In the Ring of Fire, located in the most northern parts of Ontario, access is particularly challenging. Ice roads, increasingly unstable with the effects of climate warming, are often the only route for ground travel. Small propeller planes are a common mode of transportation, assuming the availability of sufficiently long runways or nearby lakes for take-off and landing.

Toronto-based Solar Ship has what it considers a better way, one that uses less or no fuel, can carry potentially larger weights and volumes, and which doesn’t need a runway to land – a clearing the size of a school soccer field will do just fine.

“It’s not about replacing current bush planes, it’s about complementing them,” says Jay Godsall, founder and chief executive of Solar Ship. “It’s about taking things they can’t take and delivering them to places they can’t go.”

Not quite an airship, not quite an airplane, Solar Ship’s unique vehicle is a hybrid of both. It’s a delta-shaped aircraft filled with helium, but slightly less than what airships use to lift themselves off the ground. Solar panels across the top of its body, backed up by a lightweight battery system, will supply enough power to drive it forward and into the air. In this way, the design achieves just the right balance of static lift (like a blimp) and aerodynamic lift (like a plane).

Because of the buoyancy it does have, it doesn’t require a lot of space to take off, and combined with its broad wingspan – which varies depending on the model – it can carry between 200 kilograms and several tonnes for thousands of kilometres. When the sun is shining, it needs remarkably little, if any fuel.

“Theoretically, we should be able to cut down on carbon emissions and costs a great deal,” Godsall says.

The Ring of Fire is a multibillion-dollar opportunity with the potential to create many thousands of jobs, he says. The problem is that communities in the area aren’t set up for that kind of rapid growth and activity, and they’re wary of the environmental consequences of that growth – what is often called “resource curse.”

It may be why Wasaya Airways, an aboriginal-owned airline based in Thunder Bay, and which pretty much has a monopoly on commercial air travel in the region, has signed a partnership agreement with Solar Ship.

“Their communities are going to be heavily impacted by this massive mining development in their backyard, and that will mean, at a primary economic level, just moving a lot more stuff in and out,” Godsall says. “But they have trouble with large volume payloads. How does someone pick up and deliver a pick-up truck, or 20-foot container, or on-site water purification system?”

Solar Ship has built a demonstration aircraft that will be hosted in Wasaya’s Thunder Bay hangars. It will be tested under a variety of conditions to determine whether it’s fit for the job. That being the case, Wasaya could end up being one of Solar Ship’s first customers.

Demo flights in the Ring of Fire will be “extremely powerful for us,” says Godsall. “If we can prove it there, we can prove it anywhere.”

The post Mining gets a low-carbon lift appeared first on Corporate Knights.

That is the conclusion of a report released in June by the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), which, after three decades of being a fossil-fuel booster, has in recent years become a more vocal advocate for climate-friendly energy sources.

If there’s any chance of keeping the average rise in global temperatures to below 2°C, spending on clean energy development and deployment has to rise dramatically this decade, it argues.

Between now and 2050, the agency figures $100 trillion (U.S.) will be needed just to keep the global energy system in working order. On top of that, $36 trillion needs to be spent on low-carbon technologies and energy efficiency. But Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the IEA, has emphasized that the investment will pay off. Every dollar invested has the potential to generate three dollars in future savings, she says.

It may be a hard sell coming from an agency historically viewed as being in the pockets of the oil industry, but the IEA – precisely because of its conservative tradition – also brings credibility to the discussion. That the agency is now a champion of carbon pricing, the elimination of subsidies on fossil fuels and the responsible use of natural gas to displace coal, and is calling for a must faster transition to renewables, is a testament to the climate crisis we face.

Van der Hoeven, a Dutch politician, took over from previous executive director Nobuo Tanaka in September 2011. Corporate Knights had a chance to sit down with the former Dutch minister of economic affairs during a multi-stop visit to North America. Below are some edited highlights from that chat:

CK: You and many others have called natural gas an important bridge to renewables. Are you concerned how abundant, low-cost natural gas, thanks to innovations around shale gas development, is extending the length of that bridge and threatening investment in and deployment of renewables?

VAN DER HOEVEN: In two or three decades there will be nine billion people (worldwide) and that shows that the demand for energy will be growing, even with energy efficiency. We’ll need everything. To see to it that we go to a cleaner future, to renewables, we have to find that bridge, and that bridge is natural gas. Then we can phase out coal. The question is, how can we see to it that there will be a market for renewables? That’s exactly why I emphasize investments in clean energy technology, while also seeing to it that feed-in tariffs act to promote a more mature market for renewables. But there is something else endangering the whole thing. People are opposing the wind farms. They are opposing hydro. They are opposing geothermal. They are opposing solar. If you oppose that, and you oppose gas, what do you think the solution will be to provide these nine billion people with energy?

CK: Obviously, we’ll end up turning to coal. But are you saying our NIMBYism around renewables is partly to blame for how much we depend on natural gas?

VAN DER HOEVEN: It was mentioned to me, in this (northeast) region, that the lakes are a huge source of renewable energy. But the moment that people are opposed to using it, then the bridge we were talking about just now, about natural gas, will only be lengthened. So the answer to your question is a little bit complicated – it’s not only about gas, it’s about people’s acceptance of the generation of renewable energy on a larger scale than just panels on their rooftops.

CK: Do you think the transition to clean energy will be different in developing and developed countries? Will strategies vary in regions experiencing different paces of development?

VAN DER HOEVEN: I don’t know. Wind is coming of age in South America, for instance, and solar is being used on a large scale in a number of African countries. They are using these new technologies already in quite a professional way. Of course, when we talk about energy poverty, we are talking about those countries trying to catch up with already developed countries. What we also see is that the largest amount of energy demand will be exactly in these emerging countries, with China ahead of everybody.

