eCO2Labs News

Heads Down

2010-05-26T13:57:00.000+10:00

We've neglected our blog while we've been working heads-down to get a first version of our product shipped. We should have some exciting news soon. Stay tuned!

Spreading Ideas at Ignite

2010-03-09T10:59:00.002+11:00

Last week most the eCO₂Labs team headed down to a Oxford St. for Ignite Sydney. I (Soren) gave a talk "How Indie developers will save the planet" available on the IgniteShow. This is just one event in Ignite Week, which ran last week in over 60 cities around the world. Each Ignite event has around one dozen speakers talking for 5 minutes using 20 slides that rotate automatically every 15 seconds.

I had to learn how to focus. I spent about 30 hours preparing. I started over three times! I can only imagine the how many long hours the Ignite organisers put in. It is a massive effort. In many ways it is similar to TED, except that it is much more distributed, the format is tighter and normal people — not just super people, like Bill Gates and Tim Berners-Lee, both mentioned in my talk — can get their ideas out there. Ignite is about parallel processing ideas and packaging those ideas so that they resonates locally.

Yet can then be catapulted around the global, like a haikugami airplane. While I love blogging, with a talk you can make an emotional as well as rational connection. You can more effectively build common experience through stories.

Why are events like this important? We don't have much time to transition to a sustainable future. Fortunately, a locally-grounded global culture is emerging that gets us beyond the prisoners dilemma we are in. Building a global culture requires creating common experience and spreading ideas. I saw that happening at Ignite.

The GRI framework

2010-03-01T22:44:00.011+11:00

Due to growing concerns about the legitimacy and viability of business practices, businesses were more and more solicited by NGOs and administrations to not anymore only report on their financial health but also on the environmental impact of their activities and the respect of the Human Rights. The first strong international stimuli came from the Brundtland commission in 1987.

The first company to comprehensively report on the environmental impact of its activities was the Norwegian aluminium producer Norsk Hydro in 1989. The following decade saw an outburst of Triple Bottom Line reporting framework standards muddying up the water and clouding the issue for stakeholders. To provide a more readable picture and further enhance responsible decision-making, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) was created in 1997, with the support of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), with the aim of producing an harmonized framework as scalable and routine as financial reporting frameworks are. In 2000 it became a permanent institution, headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Although the GRI is independent, it remains a collaborating centre of UNEP and works in cooperation with the United Nations Global Compact.

The GRI reporting framework is now recognized worldwide as being one of the most prevalent standards for Sustainability Reporting or Triple Bottom Line reporting. This acceptance stemming from the way it was established and devised, that is through a multi-stakeholder, consensus-seeking approach. Thanks to this approach, a broad cross-section of the society – business, civil society, labour, accounting, investors, academics, governments, and others – from all around the world agreed on what the guidelines should contain and what the sets of indicators should be, subsequently paving the way for its large acceptance. Indeed, in January of last year, more than 1,500 organizations spanning 60 countries were using its guidelines to release their sustainability reports, be it corporate businesses, public agencies, smaller enterprises, NGOs and/or industry groups.

Guidelines have been upgraded three times to allow for an always broader coverage of environmental impacts and social aspects. The G3 guidelines standing for “Third Generation” and launched in October 2006 thereby build on the G2 guidelines (released in 2002) themselves being an evolution of the initial guidelines, initially set up in 2000. A comprehensive version of the G3 GRI guidelines are available here.

On environmental performances, companies have the opportunity to report upon a 16-core-indicator suite along with an extra 19-additional-indicator suite formulated in the G3 GRI. These two indicator suites encompass nine core aspects as depicted in the following table:

The comprehensiveness of a GRI TBL report can be of three levels: A, B or C; A being the most thorough. In addition, a report can either be self-declared, third-party-checked or GRI-checked. In the two latter cases, the declaration is annotated with a "+". For instance, a B+-compliant G3 GRI report is a third-party or GRI-checked B-level compliant report. The difference between the three different levels is summed up in the figure below.

The GRI framework being a UN-backed programme, eCO2labs fully acknowledge its reliability and transparency. Some of our data points will thus be sourced from GRI-checked reports with the objective to provide you with an even more readable overview of environmental practices across a wide cross-section of businesses around the world.

RW

Triple Bottom Line aka People, Planet, Profit

2010-02-24T21:53:00.002+11:00

Profit has always been the bottom line shared and pursued by each and every businesses since the dawn of time. Consequently, with the nascent development of long-haul transportation and the deployment of large-scale communication infrastructures in the post world-war era, businesses were looking to outsource their production activities to developing countries so as to benefit from their low-wage workforce to, in turn, decrease their operating costs and increase their profits. The break-even point of this shift having occurred when the incurred costs due to transportation and communication was counterbalanced.

