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MethodCleaning Combines A Light Approach With C2C Principles
Method Products, the cradle to cradle cleaning company, is an intriguing example of how marketing and green are not mutually exclusive. This San Francisco company, which generated a breathtaking $75 million worth of turnover in 2007 has opened its doors in the UK and will soon expand further into Europe.
Its worth keeping an eye out on what its directors, Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry, are doing,
if only because the Obama-Biden team spotted them and invited Ryan to the inauguration ceremony.
The same guy – a former marketing guru – also struck a recent deal to provide Microsoft with a modern image. He acts himself in the computer giant’s latest tv commercial, an animation themed ‘Be Weird – Be Different’. Check out the ad on the company’s blog here.
Motorola Launches “Carbon Neutral” Phone
Motorola recently launched what they claim to be first ever carbon neutral phone at the Consumer Electrics Show in Las Vegas. Additionally, the plastics used in the phone’s exterior are made from recycled water bottles. Enter the MOTO™ W233 Renew. The company signed up with Carbonfund.org to offset the carbon produced during the manufacturing process of the handset. Distribution and operating activities are also offset. Motorola invests in the Carbonfund’s program of renewable energy and reforestation investments.
When you take a close look at the phone you will see that the Carbonfund investment is not a free ticket to environmental utopia because the press buttons and the robust exterior are entirely made of the kinds of metals that still will need recycling at the end of the phone’s life. But, having said that, knowing that the plastics are 100% made of recycled bottles is hopeful, especially when competitors like Nokia and Samsung are using bioplastics made from food crops. The Carbonfund also awarded Motorola with its CarbonFree® Product Certification after an extensive product life-cycle assessment.
Carbon Tax Versus Cap-and-Trade
In the debate about climate change, politicians will likely become polarized between cap-and-trade supporters and carbon tax proponents. There’s no precedent for a carbon tax, but it’s definitely a viable alternative to carbon trading.
Last week, Exxon Mobil Corp.’s chief executive officer Rex Tillerson said he’s in favor of taxing carbon dioxide emissions. “[It's] a more direct and transparent approach,” Tillerson said, comparing the tax to trading carbon. Aside from Tillerson, proponents of a carbon tax include Al Gore and Ralph Nader.
The magic words associated with the carbon tax debate are “revenue neutral.” That means the government lowers other taxes in order to generate the carbon tax. In addition to what seems to be consumer central thinking, the carbon tax is supposedly easy to implement on short notice. Proponents also say a new tax is efficient and relatively fraud proof.
Tesco Builds New Superstore At 70% Lower Carbon Footprint Than Regular Stores
Supermarket chains in the UK are exploiting every conceivable opportunity to outsmart their competition. Hyper-inflating green credentials to win customers’ favor is part of the game. That’s why it’s easy to be skeptical about the efforts by Tesco superstores. Arriving at a typical Tesco shop, customers are greeted by overly jovial texts on billboards. The phrase “Helping You Spend Less” complements equally vague messages about the environment. But the shop’s management is working to clean up their act, embarking on a crusade to offer customers products that actually lower their carbon footprint. Tesco is even beginning to think about the “greenness” of the very shelves on which these products are placed.
Earlier this month the “greenest ever” Tesco outlet was opened in Manchester. The new store is, in fact, a progressive example of sustainability in many aspects of superstore retailing.
Upcycling Just Became Cool – Scottish Designer Upgrades Vintage Clothing
A fashion shop in Glasgow, Scotland, has taken a rather unique approach to up-cycling. It offers customers the chance to restyle problem vintage garments.
Raw Vintage is located in Southside Glasgow’s Shawlands. It ain’t Glasgow’s highstreet but customers will pass for no less than full blown designer addicts wearing its produce. The shop’s co-owner and creative brain Lisa Carr spent the last three years re-fashioning ill fitting vintage garments to fashionable pieces. This is how come the ‚Äò50s, ’60s, ‚Äò70s and ‚Äò80s items on sale in the store ALL look like a dream instead of the odd item. This is upcycling revolutionary style.
Raw Vintage’s regular stock is an inspiration for customers who can bring in their own problem garments for re-styling. On offer are both modern Scottish designer clothes (including Sweet Jayne, Onnie, Torres, Jennie loof, Gasoline and Electra French) and retro and vintage garments which Lisa already has turned her attention to. The restyled collection dates from the 1920’s to the 1980’s. Everything mixes – the retro styles look modern but their vintage spirit is still intact. The collection includes evening and prom wear and street style clothes.
