Category Archives: Going Green

Is Green about to hit the Big Time?

It’s been a while since my last green post, but that’s simply because Tim Minahan of Supply Excellence [WayBackMachine] has been doing such a great job on the topic as well, especially considering his recent set of posts on “Sustainable Supply”.

However, since I’ve accumulated approximately 40 links on green and green technology since my last post, it’s time for an update. After all, considering that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are at the highest they’ve been in 800,000 years, we need to consider what is required to to repair and reboot the ecosystem.

On the political front, Autopia reports a bipartisan group of senators have introduced a bill in the US to cap greenhouse gas emissions by 2012 to 2004 levels, with further reductions thereafter; the Economist reports that green states are taking the federal government to court in an attempt to force it to curb emissions of carbon dioxide; CNet summarizes Bush’s platform on better energy conservation in his State of the Union address (maybe because he has been ripped on global warming, unfortunately Bush’s plan is likely to fall short); on a more positive note, Bush recently signed an

Executive Order requiring all federal agencies to buy EPEAT registered

“green” computers; the Economist hypothesized that America may step up in the fight against climate change since it is Waking up and Catching Up. On a global note, the Associated Press reports that “China lacks the resources to cut critical emissions”, which is disturbing when you consider that China is the world’s biggest and producer of coal, and is expected to surpass the United States as the world’s No. 1 greenhouse gas emitter in the next decade.

On the automotive front, Autopia reports that ZAP s showing off new prototype electric vehicles, (CNet) Crave reports that BMW just built the Hydrogen7 which can run off gasoline or hydrogen (which could turn out to be a great move if we can cleanly convert coal into hydrogen).

On the energy front, the Economist reported that investors are ramping up clean energy investments, noting that the clean-energy business is turning into the next big investment boom; Wired News Autopia reports that scientists at MIT have created a genertically altered yeast that improves ethanol production by 50%, which is critical since CNet reports that the average individual who wants to use biofuel has difficulty locating it; MIT also finds that geothermal energy potential is largely untapped, as summarized by CNet; CNet also reports that BP is building wind power projects at five sites around the US; CNNMoney.com reports that Exxon is trying to green up its act; Magenn Power is building a helium-filled balloon that generates electricity using wind power, as reported in CNet; Fortune reports on a buoy that can convert wave motion into electricity;

ZDNet reports the result of an IDC study that found that energy efficient PCs can actually save a company money (sentiments echoed in a CIO Insight article);

finally, CNet put together a nice guide to alternative fuels.

On the retail front, the Economist reports a big move in green retailing. Not surprising, since even Walmart is making a big push on the green front, including recycling. (And as soon as they enter the tackle & bait business big time, they’ll be on the road to green success) Moreover, when we have Plug+Play Construction that makes high tech green buildings a snap, retail should not only be green, but be green end-to-end.

On the academic front, Fortune reports that Universities don’t ace the green test and that a Cambridge-based not-for-profit called the Sustainable Endowments Institute is aiming to shed some light on the matter.

For a look at the coming future, CNNMoney.com overviews 8 technologies to save the world, including a home hydrogen fueling station, a nuclear waste nuetralizer, and a sonic water purifier. In addition, CNNMoney.com published a Go Green, Get Rich guide summarizing companies tackling big problems, including global warming, and the technology they have developed. Finally, the CNet Green Tech section has matured from a few stray links to a solid resource section.

Note that on March 20, 2007 @ 1:00 pm EST, Supply & Demand Chain Executive is hosting a webinar on “Nontoxic Chemical Inventories: New Insights for Greening the Supply Chain”, sponsored by Dolphin Safe Source. After all, you don’t want to be yet another lost soul Ignoring an inconvenient truth when we’re very likely the cause of global warming. (Think of the victims of climate change, which include those of us living in coastal areas. Maybe it’s not easy being green, but it’s worth it. And if you can come up with a way to scrub greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, more specifically, a way to remove one billion tons of carbon gases a year from the atmosphere for 10 years, you could be eligible for a 25 Million Dollar prize, courtesy of Richard Branson.)

P.S. Here is a list of recent green posts from Supply Excellence [WayBackMachine].

