Bresslergreen

Different Worlds, Common Issues - Sustainability & Design Panel Discussion

In the beginning of this month Bresslergroup's Peter Bressler, Peter Byar, and Elysa Soffer teamed up with Gary Sorin of NRG Energy for a panel discussion called "Different Worlds Common Issues - Companies Find Common Grounds on Sustainability," at the Innovation Philadelphia Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit. 

Mike Flanagan, the moderator started the group off pointing out how times have changed and "back then" sustainability was endorsed by hippies, but now it's accepted as a major business topic in a Levi's vs Brooks Brothers mentality. 

Gary spoke about his experience with sustainability in the corporate world. He covered observations, the Walmart Sustainability Index effects, barriers to true sustainability, a what's next for business and sustainability as well as suggestions for getting started.

Peter Byar discussed how we as design consultants have the unique ability to guide and cajole clients regarding new product sustainability.

Next up, Peter Bressler spoke about innovation opportunities in Sustainability and founding his latest venture, SRS Energy and their integrated Solar Roofing Systems technology.

Lastly, Elysa Soffer spoke about how companies can calculate their carbon footprint and devise strategies for reduction, using Bresslergroup's internal efforts as a case study. 

You can download the Different Worlds Common Issues presentation here.

Green Polyethylene

I'll be quite cheered when reports of sustainable resins have more now and less future in them.

In the meantime, a glimmer of reduced petrochemical dependency is flickering on the horizon. The first linear polyethylene made from 100% renewable raw materials has been announced by Braskem the mundanely monikered Brazilian chemical giant. The material has been through pilot production and a new plant, capable of making 200,000 tons a year, is under construction. The Green PE is made from 100% renewable sugar cane. It is produced from the dehydration of ethanol from sugar canes (much more efficient than corn based ethanol) and then polymerized into green polyethylene. Braskem claims that the plants used in one ton of resin will capture two and a half tons of CO2. The resin is scheduled to be available in 2011. The initial tons are earmarked for containers of the Johnson & Johnson Sundown brand of sustainable sunscreen products.

It will be interesting to know how the embedded energy of the product compares to existing polyethylene. Brazil has the worlds most efficient sugar cane to ethanol industry and uses waste from the canes to fuel production.

Image from myearthware.com

Recycling Comes to Formula 1

In a very small way. According to OneStopStrategy.com, the Brazilian chemical company Braskem will produce the trophies for this weekend's Formula 1 race at the Interlagos cicuit in São Paolo. Over the course of the event, blue plastic bottle tops will be recycled into a resin used for the trophies. Quite the token gesture, you may say, but I think it's indicative of the fact that Brazil currently leads the U.S. in both sustainability consciousness and practice.

Low Mass Loudspeaker

 
Invented at the University of Warwick, this new speaker technology does not require magnets. It greatly reduces both the mass and weight of the speaker. This sounds as if it must be a sustainability win. Production partnerships have been established and more are sought.

AirDye Fabrics

AirDye Fabrics from Colorep reduce the amount of water used in dying fabrics by 95% and reduce energy use by 85%. With over 2.5 trillion gallons of water being used annually to dye fabrics this is an option you should consider for any design which requires dyed fabric. The process can be used to apply a different color or pattern to each side of the fabric. It is suitable for synthetic fabrics, which include those made entirely of recycled PET bottles. If you require a fabric which is not made of recycled material, a life cycle analysis of the cost/benefit trade-offs is required to compare AirDye fabric to organic fabrics. It represents a clear win, however, over the vast array of commercially dyed synthetics currently in use. Learn more from the Fast Company article on this Designer's Accord case study.

Huge Green News: Wal-Mart's Sustainability Index

As the October deadline for U.S. suppliers to submit their answers to Wal-Mart's sustainability assessment questionnaire approaches, it's worth noting the tremendous significance of this initiative. In their Sustainability Product Index: 15 Questions for Suppliers, Walmart asks their suppliers to address their involvement in four key areas:

Energy and Climate: Reducing Energy Costs and Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Material Efficiency: Reducing Waste and Enhancing Quality
Natural Resources: Producing High Quality, Responsibly Sourced Raw Materials
People and Community: Ensuring Responsible and Ethical Production

The fact that Walmart has confronted their thousands of suppliers with these questions (overseas suppliers have been given longer to answer) is a powerful jump-start to the spread of triple bottomline economics. (Employees, Sustainability, and $) Like many of us, Wal-Mart are finding their way to reliable lifecycle assessment and admit that they don't have a complete roadmap. However, the survey, accompanied with the public commitment to develop a sustainability index for every product sold, is a huge step forward. If you produce or design products, you need to be aware of these fifteen thoughtful questions and be thinking about their implications. 

