Accenture and the World Economic Forum have put together this report looking at how consumption can be made more sustainable.
The video below discusses the 3 key takeaways.
For more interesting information you can view the full report here
Posts Tagged ‘sustainability’
World Economic Forum and Accenture Report : More With Less
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Closing the Loop presentation
April 2nd, 2012This is the presentation I did at Ecobuild in the UKGBC tent.
Closing the loop presentation in Ecobuild
View more PowerPoint from Ramon Arratia
The concept of the magic metric
March 16th, 2012magic metric: a single piece of data that has the power to galvanise legislation at all levels to create a level playing field that promotes strong competition and innovation to redesign products to reduce their environmental footprint.
Like gCO2/km in cars
Strong demand for sustainable buildings
March 9th, 2012- 64 per cent of respondents believe that sustainability is a critical business issue (Jones Lang La Salle global corporate occupier survey)
- more than half of global construction firms expect to be fully committed to green building by 2013 (McGraw Hill Construction report)
- sustainability was ranked the number one industry opportunity over the next five years, and one of the major risks included failing to adapt to a carbon-constrained future (Davis Langdon 2011 Construction Sentiment survey).(from Science Alert)
Why modular is sustainable: the broadloom horror show
March 9th, 2012Broadloom horror show
View more presentations from David Gerson
The magic metric that changed the car industry
March 7th, 2012Climate and clean air coalition is launched
February 25th, 2012The US, Mexico, Canada, Bangladesh and Ghana have launched an initiative to cut the other green house gases (other than CO2). Methane, soot and HFCs contribute to around 1/3 to global warming. The US state department says that by tackling these gases we could slow warming by 0.5C.
This is a fantastic initiative, focused on tackling the low hanging fruit and less political than CO2. Let’s go for it, no brainer. But let’s not forget CO2…
How life cycle assessment can align your stars
February 22nd, 2012How life cycle assessment can align your stars
View more documents from Ramon Arratia
Commissioner Potocnik gets it. Thoughts from meeting him
December 14th, 2011Thanks to both the Green Alliance and the Aldersgate group, I was privileged to engage with EU Commissioner Janez Potocnik on several events in London on Monday. Such a great inspiration and reassurance that the EU Commissions gets sustainability.
Let me share with you some of the great points the Commissioner made.
- In one private meeting with several companies (all quite progressive sustainability leaders) where all the companies where asking for more regulation and proper standards on sustainability he said, in response to other companies who advocate less regulation: ‘Would you take out all the rules from football?’
What a great point. Of course we wouldnt because it would become a chaos where the strongest (and with less scrupulous, this is my own words) would benefit, not the most talented. The most succesful sport in the planet is heavily regulated but the rules are clear and are consistent.
- ‘Slovenia who was the strongest country in the former Yugoslavia and thought would benefit the most from the breakdown, lost 20% of GDP after the separation’. That tells you how interlinked the economies are and how important is the internal market and having same standards across the EU.
Other points from his various speeches on Monday were:
-Today material costs already make up more than 40 % of total costs in manufacturing industries compared to less than 20 % for labour – we need innovation and ingenuity to improve our resource productivity beyond labour productivity.
-During the 20th century the world population grew four times, its economic output 40 times. We increased our fossil fuel use 16 fold, our fishing catches by a factor of 35 and our water use 9 fold. It was called the “great acceleration”, but I am afraid that we might hit the wall soon.
-87% of European Companies expect the costs of their material inputs to increase over the next 5 to 10 years.
-Every year in Europe, we use 16 tonnes of materials per person per year to keep our economy going; and we produce 6 tonnes per person per year of waste; with half of that going into landfill. This is not sustainable. It’s more of a linear economy than a circular economy
-A one percentage point gain in resource productivity can save € 23 billion a year to European businesses, and could help them create 150,000 jobs
-It is a mystery to many people that we are prepared to sacrifice scarce public resources at a time of budget austerity in order to do damage to our environment. Just one small example is tax breaks for company cars – these cost € 50 billion a year, and increase our greenhouse gas emissions at the same time! You could also ask why we are taxing employment so heavily when we have 12 million unemployed and resources so lightly when we have environmental problems. So getting the prices right means also getting taxes and subsidies right. That means a shift away from taxing employment and on to resource use
Download the full speeches from Monday here:
CO2 as a feedstock
October 24th, 2011Sustainability has traditionally been either about having genuinely less impact or greenwashing about making a positive difference.
