Friday 18 October 2013

Disruptive dozen technologies for the future



To help cut through the hype that surrounds the arrival of almost all new technologies, the McKinsey Global Institute examined more than 100 rapidly evolving technologies and identified 12 that are almost certain to disturb the status quo in the coming years. The MGI estimates that the combined annual economic impact of this "disruptive dozen" – which span information technology, machinery and vehicles, energy, bioscience, and materials – will reach $14-33 trillion by 2025. Much of this value – in many cases, a significant majority – is likely to accrue to consumers.

Examples of the 12 disruptive technologies include:

Advanced robotics - that is, increasingly capable robots or robotic tools, with enhanced "senses," dexterity, and intelligence - can take on tasks once thought too delicate or uneconomical to automate. These technologies can also generate significant societal benefits, including robotic surgical systems that make procedures less invasive, as well as robotic prosthetics and "exoskeletons" that restore functions of amputees and the elderly.

Next-generation genomics marries the science used for imaging nucleotide base pairs (the units that make up DNA) with rapidly advancing computational and analytic capabilities. As our understanding of the genomic makeup of humans increases, so does the ability to manipulate genes and improve health diagnostics and treatments. Next-generation genomics will offer similar advances in our understanding of plants and animals, potentially creating opportunities to improve the performance of agriculture and to create high-value substances- for instance, ethanol and biodiesel- from ordinary organisms, such as E. coli bacteria.

Energy-storage devices or physical systems store energy for later use. These technologies, such as lithium-ion batteries and fuel cells, already power electric and hybrid vehicles, along with billions of portable consumer electronics. Over the coming decade, advancing energy-storage technology could make electric vehicles cost competitive, bring electricity to remote areas of developing countries, and improve the efficiency of the utility grid.

Source: McKinsey & C

Thursday 17 October 2013

RobecoSAM: Countries most likely to thrive in the future



A new report from investment advisors RobecoSAM does, and the results are quite different from the standard narrative. The report takes into account 17 factors, ultimately finding that Sweden is the most sustainable country on Earth--meaning it's best equipped for the future. And the least? That would be Nigeria, in 59th place, despite all that oil.

The factors include environmental (which accounts for 15% of scores, and includes things like renewable energy and emissions), social (25%; e.g. life expectancy, and level of worker unrest), and governance (60%; e.g. corruption and inequality). The aim: to provide a comprehensive picture of a "country's ability to safeguard the needs of its future generations."

Australia (which does better for governance than environmental factors), Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, and the U.K. come next. The U.S. is in ninth place, scoring solidly in most categories, though lower relatively on the environment.

Sweden scores well across most of the criteria, including "use of renewable energy sources and CO2 emissions," on factors like "labor participation, education, and income inequality," and governance. Above, you can see how it lines up against Russia, which comes in 55th, just above Indonesia, Venezuela, Egypt, and Nigeria. As you might expect, the biggest differences between those countries are in things like the quality of institutions and "political risk."


Source: Fast Company and RobecoSAM

Wednesday 18 September 2013

Things.info - An online home for everything?


Imagine something like Google Maps, but instead of streets, buildings, rivers and mountains are things – objects made and used by humans. This is the essence of Things.info – to create a web platform, where you can learn about the origin, usage and recycling of man-made objects.

It's also meant to be personal – you can create a catalog of your things, make some of them public, that you want to give away, lend out or sell. If you want to get rid of something, for example an old fridge, books etc, you can find the nearest places in your neighbourhood where these items can be recycled. Or a company interested in collecting old fridges will contact you and take it away for no cost.



We all buy things – from everyday food to mobiles, cars and furniture. More often than not we are interested in some aspect of the history of this unique thing we are considering buying. It could be the composition, for instance whether a food product contains allergens, or it could be the place of origin or quality or impact on nature and the people who produced it. It could be also the ownership history, especially in the case of more expensive devices like electronics and cars.

Every  thing ever produced has potentially a unique ID in the Things.info database. This enables anyone to drill down to the details of its production history, follow its ownership trail and finally to help achieve a circular economy, where all the waste goes back into production, thus achieving a zero waste world economy.

Things.info is inviting volunteers (email team@things.info) and crowdfunding (you can "adopt a thing").

Full disclosure: Wayne Visser is on the Things.info Advisory Board.

Friday 13 September 2013

Robeco SAM: Country Sustainability Rankings



Robeco and RobecoSAM have worked together to develop a comprehensive and systematic ESG ranking framework for countries, designed to complement sovereign bond ratings developed by traditional rating agencies. By focusing on selected ESG factors such as aging, competitiveness and environmental risks – which are long term in nature – and taking into account a country's position in the economic cycle, the country rankings offer a view into a country's strengths and weaknesses that are not typically covered by rating agencies.


Used in combination, standard sovereign bond ratings and RobecoSAM's country ESG rankings can be a powerful tool to enhance risk analysis for government bonds, enabling investors to make better-informed investment decisions. Country level ESG rankings also offer an additional perspective on the stability of the environments in which companies operate and could therefore be incorporated as an additional tool used in company analysis.


Source: RobecoSAM

Thursday 12 September 2013

Galapagos biodiversity goes online with Google Street View



This week marks the 178th anniversary of Darwin's discovery of the Galapagos Islands. This volcanic archipelago is one of the most biodiverse and unique places on the planet, with species that have remarkably adapted to their environment. Through observing the animals, Darwin made key insights that informed his theory of evolution.


In partnership with the Directorate of the Galapagos National Park and Charles Darwin Foundation, Google is launching the 360-degree images from the Galapagos Islands that they collected in May with the Street View Trekker. Now, you can visit the islands from anywhere you may be, and see many of the animals that Darwin experienced on his historic and groundbreaking journey in 1835.

