Posts Tagged ‘Carbon Footprint’

Carbon reporting should be mandatory

May 12th, 2011
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Defra has launched a consultation on GHG emissions reporting by UK companies (See here consultation document).A number of businesses, led by The Aldersgate Group believe the Government must introduce regulations for all large businesses to report their carbon emissions (Click here for the full press release).

My view is that carbon reporting should be mandatory for large companies. Big business come with big responsibilities and they need to help society to deal with climate change. Reducing absolute emmisions should be scrutinised publicly and this process starts wiht mandatory reporting.

But if we want to get businesses to come up with real solutions we need to make mandatory to report at product level. Most of the impacts of companies are outside their boundaries, either in their supply chains or customers. What’s the point of a car company reporting their corporate emissions? They should focus on the car emissions, which is several times bigger. Same for many physical products like a carpet tile, where around 70% of the impact is embodied in the raw materials.

So mandatory corporate reporting is good but mandatory EPDs (product reporting) would be even better….

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The era of full transparency is here – Check out the efficiency of public buildings in the UK

April 1st, 2011
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So what is the equivalent of wikileaks for energy efficiency in the public sector?

Well, it’s here:

Data reveals carbon footprint of public sector buildings

How energy efficient is your local council or primary school?

You can download the raw data here

You will see that the worse building is the University of Manchester and some buildings like the Homerton Hospital scores a ‘G’.

Full transparency is coming. One day we will be able to download all the data from the carbon emissions of the whole life cycle of buildings, old and new.

Full transparency makes people compete against each other and incentivises innovation.

And it’s a competition based on getting the best performance, not the best case study. It’s about the data, not whether a building has solar panel or a recyclable wall.

Marks and Spencer opens first ‘zero-carbon’ store

Great to see that retailers such as Marks and Spencer are innovating so quickly on sustainable construction. Their new store at Sheffield is 100% from recycled materials, includes harvesting of rainwater, LEDs and the heating will be generated from the expelled heating from the refrigeration units.

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The views of the Green Building Council on the UK budget: anti-green, anti-growth

March 25th, 2011
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The UK Green Building council has published their views on the UK budget.

Paul King, the UKGBC CEO, was especially critical of the U-turn in the Zero Carbon homes.

A new home, from 2016 will no longer have to make a net zero addition to the carbon footprint of the overall housing stock – which contributes approx 27% of the UK’s total emissions. The change of policy will result in the direct mitigation of only around 2/3 of emissions from the typical home over the course of a year.

In Paul’s words:

“In the space of two weeks, this government has gone from a firm commitment on zero carbon homes, to a watered down policy. A zero carbon home will no longer do what it says on the tin. The world leading commitment that new homes would not add to the carbon footprint of our housing stock from 2016 has been scrapped despite a remarkable consensus between industry and NGOs in support of it.

“Thanks to a crude de-regulation agenda we now have a policy that is not only anti-green but anti-growth.  Low carbon construction has been one of the few sectors showing genuine green shoots of growth. This U-turn will result in loss of confidence leading to lower investment, less innovation, fewer green jobs and fewer carbon reductions. It is a backward step by a government that wanted to be seen as ‘the greenest ever’

Read the full article here

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Carbon Trading Thefts

February 7th, 2011
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We now have the definitive proof of how important carbon trading permits are: They have been stolen.

The issue relates to €7m of permits in the Czech carbon registry.

I think this theft is nothing compared to how many companies got away lobbying for free permits by exagerating facts and now they are making money saving on these permits.

If we want the market to work, we should stop giving permits for free.

Read more about these thefts here

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Hypermobility, something we need to sort out

January 5th, 2011
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The total distance travelled by people in Great Britain virtually doubled (95% up) between 1971 and 2007, to 817 billion passenger kilometres in 2007.

The Guardian’s Damian Carrington rightly points at the issue of hypermobility, the belief that we should be everywhere all the time.

Look at the EU green house gases stats and you will see that transport is the only sector increasing in absolute emissions. Transport is eating the wins from other sectors!

What to do?

First, not subsidising fuel transport in the first place. Then, investment in infrastructure for lower carbon transport modes. Finally, convincing people that more travel does not equal more happiness.

This latest one is the most key but trickiest.