CK: After a report the IEA released earlier this year, you called the current investment level in clean technologies insufficient. Isn’t it fair to say we’ve also experienced strong growth – indeed, record levels of investment over the past few years?

VAN DER HOEVEN: I agree. This is a very important conclusion. There are quite a number of people saying, “Oh, it’s not growing at all.” But it’s growing at a rapid pace. It’s just not enough.

CK: So what’s the solution? How can we tap into the capital required to make it enough? Is the IEA working on ways to tap into or unlock that private-sector capital?

VAN DER HOEVEN: The most important thing is for countries to develop a predictable and stable investment climate. That is up to them. We are not an investment agency, we are not a bank, and we are not the World Bank. We are policy advisors to our government members. But I think this is the most important thing they can do, because if there is not a stable long-term investment climate in a country, investment will not happen. People want a certain return on investment.

CK: Do you have concerns about the ability to move toward a low-carbon economy, given the economic issues we’re seeing in Europe and the United States? There are some economists who suggest spikes in oil prices are tied to recession and that every time we climb out of recession and get into a growth phase, it drives up oil prices and we get caught in this cycle of little recessions and growth spurts.

VAN DER HOEVEN: I don’t know if that’s the case, since the past few years we were in a recession and prices still went up, up, up.

CK: Isn’t the fear that they will go up even further if we see rapid economic growth, and that this will thrust economies back into recession?

VAN DER HOEVEN: Yes, but at this moment we don’t see rapid growth, we predict growth at 3.5 per cent a year. When we translate that into oil terms, we get 0.8 million (more) barrels a day. We are not going to translate that into prices. That is always unpredictable. But we can see at the moment that all prices are high, and that there is more interest in renewable energy. There are also some examples of countries that have invested in renewable energy and come out of the economic crisis better than others. That has to do with the employment. So it pays off.

CK: The IEA, a traditionally conservative agency born in the 1970s to protect global oil supply, has been noticeably more vocal on climate change issues over the past few years. Indeed, your chief economist has made several strong statements about the need to transition away from fossil fuels, or else. What’s behind that noticeable change in posture?

VAN DER HOEVEN: The reason we were brought to life in 1974 was energy security. And in those days, it was all about oil. But energy security in 2012 is about sustainability, affordability and accessibility. And that brings climate into the story. It’s important that an organization like IEA realizes there is a strong link between economy, environment and energy. They really influence each other. And the moment that you forget about that, I think you’re not doing the right job.

CK: But it is an evolution of the agency’s position, yes? Environment was never previously a key pillar of concern.

VAN DER HOEVEN: Energy security is the key pillar, of course, but there are other pillars underneath and one of the pillars is technology and one of the pillars is the influence on climate. Of course, there is an influence of energy on climate because of carbon dioxide emissions, but we also have to look at how climate influences energy security. What about Hurricane Katrina, for instance? Or droughts? This is something on our minds. That is why our mission statement is affordable, accessible, sustainable energy security – for all.

The post The $36-trillion question appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Anastas, who first coined the term “green chemistry” in 1991, was at the time a staff chemist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Warner was an industrial chemist at Polaroid trying to get regulatory approval for a new low-impact chemical manufacturing process the EPA didn’t really understand. The two men found themselves allies in an effort to push a concept that was largely foreign to the teachings of chemistry: to make materials in an environmentally benign and responsible way, rather than tolerate harmful side effects.

Warner is now president and chief technology officer at the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry, an organization he founded in 2007 that is “dedicated to the development of non-toxic, environmentally benign and sustainable technological solutions for society.” Corporate Knights had an opportunity to chat with Warner about the field of green chemistry and why it’s so important.

CK: You are often referred to as one of the founding fathers of green chemistry. What’s behind that reference?

WARNER: I was working at Polaroid for 10 years and while there invented a technology (for a benign manufacturing process). I went to the Environmental Protection Agency to go through all the regulatory hurdles and I was having a hard time getting it through. Not because of anything to do with toxicity or environmental impact. It was just different. I found it ironic that the (existing) process we were using used some questionable, nasty stuff and here was a new technology that was head and shoulders better and the EPA was making it more difficult to do new things than continue to do old things. Everyone (at the time) was talking about measuring, monitoring, characterizing, remediating, recycling and dealing with hazardous materials after they’re in commerce, and here I was, a synthetic organic chemist, inventing something that is better in the first place. And although that seemed so obvious and straightforward, there was no language for it. There was no science to actually contemplate that.

CK: Can you explain that last comment, that “There was no science to actually contemplate that”?

WARNER: The way science grows is to be communicated, so we create a little pocket of knowledge, we give it a name and we start talking about it in journals and conferences. In 1990, there was no such thing as people communicating how to invent things that are benign in the first place. Everything about pollution was how to deal with it after the fact. The point of “green chemistry” was to come up with a science to grow a body of knowledge so that as we progressed in the future, it would be part of the lexicon of science.

CK: This must have been frustrating at the time.

WARNER: I really got discontent about this. I started looking around and I realized that not one college, not one university on the planet trained scientists who make things to identify what makes them toxic. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses, architects, engineers; all these professions have to take a test to get a licence and in a few years have to take a test to maintain a licence. My father was an electrician. He couldn’t come to your house and change a light bulb without a document saying he could do it safely. And yet, anyone can take a molecule that has never existed in the universe before – potentially making the most potent neurotoxin in history and nowhere in their education did they get any kind of training to anticipate that. We’re starting to make progress, but it is slow coming.

CK: What you developed at Polaroid you described as a “benign” approach to manufacturing, and in our discussion you’ve compared it to biomimicry – copying how nature does things. Can you explain the connection between the two?