Friday 6 September 2013

SpaceX demonstrates the future of design


SpaceX is exploring methods for engineers to accelerate their workflow by designing more directly in 3D. They describe their innovation as follows:

"We are integrating breakthroughs in sensor and visualization technologies to view and modify designs more naturally and efficiently than we could using purely 2D tools. We are just beginning, but eventually hope to build the fastest route between the idea of a rocket and the reality of the factory floor." Here's a demo by SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk:



SpaceX gives special thanks to Leap Motion, Siemens and Oculus VR, as well as NVIDIA, Projection Design, Provision, and to everyone enabling and challenging the world to interact with technology in exciting new ways.

Source: SpaceX

Friday 16 August 2013

Innocent Drinks: Creating shared value in Ethiopia


Between 2006 and 2009  iDE UK and drinks company Innocent helped set up over 250 apple farms in Ethiopia - providing small family run farms with additional income, improving their livelihoods and making apples readily available for all. iDE UK provided access to low cost irrigation systems to farmers, set them up with robust seedlings and trained them in apple husbandry (looking after the trees, growing the best fruit and so on).
 
This project proved what iDE already knew - that poor Ethiopian smallholder farmers can use innovative irrigation technologies to grow high value crops and earn a good living. In Addis the price fetched for apples is incredible – as apples are often hard to come by in Ethiopia - the dry conditions and limited water supply mean that not many people grow them. As a result of this success iDE has expanded to their work to support over 60,000 farming households (360,000 people) today.

Thursday 15 August 2013

Unilever: Crowdsoucing sustainable products for the future



Unilever is turning to crowdsourcing in its bid to help develop the world's first commercially viable shower of the future that can operate with a sustainable level of water use. In-home use is responsible for a significant proportion of the carbon footprint of shower products and this latest initiative is designed to help Unilever take increased responsibility for the way in which its brands are consumed.

Unilever feels that the global nature of crowdsourcing has the potential to deliver a coherent solution to a complex challenge and will facilitate the initiative through its open creativity platform. The move comes after the announcement of a partnership between Unilever and co-creation community eYeka to further tap into this platform across Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Russia and South Africa. Through the partnership, eYeka's online community of over 250,000 creators will have the chance to develop ideas for a number of familiar Unilever brands. 

Source: edieWater

Wednesday 14 August 2013

Turning marker pens into clean energy



JBI, Inc., a clean energy company that recycles waste plastic into liquid fuels, has announced it is partnering with Crayola on its "Colorcycle" program, which converts markers into clean energy. JBI, Inc. has a proprietary process for converting waste plastics into ultra-clean, ultra-low sulphur in-spec fuels. The emissions from its P2O process are less than what a natural gas furnace of the same size would produce.

The program will be conducted throughout the United States in participating K-12 schools and encourages students to responsibly dispose of used Crayola markers through an in-school collection process. Markers will be sent to JBI, where they will be used as feedstock to produce diesel and other liquid fuels using JBI's Plastic2Oil® ("P2O") process.

One year of Google searching equals one mile of car driving


Thursday 18 July 2013

Nanotechnology: The promise of water desalination for the masses


By creating a small electrical field that removes salts from seawater, chemists at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Marburg in Germany have introduced a new method for the desalination of seawater that consumes less energy and is dramatically simpler than conventional techniques. The new method requires so little energy that it can run on a store-bought battery. The process evades the problems confronting current desalination methods by eliminating the need for a membrane and by separating salt from water at a microscale.

"The availability of water for drinking and crop irrigation is one of the most basic requirements for maintaining and improving human health," said Richard Crooks, the Robert A. Welch Chair in Chemistry in the College of Natural Sciences. "Seawater desalination is one way to address this need, but most current methods for desalinating water rely on expensive and easily contaminated membranes. The membrane-free method we've developed still needs to be refined and scaled up, but if we can succeed at that, then one day it might be possible to provide fresh water on a massive scale using a simple, even portable, system."

This new method holds particular promise for the water-stressed areas in which about a third of the planet's inhabitants live. Many of these regions have access to abundant seawater but not to the energy infrastructure or money necessary to desalt water using conventional technology. As a result, millions of deaths per year in these regions are attributed to water-related causes. "People are dying because of a lack of freshwater," said Tony Frudakis, founder and CEO of Okeanos Technologies. "And they'll continue to do so until there is some kind of breakthrough, and that is what we are hoping our technology will represent."

Wednesday 17 July 2013

Better Life Index: In search of the good life?


The OECD's Better Life Index is a way to look at what life is actually like for people by measuring 11 key aspects of life – not just income and jobs but their housing, environment, social network, work-life balance, personal security, education, health, whether they feel part of the democratic process and their level of satisfaction with life in general. Everyone starts out with the same 11 elements, but can rank them according to personal preference to see how their country shapes up in terms of what matters to them. 


The Index currently profiles the 34 OECD member countries as well as key partners 
Brazil and Russia across the 11 topics of well-being, and will eventually include other key OECD partner countries (China, India, Indonesia and South Africa), representing the world's major economies. Of course there are also individual differences – while civic engagement is among the lower priorities for users everywhere, those in Mexico, Chile and Spain rank it higher than people in most other countries. Sense of community matters a lot to users in France, while housing is of particular concern to those in Russia, judging by their BLI choices.


The Index also lets you see how life compares for men and women, and for those at the top and bottom of the social and economic ladder. There is little difference in what is important in life to women and men, although women are more concerned about community, health and work-life balance, while men place more importance than women on income when it comes to defining what makes for a better life. Perhaps not surprisingly, health tends to matter more to people as they get older, while concerns about work-life balance fade.


Some of the results have been quite surprising. Yes we are all different but overall, the same three elements turn out to be most important for all of us, regardless of where we live in the world. Health, education and life satisfaction consistently come out as more important across the more than 180 countries where people have created an Index. Life Satisfaction has been the topic ranked as most important for a better life by users since the BLI was launched in 2011, followed by health and education. This still holds true today, when the BLI has had 2.2 million visitors, from all over the world – some 196 countries – so the coverage is truly global.