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Redesign of products in the West is the key to cut carbon in developing countries

October 26th, 2010
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On Wednesday I heard Friedrich Hinterberger from SERI speak. He had 54 slides with lots of world sustainability figures but one that got my attention was the net importers and exporters of carbon.

It shows clearly how the West is importing carbon emissions from countries like China. Most of these emissions relate to the embodied impact of raw materials that go into products. For example, around 70% of the LCA impact of a carpet tile is in the raw materials. This is more or less similar in most physical products.

So what is the best way cut carbon emissions in China then? No, it’s not transferring renewable technology there. It’s redesigning the products that we design in the West so that they have much less embodied carbon (for example by using raw materials less carbon intensive).

And is this difficult or costly? No, it’s not. The actual bottleneck is that people don’t bother to do the maths and use LCA.

Download the full deck from Friedrich here

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What makes a hotel green?

August 18th, 2010
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I find it so frustrating when I am staying in a hotel and the only sign of sustainability is their note on reducing the amount of washing by reusing the towels.  Unfortunately, this kind of singular and obvious thinking with regards sustainability is not unique to the hotel industry.  Many companies are only doing that ‘one very obvious thing’.

The response on Treehugger by Pablo Paster to the question “What makes a hotel green?” last week had me thinking about this topic more. This is what I would like to see one day in a hotel:

1. a welcome note which explains what their carbon footprint is per m2 and per occupant and their target to significantly reduce it. This would include the things they have done so far to decrease the footprint with explanations for each initiative and the impact in overall carbon metrics. For example:

  • Improved Insulation
  • More efficient air conditioning solutions
  • More efficient lighting solutions
  • Water saving features
  • Increased use of recycled content in ceilings, furniture, carpet, etc

The proposed Song Jiang Hotel, China

I think it would be very effective to have hotels name all of their initiatives on paper otherwise they would tend to do only the most visible things even if the impact is small. By writing it on paper it would also reassure cynical clients like me!  A real ‘Just the Facts’ approach that would eventually generate competition within the industry.

2. they should also do some visible but meaningful things as well such as:

  • avoid having the TV on with the welcome screen when the customer enters the room.
  • all electrics and lighting should automatically switch on/off with the room key
  • improve the speed of the hot water kicking in so as to reduce the use of water
  • install more water efficient showers and taps

What are your thoughts on this?

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Carbon reporting down to the second: gimmick or transparency?

August 9th, 2010
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defraEarlier this week, the UK Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra to you and me) joined the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Home Office in publishing real-time energy consumption data online. If you go to this page on their web site   you can see a graph spiking up and down showing energy units used per hour and use over the past 24 hours at its main London headquarters building. It is also clever enough to disclose the energy cost per hour and carbon emissions.

Whether this is simply a gimmick or real progress towards full transparency – I think it is certainly a good start. The government has committed to cutting carbon emissions across all central departments by 10% by next May, so it will be interesting to what Defra does next (and which departments follow suit). It has already promised that as more data is collected, it will publish results for different time periods (use per week, month and year).

So, Defra is definitely making a move in the right direction, but it needs to look at more than just energy consumption. Real carbon transparency will depend on reporting total carbon emissions during the whole life cycle of a building – including the energy used to produce building materials and furniture (and carpet!). Also, it’s not just carbon emissions that have a negative impact on the environment. Hopefully, one day in the not too distant future, government departments will also report on waste production and water usage in a similar way.

In my opinion, the best way for the Government (or any organisation for that matter) to get reliable and validated information on its full environmental impact, including carbon emissions is to use Environmental Product Declarations  and continue to provide just the facts.

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So what does the EU’s International LCA guide say about carbon footprinting?

June 24th, 2010
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Carbon footprint and other studies with limited impact coverage
A prominent example of impact-coverage related limitations is the case of Carbon footprint calculations where exclusively climate change related greenhouse gas emissions are considered. Such an initial limitation can be fully justified, if the overall environmental impacts of the analysed product (and its competing products) are by far dominated by climate change impacts or if all other individually relevant impacts such as Eutrophication and Acidification are very closely and positively correlated with Climate change. Otherwise such limitations in the initial settings can result in inadequacy for comparisons (e.g. if two compared products clearly differ in their environmental impacts in other impact categories).

(extracted from The ILCD Handbook)

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