WARNER: Humans have been at chemistry for 150 years. If you look at the molecules in our drugs and our cosmetics and our electronics, it’s breathtaking. We are so amazing, we should pat our backs at just how cool are the things we have done. But if you look at our manufacturing processes, we use high temperature, we use high pressure, we use nasty reagents to do all this stuff. Now, if you look at nature, and you look at the molecules in nature, we have to react with a great deal of humility. Nature outperforms us in the diversity and complexity of structures it makes. But not only is nature better from that perspective, it does everything at room temperature, it does everything at ambient pressure, and for the most part water is the solvent. Humans force molecules to do what we want them to do, whereas nature asks molecules, “What do you want to do?” and builds the system around that. At Polaroid I looked at manufacturing processes and asked myself, “Can I put two molecules together that help each other so that together they will do things at room temperature and ambient pressure?” That was the stunning success. But because it was so freaky and weird, the EPA didn’t know what to do with it.

CK: Is curriculum heading in the right direction?

WARNER: I’d say well over 70 per cent of the colleges and universities in the United States have faculties passionate about green chemistry and trying to bring it into the curriculum. But I don’t see any colleges or universities at the department level that have embraced it as part of the required curriculum. Now, if a student wants to know this, it’s becoming easier and easier for them to learn it, but I think that’s missing the point. What aspect of chemical education could be more important than this – how to keep people safe and not make toxic materials? But changing curriculum is a challenge.

CK: You have mentioned that most of the big companies are embracing green chemistry to a certain extent, but who would you say are the leaders?

WARNER: It’s hard to point to a company and say that company is a leader. There are pockets within companies that have leadership roles, so there is a group at Pfizer, for example, that is doing phenomenal green chemistry work. There is a group at Dow Chemical. There is a group at ATMI. So there are dozens and dozens of companies that have a senior vice-president, a director of research, or research groups that embraced and successfully implemented green chemistry. Have the companies themselves embraced it? Maybe in some cases by just allowing it to happen. The pharmaceutical industry was one of the first industries to get on board, and you can understand why that is so obvious. When you think about it from one level, pharma is the only industry that does tox-tests (toxicology testing) on humans. So they’ve always understood the balance between toxicity and the benefits of a molecule.

CK: Is it that big pharma is now paying attention to more than just the final product?

WARNER: What would happen before is that the person inventing the molecule at the laboratory benches wasn’t aware of all the real-world manufacturing procedures. Yes, they’d do the human toxicology tests, but what about the solvents that are being used in the manufacture? On average – and I hear different quotes – for every gram of pharmaceutical product, anywhere from 200 to 1,000 grams of waste is being generated. So the proportion of waste per product is so massive that reducing waste by 10 per cent can translate into hundreds of millions of dollars in cost savings. The pharmaceutical industry is just the high-margin place with an R&D budget that can afford to do green chemistry and can see the benefits.

CK: Where are you focusing your time these days?

WARNER: After 10 years of Polaroid, and after 10 years (teaching) at the University of Massachusetts, I met Jim Babcock and we started a for-profit, beakers and flasks chemistry research company called the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry. It’s a 42,000-square-foot facility with millions of dollars of state-of-the-art chemical research. We’ve got about 35 scientists and what we do is invent technologies. We’re working with companies that have a great deal more experience in the field than we do and infinitely more resources, yet they’re asking us to invent. And I would argue we have an incredible success rate.

CK: Why have you achieved so much success?

WARNER: Not necessarily because we’re smarter or cleverer than other scientists, but because we start from the principles of green chemistry – it places us at a different starting point than everyone else and it points us in different directions. I’d argue that it profoundly enhances the innovative process within any company. And just because companies aren’t standing on the mountaintop beating their chests doesn’t mean they’re not embracing it. If a company spends tens of millions of dollars to invent less toxic materials, how can they go to the public and announce that what they were selling last year was toxic and this year it isn’t? So you’re not getting the whole picture. In the case where we see big companies having active research programs, they’re not wearing it on their sleeves.

CK: What’s your own underlying motivation? Were you always an advocate of green chemistry, or did your interest evolve over time?

WARNER: I am driven by an amazing amount of passion. I lost a child to a birth defect. Before that, I won every award, was on the cover of Celebrity Magazine as an uber scientist, at 19 spoke at the National Academy of Sciences, and graduated (with a PhD in organic chemistry) from Princeton in three and a half years. I got every pat on the back you could get for an industrial chemist. But lying in bed on the night of my son’s funeral I asked myself, “What if something I touched caused my son’s birth defect? What if something I got an award for caused my son’s disease?” It was a disease that no one knew the cause of, but the fact that I had no tools to even answer that question is what made me leave Polaroid and go to the University of Massachusetts to try to change the way we teach science.

The post Do no harm appeared first on Corporate Knights.

At a Walkers Crisps factory in Leicester, England, PepsiCo is turning this soggy challenge into a water-saving innovation. The goal: to extract so much water from inbound spuds that the factory can go “off grid,” drawing little or no water from public taps. Doing so, PepsiCo hopes, will help save the plant roughly $1 million a year in avoided water costs.

“The idea for taking factories off the water grid came from a simple observation by our front-line teams that potatoes are 80 per cent water,” says Martyn Seal, PepsiCo’s European director of sustainability.

PepsiCo’s efforts to turn off the taps at its Walkers plant in the U.K. is one sliver of a bigger batch of initiatives to make its global operations run with less water. In 2010, the food-and-drink giant, which turned over $66.5 billion (U.S.) in sales last year, released its first comprehensive water report. The effort, similar to initiatives out of rival Coca-Cola, set out details of its water consumption alongside plans on how to use that water more productively.