However, some of the developing countries wherein assembly lines are outsourced do not necessarily respect the Human Rights, and that’s a euphemism. Therefore ethical issues were and are still raised by customers on the legitimacy of these practices. Seemingly, the daunting spectrum of pollution, global warming, as well as biodiversity and resource depletion due to energy- and material-intensive industries worldwide also led customers to put at doubt the legitimacy of these industrial activities.

Consequently, profit could not possibly be anymore the only pillar against which a company had to report the success of its activities. People and planet were to also be included in the equation. It has to be noted here that the main driving force of this shift were the customers.

Heightened awareness on the necessity to encompass all of these three pillars to measure the success of a business came in 1987 from the Brundtland Commission, known by the name of its Chair Gro Harlem Brundtland (former prime minister of Norway), which was convened by the United Nations in 1983. This commission was created as a result of growing concern "about the accelerating deterioration of the human environment and natural resources and the consequences of that deterioration for economic and social development." Seven years later, the concept of the Triple Bottom Line and its underlying 3P (planet, people and profit) was coined by John Elkington.

From then on, corporations were to be liable not only to the financial health of their activities but also to their environmental footprint and their respect of human rights. More recently, with the ratification of the United Nations and ICLEI TBL standard for urban and community accounting in early 2007, it became the prevailing approach to public sector full cost accounting. In other words, no longer (at least in theory) a company is allowed to pursue its activities without reporting on its impact on the environment and its respect of the Human Rights.

We, at eCO₂labs, are blatantly concerned by all these three pillars, be it as a company or as individuals, and we are totally in compliance with each and every of them (see our previous post on how we walk the talk). However our aim is not only to walk the talk but also to share our knowledge on doing so by providing you, through apps and guidelines, with best practices so that you can work on your Triple Bottom Line and measure your performance not only in terms of profit, which is now an outdated and obsolete vision, but also in terms of environmental footprint; this, that you are an individual or a company.

“He who does nothing for fear he can do too little is guilty of complicity” (René Wable)

Vive la France

2010-02-23T23:23:00.000+11:00

Google has a nice ability to search across public data sets. Okay, René, I have to give credit where it is due: France is doing quite well. Both Germany and the UK have brought down per capita emissions quite a bit. When will China, which was still considered a developing country in Copenhagen, surpass France in per capita emissions?

The US and Australia are clearly Carbon Hogs. It's even worse when you think that much of those Chinese emissions comes from producing goods going straight into American malls. Oink.

Soren

Sustainability News Round-Up

2010-02-23T00:57:00.001+11:00

I've put together this round up of sustainability news particularly as it relates to our efforts to adopt a sustainable lifestyle and make green choices.

Bill Gates gave a great talk on TED, touted as the biggest talk of the year. It pulls a whole new demographic into the camp calling for serious steps to combat climate change. Gates states that the developed world needs to move to zero emissions by 2050. He explains emissions as CO2 = P x S x E x C — People, Services, Energy and Carbon per energy unit. A critique from Alex Steffen tweaks this formula as CO2 = P x S x E x C / N, where N stands for nature. Another critique and another critique. These critiques raise valid points about Gate's focus on technology and research, ignoring the role of social change and biodiversity. Still I think Gates is on the money on Zero Impact, and this being his number one priority is powerful stuff. An energy miracle is necessary. It's just not sufficient. I see plenty of practical solutions that are available and economical today but are not getting deployed. Solving the deployment problem requires social change. On this note, this article suggests that cracking the nut on sustainable behaviour change requires understanding how people behave socially.

Amazon finds that the sustainability rating service from the GoodGuide can drive sales. While GoodGuide is currently mostly about consumer goods, this article suggests the GoodGuide will move into the business space as well. Also in this article, Walmart warns suppliers about transparency, "You're going to be naked". Intel is also making a transparency push. The GoodGuide is pretty useless to us here in Australia. Fortunately, there is Shop Ethical! for Aussies from the Ethical Consumer Guide. The GoodGuide also gets a mention in this article on the state of green economy.

Transparent reporting of climate change risk to investors is also a hot topic at the moment, as described here. Among other things, they need to report on the impact of potential or pending legislation to their business.

A UN report is coming out that profiles the environmental impact of the largest companies. There is more in the Guardian. The damage estimate for the 3000 largest global companies is estimated to be $2.2 trillion in 2008. Climate change is roughly half that number. If these companies are forced to pay the full costs, it would account for 6-7% of revenues, putting a good dent in their profits.