VIDEO

Tuesday 16 July 2013

Fairphone: Buy a phone, start a movement


Electronics waste accounts for about 70% of toxic waste in landfills. More than 90% of the waste in a mobile's life cycle is discarded raw material. According to Nokia, for every tonne of final waste product (discarded phones), 21 tonnes of waste are created during manufacture and 189 tonnes during raw materials extraction and processing. During its lifetime (less than 2 years) a mobile phone has an average energy consumption of 260 megajoules (MJ) – 180 MJ for the manufacturing and 80 MJ for the usage phase. 260 MJ is enough to power 1,200 60 watt light bulbs for one hour. Multiply that by 35, which is the number of phones the average consumer will purchase during their lifetime.


Human rights concerns about the mining of critical materials for mobiles centre on tantalum, tin, tungsten and gold – collectively known as 3TG. The DRC and neighbouring countries provide 17% of global tantalum production, 4% of global tin production, 3% of global tungsten production, and 2% of global gold supply. Pressure is growing on global electronics companies to tighten their supply chains to avoid such abuses. A 2010 docu-drama Blood in the Mobile triggered widespread bad publicity about the mining of the mineral cassiterite, used in tin production for mobile phones, in the DRC. The filmmakers alleged child labour, prostitution of under age girls and poor working conditions in the mines, and claimed that revenue from the minerals was financing the war in the region.


Fairphone is a social enterprise started in 2010 to address many of these concerns about the social and environmental impacts of mobile phones. Fairphone aimed at raising awareness about conflict minerals in electronics and the wars that the sourcing of these minerals is fueling in the DR Congo. The campaign and research into the complex supply chain ran for 3 years. In 2013, they established the social enterprise with the aim of designing, creating and producing their first smartphone and taking the next crucial step in uncovering the story behind the sourcing, production, distribution and recycling of electronics.


The Fairphone is built around 5 principles:
  • Made with care -  transparent, long-term relationships with suppliers to ensure good working conditions and safe recycling practices
  • Smart Design - design that considers its full life cycle and gives you complete control over how use and configure it
  • Clear Deals - transparent price breakdown, ensuring buyers understand what their purchase is supporting
  • Lasting Value - extending the useful life of the phone and promoting e-waste recycling options
  • Precious materials - ensuring the sourcing of conflict-free minerals from the DRC, which don't fund illegal armed forces
Production has been crowdfunded through pre-orders, which allow them to make a first production run of 20,000 phones, 56% of which have already been pre-sold. For more information - or to join the movement - watch the video below or go to http://www.fairphone.com/.

Friday 12 July 2013

Footprint tool: New Nike materials impacts app for designers


Over 16,000 materials are used in Nike's products each year. A pair of shoes alone can use more than 30 materials. In line with the company's commitment to "Considered Design" principles, last year, the company made its dataset of sustainable materials--developed over an eight-year period--available online for the public to use. The big reveal was part of the company's Open Challenge for Sustainable Materials, which asked visitors to "select materials beautifully, simply, and accurately, based on sustainability."

FastCompany reports that this month, Nike made that challenge just a little bit easier with the Nike Making app, now available through iTunes. The app is essentially a portable version of the database that has been available for a little over a year. Designers can look at 22 product materials--including silk, down, cotton, and polypropylene fabric--and find out their environmental impacts in four categories: waste, water use, energy, and chemistry. Performance and aesthetics are also taken into account.

Wednesday 10 July 2013

US private investors place $100 billion bet on renewables


Since 2004, the private sector has invested more than $300 billion in the U.S. renewable energy market, according to "Strategies to Scale-Up U.S. Renewable Energy Investment," a report by the American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE), California Clean Energy Fund (CalCEF), and Climate Policy Initiative released at the Renewable Energy Finance Forum-Wall Street. The groups highlighted the role of policy at the state, federal, and regulatory level in unlocking private capital in the industry during the past decade. 
 
Further, the paper finds that state policies such as Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) have effectively leveraged over a hundred billion dollars in private investment into the 29 states with RPS policies. These policies have been extremely effective at maximizing the amount of private investment in renewable energy projects, and as a result, all 50 states should aim to strengthen or create a policy framework aimed at leveraging private capital into this industry.
 
The study also explores how federal policies play an important role in leveraging private dollars into renewables, which has in turn lead to technological advances that have resulted in steep cost reductions of clean energy technologies. These advances led to a capstone year in 2012 when 49% of new electrical generation capacity brought online was from renewables, beating natural gas.

(News sourced from Clean Edge)

Monday 8 July 2013

Habitat banking: Get your nature credits here



The Environment Bank is a private company set up to deliver biodiversity gain through 'biodiversity offsetting'. Offsetting is supported by the UK Government - it was a key policy initiative in the government's 2011 Natural Environment White Paper and six government pilots are testing how it will work. The Environment Bank is a lead partner on two such pilots, in Essex and Warwickshire. Here's how it works:
  1. A Local Planning Authority agrees with the developer that planning consent can be conditioned with biodiversity offsetting. 
  2. The residual environmental impact of the proposed development is calculated using government metrics that assess habitat type, condition and area.
  3. The developer is left with, for instance, '15 grassland credits' that need to be bought to offset the impact of the development and satisfy the planning condition. 
  4. Elsewhere, a farmer or conservation NGO land manager has submitted to the registry (the Environmental Markets Exchange) a long-term management plan that will, if funded, deliver biodiversity gain of 15 credits.
  5. When the two – developers needs and land manager's offers – are matched, then credits are bought and sold and money passes into the system to fund long-term conservation management.
The Environment Bank admits that some habitats are simply not 'recreatable'.  Habitats such as peatlands or ancient woodlands, cannot be recreated by man (at least not within a lifetime) – for these habitats one cannot 'offset' damage in one place by creating habitat in another. However, they see it as a partial solution to a planning system is failing to protect biodiversity, since the wildlife value of land is often ignored or, at best, underestimated.