Now, there a few revolutionary companies that are starting in the design board with the ultimate challenge: making good stuff by using bad stuff as raw materials.
This is one example.
A bunch of green chemists founded Novomer, a company focused on developing sustainable materials using CO2 and CO as a feedstock. Their CO2 feedstock based technology produces Polypropylene Carbonate (PPC) to use in applications such as ceramics, coating or packaging. Their CO feedstock arrives through alternative synthetic routes to succinic acid (for biodegradable plastcis) or acrylic acid (for diapers, detergents).
Where do I get building materials EPDs in France?
September 2nd, 2011In Inies, the database for environmental and health information for building materials. See here
They call it FDES, Fiches de Déclaration Environnementale et Sanitaire (FDES) des Produits de construction.
All the major stakeholders involved. Ademe, CSTB, Afnor, FFB.
It would be great to create a European common database for all the EPDs. I hope this will come with CEN TC 350.
Michael Pawlin’s TED talk on using nature’s genius in architecture
August 3rd, 2011Transparency vs stealth competitive advantage
July 29th, 2011There has been some debate lately whether the sustainability world will go on a more transparent front or on a more stealth front.
Some people argue that the sustainability movement is going to a deeper shift in transparency. Some argue that sustainability is becoming such a critical competitive advantage that companies are in stealth mood developing products and services.
I think both are right. I’ll explain. There is an unprecedented shift in transparency but it is in transparency of outputs or performance. It’s the transparency on the what you achieve, not in the how you plan to achieve it. During the last 15 years we have seen the explosion of corporate sustainability reporting, companies setting public promises on what they are gonna do. This is what I call the transparency of inputs, which in my view will substantially decrease. The biased stories about nice case studies that dont work commercially will eventually banish. Unfortunately it’s the bulk of many CR reports today.
This false transparency of ‘doing good things’ will dissapear for two reasons. The first one is that after 20 years of corporate sustainability movement, society expect results, not promises. As companies will not get credit anymore for publishing promises, there will be no value in being transparent about the how you are changing things, but there still will be a huge degree of interest in the things achieved.
The second reason is that, as we face price increases in raw materials and energy, water scarcity and a long etc, all acompanied by an increasingly more clever and stronger regulation, companies will find themselves that they can make money out of solving the world’s problems. If you can make money out of recycling plastics or a new insulating material, you wont publicise your innovation until you launch it. That’s the stealth mode. But it’s a secrete mode only in R&D, in the how. Because you will want to be transparent about the benefits of your innovation for your customer. For example, how an insulation will help a house to save energy.
And that’s where it’s key the transparency of the outputs, which will be standard in a few years time. As it already happen in the car industry. All the industry is now transparent (by law) about gCO2/km. And that is driving a huge amount of innovation (by stealth) trying to get a competitive advangate.
The same is happening in the energy using products (EU labelling), buildings (the upcoming CEN TC 350 and the EPDs), energy certificate displays, etc.
This is real transparency, measuring the performance of products. And it can only increase. And it may seem counter-intuitive but it will favour stealth on the R&D front.
UK chancellor, please stop blocking DECs
July 20th, 2011Dear Chancellor
Please stop blocking the introduction of Display Energy Certificates (DECs). DECC, CLG and BIS are all cool with it so what is preventing you?
Non-domestic buildings energy is responsible for 17% of the UK’s carbon.
Transparency can drive innovation and performance. By assigning an A-G rating bad buildings will be exposed and tenants can put pressure to landlords to retrofit.
If you dont support easy, quick-win legislation such as DECs, how are you going to deliver your promise of beeing the greenest government ever?