  • Sustainable Supply: There’s No Denying It
  • Sustainable Supply the Martha Stewart Way
  • 2007: The Year of Sustainable Supply Strategies
  • The Cost (and Payback) of Going Green
  • Pump Up Green Supply – Or Else
  • Clinton Initiative: Time to Get Inspired Again

Does the (Green) Future Belong to Kermit?

It’s been a couple of months since my last green post, and the call of Kermit has been taken up by some rather large corporations in the interim. As highlighted in Supply Excellence [WayBackMachine], and Fortune, Adobe Systems has become the first company to receive a platinum award from the non-profit U.S. Green Building Council, Wal-Mart has launched a green packaging rating system, as covered in Buyer Analytics and Purchasing, Yahoo has a new Yahoo Autos Green Center and has converted its employee commuter shuttles that go between San Francisco and its Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters to run on biodiesel, and Richard Branson will be investing profits from Virgin airlines into alternative energy.

Some states are turning up the heat on global warming, and attempting to show the world that maybe, someday, the US can be green too. The most notable is California, where Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently signed into law a sweeping global warming initiative that imposes the nation’s first cap on greenhouse gas emissions, as reported by Wired and CNet. (As a side note, California also sponsors the Clean Tech Open.) Moreover, California, like New Jersey, now allows net metering, and with federal government incentives, going solar can pay for itself in a few years and ultimately result in free electricity for you.

Cities are getting in on the action too. Boston CleanAir Cabs is replacing old taxis with new hybrid-electric or alternative energy vehicles, as covered in News.blog. Now that the eco-friendly Fiat can use gasoline, methane or the E85 mixture of gas and bioethanol, they have another option. (John Gartner of Autopia makes a great case for plug-in hybrids on Wired.) In addition, Boulder, Colorado has approved a carbon tax.

And some VCs are starting to take notice big time. The Investment Network on Climate Risk (INCR) has achieved its goal of $1 billion in clean technology over the past 18 months. Clinton announced a $1B Fund for Renewable Energy Investments.

Technology is improving every day. With the advent of electrically conductive plastics, dye-sensitized solar cells, and carbon nanotubes (which are also being used in light bulbs), solar cells are now cheap and efficient, as per this article on Economist.com.

Moreover, a Brazilian company called ABC Esso will soon sell an adapter in the U.S. that lets any gasoline vehicle burn up to 100 percent ethanol! So far, the company has developed adapters for Ford, GM, Honda, Mazda, Volvo and Toyota vehicles. This means that there is no reason why all of tomorrow’s vehicles cannot be hybrids. And when you consider we could be producing enough alternative fuels to replace all of our gasoline and oil needs in as little as twenty years with the right investments, let’s hope the product takes off!

MIT has designed a system to place wind turbines far offshore and out of sight. And we now have a solar powered car, but they still have a ways to go before they can be used as more than glorified golf carts, but it’s a good start! (At least they are a step ahead of the extreme green cars of the future that are still in the design stages, although the idea of a fully recyclable car is an intriguing one. Check out the gallery.)

But it doesn’t take an MIT education to go green or realize the importance of doing so. Even farmers in Iowa know how important going green is. This is good … since cow farms are a great source of natural gas thanks to alternative energy start-up Microgy.

It’s a Green World … Unless You Live in the United States

As you know, at least once a month, I like to talk about green – green suppliers, green strategies, green best practices, and any other green you can think of that benefits your business as well as the environment. And I’m not alone. This also appears to be a favorite topic of David Bush’s over on e-Sourcing Forum [WayBackMachine] (see “Will Kermit Change His Tune”?, for example) and of Tim Minahan’s over on Supply Excellence [WayBackMachine] (see “It Ain’t Easy Being Green: Ethanol Hopes and Woes”, for example).

Today I’m going to talk not about how going green is going to help you, but how not going green is going to hurt you. Whereas the United States has decided not to ratify the Kyoto Treaty, the rest of the world appears to be embracing it not only as a requirement, but as a way of doing business.

For example, the EU is trying to stimulate green public procurement for its own institutions and governments. See a recent article on EurActiv.com aptly entitled Green Procurement. Japan’s DENSO Corporation recently announced “New Green Procurement Guidelines for Suppliers” based on DENSO’s long-term environmental policy. The Recycling Council of Alberta Business Development Committee is preparing to sponsor research on green procurement to help Canadian companies find information on green products, services, and existing green procurement policies in Canada. Even Australia, after a recent Green Procurement Audit has realized the need for a sustainability charter to drive ecologically sustainable practices.

