Designtex

Trash to Bricks

My last post on the UN climate talks was somewhat negative (I may have even used the word "dire" twice in a few short lines). Anyone concerned with climate change will understand my intermittent despair when reading yet another headline. (And I think Carol was onto something when she sent me the article Do Environmentalists Need Shrinks? from Grist last week.) Thankfully we can always look to positive developments, and so I think a brief profile of an inspiring project is in order this week. 

The Wewoka Biogas Project is a renewable energy effort that Designtex has supported this year through our partner NativeEnergy. This innovative “fenceline” project establishes a landfill gas-to-energy system in rural Oklahoma. The Commercial Brick Corporation has been producing bricks in Wewoka since 1925. Traditionally relying on expensive natural gas for fuel, owner Bob Hartsock realized that the highly potent greenhouse gas methane being released from his neighbor, the landfill next door, could be captured and used to power his kilns. Brilliant! NativeEnergy’s innovative Help Build^TM carbon offsets allowed Designtex, among other companies, to enable the construction of this community-based project, which in turn allowed Commercial Brick Corporation (the largest employer in this region) to remain in business while operating more sustainably.

The Wewoka Biogas Project will be verified to the Verified Carbon Standard to show that approximately 25,000-30,000 tons of CO2 equivalents per year will be prevented from being released to the atmosphere.  When it becomes operational in 2011, the project will connect Designtex to real bricks (if not mortar) that will be used to build homes and businesses throughout the United States.

Go It Alone? Or Work Together?

Following up on my recent post, I was curious to hear what came out of the recent United Nations meeting in Bonn, Germany that just rounded up last Friday. The talks, with delegates from 183 countries, were held in preparation for the Climate Summit set for November 28 this year in Durban (aka COP17). Apparently nothing much came out of the meeting except deadlock.

So... still no resolution from the richer nations who pledged money at previous summits to the Green Climate Fund, intended help poorer countries adapt to climate change along with the rich. They blew past the May 1st financing deadline without looking back.  (Although there has been $16 billion submitted to the fund, poorer nations say much of that is from existing programs and not new, as promised at COP16).  I guess thats what happens when the pledges are non-binding.

Even more dire than the financing, developing countries asserted that rich nations were refusing any discussion of extending their greenhouse gas reduction committments, including blocking discussion of the future of the Kyoto Protocol (due to expire at the end of 2012). Jorge Argüello, leader of a 131-nation group of developing countries, stated, "the Kyoto Protocol is the priority. Envoys [...] need to agree on a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol in Durban." In fact, Japan, Canada, and Australia have already said they will not commit to a second period under Kyoto (and of course the US has never committed). Even those that may commit want non-binding "political commitments," rather than binding emissions reductions requirements.  NGOs like Climate Justice Now are already gearing up for the expected Kyoto-killing outcome of the Durban Summit later this year. 

Meanwhile, the highest atmospheric levels of CO2 ever recorded hit 394.35 ppm in May of this year. No money put forth to make the necessary adaptations needed in the face of climate change, and no commitments made to further reduce the GHGs that contribute to climate change. Dire indeed.

Personally I think we need binding international treaties, AND numerous individual actions. We need all we can get. And we need industrialized countries (responsible for the largest chunk of GHG emissions and in posession of the needed technology) to lead the way. The world can't wait. We've entered the Age of the Anthropocene, and for better or worse our actions now define the future of the planet.

 
Earth and Moon as seen from Messenger. credit: NASA.

The Zen of Standards Development

 

 
Last week at NeoCon, the commercial furnishing industry's annual trade show in Chicago,  I went to hear a seminar on the sustainability standard for furniture, called BIFMA e3.  Two veterans who had seen that standard to market were describing the success of their rating system, evidenced by over 1000 products now certified under the level^R eco-label.  Success, one of the experts reminded us, only comes after the lengthy standards development process which, he said, might be best described as "a cross between a trip to the dentist and watching paint dry".

Having worked for 7 years on the development of a sustainability standard for textiles, I wondered why he was leaving out the part about nailing jello to the wall -- but everything feels do-able once your standard is published .  In fact, now  that the sustainability standard for contract textiles, NSF/ANSI 336 has been published as an American National Standards Institute assessment and adopted by the Association for Contract Textiles, I think I can speak for my fellow NSF 336 Joint Committee members and say any weariness we felt in the process has been replaced with something I'd call a cross between satisfaction and optimism.  Satisfaction that the consensus process worked, though there were some tightly held differences of opinion among the stakeholders from academia, public health, government, industry, and end users.  And optimism, because it seems to me, while ACT's vote to adopt was just a little over two weeks ago, that interest in employing product sustainability standards is on the rise from some very important camps. 

