Green Metrics, Clean Metrics

Safe Operating Space

A fascinating paper in Nature  (Johan Rockstrom, et al) proposes a framework of "planetary boundaries" that define a "safe operating space" for humanity with respect to the Earth system, so that environmental stability of the last 10,000 years (known as the Holocene) -- which has seen human civilizations develop and thrive -- can continue for several thousand more years. The framework involves nine planetary system processes with proposed boundaries for seven of them (the other two are TBD).

Here are the processes that have already crossed their boundaries:

Earth System Process	Parameters	Proposed Boundary	Current Status
Climate change	Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration (parts per million by volume)	350	387
Climate change	Change in radiative forcing (watts per meter squared)	1	1.5
Rate of biodiversity loss	Extinction rate (number of species per million species per year)	10	>100
Nitrogen cycle (part of a boundary with the Phosphorous cycle)	Amount of N2 removed from the atmosphere for human use (millions of tonnes per year)	35	121

The climate change boundaries result from three reasons:

1. Current models may underestimate long-term climate change because slow reinforcing feedback loops are not included.
2. The stability of the polar ice sheets are at risk when the CO2 concentration is betweek 350 and 550 ppm (based on paleoclimate data).
3. Some subsystems (such as ice in the Arctic ocean, and Greenland/West Antarctic ice sheets) are already moving outside their stable Holocene state.

Kumar Venkat

More Product Carbon Footprint Standards

We've been using PAS 2050 as one of a set of guidelines in all our product carbon footprinting (both software tools and services). Now more standards are in development:

• Two new standards for product and supply chain GHG accounting and reporting from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.
• ISO 14067-1 for product carbon footprinting.

It is hard for these standards to diverge too much, but we'll be tracking the details carefully to make sure that we can comply with all of them.

The other wrinkle is what Wal-Mart is going to do in this space -- important just because of their sheer size. Their Sustainability Consortium -- mostly university researchers -- are developing data and methodology for streamlined product life-cycle assessment (including carbon) for reporting and possibly eco-labeling applications.

Kumar Venkat

Life Cycle Thinking

An example of applying life-cycle thinking to product design and development: Canon's new multifunction office devices.

Kumar Venkat

Apple's Carbon Footprint

Apple Computers now has a very nice website that shows the key life cycle impacts of all current products. The 20-inch iMac, for example, generates 870 Kg of CO2e over its life cycle, with 44% coming from production, 50% from usage (over a 4-year use phase), and the rest from transport and recycling. Company-wide, 38% of product carbon emissions are from production (this includes extraction of raw materials and assembly) and 53% from the use phase. The computer weighs just 8.3 Kg and the enclosure is highly recyclable.

This clearly shows the use phase contributing less to the carbon footprint compared to previous generation computers (I remember an older estimate of around 80% for the use phase), a lot of it from smarter power management. Shrinking the production emissions may be the more difficult task.