AMEE is also making a data play as a search engine for data needed in carbon calculators. They closed a $5.5 M Series B. Also in this article, the report on BetterPlace (swappable electric batteries cars) and AeroFarms (urban agriculture) is also interesting. This article on AMEE's carbon accounting engine has a great video from the AMEE CEO on the need for systemic change. These guys have a great vision.

This article examines Seth Griffith's approach to a low watt lifecycle. I'm been tracking my wattage on Wattzon.com for while. It's worth watch Seth's talk on the Wattzon video. There is also an API integration between Wattzon and tweet-a-watt, which just won a green gadget award. Another interesting web resource is this site for asking green questions and getting green answers.

18% of Americans are alarmed about potential consequences of Climate Change. 7% are dismissive, and there is a range in between. There are some really interesting findings on the cognitive dissonance of sceptics. The green consumer movement continues with 30% of consumers make decision based on sustainability and CSR. Here are tools for marketers on how consumers respond to green messaging. Here is a good twtpoll from the WWF on what people would like. I'd sum it up as tools and access to take action at home, school, work and in the community. Interesting Apps are coming that help provide these tools in a social context.

In software news, SAP eats is own dogfood and drops CO2-e emissions 16% in 1 year. An Australian energy management software company BuildingIQ gets some coverage. Picking up the green IT theme from earlier posts, here is more on how Google, Facebook and others are reducing damage from their massive data centres.

eBay is an accidental green giant. As this article describes, ebay helps people reduce through reuse. eBay sells $2000 worth of used stuff per second. Check out the eBay GreenTeam site, e.g. "Buying a pre-owned smart phone on eBay saves 94 percent of the carbon associated with going to the mall and buying a new one. That's like not driving 186 miles, or over 880 hours of laptop use". Now that's what we like. Before you buy new, check eBay, craigslist or a freecycle site first. I'm glad to see car sharing getting some love. This article estimates a savings through carsharing of $435 per month. Carsharing is likely to be a good early market for electric cars as well, which, when coupled with fewer cars being produced is a double savings.

Sustainability is a big topic at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year. Among other topics, this article discusses how we buy and sell products with a view towards sustainability and what we can learn from open source. They look at how consumers can be encouraged to make sustainable choices. In the disappointment around Copenhagen, this article hopes that Davos can get some commitment from influentially people and add momentum. Another article examines how a Davos style meeting may be more effective than a Copenhagen style. And another on how businesses are asking for certainty and targets; hopefully, these sessions can set us up for real targets in Mexico so we can get out of this prisoners dilemma. This video on the Global Redesign Website makes the case that we're at an inflection point with sustainability, the global financial crisis and asks how can we design systems to solve truly global problems, bringing together a truly global group of constituents from different backgrounds.

We've had a bad 12 months with cancer. We had a big scare with my Dad when a skin cancer on his face metastasized into neck cancer. Fortunately, he's made a great recovery. Sylvia's brother-in-law is undergoing aggressive chemo after his melanoma metastasized into his lungs. We're concerned but optimistic. In September, I lost a good friend, Jeffrey Walker, to cancer. My Dad strongly recommends Anticancer. It is guiding him towards lifestyle changes, many of which are more sustainable as well as more healthy. It takes a holistic approach — mixing traditional and alternative medicine — to cancer prevention and guides us towards healthy choices.

Since no news update would be complete without information on the iPad, check out this green scorecard for the ipad. It gets a "B" when compared to eBook readers, yet given all that it can do, the reviewers describe it as a "pretty green little machine". Ops, I forgot to consume less. Must have one.

People are starting to think in whole systems and tools, at Davos, fighting cancer, with data centres and even permaculture inspired plans to build sustainable organisations. That's good news! My brain is toasted, and it was 40 C (104 F) in my office today. Cold spell, my ass. Sen. Inhofe: Can I share Al's Igloo for a bit?

Walking the Talk

2010-02-10T14:50:00.000+11:00

Nothing predestined Soren, Sylvia and I (René Wable), founders of Eco2labs, to pair up except a shared unconditional acceptance of the environmental challenge our generation and the following is and will be facing, as well as an unswerving commitment to heighten public awareness that everyone needs to improve their ecological footprint.

I am quite keen on figures, which is a good prerequisite to tackle life-cycle assessment (LCA) and input-output analysis (IOA), two techniques that underpin calculating an ecological footprint. Indeed, hardly can you possibly find a field more data-intensive than these. But no worries, we’ll do the maths for you. You will only need to interpret and ponder over your results in the light of recommendations we’ll provide you with!