Wal-Mart has engaged two universities to aid in the development of the index and the maintenance of the LCA database. I know that this is an area that Nike and DuPont, among many others, are working on and I hope that they will be able to join forces in contributing to the database.

No Impact Man, NYC

"80% of what's produced is intended to be used once and then will go straight to the landfill" says Colin Beavan, PhD, AKA No Impact Man, author, writer, engaged citizen, during a BusinessWeek interview.

Beavan decided in 2006 to attempt to live for one year in the middle of New York City without making any negative environmental impact. He was joined by his wife, 2 year old daughter and dog. They sacraficed electricity, cell phones, only ate local food and even stopped making garbage.

The goal of this project was to call attention to the high maintenance costs of the contemporary affluent American lifestyle. They experimented with ways of living that might both improve quality of life and be less harmful to the planet.

Among the notible accomplishments, the No Impact Family cut their spending by 50%. Here is the full impressive list of what the family kept out of the landfill.

Colin Beavan's sustainably produced book (made from postconsumer recycled paper and chlorine-free cardboard, with energy supplied by biogas) is titled No Impact Man and it's available now. The documentary film No Impact Man begins opening nationwide 9/11.

"Thrown away..." But where is "away"?

A team of researchers at MIT are in the process of developing unique tags that will be placed on individual pieces of trash in the public trash cans of New York City and Seattle. They plan to broadcast the movement of the trash in real time for the public to view. They will also be closely analyzing the movement in order to determine the cost and impact of trash on our environment and economy. Finally we will know where "away" is in our system of disposable products. By making the journey of trash transparent MIT hopes to shift consumption behaviors in consumers and at the beginning of the production stream. The conclusions should serve as a valuable tool in designing products for a less disposable future.    

8/4/09 Webinar - How to Design Truly Sustainable, Truly Beautiful Packaging

When: Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Starting time: 4:00 pm, EST

Duration: 1 hour

Session fee (USD$): 69.00

Presentation: Webinars Live Online

Presenters: Joshua Onysko and Josh Ivy of Pangea Organics

Joshua Onysko, Pangea’s owner, and Josh Ivy, the company’s lead designer, take sustainable packaging to a whole new level. Not only are the boxes for their soaps and gift sets completely biodegradable—you can actually plant one, and grow a tree! Colorado Blue Spruce Seeds are embedded in each box. 

How did they come up with this fantastic idea, and how do they manage to make green packaging that’s still gorgeous to look at? You now have the chance to ask them in this live webcast.

Learn:
• How to find the most sustainable materials for your project.

• How to talk to manufacturers and printers about issues of sustainability.

• The best ways to include green practices in your everyday design work.

“Pangea does its best to source sustainable materials in everything we create,” say Onysko and Ivy. “We want to reduce waste whenever possible, reuse materials whenever possible, and if we have to produce something new, make sure it's recyclable in the end.” Come and learn from Pangea’s experience, and find out what you can do to make your own design truly green.

Register Here.

Philly gets a BigBelly, actually alot of them

Philadelphia quickly jumped to the top of the list for the nations Big Bellies.  The Big Belly trash compactor that is.  The city recently rolled out 500 of the solar powered trash compactors along several major trash collection routes. 

I am excited by this story for a few reasons.  First as an engineer I think these compactors are great.  We have seen a few of these pop up on the streets recently and people seem to get excited to use the trash can.  I think they are curious to know exactly what is going on inside the beast when they hear it start up and perform its compacting cycle.  Second the compactors can hold alot more garbage than a standard can, the 32 gallon compactors are capable of holding 150 to 200 gallons of trash, and that means cities save money and keep the streets a little cleaner.  The resources saved on the new compactor routes are being deployed to other parts of the city where more cleanup is required.  The city is also pairing the Big Belly compactors with a recycling container to encourage people to separate their waste and keep the streets clean.