Saturday 6 July 2013

Sustainable food: Fish farming overtakes beef farming



According to the Earth Policy Institute, the world quietly reached a milestone in the evolution of the human diet in 2011. For the first time in modern history, world farmed fish production topped beef production. The gap widened in 2012, with output from fish farming—also called aquaculture—reaching a record 66 million tons, compared with production of beef at 63 million tons. And 2013 may well be the first year that people eat more fish raised on farms than caught in the wild. More than just a crossing of lines, these trends illustrate the latest stage in a historic shift in food production—a shift that at its core is a story of natural limits.

According to a report of the Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, diet is responsible for around 1/4 of the total ecological footprint of individuals. Surprisingly, the transportation of food has a very small impact (1.7%) on the overall footprint. Beef has an ecological footprint of 15.7 gha /1000 kg, while fish is 10.1 (vegetables are 0.4). And farmed fish - of the kind consumed in China (e.g. silver carp), which accounts for 62% of the world's aquaculture - has an even lower ecological footprint and are a relatively sustainable way of fish farming (as opposed to salmon farming, more typically consumed in the West, which relies on wild catches of anchovies to feed the salmon).

Tuesday 2 July 2013

The Rashomon Project: Activist tool get's video evidence straight



Recent protests, political unrest, and news events have been well documented with digital videos and photos posted online to social media sites such as YouTube. As access to smartphone technologies increases, this trend of capturing and sharing world events in digital formats will only accelerate. Yet as fragmented glimpses shared across divergent networks, it remains difficult to obtain a comprehensive view of contested events, resulting in viewers often drawing uninformed and contradictory conclusions.

To help address this issue, The Rashomon Project is developing an open-source toolkit that can facilitate the rapid assembly and public review of "Video Timelines" where many video and photo perspectives are time-aligned and displayed simultaneously. Their goal is to allow the public to gain a richer understanding of contested events from user-generated video and photo than is currently available online. In many cases, this video evidence is used in criminal court cases that follow protest activities.

Through temporal metadata embedded in the digital files of smartphone videos and photos, audio signals, and manual timeline adjustments according to visual cues, Rashomon have developed the capacity to accurately and quickly synch multiple video perspectives, and display a potentially limitless number of videos on The Rashomon website (with each project receiving its own unique url) which can help to verify the authenticity of footage, reveal more nuanced views into events, and archive videos in a safe, advertising-free space that does not expose the identities of users who upload and participants (when face-blurring is activated).

Monday 1 July 2013

Crowdsourcing an access-friendly map for people with disabilities



People with disabilities often suffer a 'civil death' due exclusion primarily related to physical barriers of the built environment. AXS Map is building a social movement around inclusion for people with physical disabilities. AXS Map is a crowd-sourced platform for mapping wheelchair accessibility of buildings and places, and sharing that information across a network.

At its core, AXS Map is a tool for creating social inclusion for people with disabilities, and bringing mobility freedom to this minority group historically excluded. As the AXS Map data base grows AXS Map will become a tool for visualizing data on wheelchair accessibility in buildings, documenting the success and/or failures of policy and codes across different geographies.

Thursday 27 June 2013

Cities planting trees get $3 back for every $1 invested


According to Shaping Tomorrow, Melbourne has set a target for increasing canopy cover from 22% to 40% by 2040, and within that target improving quality and diversity of plants and species. Green roofs are being incorporated into more and more developments. In the process, according to research done elsewhere in the world, they will save lives, carbon and millions of dollars.

When a pest which killed an estimated 100 million trees across 15 states in north western America, there were 6.8 additional deaths from respiratory diseases and 16.7 additional deaths from cardiovascular problems per 100,000 adults: a total of 21,000 deaths. That is because trees help absorb air pollution by up to 30%. In one study of 10 US cities, trees removed between 4.7 and 64.5 tonnes tonnes of particulate matter, with annual economic benefits of between $142,000 per tonne in Atlanta and $1.6 million per tonne in New York. The value of benefits was predominantly related to less illness / fewer deaths. 

An important tool in quantifying the economic value of trees is iTree, which was originally developed in 2006 and is in its 5th iteration, with new capabilities being added each wave. In Pittsburgh, they established that their street trees – in pavements and on streets only – provided $2.4 million worth of eco-system services – such as shade, reduced temperature, air quality, aesthetics. That represented a return of $3 for every dollar spent on tree planting and maintenance. A later study, including the cities full tree population, valued their services at between $10 and $13 million per year.

Wednesday 26 June 2013

30-Year Battery Could Replace Natural Gas Plants



According to MIT Technology Review, investors recently chipped in $15 million to fund battery startup EOS Energy Storage, a company that says its batteries could eventually compete with natural-gas power plants to provide power during times of peak demand. It plans to build a pilot manufacturing plant by the end of the year or early next year, and to start making full-size one-megawatt batteries by the end of 2014.

EOS wants to produce batteries that cost as little as $160 per kilowatt-hour and last for 30 years. Current batteries that cheap would fail after only a couple of years of service. The U.S. Department of Energy has set a goal of batteries at $100 per kilowatt-hour that can be recharged 5,000 times with 80 percent efficiency, saying that at that point batteries could be widely adopted for grid storage. EOS says its batteries can last 10,000 charges, which could make up for the higher upfront cost and lower efficiency of its batteries.

But the company hasn't reached its goals yet. It says it's "well within" $300 per kilowatt-hour. EOS has completely charged and discharged the most recent iteration of its battery cells over 1,000 times, and the batteries have so far retained 90 percent of their capacity. EOS says it's teaming up with seven utility companies to test the battery and design it to the performance specifications they need—it will announce the partners in the next couple of weeks.

Tuesday 25 June 2013

Shine Africa Shine: SolarAid's lighting revolution

Some 590 million Africans live off the electric grid, instead using dangerous and polluting kerosene lamps. With the ambitious goal of eliminating the kerosene lamp from Africa by 2020, Solar Aid, winner of the Ashden International Gold Award, works with headteachers in rural areas to promote good quality, affordable solar lights to families. With over 400,000 lamps sold since 2010, the organisation is now the largest distributer of solar lights in Africa. Solar Aid

Lights are sourced from global suppliers, and are sold with warranties for between US$7 and US$40, depending on size and features. By end March 2013, 408,000 lights had been sold, with 57% in Tanzania (where the campaign started first in late 2010), 27% in Kenya, and 16% in Malawi and Zambia. With around 390,000 lights in use, 2 million household members benefit from better quality light without kerosene fumes. Replacement of kerosene lamps is saving about 15 million litres/year of kerosene, and cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 36,000 tonnes/year CO2e.

