Sustainable Opportunity

COLUMBUS, OH — A new life cycle assessment (LCA) tool developed by the Ohio State University Center for Resilience brings a new dimension to LCA by taking into account ecosystem services like soil erosion, pollination, flood prevention and cropland.

Eco-LCA is a free, online tool that acts as a complement to other LCA tools by showing how different products and materials have different impacts on nature.

"Typically most LCAs tend to focus on emissions and their impact, and they will account for some natural resources, maybe some fossil fuels, maybe some minerals," said Bhavik Bakshi, an Ohio State University professor who helped develop Eco-LCA. "But what our work and what our tool does is it also tries to account for other services that ecosystems offer."

Those services are divided into four areas: Supporting services (soil, pollination, sunlight, hydropotential, geothermal, wind), regulating services (flood protection, disease regulation, carbon sequestration), provisioning services (fuels, ores, water, timber, cropland), and cultural services (spiritual and recreational benefits).

Eco-LCA is best used to compare items, and the online tutorial provides a walkthrough for comparing paper, foam, ceramic and glass cups.

"The tool itself is going to be coarse," Bakshi said, "so it will give you a rough ballpark of how different products might compare to one another."

Eco-LCA isn't aimed at any specific type of user, he said. "It's for people who are interested in understanding the broader environmental implications of products," Bakshi said, listing off possible users as varied as industrial practitioners, consumers, researchers and policymakers.

Eco-LCA was created and is offered for free thanks to funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“It’s exciting that many of these pilot projects -- eight in every 10 -- will revitalize previously built landscapes,” Susan Rieff, executive director of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center said in a statement this week. “We can address the serious environmental challenges the world faces in its existing communities by consciously redeveloping these spaces for ecological health as well as beauty.”

Under the SITES system, locations are rated on a 250-point scale for possible certification at four levels. Points are awarded for elements such as site selection, water, soil, vegetation, materials, human health and well-being, construction and maintenance. Sites attaining 40, 50, 60 or 80 percent of possible points are awarded one-, two-, three- or four-star certification, respectively.

Projects participating in the pilot are in various stages of development; some are still in the design phase, others are near completion. They all have until June 2012 to provide feedback about the benchmarking program to SITES. The data will be used in the certification process for the projects and to revise the assessment system. SITES has a goal of releasing a final version of its rating system and reference guide in 2013.

Details about the projects selected for the pilot are available at www.sustainablesites.org/pilot. More information about the Sustainable Sites Initiative and its rating system is available from "The Sustainable Sites Initiative: Guidelines and Performance Benchmarks 2009." (pdf) and "The Case for Sustainable Landscapes" (pdf).

The US Departments of Energy (DOE) and Agriculture (USDA) jointly announced up to $33 million in funding for research and development of technologies and processes to produce biofuels, bioenergy and high-value biobased productss.

The funding announcement is for several types of projects aimed at creating a diverse group of economically and environmentally sustainable sources of renewable biomass.

Section 9008(e)(3) of the Food Conservation and Energy Act of 2008 provides direction and guidance on the technical areas addressed by the Biomass Research and Development Initiative, (BRDI). The technical areas are:

BRDI requires that each proposed project integrate all three of the technical areas. The intent of requiring integration is to encourage a collaborative problem-solving approach to all studies funded under BRDI, to facilitate formation of consortia, identify and address knowledge gaps, and accelerate the application of science and engineering for the production of sustainable biofuels, bioenergy and biobased products.

Pre-applications are due June 7, 2010, and must be submitted electronically. Applicants who are encouraged to submit full applications wil be notified by July 26, 2010.

The funding opportunity is available online at Grants.gov. 

DOE also released a new video which showcases how cellulosic biofuel technologies can help decrease U.S. dependence on foreign oil, spur growth in the domestic biofuels industry, and provide new revenue opportunities to farmers in many rural areas of the country. The video, shot at a harvesting equipment demonstration in Emmetsburg, Iowa, highlights a new way of producing ethanol from the cellulose fibers in corn cobs, not from the corn kernels. The technology generates a new opportunity for farmers to harvest and sell the cobs that they’d normally leave in the field. To date, DOE has committed over $1 billion to 27 cost-shared biorefinery projects.

