Tag Archives: design & innovation

Corporate Knights

Yulex and the Art of Making Greener Rubber | Corporate Knights

How Yulex is commercializing “green” rubber made from a drought- and disease resistant dessert shrub |

With a name like “natural” rubber, one might think the stretchy, waterproof stuff would have unassailable green cred. After all, humanity has been harvesting rubber for millennia. The ancient Mayans converted the fluid weeping from Hevea brasiliensis into the world’s first sports balls used in ritual games.

Yet more recently, industrial scale farming has tainted natural rubber’s reputation. As Ford’s Model T ushered in the automotive age, demand for tire rubber soared. Intensive plantation farming of Hevea – the dominant variety of rubber trees – emerged as an early cause of tropical deforestation.

Today, with demand exceeding global supply, Hevea is facing a host of new worries. Pressure to boost the yield of natural rubber has inflated the use of harmful pesticides, and disease is a rising worry. More than 90 per cent of natural rubber is grown in a few East Asian countries, leaving growers vulnerable to the sort of catastrophic blight epidemic that had swept away Latin America’s plantations by the 1950s. Rubber trees are also water hogs, making them vulnerable to climate change-induced drought.

Jeffrey Martin, chief executive and co-founder of Yulex, sees the answer to natural rubber’s proliferating problems in a low-growing shrub named guayule – pronounced why-YOU-lee. A native to the arid U.S. southwest, guayule thrives with little water and zero pesticides, and can be made into latex that doesn’t trigger allergies.

In studying the plant, Martin unearthed a cache of research reaching back decades. Guayule, he found, had been temporarily commercialized many times. In the 1910s, during World War II and again in the 1970s and ’80s, industrial and government labs pursued large-scale guayule cultivation as an alternative to Hevea rubber. Each effort collapsed, however, in the face of lower-priced supplies of natural or synthetic rubber.

These mishaps didn’t daunt Martin. He used them to develop a business plan designed to avoid the mistakes of those earlier ventures. So in 2000, Martin started Yulex in Chandler, Arizona, armed with $20,000 in patents and 20 guayule seeds.

Unlike earlier efforts, which targeted the tire market from the get-go, Martin is putting off sales to high-volume, low-cost markets. Instead, he’s lowering costs and scaling production by first selling into high-margin, niche markets and plowing the proceeds into technologies that can help grow capacity. “You can’t just go straight after a commodity market like tires,” says Martin. “You have to sell the benefits of the technology first.”

California-based Patagonia, a manufacturer of performance gear, is among the first to commercialize a product made from guayule rubber. Following a four-year search for alternatives to petrochemical-based neoprene for its wetsuits, Patagonia found a match in guayule.

The company liked that growing and processing guayule had less impact on the environment in terms of water use and chemicals used in processing. Plus, “its performance is great,” says Todd Copeland, environmental product specialist for Patagonia and an avid surfer.

This winter Patagonia planned to release a wet suit made of a 60:40 blend of guayule and conventional neoprene. Yulex is also exploring new product lines including latex mattresses, athletic shoes and yoga mats.

Looking ahead, Martin is focusing on a variety of ways to scale up production and lower costs. Developing a more productive strain of guayule is at the top of this list. To that end, Yulex has teamed up with California-based SGB, an agri-biotech company, to apply advanced crop science methods that will accelerate the natural process of breeding more productive strains of guayule.

Already, compared with data from the 1980s, when the crop was last intensively grown, Yulex has tripled yields. Yield improvements are on track to double again by 2020, says Martin, and will match or better today’s average output of Hevea rubber trees, which can yield about one metric ton of latex per acre.

The company is also looking to dramatically expand the area of guayule being cultivated. Today, farming is limited mostly to Arizona. But given the crop’s suitability to arid regions, it could be grown on every continent, save Antarctica, says Martin.

Fields of Yulex-licensed guayule will sprout next in Southern Europe, thanks to a $270-million deal with Versalis, a global leader in biomaterials and a subsidiary of Italy’s Eni.