SolarAid research showed the main use was for study, also cooking and general household lighting. Kerosene saving of about US$1 per week means that cost is recovered quickly. Competitive procurement process is under way, using field experience to specify requirements for the next generation of SunnyMoney lights. SunnyMoney is launching operations in two new countries in 2013, and aims to be active in 24 countries by 2020, with schools campaigns followed by direct sales and then local distributors.

Monday 24 June 2013

New Red List for Endangered Ecosystems


The IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, is well known for its "Red List" of Threatened Species, which has become like a "barometer of life".  In 2011 there were over 61,000 species on the Red List and all mammals, birds, amphibians, sharks, reef-buliding corals, cycads and conifers have been assessed. Recently, the IUCN has also announced criteria for a new "Red List" of Ecosystems. When the list is complete - 2025 is the target date - we will be able to say whether an ecosystem is not facing imminent risk of collapse, or whether it is vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered. This will be measured by assessing losses in area, degradation or other major changes such as conversion.

The criteria have been designed based on 20 case studies, which they believe can help them assess the health of all of Earth's varied ecosystems, from spring-fed limestone caves to sparkling coral reefs. For example, the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan is a freshwater ecosystem, which has already collapsed, while the Cape Sand Flats in South Africa are a terrestrial ecosystem that are critically endangered. The Tapia forest of Madagascar and the Coolibah-Black Box woodland in Australia are both endangered, while the Great Lakes Alvars of United States and Canada are vulnerable/endangered. Europe's fresh-water reed beds are vulnerable, while the Tepui shrubland of Venezuela are classified as least concern.

Thursday 20 June 2013

California set for world's biggest solar thermal plant



Later this year, on 4,000 acres near the California-Nevada border, the world's biggest solar thermal plant - called Ivanpah - will turn on. Once all three of the units, each with a 500 ft (150 m) solar tower, is complete, the plant's 300,000 sun-tracking mirrors will produce 392 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 140,000 homes. Ivanpah will double the global capacity of solar thermal in a single step.

Unlike conventional rooftop photovoltaic panels, which convert sunlight directly into electricity, the California plant will capture heat, which will be converted to steam to create electricity. Crucially, this allows energy to be stored for use when demand exists. Ivanpah's solar thermal technology also uses 95% less water than competing wet-cooled thermal solar plants, using air instead of water to condense steam.

Electricity from Ivanpah will avoid millions of tons of carbon dioxide and other air pollutants – the equivalent of taking 70,000 cars off the road.  The project will create more than 2,100 jobs for construction workers and support staff and 86 jobs for operations and maintenance employees in addition to hundreds of millions of dollars in local and state taxes. The $2.2 billion project represents a durable model for far-reaching employment and economic benefit both locally and nationally.

Tuesday 18 June 2013

Polluter pays: China joins carbon trading



Today China - the world's biggest carbon emitter - launched a pilot carbon trading scheme in the city of Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong. The scheme is expected to cover at least 635 companies, totalling a third of business emissions in the city. Pilots are also due to be rolled out in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing, as well as in the provinces of Guangdong and Hubei. Their success could lead to a national Chinese emissions trading scheme in 2015.

According to the Financial Times, China's economic planning ministry has also indicated that it is considering an outright cap on emissions for its next five-year plan (2016-20). The US, responsible for 18% of the world's carbon emissions, and the EU, accounting for 14%, already have emission caps, so this would bring an additional 24% under a CO2 commitment, totalling 56% of global carbon emissions. This move by China could help to break a deadlock at the heart of UN climate talks, which are aiming to agree a legally binding global deal on cutting emissions – at a 2015 meeting in Paris – that would take effect from 2020.

Monday 17 June 2013

Mushroom materials: Growing a sustainable future



Gavin McIntyre and Eben Bayer are co-inventor of a process that grows all-natural substitutes for plastic from the tissue of mushrooms. They say they want to be the Dow or DuPont of this century, and to do it, they have created a company called Ecovative, which is mainly build on Mushroom® packaging, a cost-competitive alternative to Styrofoam™. The company wants to go beyond simple 'triple bottom line' to "building a business that is not just sustainable, but actually makes the planet a better place for all organisms on Earth."

The company explains: We don't manufacture these materials, we grow them. We grow them from agricultural byproducts and mycelium, a fungal network of threadlike cells. It's like the "roots" of mushrooms. In 5 – 7 days, in the dark, with no watering, and no petrochemical inputs, the mycelium digests the agricultural byproducts, binding them into a beautiful structural material. The mycelium acts like a natural, self assembling glue.

This technology is a radical departure from traditional bioplastics. While feedstocks for bioplastics are typically food crops, Ecovative are able to upcycle very low value waste products. They utilize materials that are environmentally low-impact, 100 percent biodegradable and renewable, and are part of a healthy ecosystem. Unlike other bio-plastics, their technology isn't based on turning food or fuel crops into materials; they're only using inedible crop waste to grow our products. The final biodegradable materials we produce have a variety of end-of-life options, including home composting.

Friday 14 June 2013

Triodos Bank puts the values back into value


In 1968, an economist, a tax law professor, a management consultant and banker formed a group to study how money can be managed sustainably. In 1971, they launched the Triodos Foundation to use gifts and loans to support innovative projects and companies. In 1980, Triodos registered as a bank in The Netherlands and in 1990, launched the first green fund in Europe. Today, they have assets under management of over 6.7 billion euros. 

