Posted May 28, 2009
Now that the Obama administration is showing visible signs of implementing a sustainable energy policy, many business people seem to be surprised and concerned that there will be a cost involved in moving toward sustainable energy sources and a stable power grid.
Yes, implementing sustainable power will entail a significant investment in new equipment and a “smart power grid” to move power from where the energy is generated to population centers where it will be used. We’ve discussed the enormous growth of the digital world as just one example of the pressing need to enhance the grid and the pressing need to move from polluting energy sources. Increasingly offices, retail outlets, supermarkets and restaurants are generating significant carbon emissions through inefficient energy usage at their premises as well.
While the government’s investment in sustainable power will result in increased cost per watt used, offsets to that cost increase are realistically available to business through the use of energy audits and the intelligent use of power.
Few actions will sharpen your “energy use awareness” like an energy audit. If you haven’t undertaken this task, do so. Listing, quantifying, and commenting about each place where energy is used discloses opportunities for immediate reduction of your energy bill often up to 20-30%. Some of the most effective places where energy can be saved include:
· HVAC systems run when needed – not continuously
· Complete shut-down of computer systems when not in use
· Switching from standard florescent bulbs to CFL’s
· Forming commuter “buddy systems” to cut miles driven
Amory Lovins and Paul Hawken wrote in Natural Capitalism,”The profits from saving electricity could be increased even further if companies also incorporated the best off-the-shelf improvements into their building structure, heating, cooling and other equipment.”
As an example of how effective these awareness programs can be, take the Department of Energy’s ENERGY STAR® program that, last year alone, saved enough energy to power 10 million homes and avoid greenhouse gas emissions from 12 million cars – all while saving $6 billion.
Any business exec knows that it’s cheaper to act deliberately and proactively than being forced to react to demands from changing official regulations. Begin today. Act now. It’s good for your business and good for the planet.
Lisa Wellman
CEO, SustainCommWorld
PACKAGING INDUSTRY IMPROVEMENTS CONTINUE: BIO-DEGRADABLE METALLIC WRAPPING
Mexican food giant, Grupo Bimbo, fourth largest food corporations with distribution worldwide, announced an agreement with Symphony Environmental Technologies recently. Grupo Bimbo will be the first company to launch degradable metallic, eco-friendly packaging. The change will be incorporated into every Grupo Bimbo product by the first quarter of 2011.
The technology works by incorporating a pro-degrading additive into the plastic wrapping, during the packaging’s manufacturing process. This helps break the plastic’s molecular chains, causing the plastic to degrade naturally within a reasonable commercial lifetime. Metallized plastic film is ideal for wrapping snack foods because it has all the flexibility of plastic with the added toughness necessary for a packaging which may have to stand up to a great deal of handling.
The packaging will degrade completely at the end of a pre-programmed lifespan and be harmlessly bio-assimilated in the same way as nature’s wastes but much more quickly. The fine aluminum coating will break down and join the aluminum already in the environment where it is one
of the earth’s natural elements. (Around 8 per cent of the earth’s crust is aluminum).
Because degradation is automatic in the presence of oxygen, the plastic will disappear altogether if discarded as litter. It can be landfilled but will not degrade in the absence of oxygen, and will not emit methane. As plastic is made from a by-product of oil which used to be wasted, nobody is importing extra oil to make it.
THE CARBON FOOTPRINT OF SPAM… and EMAIL
The average business email user is responsible for 131 kg of CO2 per year in email-related emissions and 22 percent of that figure is spam-related.
An estimated worldwide total of 62 trillion spam emails were sent in 2008. Globally, annual spam energy use totals 33 billion kilo-watt-hours (KWh), or 33terawatt hours (TWh). That’s equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes in the United States, with the same GHG emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion United States gallons of gasoline.
All this is highlighted in a report from McAfee and ICF International.