In other words, if you’re not green, you could find yourselves with significantly fewer customers in the near future.

On the green front, I’ve collected quite a few articles of interest over the last month.

Via Technologies, a Taiwanese manufacturer of motherboards and chips, has developed a processor, the VIA C7-D, that consumes a mere 20 watts. Now, it’s true that processors do not produce CO2, but the electricity they run on is often produced by methods that do produce CO2. By decreasing processing power requirements, and by contributing to reforestation efforts to counteract the small amount of carbon dioxide that will be produced in the production of the electricity required to power the chip, as calculated by carbon footprint, Via Technologies has taken another step towards making computing greener.

Cellex Power, General Hydrogen, and Ballard have teamed up to produce The hydrogen powered fork lift that runs on hydrogen rather than lead acid batteries. As the article says, it’s not glamorous … but considering how many forklifts there are out there, it’s significant.

Florida is building a $425 million facility that will use lightning-like plasma arcs to turn trash into gas and rock-like material. The gas will be used to run turbines and produce electricity, of which a third will be used to sustain the plant and the rest will be put back on the grid, and the material that results from the melted organic matter will be hardened into slag and used in road and construction projects.

Carbon Fiber, five times stronger and two times as stiff as steel, despite being lighter than steel, is now being used by a number of major manufacturers, including BMW. This allows for a significant increase in fuel efficiency in vehicles that require conventional fuel.

Germany recently dedicated the Gut Erlasse Solar Park, a 12-megawatt facility located near the Bavarian town of Arnstein that holds the distinction of the World’s Largest Solar Power Plant.

A number of fiber and fabric firms are launching green products, as described in this recent Apparel Magazine article. For example, Unifi has launched a polyester yarn made of 100% recycled materials, DuPont Sorona has undertaken an initiative to insure that at least 25% of its revenues come from products made of non-depletable resources, and Sole Custom Footbeds is using corn-based material in its NatureWorks PLA plastic packaging which will decompose naturally with no negative environmental impact.

Finally, GE and mtvU are sponsoring the Ecomagination Challenge where they are asking individuals and teams of college students from around the country to submit innovative, groundbreaking ideas for projects that would make their schools more environmentally responsible. The school with the best idea gets a 25K grant to bring the plan to life as well as an mtvU concert on campus.

The green city of the future

Since we should all be Living Green all the time, it’s time for another post in the green series. Since my last post, it’s been a little quiet on the blogs on the green front, but lots has been happening. On a positive note, a recent article on CNet reports that investments in clean tech have climbed rapidly in the last two years, from less than $300 million in the second quarter of 2004 to more than $840 million in the second quarter of this year.

First of all, I’d like to point out that News.com is following the lead of the Green Thinking bloggers everywhere and devoting special coverage in their special Green Tech section which notes that from solar-powered Wi-Fi to robots fueled by bacteria, researchers are rethinking the way we power our lives.

With articles on Clean Energy, Solar Wi-Fi, and Ethanol BioFuel, you know you can at least clean up the way you operate your business even if you don’t immediately cut costs from your supply chain in the process.

However, one recent article that really caught my attention is the one about the biodegradable forks manufactured by Cereplast. Cereplast’s plastic is composed of organic material and the items made from it will dissolve in a compost pile in 180 days or less. Compare that to regular plastic, which can take 100 years or more. The reality is that we have morphed into a disposable society, and if we aren’t going to change our ways, we should at least make sure we don’t continue to damage the environment with our actions. Moreover, if you can’t save money, you can always make decisions that will make money by designing products that will be perceived as more valuable and sell better in the marketplace, especially when it doesn’t cost you to do so. As the article notes, a pound of Cereplast’s resin sells for around 58 to 60 cents while a pound of petroleum-based polystyrene, meanwhile, sells for around 60 cents.

Another article that caught my attention was the Business 2.0 article that told us How Australia got hot for solar power. It seems that Australia is planning to build a 1,600 foot-tall solar tower that can power a small city. More precisely, a 260-foot-diameter cylinder taller than the Sears Tower encircled by a two-mile-diameter transparent canopy at ground level.