The first would be the USGBC, which announced last week that it was introducing Pilot Credit 43 to "increase the use of products and materials with life cycles, ingredients, and attributes understood and optimized to improve overall environmental, economic and social performance" on LEED projects.  Pilot Credit 43 recognizes a set of standards it refers to as ISO Type I and III Declarations, which includes the multi-attribute ANSI sustainability standards for furniture and textiles.  While it is too early to say which LEED projects now in work will take advantage of Pilot Credit 43 in their strategies for garnering points, this credit has the potential to focus project budgets on products that have been 3rd party certified to the standards the USGBC has vetted.  Another important camp rallying behind these same type of standards would be the Government Services Administration, where an emphasis on environmental preferable purchasing seems to be aligning with sustainability standards that can provide the kind of verification needed to make consistent decisions across a variety of furnishings.  One of the satisfying things about the NSF/ANSI 336 being published is that it now sits (if a pdf can be said to sit) alongside sustainability standards for not just furniture, but carpet, resilient flooring, and wall covering for commercial interiors.

So after a deep breath, I think those of us who went to the dentist and watched the paint, (not to mention the hammering through slippery stuff) are ready to get to work again - developing tools to help streamline data collection, working out interpretations that may be needed in some of the credit language, and reviewing issue papers meant to inform version 2.0 of the standard.  And just generally trying to help all users of the standard learn its language and appreciate its value.  Because while the interest of the USGBC and GSA is flattering, the goal is still to see the standard embraced by textile manufacturers and coveted by distributors as a seal of distinction on products that have earned it.

77 bottles of beer on the wall

 
So 8 green-collar workers file into a windowless conference room, and the LCA instructor says, “Why the linear process?” And if you can’t imagine what's funny about that, sign yourself up for two days of Life Cycle Assessment training with EarthShift, in lovely downtown Portsmouth NH. That's exactly what Deidre and I did last week, and while we now know enough about LCA to be dangerous, we are a lot smarter about an intriguing software program called SimaPro, which is used to guide an LCA study.

 Our top-notch instructor took us through a brief history of Life Cycle Assessment, which was originally called REPA (Resource and Energy Process Assessment) when Coca Cola began using it to make bottling decisions in the 1960s.  LCA, which has only become an internationally recognized methodology for analyzing environmental impacts over the last two decades, has mainly been fostered by academia.  Now you may be thinking that Deidre, and I (along with our fellow students from the worlds of engineering, certifying, furniture and carpet) had made our way to Portsmouth because we are mostly likely geeky types drawn to anything without pictures and graphics, but, really, I think we were there, and EarthShift exists, because LCA has become, well, fashionable…or maybe popular. All right, fine - a competitive business tool. 

But back to the 77 bottles of beer.  Once we had a slippery grasp on what LCA could do, we got down to our SimaPro exercise, which was an LCA study on a bottle of beer, from cradle to recycling/landfill.  Suffice it to say, we now know our inputs from our outputs when it comes to an 8oz functional unit of lager; we can process map from barley to bottling like nobody’s business; and don't even talk to us about the impacts of green vs. brown glass, because we've done that sensitivity study and Rolling Rock in a brown glass would still be Rolling Rock, as far as the planet is concerned.  Speaking of Rolling Rock, SimaPro seems to have borrowed a page out of the Old Latrobe marketing handbook with its never more, never less than 77 files, no matter how many bottles of beer you model. (Nothing in Snopes about this just yet.)

So what will LCA as a methodology tell us about the impacts of textiles, furniture, carpet, and beverages?  Having tried varying our beer (organic vs. conventional grains, green vs. brown bottles, US vs.EU grid electricity) we learned that LCA worked best with tight goals and actual measurements, the kinds of data to be had within a manufacturing context. Several of us in the room seemed happier with the concept of Consequential LCA – a study focused on what would you change about your beer once you knew where the heaviest impacts were.  Out there on the supermarket shelf, where data becomes more generalized, LCA might convince you to head home with seventy-seven O’Doul’s, instead of the one Guiness you really wanted, and maybe even needed, after all that circular, not linear, analysis.*

*A good Consequentially LCA study is a circular process that tries out various scenarios and goes back to see how that alters the product's impacts.  And yes I know, I know - if you have to explain the punchline...!

Sustainable Brands 2011: Growth, wellbeing, and humans

While gamification and play were the themes of Sustainable Brands 2011 last week in CA, I felt the more compelling discussions were those around the human side of business, limits to growth and the no-longer-a-threat, already-crisis-level of climate change that we are now facing.  I guess I’m not in the mood to play when things are looking so ominous for the planet and the beings who live on it.