Check out the article on USA Today for more details and if you see one of the solar compactors on the street in Philly, or in any other city, check them out.

IBM Sells Sustainability

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Are you still skeptical about the business benefits of sustainability?  Sustainability and profitability are engaged and will probably be married soon, though no date has been set. One indication of this, and a good reminder of some sustainability/profitability synergies, can be found at IBM's website in a three click deep synopsis that the most attention-deficit prone among us can consume. What's a CSR strategy? Time to warm up your favorite search engine! For another indicator of current trends, note the IBM homepage feature.

On a design history tangent, Paul Rand designed the brilliant punchcard logo which IBM introduced in 1956 and he designed the equally appropriate update, which made its debut in 1972.

Thinking Process

Has it been a while since you've had anything to drink? A few hours, a day, two days? I"m starting to feel anxious just thinking about it.

The method on display here is not a manufacturing process, but a thinking process. The WaterBrick was developed by Wendell Adams at WaterBrick International and folks at FPM Tooling & Automation in response to a challenge to provide that most vital of substances, water, to those in emergency need of its life-giving qualities. Devising a method for successfully air-dropping water to remote locations is a significant engineering challenge in itself. The exeptional thing about the WaterBrick project is that the the goals were expanded to include both container reuse and ongoing economic viability.

After palletized WaterBricks survive the air-drop and the contents are, gratefully I expect, consumed, the bricks can be filled with sand or earth and stacked to create long-term shelter. If the first courses are buried, they can act as their own foundation. You can see a prototype building on the WaterBrick International website. The thinking proceeded beyond the creation of individual structures to include the possible creation of a village compound. All things considered, this is a noble use of the blow-molded container. I wish WaterBrick and those they serve, the best success.

I think I'll (gratefully) go get a drink of water.

Discover Green Materials

Ecolect is a Rhode Island based sustainable materials database offered free of charge by founders Matt Grigsby and Joe Gebbia. Each material listing in Ecolect's comprehensive database includes a photograph, a summary of the material, and a description of how it is made and used. While the team at Ecolect constantly works to update the website with the newest sustainable materials they have also expanded their services.

In an effort to spread information regarding sustainable materials Ecolect runs the material Petting Zoo, which is an exhibit that travels to design related conferences, seminars, trade shows, in-office events, studios, and educational institutions. The Petting Zoo encourages designers to touch and feel samples to better understand them and their possible applications.

Ecolect is now also offering a subscription service called Greenbox ($849.95 per year). Greenbox is a box of 8 -12 sustainable material samples that are shipped directly to designers every three months. A full year's subscription to Greenbox will provide a studio with a library of almost 50 different material samples.

SolidWorks Life Cycle Assessment Software

SolidWorks has announced the promise of SustainabilityXpress, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) software to aid in making design decisions informed by environmental impact. You can visit SolidWorks' announcement to sign up for notification of availability. It will be interesting to discover how rigorous a process is used to validate the significant claims for the software. It is claimed to provide: Carbon Footprint (production of greenhouse gasses) Total Energy Consumed, Effect on Air, and Effect on Water. This is quite an ambitious assessment suite to place at the designer's fingertips. I hope to be able to marvel at it's capability and accuracy when it arrives.

Ecopreneurist's 19 Free (Green) Tools for Small Businesses

The thorough list of Green Tools for Small Businesses provided by Ecopreneurist is especially saavy not only because each item suggested is free, but also because a lot of the items utilize the latest technology. For example #3, Free control of your IT—“If you run a network, software from companies like Local Cooling allows the settings on computers to be controlled centrally so you can automatically turn those babies off when no one is using them.”

Also, # 7 on the list, the free iphone application called carbon tracker allows users to easily calculate their carbon footprint with a GPS feature that automatically determines the length of each leg of the trip. Users can set monthly “maximum emission” goals as well as monitor their progress.

One process item that I think designers could especially benefit from using is # 9, the free online market research tools. Sign up for a no-cost account with a company like SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang, or QuestionPro. Not that this is a substitution for meeting face to face with users to get honest feedback, but at least for the concept validation phase this would be useful.

Also included was a link to Energy Star’s small business recommendations for improving your company's financial performance by reducing energy waste and energy costs, while protecting the environment.