Posts in 'Tools'

A corporate sustainability manager's job is never done.  These harried multi-taskers deal with everything from phasing Styrofoam cups out of the cafeteria to setting company-wide carbon reduction goals.

And now they need to blog, tweet and manage Facebook fan sites—so said the line up of experts at the recent Social Media for Sustainability conference, hosted by Just Means.

Panel after panel covered the hows and whys of using social media to engage employees, customers and other stakeholders.  But the big idea, underscored in nearly every presentation, was much more fundamental:  It's all about transparency. Read more »

In May, with very little fanfare, Walmart introduced an extraordinary new tool known as GreenWERCS. GreenWERCS assesses the composition of chemical intensive products – which is just about any non-food item on a Walmart shelf that you can pour, squeeze, dab or otherwise apply to your body or use in or around your home or car. GreenWERCS analyzes the composition of individual products from ingredient data entered by manufacturers, examining its potential impact on human health and the environment. Read more »

So maybe energy efficiency has never captured the imagination in the same way that renewable energy has, but attention to the importance of energy efficiency has surged in recent months.  Why?  Because it saves both money and greenhouse gas emissions.

President Obama’s administration has touted energy efficiency as the cheapest, cleanest, fastest energy source and a July 2009 McKinsey report concluded that, “energy efficiency offers a vast, low-cost energy resource for the U.S. economy – but only if the nation can craft a comprehensive and innovative approach to unlock it.”

EDF has developed an innovative approach to unlock energy efficiency in the commercial building space.  It’s called Climate Corps, and here’s how it works: Climate Corps places talented MBA students from top-ranking business schools in leading companies to make the business case for energy efficiency investments in office buildings and data centers.

We just completed our second year of the program and the outcomes are quite impressive.  Overall, the 2009 class of Climate Corps fellows uncovered efficiencies in lighting, computer equipment and heating and cooling systems that could:

• Save more than $54 million in net operational costs over the lifetime of the projects;
• Cut the equivalent of 160 million kilowatt hours of energy use annually—enough to power 14,000 homes;
• Avoid 100,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year— equivalent to taking more than 12,000 SUVs off the road.

How did our fellows achieve such astounding outcomes?  By keeping an eye toward the “low-hanging fruit:” the no-cost or low-cost solutions that can provide companies with loads of savings.

Here are just a few of this summer’s stories: Read more »

In the recent EDF fleet emissions benchmarking survey, 70% of respondents noted they have programs in place to reduce environmental impact. Yet, only 44% acknowledged that they measure greenhouse gas emissions. This begs the question, how are companies that aren’t measuring their emissions tracking the progress of their efforts?

We, of course, applaud the efforts of all companies that are actively seeking to reduce the environmental impact of their fleets, and we want them all to succeed. Good management, however, requires an objective way to measure progress. Greenhouse gas emissions provide the best metric of environmental impact. Read more »

In an earlier post, I introduced this graphic (from a McKinsey report that shows the estimated cost for CO₂ abatement using various technologies).*  In another post, I looked at emissions reductions in the commercial building sector.  Now we look at another big opportunity for “low hanging” emissions reductions – fuel efficiency. Read more »

EDF recently enhanced one of our most popular resources for companies: PaperCalculator.org.

Now fully updated with the latest scientific information, it is a robust tool for understanding how different paper choices affect the environment – whether you want to know how many trees were spared by reducing paper use, or the energy savings from choosing recycled content versus virgin.

Random House, Staples, PepsiCo, Wells Fargo and Starbucks, among others, have used PaperCalculator.org to manage their paper purchases. In total, the tool saw 27,000 uses in the past year.

So what’s new with version 2.0? Read more »

A little over a year ago, EDF kicked off a partnership with private equity (PE) leader Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR). The goal of the project is to develop and implement a system (we’re calling it the Green Portfolio Framework) for improving environmental and business performance across KKR’s portfolio companies. Through the process, we hope to create significant business benefits for KKR and its portfolio companies and a new model for the PE sector. The PE industry has a history of building lean businesses through a laser-like focus on financial and operational performance.

Our hypothesis is that environmental measurement and management can make companies even more efficient and successful. If we’re right, we expect to see environmental management adopted across the PE sector as a new best practice for operational improvement and value creation.

Based on the initial results, we’re off to a good start: Read more »

The crux of our work with corporate fleets is getting them to consider greenhouse gas emissions as one variable when making vehicle purchasing and use decisions. Relatively minor decisions, when multiplied over hundreds of vehicles traveling 20,000+ miles a year can add up to significant differences in emissions. Being able to understand what decisions impact emissions and to track emissions over time are important skills for the 21^st century fleet manager.