Check your marketing and agency. The report states that emissions sources that are key contributors to spam’s carbon footprint are:
· Harvesting addresses
· Creating spam campaigns
· Sending spam from zombies and mail servers
· Transmitting spam from sender to receiver via the Internet
· Processing of spam by incoming mail servers
· Storing messages
· Viewing and deleting spam
· Filtering spam and searching for false positives
Although the report concedes the average legitimate email is associated with almost 4 grams of CO2 and an average spam message with 0.3 grams of CO2, it’s the global total that is of concern and can and should be reduced.
EDITORIAL: GET REAL
If you’re rich and educated, you stand a chance.
Given normal human behaviors – business as usual – nothing will work to change enough, fast enough to prevent catastrophic weather changes from taking place.
What scientists are reluctant to say – for fear of being ridiculed – is it is likely that we have already set in motion toxic trends that will trigger critical tipping points.
That has to be said, now.
As time goes on, humanity will be faced with fewer and fewer adaptive choices – many of them akin to the “lifeboat predicament” with too little food and a few days water and too many survivors in a leaky boat. Who decides who gets thrown overboard or who becomes dinner?
So what could be the scenario over the coming decades?
Glaciers melt, fresh water supplies dwindle. The remaining water is increasingly contaminated with salts, toxins and pharmaceuticals. Desert sands advance covering grasslands, grazing stock dies. Lumber is over-harvested destroying Amazon vegetation and globally we loose 10-20% of the oxygen needed for life. Snow melting off northern latitudes lets permafrost release millions of tons of CO2 further warming the climate. A warmer climate melts more ice and snow raising sea levels 10-30 feet forcing over 2 Billion people to become climate refugees. Society in poorer, low-lying lands descends into chaos. Food, water, medicine and clothing distribution become non-existent in poorer and hard-hit areas. Oceans continue to acidify which destroys coral, the foundation of the oceans food chain resulting in the loss of food for millions. Pine beetles and a thousand other pests invade northern forests and square miles of timber burn while other bugs spread tropical diseases into northern cities. Major rivers worldwide run dry because glaciers have disappeared. Wars are fought over fresh water supplies. Society as we know it becomes a day-to-day struggle with little time, money or energy to address the causes of Global Warming. We have developed a perfect storm, a deadly scenario that portrays a picture of humanity dying with a whimper.
These events are already underway and a part of our biosphere – on our 25,000 mile around globe, mostly covered by salt water, and an atmosphere about to 7 miles deep. Our failing has been our inability to understand that life on Earth exists due to a narrow balance of temperature and that a 3-6 degree rise will have devastating effects.
All this is already “locked-in” and unavoidable without heroic measures now.
I’m not optimistic. I’m a realist. Bringing about worldwide heroic measures is unlikely.
Can we rise to the challenge and lead humanity in restoring a balance? This has never happened in the history of our species, yet without it, our species faces extinction by its own hand.
The odds are against us! Why?
Humanity always takes the easy way out. This challenge can’t be “bought on the cheap” or solved by implementing a quick fix. There are no easy ways out or clever workarounds.
Politics only delays action.
Sufficient time to makes changes is running out – this decade.
The vast majority of humanity remains ignorant about the most basic causes of Global Warming and they haven’t begun to work on the solutions. Face it, most people don’t know there is a problem.
If humanity is to continue to exist on planet earth it is up to the educated and the wealthy. That still leaves 90% of humanity out of the decision-making process. Face it, billions of people are going to perish.
We succeeded in our efforts to industrialize using the most available means – fossil fuels and we’re now choking the life out of every species and warming the biosphere with greenhouse gasses that are the byproduct of fossil-fuel combustion.
We’ve let industrial companies dump their manufacturing by-products anywhere to the point where water supplies – both fresh water and oceanic are compromised.
We’ve failed to relate the profound importance of a 6 degree rise in global temperature to the extinction of humanity – and that omission may be our epitaph.
For all of those reasons and a thousand more, realize we are acting with too little effort, too late to save a majority of our species.
The real question is, once humanity really wakes up – after we’ve lost 3-5 billion humans, will there still be “heroic means” that can save the survivors?
Terry Wellman
SustainCommWorld, Contributing Editor, Green Media Newsletter
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