Since Yulex’s incorporation, the company has raised $75 million in private equity. Last March, it signed a deal with Italy’s Pirelli Tire to help develop guayule polymers and resins for tire applications. That deal could, in time, pave the way to the very tire market that foiled earlier efforts to commercialize guayule.

In the Yulex boardroom, Martin keeps a souvenir from one of those earlier failed eras: a faded, decades-old tire made from guayule. It serves as a reminder of the huge potential market opportunity if Yulex can get volumes up and pricing down.

Martin is convinced it’s achievable. That at the right price, guayule can win a major share of the $50-billion-plus market for tire rubber now split between Hevea and synthetic rubber.

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The Guardian

Designing for Sustainability: Facing the Challenges Behind Green Materials | The Guardian

Patagonia rejected fabrics made from bamboo over concerns about chemicals used to process the plant fiber.

Sustainable materials are gaining ground, but long development time frames and gaps in knowledge make commercialisation tricky |

Learning to surf in California’s frigid breakers, Todd Copeland, a design guru at the Patagonia clothing company, concluded that wet suits weren’t cutting it. Sure, a traditional Neoprene suit could keep him warm, but the suit’s material could be synthesised only from non-renewable, energy-intensive resources such as petroleum or kiln-baked limestone.

In spring 2008, Copeland blogged about the need for a truly green alternative. And, later that summer, his cry found its way to Yulex, an Arizona-based company working to resurrect a low-energy, low-toxin recipe for rubber from guayule, a desert shrub native to North America. Research on the plant peaked during the second world war but was then was shelved. Yulex had restarted the work around 2000 and was making hypo-allergenic surgical gloves, but was seeking a new market. It saw Copeland’s post, and soon its reps came knocking.

Yulex’s efforts are set to pay off later this fall, when Patagonia releases a full wetsuit made from a 60:40 blend of guayule and conventional Neoprene, five years after Copeland initiated the search. “We hope to get that to 100% [guayule], but it takes time to learn a new material,” says Copeland, now Patagonia’s environmental product specialist.

This serendipitous match between designer and material maker is, unfortunately, a rare exception. Speaking to Copeland recently, I wondered how many misses Patagonia has evaluated for every successful innovation, such as Yulex, it brings to market. “100? Probably more,” he speculated. “And many, many more don’t even make it that far.”

The tale of Patagonia’s eco-wetsuit offers a parable of the larger challenge facing green materials on the path from lab to market. The process remains a maze that few materials survive. But a recent survey of design leaders reveals that while eco-materials still face a tougher journey than their conventional counterparts, the process of green technology transfer is gaining momentum.

Sales of green materials are surging

Though spotty, statistics on green materials markets are all pointing up. The building industry is one of the largest shifting towards lower-impact practices. In the US, the green construction market is worth roughly $100bn, a ten-fold rise since 2006, according to the 2013 Dodge Construction Green Outlook. As a share, green construction now accounts for 44% of total US commerical and institutional construction, up from near zero a decade ago.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that big corporations are deepening their commitment to these priorities, as well. In 2006, Du Pont set out to double sales of products made from “non-depletable resources” to $8bn by 2015. The US chemicals giant blew by that mark four years early, racking up $10bn in green-materials revenue in 2011 (most recent data).

Green adoption has been accelerating at Ford, too. A decade ago, engineers at the No2 US automaker were skeptical of the cost and performance benefits of alternatives. Today, following a flurry of successful material substitutions, design engineers are required to evaluate and opt for green candidates where they equal or exceed conventional materials.

Sustained internal commitment is vital

Ford’s shift didn’t come quickly. “We were kicked out of conference rooms,” laughs Debbie Mielewski, technical leader for Plastics Research at Ford Motor Co, recalling her efforts in the early 2000s to pitch bio-based plastics to the car maker’s internal development engineers. “They saw only risk and additional cost,” she says.

But thanks to the protection of Bill Ford Jr, the company’s then CEO, Ford’s bio-plastics R&D program had the time and funding to mature new offerings to the point where today soy-based polyurethane foams are used in the seat cushions, backs, and headrests of all vehicles built in North America.

