Perspectives on greener product development and manufacturing from Sustainable Minds, our partners, customers and contributors.

  • Leveraging universal themes to build loyalists

    by Sandy Skees on February 27, 2009

    “I belong.”
    “What I do matters.”
    “In spite of it all, I am hopeful.”

    As our massive institutions stumble and crumble before our very eyes, we are seeing the emergence of new themes that permeate discussions online, in line at Starbucks, on the airwaves and inside our heads. These themes can be guides for product designers and communicators when solidifying plans for the next 12-18 months.

    According to Trendwatching.com, there is an increasing requirement that generosity become a dominant driver in both business and social interactions and institutions. Every media outlet reports on massive citizen uproar and consumer rejection of the greed that has pervaded previously trusted companies. Everyone is looking for institutions that are truthful, that give back, that will be part of the solution. Mix that with the fast-growing online community of individuals who collaborate, donate, spread the word and raise the alarm and you have a powerful new market force. They know their power and they are wielding it, at the voting booth, in online causes, through viral video and even in winning Super Bowl ads.

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    Tom Watson’s new book, CauseWired, does a great job of delineating the movement of the hyper-engaged. He concentrates on the explosive growth of deeply connected activists who are changing how non-profits and grass root movements work. There are implications for businesses and products here as well. According to Watson, “there is simply no separation between real and virtual…. This new sector relies on open access to information … and an insistence on transparency.”

    There are three basic steps for businesses seeking to make authentic connections between their companies and products and their target customers.

    Step one: Go back to the beginning and re-commit to the company or product’s initial purpose. Not its market promise or best feature but the highest customer benefit. Therein is the key to how to connect authentically. Is your product designed to support individual health? Make life easier? Save time or energy? Dig below the surface to get at the underlying value – compassion, justice, courage, respect, humanity, empowerment, integrity, holism, broader good, responsibility, excellence.

    Step two: Look out into the broader world context and seek organizations, groups, causes, or programs that are targeting the same core value. There are bound to be ways that your product or company can participate in these efforts. I am not necessarily talking about donating a portion of the proceeds, although that might be helpful. Rather, I suggest that you position your company or product in the context of a greater purpose. Recently, I spoke with a company that is designing an in–home water filtration system. They have also designed a backpack version for third world countries that they will donate, one for one, for every home system they sell. Same product design, two very different environments, but they’re gaining greater leverage by serving a greater good.

    Step three: Get the word out online. Bloggers, online news sites, cause groups, Twitter, Flickr, and the proliferation of new social media sites are key to building community for your effort. You’ll find that a great deal of positive altruistic energy is focused online today.

    Bear this in mind: products, marketing campaigns, company announcements must authentically reflect the principles, meaning, and purpose inside companies. Those that have neither a core ethos, nor the courage to claim it, will fail in the new world that is rapidly being created out of the shambles of this one. Align with your customers in co-creating a world that is built on belonging, doing and hope.

  • A few words and a few degrees

    by Ken Hall on February 20, 2009
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    During his inaugural speech, President Obama said, "...we'll work tirelessly to... roll back the specter of a warming planet." Specter is a powerful word to use, imbued with dark magic – a terrifying apparition and unreal appearance, a visible incorporeal spirit. But if the scientific synthesis of Mark Lynas in his new book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Warming Planet, is correct, then President Obama has chosen his words wisely.

    Mark Lynas has written a compelling book – and revealing its basic thesis does not spoil the read because he tells the details so well. Six Degrees is the story of the difference between the world we have now, and our world six degrees warmer. The lesson is simple: the time to act is now! Lynas has compiled and synthesized the work of numerous climate scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). His story unfolds, chapter by chapter, with a scientific description of the change that may occur with each successive degree (Celsius) of global warming.

    As Lynas relates in Six Degrees, we are currently .7ºC warmer than we would be without the impact of greenhouse gasses added to the atmosphere by humanity. Even if we stopped emitting carbon today, scientists anticipate we would warm an additional .5 to 1ºC due to the thermal lag in Earth’s vast systems, especially in the ocean. However, we are not likely to stop emitting all greenhouse gasses today, and, according to projections by the IPCC, we are likely to continue the trend toward a world that is somewhere between 1.1 and 6.4ºC warmer by the year 2100.

