Africa’s First Sustainable Biofuel Plant Opens in Mozambique

| Thursday May 17th, 2012 | 1 Comment

Operations Manager Andre Roberts Describes the Plant to Federal Minister of Agriculture, José Pacheco

Today marked the grand opening of the largest industrial park in Mozambique -and it’s got a sustainable edge to boot.

NDZiLO’s ethanol plant in the province of Dondo has a capacity to supply two million liters of cassava-based ethanol. The cassava will be grown by local farmers using a sustainable crop rotation system developed by the company’s agriculture experts.

NDZiLO was founded in partnership with CleanStar Ventures and Novozymes to provide an improved cooking solution for the people of the urban centers of Mozambique (where the price of charcoal has tripled in the past 3 years.) The ethanol burns cleaner than charcoal – which means houses and lungs stay cleaner, and deforestation is reduced.

Said Steen Rilsgaard, CEO of Novozymes, “I’ve seen many ethanol plants in the world and this is the smallest, but it is also the one that makes me the most proud.”

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A Better Idea for Branding Public Transit

CSRHUB | Thursday May 17th, 2012 | 1 Comment

By Carol Pierson Holding

An Atlantic Cities blog post recently posed a question that consistently bedevils environmentalists: How do we break Americans’ love for the automobile? A love enhanced by automakers who have used design and advertising to reinforce the link between sex and cars.

The blog post was inspired by a new book, Making Transit Fun! How to Entice Motorists from Their Cars (and onto Their Feet, a Bike, or Bus), in which designer Darrin Nordahl proposes that we apply “the power positive emotion wields over a person’s choice” to transit, just as has been done with cars. Nordahl believes that good design and branding will make this change happen. He gives concrete examples such as the gorgeous new terminal building planned for San Francisco and the names and logos developed for bus routes in Boulder – names like Hop, Skip, Jump, Bound, Bolt, Dash, and Stampede. These are fun names that give personality to the experience.

And planners point out that the new generation is rejecting car ownership anyway in favor of renting through businesses like Zipcar or other car sharing services. This younger cohort is primed for a message that will make transit more attractive and remove any lingering stigma that the older car-addicts have applied to transit.

But I would argue that transit’s sensory experience will never come close to driving’s magical sense of power, freedom, control, — and yes, sex. It’s often the first experience of its kind that a young adult encounters. And names that bring to mind speed like “Bolt” won’t work either until transit really is reliably faster than taking a car, as it can be in New York.

So if a car’s experience is so fundamentally different than riding transit, what parallel experience can we plumb for joyous attributes?

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Interview: Chuck Slaughter, Living Goods

| Thursday May 17th, 2012 | 0 Comments

Omidyar Network is a philanthropic investment firm started in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Since 2004, the firm has invested close to $300 million in both non-profit and for profit ventures, all of which have a stated mission to catalyze social, economic, and political change. We’ve written about many of the companies that Omidyar has helped start over the years – Ashoka, Mango, Kiva.org, CouchSurfing, and D.light just to name a few.

For the second time this week, I found myself presented with the “Avon model” of product distribution in Africa.  This time, Living Goods‘ founder Chuck Slaughter did the talking.   Living Goods mission is “Empowering micro-entrepreneurs to deliver life-saving and life-changing products to the doorsteps of the poor.”  In a nutshell, this means they’re basically a wholesaler for goods that are currently hard to get a hold of in developing countries – and which also have the potential for “high impact” in terms of improving people’s lives.

Items such as nutritional supplements, medicines, basic consumer goods, and so called “pro poor” products like cookstoves are among the variety of items Living Goods offers.   Interestingly, by being a wholesaler, Living Goods directly creates micro businesses in the form of people who willing to go door to door selling – the so-called “Avon ladies.”  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Living Goods model is almost infinitely scaleable and can be applied to almost any good – thus making life easier for any enterprising company with a live changing product looking for a market.

I sat down with Chuck for a brief interview:

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Mexico is Rapidly Increasing Wind Power Installations

Gina-Marie Cheeseman | Thursday May 17th, 2012 | 0 Comments

Mexico ranks 24th in wind capacity and is expected to jump to 20th, according to the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC). Mexico only produced three megawatts (MW) of wind power in 2005, but now has almost 400 times that amount and by the end of this year will have two gigawatts (GW). Mexico has the 14th largest economy in the world, is the 11th largest greenhouse gas emitting country, and is the world’s 7th largest producer of oil. Mexico also has Mexico City, which has some of the most severe air pollution in the world.

In 2010, renewable energy accounted for 27 percent of Mexico’s installed power generation capacity, and most of that came from large hydro plants. However, Mexico installed 316 MW of new wind power capacity in 2010, which represented a 156 percent increase over 2009. The GWEC attributes the growth in wind power to a “more supportive legal and regulatory framework, , the availability of new transmission capacity in the Oaxaca region, significant wind turbine price reductions, and renewed access to financing.”

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The Carbon War Room’s Top 10 Renewable Fuel Companies

3p Guest Author | Thursday May 17th, 2012 | 0 Comments

This is part three of a three part series introducing the renewable aviation fuel market in partnership with The Carbon War Room & reprinted from CCW Magazine. Read part one here, and two here.

In articles yesterday and Tuesday, we explored how no sector of the world’s economy is more ripe and ready for the Carbon War Room’s approach to emissions reduction than aviation.

Renewable fuels hold great promise for addressing the aviation industry’s carbon impacts, and innovators and investors alike are clamoring to offer their solutions to rising fossil fuel costs and environmental considerations.