So atop of these LCA and IOA calculations I am carrying out hand in hand with Soren in order to share it with you, I reflected upon the odds that led us to first be in the same city at the same time, meet up and then share what we have in common. After having read the following you’ll have no choice but to agree that the likelihood was tiny if not infinitesimal.

I was born and bred in the old continent whilst Soren comes from the other side of the Atlantic. He is a reference in IT while I am a newbie in environmental science. We both travelled half a planet to migrate to the land Down Under and besides in the very same city, Sydney; this after having knocked about several countries. In addition Sydney is big, actually it is massive, well Sydney is gigantic....

A green-ups party (my only one so far) played the trick. It also has to be noted that two third-parties were involved in our encounter lowering even more the odds... It seems that Fate knows what it's doing.

But well, saying that destiny has gently paved the way for us to easily set up what we independently craved for and planned to achieve before meeting up — a web and mobile platform to assess one’s carbon footprint — is an easy and long fallacious shortcut. Indeed, despite this fortuitous but fortunate encounter, despite having been put on the same path by some random concourse of circumstances, and despite having clicked instantaneously, we have, as every man jack, a couple of pitfalls to sort out to line up with who we want to be and who we do not specifically want to be.

We, at Eco2labs, want to lead the change and show the example; not simply preach the good word without ourselves being fully committed as is sometimes (too often) the case. Ultimately, we want to achieve carbon neutrality in our operating phase and supply-chain. Quite ambitious for a company. Well, when there is a will there is a way. Ours, at Eco2loabs, is to acknowledge our carbon hotspots, which are those of everyone else, and work on them to reduce their environmental load insofar as possible. Transport, power, stationery and food.

And here’s how we walk the talk.

We meet up thrice a week for full-day work sessions in the spacious loft in Soren's home, which the harbour breeze keeps cool through opposing windows on either side. Here is Soren hard at work on 100% scavenged and used furniture, including the nice Cinema display:

The rest of the time, we remotely work via dedicated web-platforms.

I live in the South shore while Soren lives on the other side of the harbour. Driving is not even an option as neither Soren nor I would accept owning a car, this 25%-(in)efficient oil furnace. Public transport is, but if we are not hard liners, how can we be credible? I bicycle. Despite a discouraging 12-km ride, with laptop and lunch stuffed in my backpack, it’s faster, cheaper, more reliable and flexible, and, cherry on the cake, it keeps me fit. I of course bring some extra clothes to spare Soren the fragrance of my ride. And if sometimes Sydney turns out not to be a safe haven for bicycles — the great mountain bike my flatmate used to generously lend me was stolen last week, and I thus hereby pay a last tribute to it after a year of true and tried services — the ride is fantastic, especially when crossing over the Harbour Bridge under the dual sensation of the sunset warming the skin and the sea breeze cooling it (not the sunrise, we are hard workers but not Stakhanovists either!).

What about our electricity? How do we power our machines? Soren subscribed to green electricity to power out our office and his home. We cannot of course be sure that the flux of electrons coming into our plugs are indeed stemming from green power, but we at least know that somewhere in the Australian grid, a basket of electrons equating the quantity of electricity we use emanates from green power. As we wrote early, the web-based products and services we use run mostly on the Google and Amazon cloud, which is much more efficient than having dedicated servers but not carbon free. To cover these odds and ends as well as occasional business travel, we have a monthly carbon credit subscription with Carbon Planet. We are even carbon-free in the use phase!

When it comes to stationery, inasmuch as possible we do not print out. Rather we use electronic versions which allows us to significantly decrease our environmental footprint (e.g.: carbon footprint stemming from the energy used to produce paper, land use stemming from the forests required to manufacture paper, water use required by the pulp industry etc...).

What about our lunch? We eat local foods and purchase our goods by bike so that the quantity of carbon embodied in our meals is minimal. In addition we avoid every ingredient and aliment that are tangibly known to cause a substantial carbon footprint (e.g.: meat, imported fruits and vegetables from one hemisphere to the other to deny the laws of seasons etc...). At the end of our lunch, organic residues are thrown away in the compost bin (see Soren’s previous post) while plastic wraps, if any, are disposed of in the adequate recycling container.