About 8 feet tall at the perimeter, the solar collector will gradually slope up to a height of 50 to 60 feet at the tower’s base. Acting as a giant greenhouse, the solar collector will superheat the air with radiation from the sun. Hot air rises, naturally, and the tower will operate as a giant vacuum. As the air is sucked into the tower, it will produce wind to power an array of turbine generators clustered around the structure. The result: enough clean, green electricity to power some 100,000 homes without producing a particle of pollution or a wisp of planet-warming gases. Mix in a few green roofs and some ground heat pumps, and you’re on your way to your perfect pollution free city (as long as the automotive manufacturers step up their clean car initiatives and produce enough hybrid biofuel/electric vehicles to meet the population demand, after all we can build biodiesel boats. (Alternatively, maybe someone will figure out how to scale up hydrogen fuel cells.)

Maybe my fellow blogging thunder from down under will jump in and add his thoughts to the project and the ongoing cross-blog green series (which also includes Supply Excellence and e-Sourcing Forum, on occasion) now that he’s back in the blogsphere.

Living Green

As pointed out in e-Sourcing Forum’s [WayBackMachine] post on Green Suppliers back in May, Interface Inc., the world’s largest carpet manufacturer, was able to save $260m from waste reduction initiatives, as pointed out in a Purchasing Magazine article. But the story continues.

As pointed out by Lindsey Parnell, the CEO and President of Interface Europe, in her article “A Sustainable Future” in CPO Agenda, Procurement leaders need to play their part in overcoming the many hurdles to environmentally friendly business.

The article points that sustainability is about driving enterprises towards maximum resource efficiency, maximum responsibility for any actions and maximum return on investment. It’s about doing well both commercially and in an environmental and social sense and that the development of consistent definitions of industry-specific drivers would increase focus while the establishment of a return feed of used and end-of-life products would allow suppliers to close the loop and view lifecycle costs, not just one-off purchase costs.

Furthermore, even if companies looked only at what could be achieved with the resources readily available to them, the impact would be significant. Consistently demanding the most sustainable products and services available would also help the market’s development, and I believe gravitation in that direction is inevitable.

As I pointed out in staying green, I too believe this trend is here to stay. After all, when you consider Sprott Asset Management‘s recent report “Investment Implications of an Abrupt Climate Change”, which forecasts far-reaching and “dire” impacts of rapid climate change, businesses who do not adapt may go extinct. And, as described in BusinessWeek’s Business on a Warmer Planet, some companies are already adapting. After all, as CIO Insight points out in “The Greening of the CIO”, environmental questions matter more and more for corporate IT, not as feel-good programs but business issues with a direct impact on the bottom line. After all, as pointed out by a recent Supply Excellence [WayBackMachine] post, the European Union’s Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) has triggered shortages for both compliant and non-compliant electronic components, challenges which will need to be overcome by innovative sourcing professionals. Fortunately, some manufacturers are stepping up to the challenge. Zebra Technologies has fully converted its thermal printers to be in compliance with the EU’s RoHS directive, as described in a recent Supply & Demand Chain Executive article (that is no longer available).

Green issues have an impact on everything from product marketing to employee morale to profit margins, and many of them are closely interwoven with the everyday work of IT organizations and the departments, including procurement, that IT supports. The article suggests that you should think of environmental consciousness as the next level of alignment, an enterprise-wide phenomenon that procurement must lead.

And your job is only getting easier. With companies like new startup SolFocus and Energy Solutions Alberta, you’ll soon be able to run your corporations on 100% renewable green energy from the ultimate renewable energy resources — the sun and the earth themselves. (And some researchers are even looking into ways to capture the energy we waste with each foot step, by taking the science of piezoelectrics, that powers your SEIKO kinetic perpetual timepieces, to the next level.)

Furthermore, it may not be too long before we’ll be able to stop wasting paper and silica and write on water itself as a result of some recent developments at the Akishima Laboratory in Japan. (English article no longer available.) At the very least, we should be able to replace those neon signs with a new generation of technology. (While we wait for that day to come, we will soon have e-paper to tide us over.)

To answer David’s Question in a recent e-Sourcing Forum post, I think Kermit will soon be singing about how easy it is to be green.