One of its headline goals is to improve the efficiency of water use – measured by water consumed per unit of production – by 20 per cent by 2015, using 2006 as a baseline. PepsiCo hit this target last year, four years ahead of schedule. Another goal is to strive for “positive water balance” in water-distressed areas. This means for every unit of water PepsiCo uses, it strives to restore, replenish or prevent loss of the same amount or more in the same region. It also aims to provide access to safe water for three million people in developing countries before 2016.

Early on, potato-chip plants emerged as a juicy target for these goals. Making chips is surprisingly water intensive. In a normal year, some 350,000 metric tons of fresh tubers is shipped to the Leicester factory – the equivalent of some 13,000 tractor-trailer loads.

In the plant, potatoes are washed, peeled and sliced. A steady flow of H2O is used at each of these steps. In Leicester, this process demands roughly 700 million litres of water annually, the equivalent of roughly 280 Olympic-sized pools. Yet as crucial as water is while preparing the raw spuds, it’s an unwanted troublemaker thereafter. The thin slices are plunged for a few minutes into oversized fryers filled with oil boiling at 190°C (375°F). Water trapped in the potato slices vapourizes instantly, turning the otherwise inedible starch into an addictively crunchy treat.

In a conventional set-up, the cloud of steam that rises from these vats is vented out into the air. PepsiCo engineers recognized that the vapour represents a huge waste of both water and energy. To recover these wisps of moisture, PepsiCo fit a contraption onto the plant’s exhaust towers. Inside, the hot steam passes over a network of thin, cooled tubes. Moisture from the potato vapour condenses on the cooler tubes for easy collection. The process also recaptures traces of cooking oil from the exhaust. Both the oil and water can be reused. About four-fifths of the moisture that is normally lost is recovered.

Together with systems that recycle about two-thirds of the plant’s wastewater, the steam-recapture project is on track to supply enough water to hit PepsiCo’s goal of drawing zero freshwater in Leicester. The company is already testing the technology at similar sites in Holland and Belgium, part of a plan to extend these practices to other large European operations and, later, worldwide.

A successful pilot in the Leicester plant “will provide us with a technology suite that we will be able to reapply at other PepsiCo plants, particularly in areas of severe water scarcity,” Seal says. “This is an opportunity to realize meaningful cost savings while reducing our impact on the environment.”

Combined with other projects across PepsiCo’s operations, the steam-recapture efforts contributed to savings of $45 million in water and related energy costs last year, compared with the 2006 base when the company began these efforts. By volume, in 2011 it used 16 billion fewer litres of water, compared with 2006.

As much as PepsiCo execs crow about the bottom-line impact of these efforts, they point to strategic benefits too: The company must plan for operating risks that droughts pose to future operations. By 2030, global demand for freshwater could exceed supplies by 40 per cent, explains Dan Bena, PepsiCo’s senior director of sustainable development.

“If this gap is not closed, there will be no business as we know it today,” he says.

Click here to view our complete Tech Savvy series.

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Robert Hardt, chief executive of Siemens Canada, said the company is constantly monitoring developments on the domestic cleantech scene. “It’s vital for us to have this network in place where we have an ongoing dialogue with these fast-growing companies to stay constantly informed of their activities,” he told Corporate Knights in an interview. “We can then decide the optimal time to enter into a partnership or, to take it a step further, an acquisition.” Siemens sees smaller start-ups as especially valuable because of their ability to quickly bring new, innovative products to market. With its established global distribution network, it can harness these products and introduce them to a broader audience.

Always looking to stay competitive with GE and other large corporations that are leading the market for smart grid technology, Siemens had been keeping a watchful eye as RuggedCom grew to be the world leader in rugged communications networking technology. When St. Louis, Miss.-based networking and cable maker Belden launched a hostile bid last December with a low-ball offer of $280 million, Siemens was ready to step in as a white knight. It eventually offered a 142 per cent premium on RuggedCom’s share price, and received unanimous board approval. The company not only promises to preserve the RuggedCom brand, but the acquisition is expected to be the core of a worldwide centre of competence for industrial ethernet communication, strengthening the company’s roots in Ontario. The province’s highly educated workforce, as well as the potential for the Waterloo area and other nascent IT hubs to grow, means Siemens will be watchful for Canadian start-ups in the future.

Its other recent Ontario investment was the $20 million it put towards a new wind turbine blade-manufacturing factory in the town of Tillsonburg. “The government of Ontario was visionary in putting forth a clear strategy which they turned into policy, and then they attracted a lot of companies like Siemens to invest in this area, which is paying off for the province,” Hardt said.

While rival GE was building its new Grid IQ Innovation Centre in Markham, Ont., this year, Siemens was hammering out a landmark partnership with NB Power in New Brunswick to develop a comprehensive 10-year smart grid program for the province. Utilizing its extensive smart grid technology and software portfolio, the company will be establishing its own research centre in Fredericton. The province, currently powered by a mix of fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro and imported energy, is looking to reduce its energy peaks while guaranteeing a reliable source of energy at a low cost.

The New Brunswick grid, already responsible for exporting energy to Prince Edward Island, will become strategically important in 2017 when the Lower Churchill hydroelectric project in Labrador begins generating electricity. Newfoundland and Labrador will be working to export this energy to northeastern U.S. markets through the Maritimes, ending in New Brunswick.

Hardt believes that the Siemens deal in New Brunswick is the first full embrace of smart grid technology by a Canadian utility. “Our hope is that other jurisdictions will look at our NB Power deal and want to replicate it,” he said. “It provides transparency in the distribution network, gives customers information about what is going on, combines it with pricing schemes and then gives customers choices, all while reducing costs.”