Does that bother us? Do we spend hours doing those simple daily-life gestures? Do we feel like Amish or other remote settlements? Well, riding my bike is faster than if I was to take public transportation especially at rush hours. And, as I've said, it keeps me fit and offers me every time a beautiful journey. Ah and it’s free and carbon-free! I win upon the Triple Bottom Line (a post will soon be coming on this notion, which is, in short, a benchmarking based upon social, economical and environmental aspects). What about the electricity? Well, the subscription to green power was done once for all. It is indeed more expensive, but we are willing, at Eco2labs, to not only provide best practices but also to walk the talk and show the example. Note that we still win upon the social and environmental pillars of the Triple Bottom Line. Indeed, decentralized renewable energy plants generate more jobs (social aspect) than centralized coal- gas- or nuke-powered plants (with their installed capacity sometimes reaching up to 1 GW). And obviously green power is way more environmentally-friendly than their fossil-fuel-based counterparts. As for the stationery? I love reading hard-cover books, cannot really stand e-books, but when it comes to scientific manuscripts, articles, and papers, I do prefer electronic versions thanks to their indexation and search functions that spare me a substantial amount of time. At last, when it comes to food, once again it’s faster to purchase it by bike than by car or public transportation (for the aforementioned reasons), and sorting it in the correct bin might only take me a few extra seconds which I am willing to spend (and not waste!) as a trade-off with the time saved while purchasing my goods.

This was a long post, quite personal besides, but I give you my word, next time I will be less of a chatterbox. The fact is that at Eco2labs, we insist on and will always strive to achieve transparency and comprehensiveness. “It takes a planet to preserve the Earth.” Walk the talk, with us, for you, now. (René Wable).

Alchemy of transparency

2010-02-03T17:22:00.001+11:00

With few exceptions, the product life cycles of the things you buy are opaque. Consider how you make purchasing decisions. In an opaque world, you have little more than price and appearance of the finished product to go on. If product life cycles were transparent, you would have insight into the true cost, factoring in externalities, such as waste, environmental degradation and greenhouse gases.

Here are five trends on the web that matter. While they have little direct impact on sustainability, I'm presenting them because they really underpin how we are building the products that help us do our part in the green movement. Every day more data is coming on-line. Open data combined with mobile applications will usher a revolution in transparency, affecting many aspects of your lives, including sustainability.

Dynamic languages return. My first programming course in 1990 used the language Scheme and the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I was in love. This book made it clear that programming is about shaping data into knowledge. Now, after 20 years of working with C++, Java and FORTRAN, I'm glad that dynamic languages are making a comeback in the form of Python, Ruby, Clojure (and accompanying frameworks). This is a natural and fun way to code. We are building much of our app and website in Python with the Django framework, and I'm impressed at the productivity we see. Our app is data intensive and Python kicks ass at carving up data and finding insights.
Communal computing. Better known as “cloud computing”, the web services that run on Amazon WS, Google App Engine and Rackspace, among others, are better described as communal computing First, web apps running on these platforms share communal infrastructure. There turns out to be an extremely efficient way to allocate processing resources extremely efficiently. We're running on the Google App Engine. Google has a strong vision for making data centres sustainable. Second, apps on the web are increasing interlinked with APIs and share data over open web standards such as OAUTH. They form a community of services.
Apps that matter.You won't succeed by just “meeting customer requirements”. I meet more developers who are creating apps built around the activities in people's lives. Certainly, Atlassian comes to mind in a developer's work life. So does Textmate and SimpleNote on my iPhone. Apps matter when they create a personal and emotion connection with the people who use them. You would be really upset if you had to live without them.
Rise of Open Data. Powered by Creative Commons licenses, open source software, web-service APIs and Gov 2.0 initiatives, a data commons is growing on the web. At a recent gov 2.0 hackfest I attended in Sydney, Digital Eskimo created GetStimulated to show how our economic stimulus package got spent. Techniques for giving meaning to data on the web are improving. Developers are reading Tufte, and statisticians are learning to create powerful visualisations to communicate ideas.
The laptop will be the *least* mobile computing device you own. Rich internet applications, ebooks and mobile apps will continue to blur and fragment on competing devices, such as smartphones, netbooks, e-readers and tablets. This fragmentation will drive us insane, but it will usher in period of rapid innovation in app development. Of course, many of these mobile apps will tie into open data on the web.

These things stuck up to create a kind of alchemy depicted on the cover of that computer science textbook:

Despite being 25 years old, book is picking up a cult following, a bit like K&R.

While there are many good blogs on these topics, I find the O'Reilly Radar blog particularly useful. Also Hans Rosling's Gapminder shows the potential of data visualisation for social change. There is also a lot of work going on in the open source community. I learn by following projects on social coding sites Bitbucket and Github.