You think voluntary agreements will solve everything but what is the incentive for bad building to show the DEC? It should be mandatory the same way gCO2/km is mandatory EU-wide to the car industry. So look at who is delivering sustainability transformation to your country, the EU that you dont like.
This is an opportunity where benefits outweights costs. It’s politically stupid to miss it.
The LCA of an ipad
June 21st, 2011I got the ipad, beautiful creature, but what is its environmental impact? Well, Apple hasnt published a proper full LCA, let a lone a type III EPD but they have a quick and dirty ‘product report’ with some interesting analysis.
Even being a energy-consuming product, the raw materials phase has creates twice CO2. Again, it comes back to my old point of how important is embedded carbon. It would be good to understand which components have the highest impact and some discussion about Apple’s strategy to improve it.
The energy efficiency in sleep and charging mode has been quite well addressed but the recycling section does disclose much. How can it be recycled, what can components and metals can be recovered, what has been done in the design to facilitate dismantling?
GHG of an Ipad 2 across its life cycle
England’s Waste Review published by DEFRA
June 15th, 2011The much awaited Waste Review was published yesterday June 14th. It has some positives like the focus on the waste hierarchy.
View the full publication here: Government Review of Waste Policy in England 2011
Nice to see restrictions on the landfill of wood and even better to see that the coalition has softened their anti-regulatory views and are consulting on landfill bans in other waste streams such as textiles and bio-degradable waste. Hopefully they are not just empty words, it’s quite easy to promise on consultations…
Happy to see the intention on pushing Anaerobic Digestion. I haven’t read fully their separate paper but it’s good to see that they estimate that by 2020 AD could deliver between 3–5 TWh of Electricity.
Read the full report here: Anaerobic Digestion Strategy and Action Plan
Where are the negatives?
There are some very worrying things.
- Too much reliance on voluntary agreements with industry, which some people think is a magic wand to solve all issues. They take long time, they usually are minimum common denominator and they are pretty un-ambitious, especially if they are set up without the threat of legislation.
- The whole thing on civil liberties, which on one hand are right, on the other hand it could be used as a excuse to legislate. Why we get a fine for driving fast and not for throwing away the wrong things? If I didn’t have the threat of the fine, I’d drive much faster. That convinces me that they are people who don’t bother how they recycle.
Why carpet tiles are increasingly even more popular.
April 28th, 2011Interesting entry looking back at what carpet tiles are increasingly the flooring of choice by architects and designers.
The mention sustainability and design as the two biggest reasons.
They give InterfaceFLOR the credit for the random design, based on biomimicry but they fail to mention that we also invented carpet tiles and pioneered sustainability in the sector in 1994.
Read the full article here: Carpet Tile’s Commercial Landscape
InterfaceFLOR opens factory in China….to serve the local market
March 28th, 2011We just officially opened the doors to our new modular plant today in Taicang, Jiangsu Province with a focus on our usual brand attributes: sustainable design, quality customer service, efficient operations and premium products. Employing 110 people from the area, the new facility will supply modular InterfaceFLOR carpet products made of high recycled content—specifically for the greater China market.
This continues our commitment to local manufacturing, establishing our factories where our markets are. For example in Europe 99.7% of the products sold are manufactured in Europe.
These are some of the environmental features of the plant:
- Instead of building from the ground up, we have refurbished an existing structure. The factory’s use of existing materials minimized the need for extracting virgin, non-renewable resources from the local environment.
- Interior designers also used salvaged timber and bricks from once-standing houses and bridges in the area, supporting InterfaceFLOR’s sustainability goals and honoring Chinese heritage. Noise-absorbing glass and carbon-absorbing bamboo throughout the facility’s interior spaces were integrated.
- The building also adheres to the design specifications of the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for New Construction (LEED-NC) accreditation program. Energy efficiencies are realized through automatic controls and low-level lighting systems. Roof-top heat shields and a ground source heat exchange system stabilize indoor air temperatures by tapping geothermal energy stored in the ground. In addition, water use and flow is controlled automatically and kept low, and rainwater is collected to run irrigation systems.