Triodos says their mission is to make money work for positive social, environmental and cultural change. They achieve this in various ways: by financing the entire organic food chain, from farm to fork; by funding renewable energy over the past 25 years, with associated annual CO2 savings of over 2 million tonnes; by putting 68 million euros into arts and culture programmes; and by supporting over 80 microfinance institutions in 40 countries around the world.

Triodos is also a founding pioneer of the Global Alliance for Banking on Values (GABV), which uses finance to deliver sustainable development for unserved people, communities and the environment. In 2009, the GABV announced a commitment to raise $250 million in new capital over three years to support the expansion of $2 billion in lending to green projects and unbanked poor communities around the world. Today, GABV represents seven million customers in 20 countries, with a combined balance sheet of over $14 billion. Their aim is to positively improve the lives of one billion people by 2020.

Thursday 13 June 2013

DIY eco-manufacturing: Turning banana peels into bio-plastics


Elif Bilgin, from Istanbul, Turkey is a finalist in the Google Science Fair Festival. After two years of experimentation, she has developed a simple method for using banana peels in the production of bio-plastic as a replacement for the traditional petroleum based plastic. The bioplastics can then be molded into a making cosmetic prosthetics or used in the electrical insulation of cables. Banana plastic is cheaper to make than the petroleum based plastic we currently use, it recycles a waste material, and it's simple enough to make in your kitchen.

The banana peel is something we throw away every day, but little do we know, it has much more efficient uses. For example, in Thailand, 200 tons of banana peels are thrown away daily and this number increases each year and in the fruit industry. All those peels may be put into much more use. Starch and cellulose are important raw materials used in the bioplastic industry. Since they are rich with starch and this starch is very easy to extract, potatoes are the most commonly used raw materials.

The 9th and 10th pilot experiment Bilgin conducted was successful in producing plastic, but had started to decay after only 3 days. Then she discovered that in order to improve shelf life of post-harvest wild mango fruits, sodium metabisulphite can be used. On the 11th and 12th trials, she dipped the banana peels in this solution prior to the preparation of the plastic. Both trials were successful and have not shown any signs of decay for 2 months and counting.

Wednesday 12 June 2013

Energy savings of cloud computing could power L.A.


Berkley Lab has released a research report suggesting that - despite data centers 
currently accounting for 1-2% of global electricity use - the potential for energy savings from cloud-based computing is substantial: if all U.S. business users shifted their email, productivity software, and CRM software to the cloud, the primary energy footprint of these software applications might be reduced by  as much as 87% or 326 Petajoules. That's enough primary energy to generate the electricity used by the City of Los Angeles each year (23 billion kilowatt-hours).

Cloud data centers are also likely to play an increasing role in reducing demand for physical goods and services (a process known as dematerialization) through the provision of digital news and entertainment, e-commerce, and remote work and collaboration capabilities. For example, life-cycle assessment studies suggest that digital music can reduce the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions intensity of music delivery by 40%-80% compared to compact discs and that digital news can reduce CO2 emissions of news delivery by 1-2 orders of magnitude compared to a newspaper.

Last week, Google hosted a conference called How Green is the Internet?

Tuesday 11 June 2013

Patient capital from Acumen: The rise of impact investing


Jacqueline Novogratz, the CEO of the Acumen Fund, started as an international banker, then drifted into the aid world in Africa. According to the New York Times, Novogratz became frustrated that many of the aid projects didn't help and sometimes made things worse. In Rwanda, she became involved in a bakery project, in which 20 poor women made doughnuts and samosas to sell in the neighborhood. Two charities subsidized the project at the rate of $650 a month – more than $1 per woman per day – and yet the women earned only 50 cents per day from selling the baked goods, too little to survive. Jacqueline helped the women transform it from a charity project into a real business, in which they turned a profit and averaged $2 a day in earnings each. 

This experience was one of the early inspirations for the Acumen Fund, which today states its mission as working to create a world beyond poverty by investing in social enterprises, emerging leaders and breakthrough ideas. They invest patient capital in business models that deliver critical, affordable goods and services to the world's poor, improving the lives of  millions. Since 2001, Acumen Fund has invested more than $70 million in enterprises that provide access to water, health, energy, housing, education and agricultural services to low income customers in South Asia, East Africa and West Africa.

For impact investing to work, it has to make genuine investments in businesses that can generate a return. According to the Monitor report on impact investing, From Blueprint to Scale, Acumen Fund's investing experience reflects this reality: it has considered more than 5,000 companies in the past ten years and has invested in just 65 of those. Recent Monitor studies of inclusive businesses on the ground paint a similarly challenging picture. The team looked at 439 promising inclusive businesses and found that only 32 percent were commercially viable and had potential to achieve significant scale. Only 13 percent were actually operating at scale.

Next-gen cars: Silicon Valley bids to become the new Detroit



The Googlemobile, Google's famed self-driving car, has logged some 500,000 miles since 2009. Capturing 1.3 million bits of data per second along with video feeds and radar pulses, the car's computers can "see" the vehicles around it and keep clear of them. Nissan's CEO, Carlos Ghosn, predicted driverless cars will hit showrooms by 2020. The market for smart vehicle systems like lane-departure warnings and collision-avoidance will be around $22 billion by 2020, Ian Riches, director of the global automotive practice at London-based Strategy Analytics, told Forbes.

Meanwhile, Tesla Motors, the Silicon Valley electric carmaker, is riding high. The company reported its first ever quarterly profit this month and saw its stock price shoot upwards of $97 per share—an all-time high. At more than $10 billion, the company's market value is now greater than that of established automakers Fiat and Mitsubishi Motors. And for icing on the cake, Tesla's first made-from-scratch car, the electric Model S sedan, has received a rare near-perfect score from Consumer Reports, according to National Geographic.

In the first three months of this year, Tesla reported $7 million in revenue from development services. Another $68 million, or roughly one in every eight dollars of revenue during the quarter, came from selling credits earned under California's zero emission vehicles (ZEV) program. About $17 million came from sales of "other regulatory credits." The company is preparing to take advantage of its popularity on Wall Street by raising an estimated $648 million by selling a combination of shares and debt-like securities, to be repaid in 2018.

