Industry/Professional Audiences

Greening Your Business

In recent years, more and more companies have been getting on the green bandwagon.  This trend is impacting the playing field and adding new dimensions to the competitive marketplace.

The starting place for either initiating action or responding to the actions of your competition is an understanding of current environmental performance. Knowing the environmental impacts associated with your products and processes is essential to development of a rational and effective plan for competing in the evolving green marketplace.

Fundamentally, the green marketplace is asking manufacturers and distributors to know their products inside and out.  Companies that understand the processes and impacts from their entire distribution chain will be best positioned to understand the expectations of the green marketplace and engage effectively.

Distributors, large volume buyers, and individual consumers alike expect top quality at competitive prices, but they also increasingly expect verifiable assurances that neither environmental damage nor human exploitation are linked to their purchases.  The benefit that customers are looking for (and potentially willing to pay for) is avoidance of a “consumer guilt-trip”. The world’s leading firms have already discovered this reality, and are moving forward quickly to change the way that they do business. A similar and more broad-based trend now appears to be developing among smaller firms and across a number of industries.

As more and more companies begin to focus on environmental performance, and to seek competitive advantage based on reduced environmental impact, firms that have not yet begun to consider the environmental impacts of what they do risk losing both market share and profit potential.  There are also less tangible potential impacts to employee moral and performance, as well as to a company’s credibility and ability to recruit and retain high quality individuals.

The learning curve to achieving improved environmental performance can be steep, and a strategy of waiting for competitors to act first can translate into significant delay.   This article provides a framework for assessing environmental performance and tackling the associated learning curve.

Rising Social Expectations & Implications for Manufacturers & Distributors

Distributors, large volume buyers, government agencies, and individual consumers are increasingly seeking assurances that environmental damage and human exploitation are not linked to the products they purchase. Manufacturers and distributors are increasingly expected to know and understand environmental and social impacts associated with their entire distribution chain.

This presentation focuses on:

• Business oriented environmental initiatives of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development
• Environmentally preferable purchasing programs of the federal and state governments and of growing numbers of corporations
• The growing move toward use of life cycle assessment (LCA) and environmental product declarations (EPDs) in determination of environmental attributes of products and business-to-business and business-to-consumer communications
• The emerging global carbon market
• The forthcoming ISO 26000 series standard on corporate social responsibility, and how it is likely to change the playing field for business entities worldwide

Use of LCA in Building Design & Materials Selection

Environmental life cycle analysis, or LCA, provides a mechanism for systematically evaluating the environmental impacts linked to raw material and product choices in building design, post-construction maintenance and end-of-product strategies.  LCA is a powerful tool that should be used whenever creation of an environmentally superior building is an objective.  In this presentation, the basics of LCA are examined, followed by a demonstration of how on-line tools, such as the ATHENA® EcoCalculator for Assemblies, can be used to inform architectural design and building material selection.  LCA-related credits available through various green building programs are also identified.  The use of product certification programs in conjunction with LCA analysis is also discussed.

Are Green Building Programs Really Leading to Green?

While the influence of green building programs is generally positive, many use prescriptive standards for designation of environmentally preferable materials that are based on intuitive judgment and/or single attributes.  Moreover, such programs almost universally focus on environmental issues associated with production of only one of the myriad of construction materials.  The result: a number of materials listed as environmentally preferable have demonstrably greater environmental impacts than non-favored alternatives.

Perhaps the worst characteristic of most green building programs lies in what is not considered in identification of environmentally preferable materials.  Few consider embodied energy of products and product assemblies, or systematically and comprehensively consider impacts linked to all inputs and outputs associated with building materials production and use.  What this means is that many of the foremost green building programs don’t consider such things as total energy consumption, or releases of greenhouse gases or any other emissions to air and water.  Worse, these programs, as currently designed, have no capacity to consider such things.

This presentation examines current problems, provides examples of greater environmental impacts resulting from pursuit of green credits, and highlights readily available tools that can help to ensure that green design actually results in environmentally better buildings.

Bioenergy, Biochemicals and the Emerging Bioeconomy

Near and longer-term concerns vis-à-vis petroleum supplies and the impacts of energy imports on the U.S. trade balance have led to interest in alternative sources of energy, including biomass.   Bio-energy sources include such things as waste wood and cooking liquor from wood pulping operations, methane gas from old landfill sites or from manure collected at feedlot or dairy operations, organic materials recovered from wastewater, and municipal solid waste.  However, in terms of volumes available, the bio-material with potential for use as an energy source is overwhelmingly biomass.

Current technology provides a number of options for conversion of biomass and other biomaterials to energy and these include direct firing for electrical generation, production of ethanol and bio-diesel, and use as a fuel in steam generation for either large-scale district heating or for powering manufacturing operations. Backed by substantial government and private sector funding, research scientists around the world are working to perfect and develop new technologies for converting bio-feedstocks to energy, chemicals, and other materials.  Progress is being made on a number of fronts, inspired not only by research support, but also by a menu of governmental targets, incentives, and mandates.  It appears to be only a matter of time before successes in research laboratories and pilot plants move into commercialization, bringing society closer to what has been described as the emerging bioeconomy.

This presentation explores progress in bioenergy development, and examines a number of associated non-technical issues that must be addressed if long-term success is to be achieved in making bioenergy a significant part of the nation’s energy portfolio.

General Audiences

Materials & the Environment

It is increasingly recognized today that there are three essential pillars of sustainability – ecology, economy, and society – and that achievement of sustainability requires attention to all three pillars simultaneously.  A society cannot, for example, create a robust economy over the long term in the absence of a sustainable environment or a social fabric that addresses the essential needs of its citizenry.  Similarly, a society cannot achieve a sustainable environment in the absence of a sustainable economy and/or social structure that can provide the financing and support base for environmental action.  Nor can a sustainable society be built without also building a sustainable economy and maintaining a sustainable, life-supporting environment. These realities provide the context within which a U.S. president, a community leader, an environmentalist, or anyone else seeking to address an environmental issue must operate.

The environmental problems faced by society today are principally multidimensional, complex problems that cannot be easily solved.  The easy-to- solve problems have for the most part been dealt with long ago.  If we are to have any hope of finding lasting solutions to current and future environmental problems at least four elements must be part of environmental planning and decision-making processes:

• Planning must be global, systematic.
• Information on which decisions are based must be scientifically verified.
• Where scientific knowledge is lacking, carefully considered assumptions must be employed.  Such assumptions must be realistic, and as complete as possible.
• Decision-making must be based on rational thinking.

It is abundantly clear that actions taken within one region or state or nation can impact the environment of other regions, states, or nations.  Obvious examples are water and air pollution that can move freely across boundaries.  Less obvious, but no less significant, are actions that may shift environmental impacts of consumption from one region to another.  Because of these realities, careful consideration must be given to potential impacts of local  actions on distant regions.

It is also important to understand in planning that when a change occurs within a system that change almost invariably triggers other changes in the same or other system.  Moreover, such changes are often as significant, or even more so, than the change that triggered them.   The implications for planning are obvious:  unless planning processes successfully anticipate changes that might result from an action or policy shift, unanticipated changes can easily negate or even overwhelm the desired outcome. 

It is probably unnecessary to point-out that sound decision-making requires rational thinking.  Nonetheless, there is today a remarkable lack of rationality, realism, or global and systematic thinking applied to environmental planning, and perhaps especially within the United States.  This must change if progress is to be made in solving the most serious environmental problems facing the world.

This presentation critically examines U.S. consumption, environmental policy, and sourcing of raw materials, and explores strategies for positively changing the current reality.