s looking at every component as well as overall design, looking for ways to improve efficiencies. We call it paying attention in exquisite detail. It’s like going on a diet: to lose weight, you can’t just cut down on desserts. You’ve got to exercise more. The change needs to be comprehensive to last.

In the near term, I think Ford’s EcoBoost technology will have the biggest impact because it is an affordable fuel-economy technology that we will offer across most of our lineup. The centerpiece is a four-cylinder engine that delivers the power of a six-cylinder design, boosting gas mileage by up to 20 percent and reducing CO2 by as much as 15 percent. We use turbochargers and direct injection of the gasoline at higher pressures to help achieve these gains.

The approach makes other improvements possible, too. A smaller engine is lighter, so we can downsize other parts on the car — smaller brakes, lighter power-steering motors, and less rugged transmissions, for example — without sacrificing performance.

You’ve said that improving the efficiency of Ford’s entire product line with steps like EcoBoost — rather than the development of a particular advanced hybrid or electric technology — will be the company’s biggest impact. Why?

Because we developed EcoBoost and related design enhancements at a time when the industry was throwing out attention-getting, high-tech prototypes like EVs and plug-in hybrids. Those are important technologies, but will sell in small numbers for some while. We wanted a solution that was more holistic and mainstream.

It doesn’t have the same pizzazz, but because this [EcoBoost] technology will make its way into nine out of 10 of our models within a few years, most of the cars we sell will have the option to be up to 20 percent more fuel-efficient. We are adding more EVs and hybrids too.

In the near term, selling larger numbers of more efficient, affordable gasoline engines will have a bigger impact in reducing CO2 than the much smaller volume of electric vehicles.

In July, President Obama announced a landmark agreement with the auto industry to boost average fuel efficiency to 54.5 miles per gallon, for the model year 2025. In talks with lawmakers, car manufacturers have long fought to stop, delay or reduce such an increase, as they did during recent negotiations. For all the talk about greening cars, why has it been so hard for industry to change its tactics?

We look at affordability and higher mileage goals and realize we can’t just force certain technology onto consumers. When we started the first serious push for fuel economy back in the ’70s, consumers were disappointed with cars that were so underpowered they could barely get out of their own way.

That said, much has changed. In the past, the government would throw out a new mileage number and the industry would say, “No,” and the relationship was much more adversarial.

Today, we recognize efficiency as a strong reason for consumers to buy a Ford. It’s a competitive advantage for us. We are committed to improving the fuel efficiency of every new product we bring to market, but in terms of regulations, we still believe the agencies setting standards need to understand there is not a single technology solution, and that the technology advances we employ must remain affordable for car buyers.

In your role, how do you make sure that the company isn’t just paying lip service to sustainability but is getting actual, measurable results?

The thing is, the company that figures this all out is going to be the most successful. That’s a powerful incentive to get the strategy right. It’s easy for a company to project a vision and talk about the future. We’ve found it more useful to do what we need to do, and then talk about it.

Frankly, with all the noise out there about the financial troubles in the auto sector in recent years, it’s been hard for our green offerings to get the attention I think they deserve.

Our momentum is building. We’ve had a highly successful launch of our EcoBoost technology. The Escape Hybrid SUV has been on the market since 2004. The Fusion Hybrid joined the line up in 2008. And we recently announced we are bringing a new hybrid, a plug-in hybrid, and two all-electric vehicles to market within the next two years.

What does the future hold for Ford’s lineup — will it be all-electric?

It’s important to recognize that there is room for an entire range of technologies, but in terms of electrified vehicles (EVs), we see a stronger future for hybrids and plug-in hybrids. A plug-in hybrid can be charged overnight and run on batteries until they’re depleted, before switching over to a gas engine.

If I look into a crystal ball, we’re looking for two breakthroughs: battery costs have to come down as more EVs are sold, and we’re looking for new, better battery technology that will help increase driving range. Without both of those, I’m not certain whether drivers’ concerns about running out of battery power can be overcome for EVs that don’t have a traditional engine as a backup.

That’s why we’ve also focused on charging infrastructure, improving both charging speed and encouraging the development of more sites where drivers can re-charge outside their homes. We expect most people will charge at home, but we also believe consumers will become more comfortable with the concept of electric vehicles when there are a lot more places to plug them in.

In a company with some 160,000 employees around the world, simply delivering the message that sustainability is a priority seems daunting. How has Ford done that?

Our CEO Alan Mulally saw my background and appointed me to head up sustainability. Given that I started out as an engineer, his decision reinforced that the sustainability factors are woven into the earliest stages of our design process all the way through manufacturing.

Day to day, one of the ways we keep the organization’s many moving parts in sync is via a sustainability mobility governance group, which includes senior executives in charge of developing new products, R&D, marketers and others. The issues we evaluate and prioritize there help guide Ford’s highest, board-level discussions of automotive strategy.

Sidebar: Truth Squad

Checking industry claims with NRDC’s sustainability experts

Alone among its Motown rivals, Ford outran bankruptcy during the fiscal crisis. For this and for developing a genuinely greener lineup of hybrids, electric vehicles and higher mileage cars, Ford deserves praise, said Roland Hwang, NRDC’s transportation program director in San Francisco. For example, under CEO Alan Mulally, Ford has re-geared its product offering to emphasize fuel-saving options across more of its offerings. In mid-September, it ended production of the Crown Victoria sedan, a fuel-economy laggard that averaged just 16 mpg in the city.