The upgraded clothes were recently officially critiqued in The Skinny a local entertainment paper which commissioned Ms Carr to upcycle some seemingly hopeless and outdated vintage garments. Photos supplied here are copyright The Skinny.
Battery Manufacturing Is Coming Back to the US
Battery production hasn’t been a major US industry for a long time. In recent years, US firms have become more and more involved with developing new technology to make batteries last longer. Now they’re ready to lure the actual production of batteries back to the US. A group of automobile manufacturing companies has formed a coalition and raised $1 billion in government funds to set up domestic battery production facilities – primarily inspired by the anticipated demand for hybrid and all-electric vehicles.
The coalition, the National Alliance for Advanced Transportation Battery Cell Manufacture, is backed by various established and start-up companies including Johnson Controls-Saft Advanced Power Solutions, 3M Co, ActaCell, All Cell Technologies, EnerSys, Envia Systems, MicroSun Technologies, and Townsend Advanced Energy.
Small Businesses Running On Solar WiFi
It sounds iffy; running your company’s network on a WiFi connection that is entirely powered by solar energy. But a Mountainview, CA firm says it provides a 100% uptime solution. And it reports a mad dash for its products by companies in the range of 50 to 200 employees.
Mesh WiFi firm Meraki started shipping its Meraki Solar December 4th, after a year long delay because it needed to improve its battery technology.
The delay lands both the firm and customers in a slightly awkward situation. The worldwide run on solar power equipment seemed overly justified when oil prices spiked. Now that the price of oil is in the 40 dollar bracket, what should solar be priced at? Meraki has found a creative way around this stumbling block. Customers can bring their own panels! They’re selling solar Wifi solutions for apartment blocks or businesses and small communities at $749 a piece for a bring-your-own-panel model up to $1,499 for areas with shorter days or less light which require a battery.
Company cofounder Sanjit Biswas told ArsTechnica that Meraki decided to change from sealed lead-acid to lithium iron-phosphate for greater capacity.
Biswas said this dropped the battery’s weight, which in turn reduces shipping costs for the many remote areas that the Solar unit is being deployed.
The True Cost of a Home: How Green Trends Might Save the Housing Market
There’s a paradigm shift going on in the US real estate sector. Yet will home owners justify paying extra for green building if the economic situation continues to deteriorate?
The US homeowner population has been silently suffering for years now. Numbers from the Center for Housing Policy show that between 1996 and 2006, homeowners have been spending an increasing portion of their income on housing (the current crisis notwithstanding). A household would typically spend 21.5 percent of its total income on housing in 1996 and this had risen to 26.2 percent in 2006. Nearly a sixth of homeowners were far worse off, spending more than 50 percent of their disposable income on their homes in 2006. Another harrowing fact: housing expenses went up 64.9 percent over the ten year period, while homeowner incomes increased by only 36.3 percent.
It makes you wonder how sustainable the sustainable building wave will prove to be. “In order to avoid repeating the dire situation so many home owners are in today, it is critical that our thinking evolve around home costs,” said Michelle Kaufmann, founder and chairman of Michelle Kaufmann Designs, an architecture firm specializing in sustainable designs. Kaufmann’s recently published white paper “Redefining Cost: A Beacon of Hope Shines through Housing Market Gloom” (PDF link). The study hones in on the current troubles in the US housing industry outlining why it is imperative to consider cost structures in a changed perspective.
Datacenters That Heat Swimming Pools, Residences, Hotels
Datacenters that are faced with the challenge of cooling their servers have a brilliant opportunity to jump on the green bandwagon and distribute energy. A European IBM outlet, an Israeli Intel facility and a Scottish Microsoft center are all using the heat their datacenters produce to warm up buildings and other facilities. IBM is even commercializing its method.
The Zurich Research Laboratory is a grand name for the defunct military underground bunker in which IBM housed one of its European datacenters. The company is putting the datacenter’s heat waste to good use; it is cooling its servers with water which is subsequently used to heat a local swimming pool.