A focus on value and performance has helped reverse early skepticism. “Our goal has always been to match the price and performance of any material we’re hoping to replace,” she says.

To cultivate and scale production of new materials, suppliers will need help

Internal approval of new green materials isn’t always enough.

For strong, smooth plastics used to make bins and liners, Ford has successfully replaced glass fibres with wheat straw – the fibrous waste left when wheat is harvested – to reinforce the plastic.

Yet as Mielewski points out, ensuring consistency of the straw’s strength posed a new challenge, as did ensuring uniform size of the material, which must be milled into identical short lengths to be blended into plastic. “In Canada, wheat straw used to be burned,” she says.

To change that practice, Ford collaborated with farmers and third-tier suppliers to develop a supply chain to recover, test and standardise the processed straw. Without Ford’s commitment to the end product, the investment wouldn’t have happened, says Mielewski: “A third-tier supplier had to invest in and build a mill to meet our demand. That takes real confidence.”

Recovering waste takes patient, innovative collaboration with vendors early on

As its commitment to recover and re-use waste carpet materials started to take root in the 1990s, Atlanta-based Interface, a $1bn-per-year manufacturer of carpet tiles used primarily in commercial spaces, recognised it could push this goal only as quickly as a key fibre supplier, Italy’s Aquafil, was able to develop and scale-up processes to harvest fibers from recovered carpets and to then re-melt them for use in new carpeting.

“This was more of us pushing [recycled materials],” by Interface, “rather than a pull” from the market, says Nigel Stansfield, Interface’s vice president and chief innovations officer. “We had to overcome a perception that recycled was more costly, or performed less well.”

Interface also faced a reverse logistics challenge: it had to work with existing and new partners to learn how to capture and truck tons of carpet back to its partner plants. “To make this work, we’ve had to focus on all parts of the product’s life cycle at once,” Stansfield says.

At the installation phase, for example, this has meant educating flooring installers to abandon long-standing practices of gluing carpets down, which damages the material at the later recovery stage. Interface instead relies on gravity and strong adhesive patches to link its carpet tiles and keep them carpets locked down.

And at the end-of-use stage, the move has meant developing reverse logistics flows, to steer carpet waste away from landfills, and back to re-processors such as Aquafil.

Vetting green materials remains a weak link

Designers are widely frustrated by a lack of consistent, reliable services that can authenticate green materials’ virtues. The industry needs a “greenwash monitor,” Patagonia’s Copeland says. There has been some movement toward this goal, with efforts including Nike’s MAKING app, Material ConneXion, and the Sustainable Packaging Coalition.

Green materials can fail an evaluation for many reasons. A few years ago, Patagonia became interested in bamboo-based fabrics. The cultivation of fast-growing bamboo was appealing as a sustainable raw material. But on deeper investigation, Patagonia passed on the new fabrics because the process to convert bamboo into fibres proved just as toxic as the standard viscose method.

Likewise, PLA, a bio-plastic made from corn sugar, has attracted interest both as a renewable resource and because the end product is biodegradable. But in a car’s cockpit, durability is paramount, and Ford found that in tests, the stuff didn’t hold up. PLA plastics would “begin to compost in the car,” Mielewski says.

Resist the bias toward replacing old with green

“Most clients think that sustainable design is simply a case of switching existing material for a greener option,” says Chris Sherwin, head of sustainability at Seymourpowell, a London-based design advisor. “Same product, new material: that’s wrong on many grounds.”

Sherwin argues that its critical to understand that the stuff from which a product is made often accounts for only a tiny fraction of the impact of the use-phase of a product’s lifetime. Hence, it’s smarter for laundry soap makers to improve the performance of their detergents in cold water rather than focus solely on revising packaging.

“We should start with more fundamental product redesign,” Sherwin says. “We must start by asking, how will the consumers’ needs best be satisfied, and design accordingly.”