Kumar Venkat

Ecolabeling -- Early Stirrings

When I wrote this 6 years ago, little did I realize that it would become such a mainstream idea within the decade!

~~~

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0714/p09s02-coop.html 

Beware the life cycle of 'recycled'

By Kumar Venkat

CUPERTINO, CALIF. - I have recycled my trash with an almost religious fervor for many years. Every scrap of paper and every used container go into recycling bins. And to close the loop, I look for products made with recycled materials. But when my recycled toilet paper is made in Canada (using wastepaper from who knows where) and transported a long way to my California supermarket, I'm not sure if I've done any good. At what point are the benefits of recycling offset by the environmental costs of long-distance transport?

This situation recurs in some form with almost every purchase that I make. I try to buy organically produced food as a form of economic pressure to remove pesticides and other drugs from the food system. But I recently noticed that my organic kiwi fruit comes all the way from New Zealand, flown in on jets that burn fossil fuel and contribute to global warming. My favorite brand of laundry detergent is made without petroleum-based cleaners, but it is packaged in a petroleum-based plastic bottle and shipped more than 3,000 miles to a store near me.

As consumers, we're overwhelmed by far too many brands, but we rarely have sufficient information to make the right environmental choices.

We might think it would be better for the environment if we switched to more energy-efficient refrigerators, light bulbs, or cars. But this, too, poses a problem. From extraction of raw materials to manufacturing, packaging, and shipping, existing appliances and cars represent energy already spent - carbon dioxide and other pollutants already discharged into the air and water. These environmental costs must be "amortized" over the life of a product. When does it make sense to discard older machines and buy newer, more efficient ones?

The crux of the problem is that most of us are not aware of the origins and history of the products we buy. As Rebecca Solnit observed in a recent essay in Orion magazine, we no longer know the stories behind modern-day objects because of the remote and intricate processes used to create them.

This "silence" of industrial-age foods and manufactured goods must be broken so that ordinary consumers can make informed choices. Besides the "organic" label, manufacturers often voluntarily disclose other things about how they made a product, such as "no animal ingredients," "not tested on animals," "printed on recycled paper," and "made with recycled plastic."

These little bits of information about a product's history often make for better purchasing decisions.

But uncertainties about the relative environmental impacts of alternative choices can be truly reduced only by accounting for all the materials and energy used and waste generated during the entire life cycle of every product. Even a modest approximation of such a "life-cycle assessment," printed in simple terms on a product's label or indicated next to the price tag on a supermarket shelf, would give consumers the means to make a real difference with their everyday purchases.

To start with, manufacturers and food producers should disclose the average amount of energy (renewable and nonrenewable) spent in creating and delivering a product, including energy used to produce its ingredients or components. This estimate should include all the processing and transportation - from extraction of materials to finished goods - as well as energy needed for recycling or disposal at the end of the product's life.

A second useful figure would be the quantity of materials, such as paper, plastic, glass, and metal, used in manufacturing a product and which of them are recyclable.

A final figure would be an estimate of the average distance traveled by the product, similar to the average energy consumed. Smaller energy and materials figures would indicate greater resource efficiency, and smaller distance figures would reflect greater local content in a product.

It isn't unthinkable for forward-looking manufacturers and retailers to jointly provide - and consumers to expect and demand - these numbers and additional explanation. While this may add marginally to the cost of a product, it would be no more complicated than the nutrition information printed on food products.

Before the industrial age, a product's history was usually known because of the proximity of producer and consumer. Now, in the age of globalization, when most products come from unknown farms and factories, imprinting a product's history on its label would be a way to restore some integrity to the product and its purchaser.

Questions on locally grown food, cooking, and canning

I recently spoke with Carrie Sturrock at The Oregonian about the pros and cons of home-grown food, locally grown food from farmers markets, canning your own food, and buying canned food at the grocery store. Her column is in today's print edition. More at http://blog.oregonlive.com/pdxgreen/2009/08/canning_issue_can_get_complica.html .

Kumar Venkat

Energy and Carbon Intensity of Wine Distribution

The Journal of Cleaner Production has published our new paper on the energy and carbon intensity of wine distribution. The analysis was done using our CargoScope tool.

http://www.cleanmetrics.com/pages/CarbonIntensityWineDistribution.pdf

Kumar Venkat

Role of LCA in Sustainability Agenda

A new white paper by Deloitte makes the case for using life-cycle assessment (LCA) to make sustainability golas more tangible and credible. The paper sees a number of market drivers for LCA, particularly from the perspective of product carbon footprints:

• Companies taking action, including Wal-Mart's recently announced sustainability product index. Two-thirds of companies in a recent study say they expect their customers to ask for carbon footprint information in the next year.
• Consumers want to know. Fully 95% of consumers would buy green if they had the right information and the product in question was satisfactory.

• Cost savings from energy efficiency and other environmental performance improvements.

• Keeping up with evolving GHG regulations.

Once LCA becomes part of the sustainability strategy, it can have big impacts in supply-chain environmental performance, new product and packaging development, marketing and communications, and sustainability strategy and reporting.

There are well-known issues with LCA -- such as system boundary selection, data quality, and the impact of assumptions -- that must be monitored to ensure consistent and comparable results, and the PAS 2050 standard is helping to iron out these problems.

Kumar Venkat

Food, Clothing and Shelter - Carbon Footprinting the Essentials

I typically don't use this blog for marketing messages, but I want to take a little space here just to point out some important things that are in the CleanMetrics pipeline. We are taking our life-cycle assessment methodology, software modules and data, and creating a series of highly customized industry-specific carbon footprinting tools. All are hosted software solutions that can be accessed through the web and will be available by annual subscription.

• The first of these is BuildingScope, which is being released in the next week or two. BuildingScope will address life-cycle GHG emissions and carbon storage in all phases of a building's life cycle, including construction, operation (including energy and water consumption), land use, landscaping, waste disposal, etc.
• Next in line is FoodCarbonScope, which is due around end of June. FoodCarbonScope will provide life-cycle carbon footprint analysis for food products, including agricultural production, processing, packaging, storage, transport, cooking, and waste disposal.
• Last in this list is ApparelScope, which will be ready in July/August. ApparelScope will target life-cycle carbon footprint analysis for clothing and accessories.

Kumar Venkat

Deep Carbon Footprinting (tm)

I believe that it is time to take product life-cycle carbon footprinting to the next level. Deep Carbon Footprinting^TM would look beyond static carbon footprinting, and explicitly consider the dimension of time in every part of a product's life cycle -- production, transportation, use, and disposal. It would also look at a broader range of biophysical phenomena (including some second-order effects) that could potentially impact a product's real carbon footprint. Deep carbon footprinting is needed to really understand the relative contributions of different stages in a product's life cycle, which is the first step in any attempt to reduce the product's footprint.

Here are a few examples of the types of analyses that would be included in deep carbon footprinting (I'll be offering numerical examples from selected industries/products in future posts):

• Consider the wood in a building or in a piece of furniture. The biogenic carbon in that wood is stored in the product as long as the product is in service. When the product (or a part of it) is disposed and landfilled, the wood might decompose aerobically or anaerobically (releasing its biogenic carbon atoms back into the atmosphere as either CO2 or methane) over a short or a long period of time, during which there is continuing but diminishing carbon storage in addition to the GHG emissions. A similar analysis can apply to a piece of cotton clothing, or any other product that sequesters and then releases biogenic carbon.
• Concrete in buildings and infrastructure continually absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere through a process called carbonation. At end of its service life, the concrete might be demolished and then either re-used as concrete aggregate or landfilled. Demolition/crushing increases the available surface area and potentially speeds up the carbonation. If we are looking at a 100-year assessment period, then the concrete would have to be credited with a certain amount of carbon sequestration, starting at 0 and ramping up over time. The carbon credit is not all the CO2 that is ultimately absorbed by the concrete in the 100 years, but a smaller amount that actually reflects the timing of all the absorption.
• On a related note, trees planted in a landscape project should not take credit for the total CO2 absorbed over the average growing period of 20 years or so. Any CO2 absorbed in the first year is a lot more valuable than any CO2 absorbed in the 20th year, so the time series of annual CO2 absorption amounts would have to be weighted appropriately based on the year of absorption and then summed together. (Since the current carbon offset market doesn't consider the time dimension in this manner -- as far as I know -- offset purchasers may well be getting considerably less climate-change-mitigation than what they are paying for!)
• Food waste is among the most easily decomposable materials in the waste stream. There is almost always some food waste before cooking and after cooking. Unless it is composted properly, most of the food waste will turn into methane under anaerobic decomposition over time (biogenic carbon released as CO2 very soon after production is climate neutral, but any biogenic carbon that is released as methane is decidedly not neutral unless it is recovered and used as fuel). Once again, the timing is important. We've seen that this effect can sometimes exceed the transportation impact as far as carbon footprint is concerned.

We are currently incorporating a Deep Carbon Footprinting^TM methodology into several new industry-specific carbon footprint tools that are in development. More on this in future posts.

Kumar Venkat