Tracking emissions of hundreds to thousands of vehicles dispersed across the country is easier said than done. Medium-to-larger fleets that use a national fuel card typically have good information about the type and volume of fuel their vehicles are consuming. With this information, they can calculate the carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from their vehicles. The data required to calculate emissions of the other greenhouse gases from vehicles – nitrous oxide (N₂O), methane (CH₄), hydro fluorocarbons (HFCs) {most commonly HFC 134a}- are a different story.

For N₂O and CH₄, fleet managers need to know the emissions control technology used and miles traveled for each unit. Unfortunately, mileage data is notoriously unreliable for fleets because relying on drivers to code in correct mileage information adds human error. Matching each unit with its specific emissions control technology, such as EPA Tier II or California LEV, is possible. But as they've never had a reason to track this before, most fleets don't have this information readily available. As for HFC emissions from air conditioner leakage, most fleets have no way of tracking these emissions. Getting this information from a dispersed fleet is a data collection nightmare.

Fleets with good fuel data face their own version of the infamous 80-20 rule, except in their case it's more of a 95-5 rule. Carbon dioxide accounts for about 95% of greenhouse gases from passenger vehicles (on a CO₂E basis). With good fuel consumption data, it's straightforward to calculate emissions. The other three gases account for about 5% of the emissions, but – as they are vastly more complex to track – it can take 95% of the effort to track them.

To help fleets overcome this paradox, we created a fleet GHG emissions calculator that estimates total fleet greenhouse gas emissions from fuel consumption data alone. The fuel data is directly used to calculate emissions of CO₂. Emissions of N₂O, CH₄ and HFCs are estimated based on their prominence among greenhouse gas from transportation source as reported in the Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990-2006, Table 2-15.

We worked with NAFA Fleet Management Association to develop this calculator and unveiled it at the annual NAFA I&E held in New Orleans in April. Over the two days EDF had the calculator on display, we were visited by a few hundred fleet managers from a wide cross-cut of private and public fleets. An additional fifty fleet managers joined our seminar on measuring greenhouse gases. Based-on the conversations we had in New Orleans and since, it appears that the calculator is filling an important niche.

We encourage fleet managers that have good fuel data to use our tool. For the few fleets that have the more complete data needed to measure non-CO₂ emissions, they might want to follow the more complex calculation protocol put forth by the EPA Climate Leaders program. At minimum, we encourage all fleets to start to create data collection systems

If you have thoughts on ways we can improve on the calculator, we'd love to hear them. The calculator can be found at: http://edf.org/greenfleet. A technical background piece [pdf] is also online.

Yesterday the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC) launched COMPASS, a new software tool that corporate packaging designers can use to assess the environmental impacts of packaging designs and inform decisions about packaging changes.

COMPASS grew out of an earlier software tool called MERGE that EDF developed through our partnerships with SC Johnson, Bristol Meyers Squibb and Aveda in 1996-2001. The goal of those partnerships was to create an easy-to-use software program that companies could use to evaluate the environmental profiles of different product and packaging designs. Bristol Meyers Squibb and Aveda each used MERGE to redesign packages to reduce environmental impact.

In 2006, the SPC, an industry working group of packaged goods companies and packaging suppliers, conducted a review of available environmental packaging design tools. Selecting MERGE as the most promising among them, SPC approached EDF about updating and redeveloping MERGE for use by a broader group of companies. We licensed MERGE to GreenBlue, the non-profit organization that convenes the SPC, for its use as the basis for COMPASS. Our Senior Scientist Dr. Richard Denison, who was the original developer of MERGE, served as a peer reviewer for COMPASS' new methodology.

The new COMPASS tool is supported by updated datasets, includes additional packaging materials and environmental metrics, and includes specific packaging fabrication processes not included in the original version of MERGE. It should be a good resource for companies looking to understand and improve the environmental impacts of their packaging. A license will run you $750 ($500 if your company is an SPC member), but you can get a pretty good sense of the tool’s capabilities by using the free trial. Check it out and share your thoughts with the Innovation Exhange community!

A goal for the EDF Innovation Exchange is to package things we've learned and the research we've done for easier reuse.  Many of the most directly reusable items we've got so far are listed under the "Tools" tab.  Here's a list:

4Cs of Climate Action – Four steps to prioritize climate action: conserve energy, convert to lower carbon energy, choose high quality offsets, call for action.

GEMI Water Sustainability Tool – Identify new market opportunities, mitigate risk, develop sustainable water strategies and create shareholder value.

Getting started – Five steps to understand your company's environmental opportunities and set goals for your organization.

Read more »