In addition to smart grid, Siemens is also enabling the development of smarter cities. As a way to advertise its smart cities software and technology, the company has produced Green City Indices in different parts of the world, bringing the model to North America last year. Hardt insisted that the goal is not to put pressure on municipalities, but rather to provide transparency and open up a discussion about making cities greener and more livable.

“The challenges cities face are quite similar, particularly in highly urbanized countries like Canada. It’s important that cities do not act in isolation, and that they can learn from each other. We see ourselves as a broker of ideas. Of course, we contribute what we believe to be possible: what technology is on hand, what is coming down the pipeline?”

Its Canadian urban transit portfolio has also grown beyond providing trains to Calgary and Edmonton, having recently won the contract to expand Ottawa’s light rail system. As a main competitor to Bombardier on domestic transit projects, it is also expanding its Canadian manufacturing operations to meet local content requirements often baked into bidding rules. “Local content is always a topic that we are eager to address,” he said.

The post A green giant on the prowl appeared first on Corporate Knights.

General Electric announced in September that it had successfully recycled 100,000 refrigerators and freezers through the UNTHA Recycling Technology (URT) system. The company estimates about nine million refrigerators are disposed of every year in the U.S. and shredded for metal, sending over 200,000 metric tons of foam and insulation to landfills. In 2011 it teamed up with the Appliance Recycling Centers of America, an organization that provides services for 175 utilities in North America, to establish an end-of-life recycling program within 12 states in the U.S. Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions.

GE became the first appliance manufacturer to work with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to comply with its Responsible Appliance Disposal program, by offering to remove old units for recycling when it delivers new refrigerators to customers. The URT is a 40-foot machine which deconstructs the refrigerator into two-inch pieces in under a minute. Greenhouse gases from the foam are captured in a closed system, while foam and insulation are converted into pellets and used as fuel in a cement kiln. Steel is sent to a mill, with copper and aluminum sold off to a motorcycle engine manufacturer. Only 5 per cent of the fridge material is not recycled.

Along with other appliance manufacturers, GE has faced criticism for contributing to a marketplace increasingly filled with disposable appliances that have become less reliable. Putting greater emphasis on end-of-life recycling for its products does not fully address this problem, but it does help mitigate the burden placed on utilities mandated with waste disposal. GE, which produces more than 500 Energy Star-approved appliances, has also partnered with the EPA on three other voluntary initiatives. These EPA programs include WasteWise, which focuses on waste reduction and saving environmental resources while reducing emissions, and SmartWay, designed to help lower transportation-related emissions by encouraging companies to use certified carrier partners with a track record in fuel efficiency and environmental performance. In 2005, GE launched its green-focused Ecomagination research and development program, which generated $21 billion in revenue for 2011. The company is on track to meet its 2015 goal of $10 billion in research and development for the program, with Ecomagination profits growing twice as fast as overall company profits.

Zero: Hudbay Minerals

Guatemalan officials announced on September 28 that they have arrested Mynor Padilla, the former head of security at the Fenix mine property near El Estor, Guatemala, on charges of murder and attempted murder. The mine was owned at the time by Hudbay Minerals, a Canadian mining company that acquired it as part of a merger with Skye Resources in August 2008. Skye Resources, which was then renamed HMI Nickel, controlled the Compania Guatemalteca de Niquel (CGN), which operated the ferronickel project. This was the first time Hudbay had controlled assets outside of Canada.

Following years of tension over disputed land rights with local Mayan Q’eqchi’, who claim they were driven off the land during the Guatemalan civil war, a meeting between the regional governor and protestors spiralled into a violent confrontation that left one protestor dead and another disabled. Witnesses allege that Adolfo Ich, an influential community leader, was surrounded by CGN personnel who attacked him during the daytime with machetes and then shot him in the head. Despite the controversial actions taken that day, the head of security continued to be employed by the company for over a year. Hudbay denies any wrongdoing, noting five security personnel were also injured that day. “Based on internal investigations and eye witness reports, Hudbay believes that CGN personnel were not involved with his death,” the company said in a statement. In August 2011, Hudbay sold the Fenix mine for $170 million to a Cyprus-based private equity firm.

Three lawsuits are currently in Ontario courts, two of which deal with attacks from security forces that day. The third lawsuit claims that before Hudbay acquired Skye in January 2007, 11 women were raped during a forced eviction from land near the Fenix mine. At the heart of the Canadian lawsuits is whether a parent company is liable for actions taken by subsidiaries in foreign countries.

Murray Klippenstein, the lawyer for Adolfo Ich’s widow, who brought forward one of the lawsuits, is encouraged by the arrest in Guatemala. “Now that the man that Hudbay allowed to be put in charge of security has been arrested for murder, we hope Hudbay changes its unsupportable position, makes amends, and takes real, concrete steps to ensure that similar severe human rights abuses never again are committed at one of its projects.”

Click here to view our complete Heroes & Zeros series.

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But 2012 wasn’t quite the leap forward that it could have been. A few standout companies like Unilever, Nike, and DuPont are aggressively driving sustainable growth. Smart followers like GE, Google, Sony, Microsoft and others are on track to be tomorrow’s sustainability leaders. But most companies – about 75 per cent – just muddle along making only incremental improvements.

And here’s the rub: Most chief executives say they’ve already embedded sustainability into their organizations. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Mind you, these are tough times. The short list of challenges include the U.S. and European debt crises, the third global food crunch in the past five years, U.S. droughts and forest fires, and an alarming rate of Arctic melting. As U.S. corporations compete to meet and exceed their customers’ expectations, more communities in their global supply chains grow restless under the pressures of water scarcity, famine, floods, and other forms of environmental and social degradation.