    At some point above 2ºC is when the specter of a warming planet begins to really sink in, due to biofeedback mechanisms that accelerate the pace and scale of change. Scientists increasingly fear that first we will cross a tipping point, causing Amazonia to collapse and release carbon from warming soils, pouring up to 250 ppm of additional CO2 into the atmosphere and accelerating global warming in a positive feedback loop. As we cruise into a world that is 3ºC warmer, we enter a climate not seen since the Pliocene Era, when the sea level was 25 meters higher. But the specter continues – somewhere just over 3ºC we will cross another tipping point as the permafrost of Siberia melts, releasing vast quantities of methane (an even more potent greenhouse gas) into the atmosphere and further accelerating our march towards six degrees. The third major tipping point, known with less precision, but feared more greatly, is the possibility of causing an oceanic methane hydrate release somewhere close to 5ºC. This is literally an explosive release of methane into our atmosphere, sending us beyond a 6º C warming. At 6ºC global warming, it is likely that the mass extinction may exceed the “End-Permian Wipeout” when 75-95% of life on earth went extinct.

    The key take-away from Six Degrees is that our safe landing zone is not more than 2º C global warming. The current financial crisis and specter of a warming planet give new meaning to the mantra that “de-carbonizing the economy is our greatest economic opportunity since we mobilized for WWII.” President Obama, please give the order: it is time we mobilized to defeat the specter of a warming planet!

    PS. Please read Six Degrees and make up your own mind. Mark Lynas has compiled a great story and I apologize if I have prematurely spoiled it for anyone.

     

  • How to spend all that infrastructure money from the Obama stimulus package in a sustainable way?

    by Joep Meijer on February 13, 2009
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    With the new administration, the green building industry cries victory and LEED is getting ready to help all federal and government agencies spend money on making buildings more energy efficient. That's great – but what about all that money that is going to be poured into concrete, steel and asphalt in upgrading our existing infrastructure and creating more mass transit infrastructure? Who will make sure that the money is not just spent, but that it is spent on what works, especially from the point of view of sustainability? There is no LEED for transportation projects, after all.

    If we are going to inspire and influence this administration, we should make certain that sustainability attributes are part of every request for proposal and contract evaluation. There are parallels from the old world with some tantalizing ideas – including life cycle assessment (LCA) as a fundamental part of tender and evaluation procedure.

    Let me share some experiences I have had in Europe related to spending tax dollars on infrastructure.

    Searching for the most environmentally friendly alternative
    When Departments of Transportation (DOT) design their transportation solutions, they make cost estimates. How can we get the most bang for our buck? The input data for these cost estimates can be run through a life cycle costing model, including both initial cost and maintenance. There is a striking similarity between these data and the data needed for an environmental life cycle assessment: they are the same. Over a decade ago, several European DOT’s started asking questions about the energy footprint of infrastructure projects. They used it to select the most environmentally friendly alternative after considering functionality and cost. It was a great experience. Over the years they realized that it was not much more difficult to include all life cycle impact categories and extend energy to a full scale LCA. The Dutch DOT has a tool called DuboCalc that does just that (Dubo is a Dutch popular abbreviation for sustainable building).

    Competitive tenders including sustainability
    Some governments are truly interested in including sustainability in their tenders. A question I often get is, "How can we do this?" Being a consultant, my answer is long and complicated, hmm? Well, not really. Why not start with asking competing vendors to tell you their sustainability story and make sure you take that into account in evaluating the best party, maybe even at a small increase in cost. If you do this for a year and evaluate what kind of stories competitors bring to the table, you get a feeling for what the industry can handle and you become more specific with your criteria. After a while, you are confident enough to move from qualitative requirements to quantitative ones, and over even more time you find yourself drafting sustainable functional requirements, not prescriptive measures.

    Think about the commissioning party for the construction of a railroad asking his regular providers of concrete beams to identify the carbon footprint of their standard product and to present a different product with a lesser footprint. Basically asking them, "What can you do?"