Big IF campaign to end global hunger


Ekkleisa reports that 45,000 people joined the Big IF anti-hunger rally from 2pm-5pm in London's Hyde Park on Saturday 8 June. Its aim was to press for global action, and it starts ten days of campaigning action targeted at the G8 and other world leaders. There has also been a rally in Belfast, and Big IF actions have been developing across the country. Two million petals were arranged in the shape of the campaign petition in London, to symbolise children dying of hunger every year.

Meanwhile, in a small but helpful boost to the campaign, the the UK has committed an additional £375 million of core funding to help feed the world's poorest children, as part of a £2.7 billion global agreement. Participants at the G8 summit, who signed a Global Nutrition for Growth deal this week, committed their countries and organisations to:
  • Improving the nutrition of 500 million pregnant women and young children.
  • Reducing by an additional 20 million the number of children under five who are stunted.
  • Saving the lives of at least 1.7 million children by preventing stunting, increasing breastfeeding and better treatment of severe and acute malnutrition.
'Enough Food For Everyone IF' is a joint coalition of over 200 UK organisations campaigning for action to eliminate the causes of hunger. Its key message is: "There is enough food for everyone, yet one in eight people do not have enough food. This year, world leaders must tackle hunger and save millions of lives."

Sunday 9 June 2013

The age of the solar cell printer has dawned



Inhabitat reports that an incredible new printer at the University of Melbourne has allowed researchers to print solar cells up to the size of an A3 sheet of paper every 2 seconds. Developed in collaboration between the Victorian Organic Solar Cell Consortium (VICOSC), CSIRO, and the University of Melbourne, the solar cell printer makes renewable energy even easier to source. 

The solar cell printer can transform plastic or metal into photovoltaic panels ranging from the size of a fingernail up to an A3 sheet of paper. CSIRO's Dr. Scott Watkins foresees these cells being used on rooftops, glass surfaces, or even personal devices like laptops. In just three years, the researchers behind the printer have been able to increase the output size from just 2 centimeters to 30 centimeters wide.

The printer cost a whopping $200,000, although the University of Melbourne is accepting proposals for manufacturing orders – which will allow small companies to gain access to the device to print out projects (much like a screenprinting business). The printer lays semiconducting inks onto plastic or steel at a rate of one cell every two seconds.  Printed on flexible material, the solar cells are more versatile than silicon solar panels. The team will continue to work on making the printer more affordable so that they can make it available for purchase by other companies.

Urban mining: Glittering pavements and underworld treasure

According to New Scientist, the streets are literally paved with riches. A team at the University of Birmingham has set up a company called Roads to Riches to recover platinum from our catalytic converters that ends up as road dust. The best platinum mines in South Africa have 2-10 ppm of platinum in their ore. Street sweepings have 1 ppm, but are much easier and less expensive to mine. Birmingham University's Angela Murray calculates that £64 million of platinum metals are swept from UK roads every year and dumped. 

In fact, the riches may be even greater, since roadside soils have concentrations may be 100 to 1,000 times greater, according to the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna. That's one of the reasons that academics like Helen Parker at the University of York, UK, are experimenting with 'hyper-accumulating' plants grown in soil rich in the platinum metals. Besides roadside plants, they have also found that seaweed can successfully capture gold, coppy, nickel, zinc and platinum group elements.

A team at Linkoping University in Sweden has another lucrative strategy. They estimate that there is between 90,000 and 400,00 tonnes of copper power cables worth $630 million beneath Swedish cities. Using this scrap metal instead of mining the copper would save 360,000 tonnes of CO2. In Japan, the source of riches is industrial waste sludge. In Nagano, these effluent flows have gold concentrations of up to 2.9 kg per tonne, nearly five times greater than conventional gold ores. This has also been a practice in India's major cities for some time, where gold is extracted from waste sludge in the jewellery districts.

Saturday 8 June 2013

Alchemy is possible: New partnership to turn waste into materials



During his plenary presentation at the Sustainable Brands 2013 conference, designer, author and sustainability thought leader William McDonough announced a new partnership between McDonough Innovation and Waste Management, Inc — North America's largest environmental solutions provider and residential recycler. The Sustainable Innovation Collaborative will directly serve producers, manufacturers, retailers and suppliers of packaged goods and products. Advising on product and packaging redesign for recyclability and positive ecological and health impacts will be among the collaborative's goals.

McDonough said: "Designing up from the dumpster is one reason why I am personally very excited to launch the Sustainable Innovation Collaborative with Waste Management. Working together, we will use the tools of design, science and principled business practices in collaboration with manufactures, retailers, distributors, consumers and recyclers of products and packaging to profitably work toward eliminating the very concept of waste. We can link healthy, safe materials and sophisticated logistics, and this allows us to bring a uniquely valuable perspective for continuous innovation and quality improvement with supply-side and demand-side collaborators."

"Over the years, enlightened manufacturers have taken positive and forward-looking steps to lighten their footprint on the environment," said Tom Carpenter — Director, Sustainability Services at Waste Management. "As those efforts have progressed, we now see a growing demand by these same manufacturers to address every link along supply chains that produce residual waste. This collaborative will combine design, recycling and material science expertise to guide these next generation strategies."

Friday 7 June 2013

Biometrics stop drivers falling asleep at the wheel


The Fatigue Monitoring System (FMS) from Seeing Machines of Canberra, Australia, is designed to prevent accidents caused by tiredness, which account for 70 per cent of those where the driver was to blame. With an infrared camera that can see through sunglasses, and an image-processing computer, the FMS assesses the frequency, duration and speed of the driver's blinking to weigh up inattention and the likelihood of imminent "microsleeps".

An "eyes on road" message booms out if the FMS senses the driver is distracted, but a shrill alarm that's "humanly impossible to sleep through" sounds if a microsleep is predicted, says Seeing Machines' CEO Ken Kroeger. Mine operators are warned of each event wirelessly, so they can redeploy consistently sleepy drivers. In early tests the FMS reduced fatigue events by 72 per cent, Kroeger says. According to New Scientist, the drowsiness detector in the cab has proved so successful that US-based firm Caterpillar is fitting the $10,000 system in all its mining trucks.