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and Green Building Council Italia (GBC Italia) have partnered to advance green building and promote carbon emissions reductions in Italy and worldwide.

At the heart of the partnership, GBC Italia will be the first organization in the European Union to implement the LEED green building rating system. In the GBC Italia version of LEED, local standards and codes will be referenced, Italian-specific units will be incorporated, and alternative compliance paths will be provided as appropriate to account for regional variances and contexts.

The two groups signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that also agrees to sharing of tools, research and information around green building.

“Harnessing the strengths of partnerships around the world allows us to collectively make a difference in our built environment on a scale that otherwise would not be possible,” said Scot Horst, Senior Vice President of LEED, USGBC.

The LEED green building certification system is a leading program for the design, construction and operation of green buildings. Over 32,000 projects are currently participating in the commercial and institutional LEED rating systems, comprising over 9.6 billion square feet of construction space in all 50 U.S. states and 114 countries across the globe.

The green building industry is projected to contribute $554 billion to the US gross domestic product from 2009-2013.

GBC Italia is a member of World GBC, with more than 330 members, all leaders in different positions of Italian and international building sector. More than 70 projects are registered in Italy, and there are around 100 LEED Professional Credential holders.

*SustainableBusiness.com News

OAKLAND, CA — Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell reduced their greenhouse gas emissions last year, though those cuts were mainly from lower production and facility shutdowns.

Both companies released their latest sustainability reports this month, covering GHG emissions, energy efficiency, renewable energy and more.

One of Shell's main strategies is to increase its focus on natural gas, which is says will account for more than half of its energy output in 2012. Natural gas plants cost less than coal plants to build and can emit 50-70 percent fewer emissions than coal plants, depending on how old the plants are.

Shell's direct GHG emissions in 2009 totaled 67 million tonnes of Carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), an 11 percent drop from 2008.

The company explains in its 2009 Sustainability Report that the lower level is mainly due to reduced activity at refineries and chemical plants, and forced production shutdowns in Nigeria, where violence and oil theft caused Shell to suspend some production while it repairs damage. In the future, though, emissions may rise as other projects are completed and starts producing.

Energy efficiency projects were a lesser cause of emissions reduction as some efficiency gains were balanced out by emissions increases elsewhere. Shell's upstream business increased its energy efficiency, which was offset by the increased energy it needed to use when working in ageing fields and getting to harder-to-reach resources. The company also increased efficiency at its Canadian oil sands operations, but those too were offset by its trucks using more diesel to cover longer distances between mining areas and the processing plant than in 2008. 

Over the past decade, "sustainability" has become a popular corporate buzzword with a nebulous definition. To most people it connotes an abstract sense of do-gooding that centers on a company's effects on society and the environment. A Toronto media company called Corporate Knights has tried to make the idea clear and measurable by collecting data on 3,000 global public companies and evaluating them according to 11 different metrics. Today, as a result of that research, it published its first-ever ranking of the world's 100 most sustainable companies.

Corporate Knights' editor-in-chief Toby Heaps says that to be considered sustainable, companies must "squeeze four times more wealth out of every resource they use." Heaps announced the list at Davos, where his company is hosting a dinner for the financier George Soros.

Corporate Knights worked with a research firm to winnow down its list of publicly traded companies from 3,000 to 300, based on financial performance and other criteria. Then the Corporate Knights research group worked with two different asset management firms to evaluate those 300 companies based on 10 environmental, social and governance performance metrics, including energy productivity, waste productivity and CEO-to-average-worker pay ratio. An 11th indicator was added for "transparency."

Corporate Knights relied on the companies to give it accurate data. When a company wouldn't provide information for one of the 10 metrics, Corporate Knights assigned it a null score for that category and then penalized it with an unfavorable transparency score.

Heaps says he believes that consumers and investors will be less jaded about sustainability if companies are more transparent. "One of the things that have held back the sustainability movement on Wall Street is that on many of these issues, companies operate in a black box," he says. "You need to have transparency if you want people to take you seriously. Then you can get beyond platitudes and discuss issues that people really care about."

1. General Electric

2. Pacific Gas and Electric

3. TNT NV

4. Hennes & Mauritz

5. Nokia

6. Siemens 

7. Unilever 

10. Geberit.