Returning to the original topic, Nicholas Stern writes in his report that climate change is the biggest market failure in human history. The externalities that cause failed markets exist because of imperfect information. But there is both too much and not enough data. This is a unique time for developers to step in and mine the open data to build apps that really matter — Apps that bring transparency and insight to everyday decisions. This will expose externalities and guide us to a viable and sustainable future. Our works are still in development, but we look forwarding showing them off soon!

Søren

Salad Friday

2010-01-18T21:58:00.000+11:00

My family has had an eight year tradition of "Salad Fridays". Certainly nothing can be more simple and natural than loose leaf lettuce, fresh tomatoes, some roasted pine nuts, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Since we're worried about pesticides, mostly we eat organic lettuce, which comes pre-washed and packaged in neat polyethylene bags, ready to eat.

Last week I wrote about how the WWF carbon calculator gives you a much lower footprint if you live low on the food chain. Indeed, in the Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan estimates that the 4,500 calorie (19kJ) fast food meal he and his family consumed required at least 45,000 calories to produce, or roughly 1.3 gal of oil.

Surely you can do better than this living lower on the food chain. Surely organic lettuce is better still because it uses compost and natural insecticides instead of hydrocarbon-based fertiliser and pesticides that contributed so much to the footprint of orange juice.

Unfortunately, at least in the case of our Salad Friday, Michael Pollan dashes my hopes. He cites ecologist David Pimentel's estimate that "growing, chilling, washing, packaging and transporting that box of organic salad [from California] to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy." While this is 10% of the fast food meal on a per calorie basis it is over 5 times higher!

There was a time when it took about a calorie of input to generate a calorie of agricultural output. In our garden it is still the case. Our local farmer's market is probably much better too if you seek out small local farmers. While industrial organic is certainly less bad, it is far good. To achieve scale organic salad joins the industrial system of production and distribution, just like everything else.

Now if we can just keep the possums out of our Silver Beet!

Since we're in a town home, we're going vertical with the herbs and strawberries.

And you need to keep your compost hot enough to kill the pumpkin seeds, lest they take over the patio and make their way into the house.

Have a lovely day and tread lightly,

Soren

The Ecological Credit Crunch

2010-01-10T16:17:00.003+11:00

Over the last two weeks we’ve been interviewing people about their attitudes towards climate change. Of the people we've talked to, even the most sustainably conscious don’t feel like they have a good understanding of their footprint. This is not surprising. Your footprint calculation varies depending on the starting definitions, assumptions and the economy in which you live. I've found dozens of carbon calculators on the web, and they give different answers. In this article, I’ll take you through the results of the Australia WWF calculator for our family of four in Sydney, Australia.

WWF Calculator

When using a footprint calculator, first take note what the calculator is modelling. The Australia WWF calculator defines an "ecological footprint" as the amount of the Earth’s biocapacity your family uses for food, housing, heating, cooling and transport. Straight away, there are few things to consider. The authors of this calculator value how your consumption affects the planet's ecology, including biodiversity, climate change, water, etc. This is reflected in the unit they choose to emphasise: hectares per person. Let's see how we do.

I got off to a slow start with the calculator because it is a flash app that didn't load. I fixed it with the help of FireBug. After creating an avatar, which seems a bit pointless, it takes you through a series of questions, covering areas such as food consumption, consumer goods, recycling, housing. Interestingly, it didn't ask me about pets. What is the impact of 365 doggy poo bags a year or a box of cat litter? (Guessimate: 73 kg co2-e for poo bags and kitty litter is complicated.) The calculator allows you to answer high level questions or detailed questions for each category.

Using the detailed questions, our footprint came out to be 4.1 co2-e (tonnes of carbon). It came out to 5.8 co2-e answering the high-level questions only. Our largest contributing category was food at 61%. I found it surprising that transportation is just 5% given how much I fly internationally. If everyone on earth lived like people in our family, we'd need the ecological capacity of 2.4 planets to support us. This works out to 4.3 hectares to sustain each person in our family, compared to the 6.6 for the average Australian.

It is frustrating how much of our footprint comes from the "background economy". As I wrote about oranges, 33% of the footprint of orange juice comes from how oranges are grown. That is what I mean by background economy. Similarly, roughly ten calories of hydrocarbons are needed to produce one calorie of corn in the US, largely from hydrocarbons used in food production. Author Michael Pollan of The Omnivore's Dilemma describes us as eating oil. There is not much you can do about it directly. It is systemic.