There’s a disturbing disconnect here. These issues will increasingly matter to customers. Indeed, tomorrow’s customers will care more about how companies deliver and develop sustainable products. But in working with companies globally, our experience at Hedstrom Associates suggests that fewer than 25 per cent of CEOs have embedded sustainability into their corporate DNA. The vast majority remain stuck in what strategist Robert Shelton has called “rampant incrementalism.”

After 15 years of tracking corporate progress on sustainability, two criteria have emerged to separate the true leaders from the so-called rampant incrementalists. The leaders clearly drive to have zero impact. They also work to change business models to tap into “green” revenue growth. Generally, there are four stages that get them to where they need to be.

The first stage can best be called beyond compliance. About 45 per cent of companies are in this stage. They conserve energy, reduce waste, and address safety incidents and human rights abuses. However, they do not yet grasp the profound changes they will have to address in the next few years. Apple, with its environmental and human rights issues in China, is a classic Stage 1 company. Its entire sustainability focus seems to be just trying to do less bad.

Companies in Stage 2 can be described as smart followers. At this stage, the CEOs of companies believe in the importance of sustainability. They establish reasonably tough environmental and social responsibility goals and issue strong sustainability reports. But they do not change their businesses in any meaningful way. Most of the companies rated highly by the majority of sustainability rankings fall into Stage 2.

When companies enter Stage 3, they can accurately be viewed as tomorrow’s sustainability leaders. They set very bold positioning goals that break ranks with industry peers. Increasingly, that means goals of zero: zero carbon, waste, toxics, or species reduction on the environmental side; zero human rights abuses on the social side; and zero corruption or tax evasion on the business side.

HP unveiled its Net-Zero Energy Data Center. Sony is on track to meet its 2050 goal of a zero carbon footprint. Microsoft vowed to be carbon neutral in fiscal year 2013.

Tomorrow’s leaders are also investing in green growth. GE calls “environmental performance” a key driver for business. It has 130 products and solutions in its $85-billion (cumulative sales through 2010) Ecomagination portfolio. GE and Unilever are among about 300 companies that are backing a price on carbon in Australia.

These companies are starting to realign their business models to sustainability drivers. It’s an encouraging sign, but they have yet to boldly institute that realignment across the corporation.

Stage 4 companies are today’s sustainability leaders. They are aggressively investing in a fundamental business transformation by selling off operations that have a high eco-footprint per unit of revenue and investing in operations that have a low footprint.

Unilever, Nike and Google are prime examples. Unilever CEO Paul Polman plans to double sales revenue while cutting the company’s environmental footprint in half. Nike is launching a new supply-chain manufacturing index that places sustainable practices “on equal footing” with the traditional measures of quality, cost and delivery. Google has invested nearly $1 billion in renewable energy and smarter grids.

Much of this isn’t news. Many senior executives “get it.” What stops them is that the path to sustainability seems so huge, complex and challenging. They don’t know where to start.

Finding the right answers begins with the right questions. Companies must ask themselves: Which stage are we in? Where do our customers want us to be, both the customers we have today and those we hope to have tomorrow? What critical few steps should we take on Monday that will put us on that path?

The breakthrough comes when companies consumed with being less bad figure out that being good – in a way that moves decisively toward long-term, sustainable growth – is the way forward.

The post Being ‘less bad’ isn’t enough appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In his new book Green Illusions, Ozzie Zehner, visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, writes that there never really was an energy crisis. What we have, he argues, is a consumption crisis that is being compounded by all the gizmo-green technologies we are throwing at it. Zehner subtitles his book “The dirty secrets of clean energy and the future of environmentalism,” and he devotes the first half of his work to a “colonoscopy” of clean-energy technologies.

Zehner questions the cleanliness of solar-panel manufacturing and the long-term effectiveness of the panels, and claims that even if they were free, the costs of installing, connecting, maintaining, cleaning, insuring and eventually disposing of photovoltaics make them uncompetitive.

Many have disputed his position. But you cannot dispute his questioning the logic of slapping solar panels on the roofs of suburban homes to “supplement the power for the wine chillers, air conditioners and clothes dryers of the nation” instead of designing and insulating those houses properly in the first place.

Similarly, Zehner has been criticized for his claim that electric and hybrid cars are really running on coal, nuclear power and lithium mines and that overall, they have no real environmental benefits. However, one cannot dispute his comments that the electric or hybrid car does little to deal with the larger ecological impacts of sprawl, and that “a car’s odometer may be more environmentally telling than its fuel gauge.”

Zehner attacks every alternative energy source with glee, from easier targets like hydrogen and biofuels to weightier sources like nuclear and wind; sometimes with too much glee and perhaps too little research. I was surprised that he doesn’t appear to know the difference between a ground-source heat pump, inaccurately called geothermal by American salespeople, and real geothermal from lava and hot springs.

This is all a great shame because it distracts readers from the real value of the book, in which Zehner asks the question: “Why do the options of wind, solar, and biofuels flow from our minds so freely as solutions to our various energy dilemmas, while conservation and walkable neighborhoods do not? Why do we seem to have a predisposition for preferring production over energy reduction?”

Zehner’s provocative suggestions will make any Republican candidate choke. He starts with women’s rights and population control. Given the average carbon footprint of an American born today, he calculates that “just lowering American teen births alone to European levels would prevent the need to generate over 30 billion kilowatt-hours of energy annually, the equivalent of $500 billion in solar panels per year.”

His other suggestions are only slightly less radical. Zehner urges us to reduce conspicuous consumption, arguing that we suffer as a society from “affluenza” – a disease inculcated from an early age through advertising. He suggests the banning of all marketing to children as a first step in the right direction.