The following are the top ten contenders as determined by renewablejetfuels.org:

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7 More Companies Reject SFI

| Thursday May 17th, 2012 | 0 Comments

When you see a headline about a new batch of companies moving away from something, you usually can bet it’s either APP, the paper company operating in Indonesia, or SFI, the forestry certification. This time it’s SFI, and the list is of seven companies, including Pitney Bowes, Ruby Tuesday, Phillips Van Heusen, and US Airways that are taking action to avoid the use of the SFI label. Ruby Tuesday, for example, has made a commitment to avoid any use or promotion of the SFI logo and name in conjunction with its brand, products or services, and US Airways has committed to avoid any use or promotion of the SFI logo or SFI certified products.

The news comes from ForestEthics, an organization leading the campaign against the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), which ForestEthics describes as an enabler of “business-as-usual forest destruction.” This is not the first time that ForestEthics has won such a battle against SFI. Last November, we reported that another list of seven companies, including Sprint, AT&T, State Farm, U.S. Bank and Comcast that decided to stop using SFI-certified products. Just like in the case of APP, the growing number of customers that become former customers hasn’t made a dent yet in SFI’s approach, so what are the chances that the new list will make any difference?

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Shareholder Resolutions Flourish at JP Morgan Meeting

| Thursday May 17th, 2012 | 0 Comments

As an advocate of shareholder activism, I seldom see more than one or two shareholder proposals on proxy statements.  However, yesterday’s JP Morgan shareholder meeting contained 7 shareholder proposals and had me smiling like a kid in a candy store.  Now this is what shareholder advocacy is supposed to look like.

Considering the bank’s recent lost bet of $2 billion in derivative trading and CEO Jamie Dimon’s $23 million pay package, this is an opportune time to perhaps take a brief look at what small and big shareholders were advocating for at one of the world’s largest banks:

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DreamBikes Teaches Job Skills and Boosts Bicycling in Urban Neighborhoods

Leon Kaye | Thursday May 17th, 2012 | 0 Comments

 

dreambikes, trek, trek bicycles, bicycling, bicycles, Milwaukee, Leon Kaye, social enterprise, madison, wisconsin

Dreambikes, Milwaukee

Bicycling has become more popular in America’s cities but is still out of reach for many of those who struggle to make ends meet. One non-profit, DreamBikes, is tackling many the problems of poverty, transportation and skills training in the Wisconsin cities of Milwaukee and Wisconsin. While teens learn new job and mechanical skills from repairing bicycles, local residents benefit from access to low priced and healthy form of transportation.

DreamBikes started when John Burke, president of Trek BIcycle Company, suggested the idea and then donated the seed money to open the first DreamBikes shop in Madison four years ago. A year later in 2009, the store and repair facility sold 1400 bicycles, meeting the needs of more residents in Wisconsin’s capital.

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The Avon Lady Comes to Mozambique, Hawking Cookstoves

| Wednesday May 16th, 2012 | 2 Comments

3p Editor Jen Boynton is in Mozambique this week along with TreeHugger’s Brian Merchant to get the full story on a remarkable triple-bottom-line business model. Read on…

Sales rep Lonola Tembo explains the cook stove to me

There’s no denying that charcoal cookstoves are a huge problem in Africa. Used to cook meals in many family homes, they contribute to massive deforestation to create the charcoal, which is expensive to buy, and when they are operated, they fill homes (and lungs) with dirty black soot. And, it’s hard to control the temperature of the cooking flame. Imagine cooking by an indoor campfire for every meal of your life.

There are many companies and NGOs working to attack the problem from different angles. We’ve covered solar cookstoves a few times here on TriplePundit before, and they have an obvious benefit with their clean, free fuel. However, they still lack the ability to control temperature and are difficult to use indoors unless you have a lot of windows. None of these solutions has managed to gain traction despite the multi-million dollar economic opportunity they represent.

One company, CleanStar Ventures, understands both the financial opportunity and the social and environmental imperative. CleanStar invests in, builds, and scales triple-bottom-line business models in emerging markets around the world. CleanStar Mozambique, their latest and fastest growing project, was founded to tackle the cookstove problem with a bilateral solution: new clean-burning ethanol stoves and an ethanol processing facility to fuel them. This full-service solution means that they’re creating jobs not only for the folks who market and sell the stoves, but for producers and cassava farmers to create the ethanol. Thus far, they’ve had multiple investments in the 7-figure range from multi-national corporations including Novozymes, ICM, and Bank of America.

We’ll be covering the entire value chain in a series of posts – starting with this simple question: how do you enter a market that is pretty much entirely fragmented with individual charcoal vendors and stove welders? Try a western model, applied to an African audience: the Avon lady.

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Interview: Matt Bannick, Managing Partner, Omidyar Network

| Wednesday May 16th, 2012 | 0 Comments

Omidyar Network is a philanthropic investment firm started in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Since 2004, the firm has invested close to $500 million in both non-profit and for profit ventures, all of which have a stated mission to catalyze social, economic, and political change. We’ve written about many of the companies that Omidyar has helped start over the years – Ashoka, Mango, Kiva.org, CouchSurfing, and D.light just to name a few.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Omidyar Network’s annual executive forum in Redwood City, CA.  It’s an event designed to bring all of the Omidyar Network’s grantees and investments together under one roof for 3 days of brainstorming, inspiration, and learning.  This year the vast majority of Omidyar’s 100+ companies had at least one representative present, some having traveled from as far as Zambia.

The network’s areas of investment are concentrated in two main areas:  Access to Capital (focusing on microfinance, property rights & entrepreneurship) and Media, Markets & Transparency (focusing on technology and government/corruption).

Determining which of the world’s problems can be solved with profit generating entrepreneurial ideas and which are more suited for traditional non-profits is a difficult decision.  It’s one that Omidyar grapples with every day.   I sat down with Matt Bannick, Managing Partner for Omidyar Network to look for some perspective:

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