The most interesting talk I heard at the conference was by Jules Peck, who was beamed in from the UK.  He states that we’ve been using up the planet’s natural capital like there’s no tomorrow and we are now in “overshoot” mode.  And sadly, while using up those resources, we haven’t been getting any happier doing so, something he terms “the flatlining of wellbeing.”  Peck draws on the work of the Happy Planet Index, which shows (generally) that having and using up a lot of material resources does not necessarily guarantee happiness. Quoting Tim Jackson, Peck reminds us that "We spend money we don't have, on things we don't need, to make impressions that don't last, on people we don't care about."  Instead, Peck proposes an update to capitalism with a model of the flourishing enterprise, which asks businesses to look at ways to go beyond simple profit, and to even push the CSR triple-bottom-line principle of people, planet, profit, towards looking at the underlying “wellbeing” of our products and services.

On the human side of business… From the traditional mantra of “manage what you can measure,” Chip Conley gives us “measure what is meaningful.” Chip posits that the intangibles that previously seemed impossible to measure are now approachable for quantification (ie, see the Happy Planet Index mentioned above).  In a similar vein to Peck, Conley believes we should be trying to quantify and understand what makes us happy as humans, and focus our efforts there. He is looking to guide business leaders to the kind of flourishing enterprise that Jules Peck envisions. Conley states that a CEO has the potential to be just a "cheap emotions officer," while a true leader is an emotional thermostat for the business, gauging and reflecting what will make all stakeholders of the business thrive. Conley believes the often forgotten asset in business is the human.

After his morning talk, Chip Conley appeared onstage again in conversation later in the evening with a true sustainable leader, Jeffrey Hollender.  Hollender touchingly revealed some regrets about the end of his 23-year tenure at Seventh Generation, a company he helped found and guide to the top notch of the “sustainable brands” hierarchy. He went on to describe the pressing social needs that he believes businesses of the 21^st century must address.  Hollender looks towards a shift, at least in the United States, from the waning labor movement to more worker ownership and cooperative business models. He believes strongly that microenterprise has been maligned in the past few years, but is in fact sorely needed to get more small businesses up and running. In terms of products, Hollender states that we have “fundamentally confused ‘less bad’ with ‘good.’ … We live in a world where we celebrate ‘less bad.’”  He is still looking for a truly sustainable brand, he brashly stated at the Sustainable Brands conference. 

Kudos to these three gentleman, who took the conversation to a more serious level than I had anticipated.

The “Global” in Global Warming

An interesting thing is happening in a small country in the Pacific Ocean. Micronesia, an island nation that is already suffering from the effects of global warming, has decided to try to force the issue of global responsibility for climate change. The nation has lodged a legal challenge against the Czech government to stop the expansion of a coal-fired power station some 7,000 miles away. The proposed expansion would create a coal plant that emits forty times more carbon dioxide annually than the entire Micronesian population.  

 

Micronesia, along with Greenpeace, is asking the Czech government to engage in a Transboundary Environmental Impact Assessment, a type of study that is normally requested of neighboring countries. Micronesia and the Czech Republic are not even on the same continent, much less in the same hemisphere. And yet the issue the Pacific nation hopes to drive home is to point out that its 600 islands, which lie just above sea level, will surely be impacted by any activities that cause a rise in ocean levels, despite where those activities originate. The legal action is asserting that the Czech expansion project could have grave consequences for Micronesia’s future.

 

Coincidentally this legal challenge to the industrialized west is making headlines at the same moment that developed countries have failed to meet the United Nation’s May 1 deadline for funding to developing countries around the issue of – yes – climate change. The financial pledges by industrialized nations were made at the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, and reiterated again in the December 2010 meeting in Cancun.  The May 1 2011 deadline was supposed to be the start date for developing countries to honor those commitments (of providing $30 billion in 2010-2012, an up to $100 billion by 2020). The funds are meant to help the developing world slash their carbon emissions, as well as grapple with the effects of climate change that are already occurring.  Developed nations are generally considered to have contributed the most to global warming through their industrial activities, while benefitting the most from those activities. Poorer nations expect help from industrialized nations in coping with global warming’s consequences.

 

As the impacts of climate change become more apparent, we are ever reminded that the problem is global, and needs a global solution. The problem will not be solved by any one nation or group of nations, but by forging global commitments from all the “stakeholders” – and for all the “stakeholders” – on this planet.

Designtex Offers New CEU: Global Warming and Carbon Footprint Reduction

I’m excited to say that Designtex now offers a new Continuing Education Course (CEU) entitled Global Warming and Carbon Footprint Reduction. Although we are by no means the top experts on this topic, after working on our company’s footprint and emissions for the past several years (with our excellent partner NativeEnergy), I had a lot of information that seemed worth sharing. This course examines the impact of climate change on human and environmental health. Attendees will learn the scopes and boundaries for defining a carbon footprint and business efforts to mitigate climate change will be discussed. The difference between RECs and carbon offsets is demonstrated, as well as the criteria for validating such offset projects. The course is IDCEC-approved for 0.1 CEU hours and is categorized for Health and Safety credits. GBCI and AIA accreditation are forthcoming.

As always, those interested in scheduling a presentation should contact their local sales representatives.