Energy efficiency should also be a top priority. “America has plenty of energy, more than twice as much as it needs,” he writes. “We just waste most of it.” The key, in his view, is to improve our buildings’ insulation, design and technology so that they consume energy much more efficiently.

He also puts much weight on transportation and planning. “The fact that communities hold bake sales to finance bike racks and safe thruways for students while the fetishized solar-cell industry bathes itself in billions in public funds is an inglorious national embarrassment,” he opines, suggesting that walkable, bikeable, denser communities be given priority over car culture.

Finally, and perhaps most controversially, he calls for creation of an energy tax on all forms of energy, rather than just carbon-based energy sources, to encourage the embrace of energy efficiency and stifle the rebound effects that sometimes result.

Do that, he writes, and “Future environmentalists will drop solar, wind, biofuels, nuclear, hydrogen and hybrids and focus instead on women’s rights, consumer culture, walkable neighborhoods, military spending, zoning, health care, wealth disparities, citizens’ governance, economic reform and democratic institutions.”

A quick Google search shows that Green Illusions has been cherry-picked by climate skeptics and right-wing websites who would choke on the meat of it if they actually read the whole book. Bashing investment in solar and electric cars is popular in certain political circles right now; Zehner has given them plenty of ammunition, mostly duds.

It would have been a less popular but much better and more accurate book if he had stuck to his positive proposals for change, found in the second half of the book, instead of spending the first half feeding the fury of anti-clean energy trolls on the Internet.

The post An energy crisis of our own appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“We get a dual benefit by investing in water innovation,” says the managing director of water investment firm XPV Capital. “It will increase the productivity of our key sectors and, at the same time, create a whole new generation of companies that can export their water solutions around the world.”

Laura Shenkar of the San Francisco-based Artemis Project agrees. She says that water technologies represent the next wave (no pun intended) of high-growth tech investments.

The Artemis Top 50 Water Tech Listing began as an initiative to prove to the investment community that there is a critical mass of water companies worthy of venture capital investments, Shenkar explains. The sector is bolstered by reports that project these disruptive technologies and business models will yield profits as revenues in the water industry approach US$1 trillion by 2020.

Shenkar and Henderson believe that many successful next-generation technologies exist to refine traditional systems and solutions. The real game-changers are often relatively simple ideas that make tweaks for added efficiency – adding a sensor to collect data here, developing a less energy-intensive filtration membrane there. Here are examples of how new tech is tackling some of the world’s biggest water challenges with just a few small adjustments.

At its most basic level of human use, water needs to be drinkable. Much of North America’s large supply of freshwater is teeming with biological and chemical contaminants from a wide range of sources, such as urban and agricultural runoff, industrial effluent, and human and animal waste. To get water to a potable point, we need to identify potentially harmful ingredients. But traditional testing methods are slow and sometimes fussy. Before we can determine what to remove from a water supply, samples must go through incubation periods and specific temperatures.

Researchers like University of Waterloo’s Janusz Pawliszyn recognize the need for faster, more accurate samples. His team developed the solid-phase microextraction (SPME) technology, which skips a lengthy phase of sample preparation and allows field researchers to monitor and analyze samples on site. Working with Canadian environmental laboratory Maxxam Analytics, Pawliszyn’s team is striving to make the process more cost-effective, which could open the technology to developing countries with large populations that suffer from waterborne disease.

Public health risk, however, doesn’t stop at the treatment plant. In North America, aging or poorly maintained drinking water systems lose millions of gallons of treated water every year. Not only are the systems leaking – some estimates say that Montreal loses up to 40 per cent of its drinking water en route to taps – they’re opening the door to contamination and infrastructure catastrophes.

Limited municipal budgets are just one reason we’re having more frequent sinkholes. In many cases, the real problem is that cities don’t have a clue where and when they’re leaking. The problem is data deficiency, and the solution is better intelligence.

Automation and data-gathering technologies are the way forward, says Dave Woollums of Mueller Co. The company’s recent acquisitions – such as Ontario’s Echologics, which uses acoustic technology to detect leaks and assess the condition of water pipes without breaking ground – focus on these areas.

“We’re working on embedding intelligence into devices that have, in the past, been dumb mechanical products,” says Woollums, Mueller’s vice-president of research, development and engineering. “By placing pressure sensors in strategic valves in a system, for instance, we can reduce energy consumption and leakage, and extend the time before utilities have to repair leaks in pipelines.”

Combined with sensors, robust GIS systems can help municipalities capture and predict the state of their water infrastructure assets, layering collected data with adjacent infrastructure, environmentally sensitive areas, and other datasets that can help them make better decisions.

“GIS is like a crystal ball, but better,” says Karen Stewart, ESRI Canada’s public works industry manager. “Every time you track conditions, you can finetune your analysis and more accurately extrapolate future performance.” The more you measure the system, the better you can manage it.

It’s a good thing we’re fixing those pipes, because the planet is about to get thirstier. Research from McKinsey & Company projects that, with population growth, water demand will outstrip supply by 40 per cent by 2030. Throw climate change – especially extended periods of regional drought – into the mix and you’ve got a significant challenge.

Over the past few decades, water-scarce regions have turned to the sea for a viable alternative to surface and groundwater supplies. According to its Ministry of Environmental Protection, Israel’s mammoth desalination operations are projected to create some 600 million cubic metres per year by 2013 – a quantity equal to about half the freshwater that is pumped in the country on average each year – making desalination its main source. While relieving the demand for freshwater, however, the early days of desalination proved it can be an energy-intensive, and therefore costly, process.