The broad shift has proven Ford can make money selling more efficient, in some cases smaller, vehicles, said Hwang. “Ford’s return to profitably this year has been impressive,” he said, and unlike past years, “earnings weren’t driven by pickups or SUVs.” Yet this fiscal resilience cast the company in a peculiar role: as de facto leader of the automotive industry’s opposition to the White House’s push for higher mileage standards. With the federal government holding about one-third of GM stock, and nearly a tenth of Chrysler’s, Ford emerged as the industry’s flag carrier.

In May, Mulally personally lobbied Washington lawmakers to bar California from setting higher standards independent from federal rules. And behind the scenes, Ford’s top lobbyists led a push to soften the new standard, known as Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE). “These lobbying efforts run counter to its progress with greener vehicles,” said Hwang. In early July, the auto industry and the Obama Administration settled on a figure of 54.5 mpg by 2025, up from around 30 mpg today. A month later, Ford responded to the tougher rules with a plan to join forces with Toyota, its top international rival, to co-develop gas-electric hybrid systems for SUVs, pickups and other light trucks. Under past mileage rules, this so-called light truck category has been granted loopholes that tighten under the new standard.

There are competitive reasons for the tie-up too. The world’s other two top auto markets — China and Europe — are pushing towards mileage standards more stringent than proposed U.S. rules.  Adds Hwang: “Ford knows there’s a solid business reason to be ready sooner than later with high mileage solutions.” — Adam Aston

URL for the original story: http://www.onearth.org/article/change-makers-ford-sustainability

GreenBiz

Why a Former GE CSO Is Taking the Plunge to a Water Startup | GreenBiz

After more than two decades working his way up the ranks at GE, Jeff Fulgham took a hard look at his past achievements in the water business, and looked out ahead its future prospects. Worsening water shortages and rising water prices in ever more regions, he concluded, all meant that the typically sleepy world of water was about to start roiling.

As Chief Sustainability Officer at GE Power & Water, there were plenty of ways to tap into the opportunity. But Fulgham, 52, saw another option. In mid September, he started as employee No. 3 at Banyan Water, a San Francisco-based startup that is barely a year old. He enters as the company’s chief sales officer.

A well-connected industry insider, Fulgham is tasked with scaling up a young business and guiding a team of decades-younger MBAs to build a new kind of water business. The move comes as a surprise to many in the business — it’s only the second time Fulgham has left a company. And with retirement on the horizon, staying at GE promised a future of steady compensation, healthy options and a comfortable pension.

“It’s a challenge to walk away: GE’s been fantastic. And I’m not much of a job jumper,” Fulgham reflected last week, when I caught up with him in New York City. In town for Climate Week NYC, Fulgham spoke on a panel titled “The Energy-Water Nexus” which I moderated.

In the end, the challenges of building a business from scratch won out. Compared with the pipes, pumps and chemicals approach that Fulgham knew at GE Power & Water, Banyan’s model is more 21st century, more Silicon Valley. Founded by CEO Tamin Pechet and backed by Catamount Ventures — where Pechet was until recently a principal — the company isn’t focused on developing its own technology. Instead, Banyan is buying up specialist companies already at work in the market.

Banyan then will scale up and customize those services into a comprehensive suite it can offer to big enterprises — such as universities and corporate real estate managers — looking to cut their water use, streamline billing, and lower costs.

“The idea is that we can pull in great little companies, and bring them together into one larger, more efficient, durable company, making them the part of a much stronger whole,” said Fulgham.

Typically, the experienced companies Banyan is evaluating have great technology but are hamstrung by a lack of capital, said Fulgham, and thus face a hurdle moving beyond their home markets. Banyan hopes to help, with capital, plus sophisticated sales and support systems.

“It’s a business model combining technologies and services in a field that, five years ago, probably wouldn’t have worked,” he said. “The market is ready now, though.”

“In drought-stricken areas like Atlanta, in Texas, and in California, water prices have risen by five or even ten times in the past decade. This makes new business models possible,” Fulgham said.

Not surprisingly, Banyan’s initial focus will be water-starved stretches of the southern half of the United States. Fulgham is understandably cautious to say too much about Banyan’s strategy just now, given that it is about to unveil its first acquisitions.

He offered the example of a hypothetical Texas university, facing diverse water challenges, including scores of bills for different sites, aggregate water fees in the million-dollar range, and scant knowledge of just how much water was flowing to which facilities.

To help this university get a handle on its water use, one of Banyan’s first offerings — there are more in the pipeline — will install a smart-grid style network of sensors and controllers that deliver real-time data on how much water is going where and when, notifying managers if flow rates spike at a given sensor, indicating a leak.

For the university grounds, Banyan could install state-of–the art irrigation management software that knows when to delay watering – by knowing not just when its raining, but able to use weather forecasts to delay today’s watering if rain is due tomorrow.

To finance these retrofits, Banyan aims to adapt a model used in the power sector by energy services companies, or ESCOs. The approach pays for efficiency upgrades by using the savings freed up by the retrofits to finance their purchase. This allows a client to pay for improvement from operating budgets, rather than as a capital expenditure.

But why “Banyan,” I wondered? Banyan trees, Fulgham reminded me, have adapted to thrive even in arid climates by sending out aerial roots penetrate the round, vastly extending the tree’s reach to soak up moisture. “We’re hoping to do the same thing: reach out to small companies, and connect them into a stronger, more successful whole,” he explained.

Photo CC-licensed by Jeff Howard.

Writer, editor, content advisor, creative leader – energy, climate | Chief storyteller at RMI | Co-founder of T Brand at The New York Times