Novartis social business expands healthcare access in India


Swiss-based healthcare company Novartis has joined the Business Call to Action (BCtA) with a commitment to further expand their rural healthcare programme in India, which has already reached more than 40 million people. Their the Arogya Parivar ("healthy family") programme aims to empower communities to make better healthcare decisions and expand access to health education and affordable drugs.

Over six years, Arogya Parivar has helped create more than 500 jobs and has built skills and capacity among hundreds of business partners, suppliers, and customers, including healthcare professionals in India. Its impact translates to providing 42 million people with improved access to healthcare across an estimated 33,000 villages. According to the company, 50,000 doctors and pharmacies have also received medical knowledge transfer.

Wednesday 5 June 2013

Coca-Cola aims to double 50,000 farmers income in Kenya and Uganda


Launched early in 2010, Project Nurture is an $11.5 million partnership among The Coca-Cola Company, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the international non-profit organization TechnoServe. It intends to double the fruit incomes of more than 50,000 smallholder farmers in Kenya and Uganda by 2014 by building inclusive mago and passion fruit value chains.

Harvards CSR Initiative has analysed the project and finds some impressive achievements already:
  • More than 42,000 farmers have participated in the program, 14,000 of them women
  • Annual fruit incomes have, on average, already more than doubled.
  • 297 loans worth $115,300 have been disbursed to finance passion-fruit farming start-up costs such as seeds, seedlings, poles, and wires.
  • Coca Cola expects to recoup its investment in the project in the next 3-5 years through cost optimization and replication in other countries
Key elements of the model have been implemented in Haiti and India, with further replication being considered for Zimbabwe, Nigeria and/or Ghana. The foundation is now looking to establish similar additional partnerships for widely-grown staple crops such as rice, maize, and cassava.

Philips and UNIDO create centres of light in Africa


Dutch technology company Royal Philips and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) have signed a declaration regarding their joint collaboration on innovative LED lighting solutions for poverty reduction. 

Philips is currently installing more than a hundred Community Light Centres across Africa. These are areas of approximately 1000m2, or the size of a small soccer pitch, and are lit using a new generation of efficient solar-powered LED lighting. The concept of the Light Centres is to create areas of light for rural communities, which live without electricity, thus effectively 'extending the day and extending play', creating numerous opportunities for social, sporting and economic activities in the evening.

The joint declaration commits UNIDO and Philips to cooperate to promote rural access to energy and energy efficiency for productive activities, technology transfer and access to renewable energy solutions through solar-powered LED technologies, in particular in Ghana, Kenya and South Africa. The two organizations state their intention to identify suitable projects relating to the above areas of cooperation on an annual basis.

Using the web to improve accountability in war-torn countries



Integrity Action's mission is to empower citizens to act with and demand integrity, actively taking part in building institutions to promote a state that is open, accountable and responsive. They were recently selected to receive a £500,000 Global Impact Award from Google's Global Impact Challenge.

With the Global Impact Award, Integrity Action plans to develop an online data collection and reporting platform that enables citizens to hold government and development agencies accountable. Over the next 18 months, Integrity Action will train over 2,000 community monitors in seven war-torn countries and help citizens fix 50% of problems in public services and infrastructure projects. This will ultimately lead to better quality of life for over 500,000 poor people.

Fredrik Galtung, CEO of Integrity Action said: "The Google Impact Award is an  incredible endorsement by Google of the power of technology to empower even the poorest and most disenfranchised so that their voices will be listened to". The organisation operates from offices in Jakarta, Jerusalem, and London and has staff permanently based in Amman, Bishkek, Nairobi and Yerevan.

China gears up for green building boom


According to the China GreenTech Report 2013, buildings currently account for at least 33% of China's total energy consumption. Green buildings offer a solution, which can dramatically reduce the environmental impact of new and existing developments. Aggressive targets set within the 12th Five-Year Plan, and developed through more recent policies and guidelines, could encourage widespread adoption of green building practices, driving significant near-term growth.

China aims to develop 1 billion m2 of new green building floor area by 2015. This represents a fourteen-fold increase on the 69.5 million m2 in existence at the end of 2012. By 2014, all government investment in public buildings, and all affordable housing in selected cities, must meet green building standards and 30% of new buildings measured by floor area must be certified as green by 2020.

During the past six years, China has been developing and promoting its own green building rating system, based on a rising scale of one, two and three stars. There is a wide difference in standards between the three but all are considered by the government to qualify for green certification. More recently, international systems such as LEED, BREEAM and CASBEE have also been recognized and applied.

Monday 3 June 2013

Greening Lighting: Check out the Algae Powered LED bulb

Designer Gyula Bodonyi has harnessed the power of green algae in a light bulb, according to Yanko Design on Inhabitat. Algae projects have already been seen powering power entire buildings, but Bodonyi's concept brings green power to the public on a more user-friendly scale. With the Algaebulb, algae powers a single LED activated by a tiny air pump and hydrophobic material able to create a teeny-tiny power house for light. 

The tear-shaped bulb is made up of an air pump, LED, hidrophob container, PC Shell, and air outlet. The system sucks in carbon dioxide and water through the pump near the E27 screw-top, and as the air passes through the bulb, chlorella pyrenoidosa spirulina microalgae are fostered. While algae flourishes, it gives off oxygen, which in turn powers the tiny LED inside.

When the AlgaeBulb is not illuminated, it appears to be a dark green; a result of the colony of microalgae living within. When illuminated, it gives off a slightly green tinge on the interior, making for a green bulb that is literally "green." Although small in size, if AlgaeBulb is employed on a large scale, it holds the potential to save a significant amount of energy. Aside from providing a light source with renewables, the bulb also sucks up carbon dioxide, helping to alleviate greenhouse gases one bulb at a time.