By Zachary Shahan •
January 27, 2010
Nike has been one green company lately — in the last year, it has pushed for a strong clean energy and climate bill in Congress on its own and in concert with others and it has helped to reduce deforestation of the Amazon. Now, Nike has also just reported that it reduced its own carbon footprint last year while still growing economically. In fact, it has tremendously reduced greenhouse gas pollution over the last decade and 2009 just kept the ball rolling.
On top of all of that, Nike announced today that along with nine other organizations — Yahoo!, Best Buy, Creative Commons, IDEO, Mountain Equipment Co-op, nGenera, Outdoor Industry Association, salesforce.com, and 2degrees — Nike will “collaborate and share intellectual property (IP) which can lead to new sustainability business models and innovation.” This “Web-based marketplace” — GreenXchange (GX) — was announced at a CEO breakfast at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this morning.
If this all has you feeling warm inside, read on.
By Kelli Peterson •
December 15, 2009
Recognizing that the process of renting equipment is both painful to customers and highly inefficient to business, Rentcycle developed a model that creates efficiencies through online scheduling, tracking and inventory management.
By Steve Savage •
November 14, 2009
Ok, I didn’t actually clear this challenge with the Nobel Committee, but I think we could convince them. Nobels were awarded early in the 20th century when German scientists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch made the sequential advances that made it possible to make synthetic nitrogen fertilizer from the nitrogen gas that makes up ~80% of the atmosphere. Without their contributions we could not have improved the lives of billions of people, and we could never have fed the increase in world population that has occurred since their work. Of course that comes with the environmental issues I’ve been discussing in my previous posts. I’m not forgetting that there are changes that need to be made in the way we farm to make nitrogen use more efficient and to prevent water pollution issues.
The Carbon Footprint of Fertilizer Issue
The other thing that would be good to address is the “carbon footprint” of running Haber-Bosch. For every pound of ammonia that is synthesized, about 3.7 pounds of carbon dioxide is generated (mainly through the use of natural gas to generate hydrogen). That means to fertilize an acre of corn at 120 pounds of nitrogen, there are carbon dioxide emissions that are the equivalent of ~20 gallons of diesel. That works out to 1.59 billion gallon equivalents for just the US corn crop - some serious carbon emissions (I’ve already posted about why Organic fertilizers are not the solution here).
By Steve Savage •
October 18, 2009
Around 1300 c.e. the Yao and Zhuang people of Guangdong Province in Southern China faced a serious problem. In the Longsheng area there was a growing population, but their mountainous surroundings gave them very little land that could be used for farming. They needed more food and so they turned to technology for the solution. What they did was to terrace their mountainsides even up to slopes of 45%. I’m sure that the method was perfected over the 400 years of building. What they were able to do is still an impressive example of civil engineering, even today. Using stones and mud they built terrace walls that stand firm even with the torrential downpours that are common in the area. They used bamboo piping to distribute water to each paddy - some so narrow that they only have room for two rows of rice. This production system has remained productive for centuries when many other contemporary farming societies around the world simply depleted one area and moved on to the next. These terraces are called Longji, or the ”Dragon’s Spine” and they now extend over 66 square kilometers. They are both beautiful and inspiring.
By Nick Chambers •
September 18, 2009
Welcome to another episode of “If college students can do it, why can’t the rest of the world figure it out too?”
An enterprising and organized group of undergraduate and graduate students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have fitted an old sail boat with a spiffy set of hydrogen fuel cells and plan to run the boat from Manhattan to upstate New York later this month in a “green power” tour of sorts.
I love it when college students do this kind of stuff. Seriously. If I could have stayed in college forever, I would have. Believe me, I tried.
By Leah Edwards •
September 2, 2009
In yesterday’s Disruptive Innovation panel at SoCap09 “Three Successful Approaches to Scaling Impact”, Kevin Jones moderated a panel of three very different but equally disruptive business models. Instead of establishing a nonprofit organization to increase computer access around the world, founder Mark Beckford explained that NComputing is a for-profit company leveraging existing distributing channels and repair services in developing countries. Their hardware and software solution, which they call “the $70 PC”, can actually yield more margin and profit for distributors than more expensive computers with high-cost distribution networks.
NComputing is also using a technical solution to green PC use. With distributed computing, nComputing systems draw less than five watts, using 90% less energy than a typical PC, and can be run by solar power or a battery.
Sungeeta Chowdry of the Acumen Fund spoke about the Ripple Effect Project, their collaboration with IDEO (represented by Sally Madsen) to create solutions for customer-centered, sustainable and affordable delivery of water.
They brought together twenty organizations (both for-profit and nonprofit) on the ground in India and East Africa, in addition to the nonprofit Gates foundation, the private company IDEO and the Acumen social venture fund, for a complex cross-sector collaboration. IDEO led a human-centered design process, which means rapid prototyping, speaking to potential users immediately, iterating while continuing to listen, and coming up with a fairly quick solution. The resulting projects are commercial water sales operations, with some unusual aspects such as government ownership of the land and/or equipment in some places.
So why is water sales a more effective and scalable solution than donated aid? Some of the answers are compliance and aligning incentives. Madsen and Chowdry explained that people aren’t always able to make the best health decisions. Using a standard business practice of customer segmentation, IDEO put together a set of behavior profiles, so on-the-ground organizations could talk about more than health, such as by emphasizing the status of buying clean water or following government direction.
By mcmilker •
August 14, 2009
I’ve heard this conversation a number of times at the small-to-medium sized enterprises (SME) I work with:
Green Vendor: “So Mr. CEO, how many of my carbon neutral, biodegradable, BPA-free whoozamacallits would you like to purchase?”
By Yael Borofsky •
August 10, 2009
After a White House announcement last April regarding the provision of $777 million to fund 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRC’s) advancing innovation in clean energy technology, the Department of Energy (DOE) recognized the completion of the funding process last Thursday. The investment represents a much-needed show of governmental support for the research and development of the numerous energy breakthroughs necessary to transition the U.S from dirty to clean energy.
Among the list of 46, 31 centers are affiliated with universities, twelve are DOE national laboratories, two are non-profit organizations, and one is a corporate research laboratory. In total, the DOE has awarded $377 million in funding this year, with $277 million coming from the economic stimulus package (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act -ARRA) and the additional $100 million provided by the DOE’s FY2009 budget.
By Yael Borofsky •
August 3, 2009
Last Wednesday, the Senate passed the Energy and Water Appropriations Bill (H.R. 3183), appropriating $34.3 billion in energy spending for FY2010. Although the bill made good on Obama’s campaign promise to shut down Nevada’s Yucca Mountain nuclear waste facility and funds numerous Army Corps of Engineers’ water initiatives, the bill is shockingly silent with regard to Obama’s energy education program RE-ENERGYSE.
A recent article by TIME’s Bryan Walsh also calls attention to Congress’s stinginess with Obama’s Energy Secretary, Steven Chu’s proposed “energy innovation hubs,” to which the House appropriated $35 million of $280 million he suggested. This allotment is enough to pay for one hub, not the eight R&D centers called for in Chu’s proposal.