In our case, we live without a car, offset flights, dry clothes on the line, use recycle, compost, etc. If we bought a Landrover and drove everywhere instead of cycling, that would increase us to 2.9 planets. Conversely, if we stopped flying that would reduce us to 2.1 planets. That still leaves us at twice the ecological capacity of the planet. If we became vegan locavores, only then could we get our footprint down to 1.3. For the vegan locavore cyclist who doesn't fly, the community and government services that support that person make up 43% of their footprint. And even this is still above the global average because the same products and services are more expense in terms of ecological costs than in other countries.

The WWF describes our economy as running an ecological debt that we in Australia, US, India, China among others are running up in other parts of the world, like the Congo. Eventually, we will have an ecological "credit crunch."

Assuming the WWF data is reliable, I think this exercise shows that reducing individual consumption alone can't get us out of ecological debt and avoid the inevitable ecological credit crunch. Hope rests in individuals making sustainability a priority in their decision making. Only this will send a clear signal to other actors in the economy to make changes to how services are delivered, how food is grown and how products are produced. Make this a priority of how you vote, spend, invest and get your friends and employers on board.

Why Oranges are not Green

2009-12-18T11:33:00.000+11:00

My kids are big juice drinkers. Most kids are. They can demolish a litre of orange juice in one breakfast if I'm not watching, and I've heard it only gets worse when they are teenagers. According NYT How green is my orange? when Tropicana did a carbon footprint assessment of a 1.9l carton of OJ, they found equivalent CO₂ emissions to be 1.7 kg. This is slightly more than driving your car five miles. You can find another data point on the Carbon Trust website comparing different types of packaging.

I guess I had imagined the CO₂ culprit to be in the transport, pasteurisation, storage and packaging. It turns out that the biggest contributor at 33% is growing the oranges, mostly because of the production and application of fertiliser. Tropicana has pledged to work with growers on better farming practices. In the mean time, we'll be looking for locally grown organic fruit tomorrow at the North Sydney Market tomorrow morning.

Fortunately, once we explained how thoughtlessly gulping down OJ contributes to global warming, the kids were happy to slow down and enjoy their juice. Clearly the environmental argument works where the saving money argument didn't. They know it's their planet.

When Surfing Becomes Carbon Intensive

2009-12-10T18:17:00.006+11:00

The article 'Carbon cost' of Google revealed claims that a typical Google search on a desktop computer produces about 7g CO2, that is half the amount of carbon dioxide required to boil water for a cup of tea.

However, Google was quick to react, disagree and rectify; announcing rather 0.2g of CO2 for every one-hit Google search requiring less than a second. With daily internet searches across all sites ranging from 200 million to a billion, of which 40% are done through Google (calculated by www.alexa.com), it is understandable they did so, and quickly, to maintain a semblance of sustainability.

But what is needed for a single search? If you wish to perform a search, you first need to type in the search, assuming that your computer is already turned on. Hence there is an energy cost for the personal computer being used. There is also the energy needed for the network. The search request then probably goes to multiple servers in multiple data centres. Each server must be prepared to receive your request, so there is work to be performed before the search. starts, work such as building a search index. In addition to the power used for each server, there is the overhead power needed to run the data centres. All of this has to be factored into any calculation on the total amount of power used for a search. Of course, searches vary widely in their complexity, with some needed far more time than others. As for Google’s own estimate for an average search , it only takes its part of the equation into account.

So who to believe? The article, Google? The scientists referred to by the article? Even though the Times article links its claim to Wissner-Gross’s research, an environmental Fellows at Harvard, his research never, in fact, mentions Google and focuses instead on the Web overall. Still, this scientist estimated that it takes on average about 20 milligrams of CO2 per second to visit a website.

But the real issues might lie elsewhere. Indeed, the fundamental question is not really the energy required to perform one "average" search, but rather the environmental consequences of the internet as a whole. A recent report by the American research firm Gartner suggests that the global IT industry causes 2% of global emissions, exceeding that produced by the world’s airlines. Indeed, "Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable," said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

If Google wants to make reducing energy consumption their number one goal, they could encourage us to reduce our time on line. But well, this isn’t likely to happen. These companies are in business to make money, and the business requires that we are on line. It is a good thing that Google is working on controlling the environmental impact of the business at its end. That leaves the consumers to consider their end of the equation. If all of us paid more attention to the environmental consequences of our searches, not just leaving the concerns to the “Googles” of the world, we could make a significant difference.

Hints to walk the talk:

What about those hours of endless (useless?) recreational searching?

Or what about bookmarking websites to avoid hitting keywords to find it back subsequently?

When one knows that a piece of information will be stored in a given website, instead of lazily asking Google, browse the website to find it out.