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Check out the original at http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/designing-sustainability-challenges-green-materials

GreenBiz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GreenBiz

Dan Hendrix: The Future of Interface is Bright & Greener than Ever | GreenBiz

Dan Hendrix: The Future of Interface is Bright & Greener than Ever

Because of the enduring green epiphany of its charismatic founder, Ray Anderson, the influence of Interface has always been outsized in the world of sustainability.

In the wake of Anderson’s death last autumn at age 77, following a nearly two-year battle with cancer, the focus has shifted to Daniel Hendrix, Interface’s CEO and president. Yesterday, at theGreenBiz Forum 12 in New York City, senior writerMarc Gunther caught up with Hendrix to see how the billion-dollar carpet maker is moving ahead with its founder’s eco-vision.

At Interface, sustainability continues to evolve from an operations focus into tool for innovation and market development, Hendrix reported. One example of this shift will soon be found up in the air.

After a four-year development process, the company’s carpet tiles were okayed for use on commercial jets. Developing the product required reducing the weight of the tiles by nearly half, while meeting stringent fire and toxicity standards as well as passing Boeing’s grueling performance tests.

Southwest Airlines will be among the first to start using the tiles as part of its Green Plane initiative, a project to outfit a Boeing 737 cabin with green products. “It’s a big win for us, and for the airline industry,” said Hendrix.

Promoted to his post in 2001, Hendrix has been running Interface’s day-to-day business for over a decade. Hendrix, who will celebrate his 30th anniversary with the company next year, worked closely with Anderson through an acquisitive period in the 1980s to scale-up the business. A decade later, when Anderson had his green epiphany and declared this intention to transform how the company would make tiles, Hendrix recounted that he was a disbeliever: “I thought Ray had lost his mind.”

It didn’t take long for Anderson to convert Hendrix, or the rest of the company. To aid his effort, Anderson turned to a green “dream team” to make the case to his colleagues. A veritable who’s-who of sustainable manufacturing, the team included Paul Hawken, Bill McDonough, and Amory Lovins, among others. The case altered the thinking of Interface’s leadership, and re-set the company’s course towards a goal of making carpets using less oil, water, and other inputs, with less waste overall.

The company has tracked these metrics steadily since 1996. Since then, the company has lowered the oil intensity of its products to 60 percent from 90 percent, Hendrix reported. Roughly 40 percent of its carpet are produced from post-consumer recycled materials, remade from used carpet tiles where fiber is shaved off for reuse, and the heavy backing is re-melted to recapture its embodied energy. “We’ve seen an 82 percent reduction in water use, and a similar improvement in waste sent to landfill,” Hendrix said.

One of the latest efforts to deepen Interface’s green practices is a program to develop environmental product declarations, or EPDs, a sort of successor to a life cycle assessment (LCA). “It creates transparency,” said Hendrix, as a kind of environmental nutritional label for each product, showing key content such as carbon footprint, toxicity data, and water usage.

“It’s like an LCA but with more detail. It takes a lot of the mystery out of what impact this product has on the environment,” said Hendrix. “It’s far from being standardized. And we’re one of the first to pursue it in the U.S.”

After nearly 20 years of sustainability efforts, the process of extending green practices within the organization, born with Anderson, continues today. “Ray gave Interface a wonderful gift: There’s a tremendous emotional capital that continues to motivate our people to get up everyday and think there’s a higher purpose than just a paycheck,” Hendrix said.

Interface is looking to its employees for guidance on how and where to innovate. “We call the exercise ‘appreciative inquiry,'” said Hendrix. “We interviewed employees and a few customers, to help push towards a goal of zero emissions.” A lesson that emerged from this exercise was to cross-pollinate staff between offices, sending high performers from Bangkok to Europe, or from the U.S. to Australia, to learn and to exchange innovative ideas.

For more on Anderson’s legacy, check out Joel Makower’s memorial to the ” iconic and iconoclastic industrialist“. And in the first of an ongoing series called “Radical Industrialists” here at GreenBiz.com, read an essay contributed by Interface’s Lindsay James and Mikhail Davis, “Mind the Void: Interface after Ray.”

Photo by Sophia Wallace.

Check out the original story here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/01/25/dan-hendrix-future-interface-bright-greener-ever