Today, water-tech entrepreneurs will tell you otherwise. California’s NanoH2O, which earlier this year secured financing from BASF, Total Energy and Keytone Ventures, has developed a more economical, more energy-efficient reverse osmosis membrane. Vancouver’s Saltworks Technologies harnesses low-temperature heat from solar energy and waste heat from power generation to reduce the amount of mechanical or electrical energy required for the process.

These technologies work for drinking water, but they can have several other useful applications. NanoH2O’s membrane, for instance, could also help water-using industries preserve equipment from salt corrosion, which results from using saline groundwater, rather than depleting surface-water supplies. Multiple applications give these technologies their staying power, says Shenkar. “Companies are identifying niche areas where they can provide dramatic benefit, and finding success.”

Not surprisingly, oil and gas is proving to be a popular “niche” sector. Increasingly expensive and limited water supplies that steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) operations in Canada’s oil sands demand, for instance, are attracting and driving innovation. Developers have the funds to take risks that municipalities can’t afford, and Shenkar says that makes this sector one of the major areas of opportunity.

If you need to ensure a stable water supply, why not reuse what you’ve already got? Texas-based 212 Resources looked at the costs of handling water, from sourcing to disposal, in the hydraulic fracturing process that helps extract natural gas from shale. The company’s process treats “frac” water – often high in salt and other contaminants – to take it to a level high enough for safe discharge back into natural waterscapes, which also makes it possible to reuse the water for subsequent hydraulic fracturing of shale rock.

Reuse possibilities extend to wastewater byproducts. 212’s process also separates concentrated brine from frac fluid, which has applications in other on-site drilling activities. New Sky Energy in Colorado converts salt and carbon dioxide from wastewater into valuable chemicals using a proprietary electrochemical-chemical cycle. Vancouver’s Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies designs, builds and sells water treatment systems that recover nutrients from wastewater, which it then uses to make an eco-friendly fertilizer.

These technologies in particular are indicators of a growing trend – and for good reason. They’re creating new revenue streams that can encourage even the risk-averse, cash-strapped municipal sector to more seriously consider innovative options for water management.

Technology that tweaks existing systems, makes processes more efficient, and generates revenue? If the investment community is right about emerging water tech, it’s going to be a profitable run to 2020.

The post A clear need for water appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Office Depot has been named to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) list of 2012 Energy Star leaders for its greenhouse-gas reduction efforts. In the past seven years, the second-largest office supply retailer in the United States has reduced C02 emissions at its North American facilities by 37 per cent – over 140,000 metric tons. It was also recognized by the EPA last year for having achieved 20 per cent energy efficiency improvement across its domestic portfolio since 2004. “Becoming the first [U.S.] retailer to achieve 30 per cent or greater energy reduction further demonstrates our commitment to environmental leadership,” said Edward Costa, vice-president of construction at Office Depot.

The retailer has continued to push forcefully for C02 emission reductions at its 1,123 domestic stores in the face of weak post-recession revenue returns. The company began investing in energy efficiency back in 2005, with an initial $20 million expenditure spurring a 10 per cent carbon dioxide reduction a year later. Further improvements were achieved by constructing a series of LEED-certified green buildings, with Office Depot stores earning the top three spots for retail energy efficiency gains in the 2011 EPA Energy Star national building competition.

The company has also pursued upgrades to HVAC systems, adopted energy efficient lamps, reflectors and ballasts, and maintained aggressive energy management controls and monitoring. During the height of the economic downturn, Office Depot reduced transportation costs by 12 per cent through upgrading vehicles and streamlining supply chain management. The Environmental Dashboard was established that year to monitor its “buy greener, be greener and sell greener” strategy, highlighting the chain of command for each environmental initiative being pursued by the corporation, along with key performance indicators to monitor implementation.

Although costly, the EPA believes that these investments will ultimately result in increased profitability. “With help from EPA’s Energy Star program, leaders like Office Depot are benefiting their bottom lines while protecting our health and the environment,” says Gina McCarthy, assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation.

Zero: Chevron

Chevron, one of the world’s six “supermajor” oil companies, is currently the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) after air quality officials discovered an internal pipe routed around two sets of emissions monitoring equipment at its Richmond, Calif., refinery. The facility, located in the San Francisco Bay Area, provides about 10 per cent of west coast petroleum refining capacity.

The investigation came to light through a Freedom of Information request submitted by the San Francisco Chronicle after an August fire at the refinery, unrelated to the EPA probe, sent hundreds of Bay Area residents to hospital. The original two-year investigation from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which enforces federal air quality standards, began in late 2009 after two investigators noticed a flare not being recorded at all by the pollution-monitoring installations. After looking through plant surveillance footage, they were able to determine that the pipe was used 27 times over a four-year period.

Chevron had previously settled a lawsuit filed against it by the EPA in 2005, in which the company agreed to limit the flaring of gas, install monitoring equipment and report every incident to the Bay Area air quality district. Wayne Kino, an enforcement manager for the district, told the Contra Costa Times that Chevron “knew they were flaring, and they knew that unmonitored flaring was not legal.” A $170,000 fine was given to Chevron in August 2011, although this was not made public. The EPA opened its own investigation in early 2012, looking into who was responsible for the pipe installation and its continued use, as well as any members of the upper management who were aware of its presence. Chevron employees could be charged, as EPA investigations in 2011 resulted in a total of 249 convictions against individuals or companies, along with 90 years of prison time.

Refinery general manager Nigel Hearne insisted at a Sept. 24 press conference that this was not an attempt to circumvent federal flaring regulations. “This was certainly not done intentionally. Safety and protecting people and the environment is one of our core values as a company and we take that responsibility very seriously.” He also emphasized that the air pollution released was a negligible amount, although investigators have not been able to confirm the size of the 27 flarings between 2005 and 2009.

Click here to view our complete Heroes & Zeros series.

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