OB

iPhone Footprint

2009-11-30T21:15:00.001+11:00

In the past 10 years I’ve had 4 mobile phones. I have a basic Nokia clam and an 8 GB iPhone3G. My wife has our old first-generation iPhone. Since phones are evolving so quickly, people generally cycle to newer phones often and discard perfectly good phones while they are still under warranty.

According to a Computer Weekly article, the International Telecommunications Union estimates that 4.6 billion people will have a mobile phone account by the end of 2009. Given the planned obsolescence and the rate of innovation, we can expect over 1 billion phones produced per year and a similar number discarded. That is a lot of e-waste.

This got me thinking about the carbon footprint of my iPhone. You may remember when Greenpeace blasted Apple about the iPhone’s green credentials. Since then, Apple has made impressive progress and addressed many of Greenpeace’s criticisms, which you can read about on their website . They published a lifecycle assessment puts the total greenhouse gas emissions for an iPhone 3G at 55 kg CO2e, with 49% customer use over three years, 45% production, 5% transport and 1% recycling. If that is still to much CO2 for you, there is an app for that. Intunity and others have written apps that allow you to offset your iPhone with carbon credits.

But what about network? A Swiss report estimates 1 GBit of information at 25kg CO2e in 2004 in Switzerland. They say this amount would be higher in Germany where the power mix has more carbon per kilowatt. According to an WWF article, Australia has 4.5 times the carbon intensity of the Swiss economy. This isn't just banking vs. mining. It's also the 50% of Australia's carbon emissions coming from the energy sector, of which 84% comes from coal, which gives Australia 3.2 times the per capita carbon footprint of Switzerland.

In a typical bill, I have 80 minutes of calls, which according to the report works out to 160Mb of data plus 812 Mb on the data service. Say I’m using 10 GBits per year of bandwidth. Still it isn’t obvious how a 3G network scales and how it has improved in five years. I'd be surprised the the networks still require 25kg CO2e per Gb, but I'd bet it is at least 50kg CO2e per year for my usage pattern.

Fortunatley, my iPhone helps me be more carbon efficient. My life is becoming more digital. I read RSS feeds on the iPhone instead of news papers. In the last year, I have purchased one real book, but I've read 7 e-books with Stanza on my iPhone or on my laptop. According to a NYT article, books are roughly 7.5kg CO2e a pop. I can make the argument that my iPhone has helped me eliminate 52 kg CO2e in a year just from books.

Carless in Sydney

2009-11-15T21:49:00.002+11:00

Our family of 4 has been living without a car in Sydney for 18 months. We get the occasional astonished reaction from friends here in the Sydney suburb of Cremorne. Here are the challenges facing a family with primary school children:

Getting kids to birthday parties in places that public transportation serve poorly
Hauling groceries, building and gardening supplies
Hauling my early '70s 30 kg Fender Twin Reverb guitar amp around
Getting kids to activities < 30 minutes after school ends
Weekend trips around in the area

Yet we adapted to this constraint more easily than I thought we would:

Yesterday I hauled US$40 of groceries from the North Sydney market, a stack of library books and two children (combined 70kg) on the Yuba Mundo cargobike. These bikes are inexpensive and sturdy, but around Sydney you may consider an electric assist.
We chose to buy a home near shops, restaurants, the kids school and frequent bus service.
We use goget carsharing, which has 5 cars in walking distance. It is a great system. Theoretically, I could take the Twin to a gig on the cargobike, but this is really a job for a goget.
Until recently I worked for Atlassian, which provide excellent facilities for cycling, including showers and indoor bike parking. Sylvia bikes to her work in the Gardens. You can't beat a relaxing ride over the Harbour Bridge followed by a stroll through the gardens.
We have awesome friends, who on several occasions have loaned us there car. If they have the car on a novated lease, the mileage we put on may save them money because you get a bigger tax break the more you drive. We both win, but it's still bad policy.

Green business on Google Apps and JIRA Studio

2009-11-10T21:34:00.001+11:00

After coding until 1am last night, the eCO2 Labs team took a break from building product to spent today setting up infrastructure for the business on Atlassian's JIRA Studio and Google Apps. That includes setting up this blog. This is the inaugural post!
This blog will give you our blow by blow experience setting up a small web startup with the lowest possible carbon footprint. Since we're creating software to help people reduce their carbon footprint, we're making it a point to start with a strong social charter. This means we will be technically carbon neutral from birth, bridging the gap between our low footprint and carbon neutrality with carbon offsets.
And we will use our own software to achieve this.
SH