A report on IEEE Spectrum indicates that instead of using air-conditioning or fans, the IBM datacenter simply has devised a water pump system through micro channels within the computers themselves. The water then absorbs the heat from the datacenter and sold to the neighbors. “A 10-megawatt datacenter could produce enough energy to heat 700 homes,” according to the article in IEEE Spectrum. Nifty or what?
The reason that IBM opted for heating up the pool rather than its own facility was that there wasn’t an office to heat up because the bunker is based in an inconvenient location and underground. “Through reclaiming the heat, approximately 130 tons of carbon emissions can be saved. This corresponds to the CO2 discharge of mid-size cars driving 500,000 miles,” according to IBM spokesman. “It’s a nice solution. It’s obviously a terrific example of the private sector and the public sector working toward each other’s mutual benefit.”
Datacenters Are Running Out Of Energy, Fast.
A recent report has revealed that data centers will face critical shortages of energy in less than three years. By 2011, two thirds of all datacenters won’t have enough electricity to perform critical computing tasks.
The survey, carried out by Emerson Network Power is based on interviews with datacenter professionals. 64% of the 167 respondents estimate that they are going to run out of data capacity by 2011 because they will be faced with energy shortages by then.
The situation in Europe is no better than in the US. IDC recently issued a report that had similar findings, indicating that European data centers will land in an energy crisis in the near future too. The main reason being that energy consumption increased by more than 13% between 2006 and 2007. The report predicted that energy consumption by data center facilities would reach more than 42 terawatt hours in 2008.
The Financial Proposals At Poznan
The ongoing global climate negotiations in the Polish town of Poznan are all about financing, insiders say. So what proposals are on the table? A roundup of some headline generating plans:
The future of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is at the heart of the discussions. New projects in this mechanism, which allows emission-reduction projects in developing countries to sell credits to industrialized countries wishing to meet their emission reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol, are worth $25 billion. Last year alone, $82 billion worth of carbon credits were traded globally. The certificates are aimed at boosting technology transfer to developing countries.
How a Local Firewood Cooperative Can Lower a Nation’s Carbon Footprint
It’s one of the biggest issues currently being addressed in Poznan: How can we stop the burning of forests as poor people burn firewood to make a living? Wood is also increasingly popular as a biomass fuel. So what’s the deal? Can we burn wood and not impact the environment?
The quick answer is that so long as the wood comes from a well managed forest, you’re more or less in the clear. And in case you are worried about the ecological impact of the smoke and the carbon dioxide emissions, this recent article in The Telegraph newspaper points out that because wood is a biomass fuel, burning is is carbon neutral – when you burn wood, it releases the exact amount of carbon dioxide that it absorbed when growing. It may actually be better to burn wood in some cases because when wood decomposes, it slowly lets go of the carbon it soaked up, a process which in many cases goes by unaccounted for (also read my article Clearing Forests Of Dead Wood Prevents Massive CO2 Emissions). So long as replanting matches harvesting your burning it will not lead to an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. Far more serious is what happens in the rainforests in Asia. The impact of people’s burning of firewood is dramatic because it leads to the loss of natural forests.
COP14 Begins – What Can We Expect?
The two-week COP14 climate talks which start today in Poznan Poland, are the halfway mark in a two year negotiation effort by no less than 190 countries on a replacement for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
The new concept is way more ambitious than Kyoto which was signed by only 37 industrialized countries who committed to reducing carbon emissions to below 1990 levels by an average 5% by 2012. China, which had been hesitant about some of the issues on the table made a u-turn in its policy last December when it agreed to commit to a target in emissions reductions – on condition that it wouldn’t be bound to the same limits as industrial countries, and only if the rich world assists the poor countries in transitioning to cleaner production methods.
The Poznan conference will begin reviewing ideas on how to help poor nations in their efforts to combat climate change. A major part of this will be ideas as to how to finance the technological transfer that’s needed and what kind of targets are fair. Another focus point will be how to incentivize countries to successfully cut back on deforestation. Efforts will be made to agree to a time table for all these issues and achieve agreement by December next year.
Advertising And Global Warming – Prepare To Be Shocked
What do you get when an advertising creative is allowed to let loose their creative juices on global warming? Right. The party continues! Glamorous places like New York and Paris are simply re-styled and being submerged under water – something that’s made out to be fun and luxurious. We have boats, after all.
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