    Green purchasing for every dollar spend
    The Dutch national government has adopted a policy to spend money only on projects that have been screened for sustainable performance. Every dollar from January 2010 will be accounted for in this way. How can they do this? They started a communication platform with the industry and included LCA in their decision making process. They have developed a tool that allows everybody to submit their own data according to a national standard for product LCA’s. Wow!

    If Obama had such a tool, he could mandate the use of it and start building a benchmarking database for U.S. infrastructure projects to establish a sustainability scorecard related to dollars spent. We could learn a lot from this database after a year and select the best practices in order to start using them more and more.

    Exciting developments are starting to sprout here in the U.S. Examples are: Green Highways Partnership; the committee for Sustainable Leadership for Concrete Pavement, from the National Concrete Pavement Technology Center and many others. Initiatives range from using locally recycled content to the use of different binders for new roads. All of them are starting to cast the light of sustainability in some form or fashion on the U.S. infrastructure.

    I hope these initiatives can find some stimulus from Obama's package and that Obama provides us with a package that works to create jobs and greater sustainability.
     

  • Sustainability Performance Software – an emerging sector

    by Terry Swack on February 9, 2009
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    We’ve all heard the expression, “companies measure what matters, and what matters gets measured.” As organizations endeavor to figure out what sustainability and green mean to them, software vendors are emerging to help. Given the lack of definition, standards and regulation, organizations are learning and taking action at their own pace, and there’s a lot for everyone – organizations, software vendors, industry groups and government – to figure out.

    In the effort to explain where Sustainable Minds fits in the software landscape, we realized that we had to define this new sector, just to explain where we fit within it. For this purpose, we’ve coined the phrase ‘Sustainability Performance Software.’ Being a customer-centered product design organization, our definitions are based on who the customers and users are of these new apps, and their purposes for purchasing.

    We have identified four categories in this new sector:

    1. Carbon management

    • For organizations to manage and report their carbon footprint to:
      • Get ahead of impending carbon tax, cap and trade and/or reduction regulations. The term 'Green IT' is being used to describe a sub-set of this group used to manage carbon impacts from computing and data centers. Example: Clear Standards
      • Manage and report a product’s carbon footprint to consumers. Example: Cooler 
    • For consumers to reduce their personal carbon footprint based on lifestyle and product purchase choices. Example: TerraPass

    2. Enterprise

    • For organizations to measure various aspects of its operations for compliance and other sustainability goals, in addition to carbon management. Example: Foresite Systems

    3. Products

    • Life cycle assessment (LCA) software for LCA expert practitioners for comprehensive LCA of systems and products to quantify environmental, social and economic impacts. Example: PE International 
    • LCA-based ecodesign software for product development teams for use in concept design to estimate the potential life cycle environmental and human health impacts. Example: Sustainable Minds

    4. Packaging

    • For package design teams to compare the life cycle environmental and human health impacts of package designs. Example: COMPASS, from the Sustainable Packaging Coalition
    • For companies to reduce the environmental impacts of packaging to meet market-specified performance goals. Example: Package Modeling Software created for use with Wal-Mart's Sustainable Packaging Scorecard.

    Right now, the biggest sector by far is carbon management software. Entrepreneurs and investors are placing bets the government will establish some type of carbon regulation in the near future, and they’ll be there to help when companies must comply. There’s nothing like government regulation to drive product innovation!

    About carbon footprinting relative to a total life cycle environmental assessment:
    LCA and carbon footprinting both model the entire life cycle of a product or system. The only difference is that LCA generally models eight to twelve impact categories (including global warming), while carbon footprinting only models one: global warming. The major drawback of carbon footprinting is that it neglects other impacts such as human toxicity and ecotoxicity, water pollution, smog, acid rain, and fossil fuel depletion, to name a few. The risk is that reducing the carbon footprint of a product or system may actually increase some of these other impacts. Read the Ask the Okala Expert post by Philip White on this topic. 

    Companies getting serious about sustainability will purchase a number of software products to help them innovate, manage, track and report on sustainability performance and initiatives. In smaller organizations, it's possible they’ll be purchased by the same person. In larger organizations, it’s more likely that different people will make these purchase decisions, because they serve different purposes and parts of the organization. Over time, these systems will be designed to interoperate so that sustainability can be operationalized into business as usual, to measure what matters.