Category: Sustainability

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The Sustainability Diamond

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Tuesday, 7.57am

Sheffield, U.K.

Sustainability can’t be like some sort of a moral sacrifice or political dilemma or a philanthropical cause. It has to be a design challenge. – Bjarke Ingels

I’ve been thinking of how to market environmental consulting products for a long time.

I remember sitting in a marketing training program so 20 years ago, and coming up with four words that mattered to clients when trying to make choices.

Cost, consumption, carbon and compliance.

These four words were, at the time, seen as quite technical – and I had to play with them to make the messaging easier for a lay audience to understand.

But the words themselves have stayed relevant.

Over the decades, companies have focused on one or the other at different times.

A good way to think about this is what I’m calling the sustainability diamond.

At the top of the diamond sits the company. Or any other organisation structure that has to think about its use of resources.

Resources have a cost – using gas and electricity results in bills, raw materials have to be purchased.

Companies actively track current and expected future costs – helped by traded commodity futures markets.

That’s where I started my career – building systems to look into the future and make decisions based on where prices were now, and where they were expected to go in future.

A bad trading decision could result in a swing in prices of 50% either way.

Then there was consumption – how much of the resources you used.

The easiest way to save money is not to burn fuel, to use fewer resources.

But it’s also a hard source of savings. It takes time and effort to identify where you can make improvements.

Energy and resource usage can easily become wasteful if you don’t monitor and control what’s going on.

In the middle of my career consumption management became more important.

As we added more renewables to the grid, the idea that we could manage demand – pay consumers to reduce their usage if supplies dropped – came to the fore.

This meant that if the wind stopped blowing and energy supply fell, we could balance the system by dropping demand rather than having firing up a gas turbine to fill the gap.

But to do this you needed a good handle on usage – and we built systems to monitor this on a minute by minute basis.

Cost considerations came screaming back after a series of events – the Fukushima nuclear reactor, the rise of shale gas.

But for the last ten years or so, the focus has been on compliance as new rules came in – most importantly net zero targets in many countries, starting with the UK.

Companies had to start complying with these new rules – measuring and reporting on the resources they used and starting to make plans to make their companies more sustainable.

These then are the three facets of the diamond – managing cost, consumption and compliance are the drivers for taking action.

And the action we take has a result in terms of carbon.

Recently, it’s become clearer and clearer that we should think of carbon like we think of dollars – a way to normalise different measurement systems.

For example, we convert all currencies into a standard one, like dollars, if we want to get a like for like understanding of how a firm is doing financially.

Measuring outcomes in terms of carbon allows us to do the same – taking therms of gas, kilowatt-hours of electricity, litres of diesel, purchasing spends – and putting them all into one, relatively consistent, unit. There are issues with conversions and emission factors, but on the whole we end up with something that is consistent and comparable over time.

The Sustainability Diamond may be a good way to keep the big picture in mind while focusing on any one part at a particular point in time.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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Have We Made Things Worse By Making Them Better?

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Thursday, 9.58pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Reducing and reusing take nothing more than a rethink on the way we shop, and using our imagination with the things that we might once have considered junk. – Sheherazade Goldsmith

You will probably conclude that I have too much time on my hands after reading this.

As you are aware, it’s difficult to go places these days.

So, I spend some time sorting through the piles of paper that have accumulated everywhere.

Most of which have to do with notes that I’ve taken over time.

Over the years I have probably had more than my fair share of time obsessing over note taking.

This could turn into a very long post if we start discussing the merits of bound books versus loose paper.

Pros, cons and angst await us in those debates.

But I had a simpler question.

What was I to do with all this paper?

Do I just throw it out? Put it in the recycling? Shred it?

Here’s the thing, we don’t really think too much about paper, do we?

It’s so easy now to get hold of stuff we want.

Paper comes in reams and books and we fill it and put it in files and piles and pretty soon it’s everywhere.

More comes through the letterbox every day, folded inside other pieces of folded paper.

And we’re too busy to deal with it so it goes onto a surface awaiting dispatch into a recycling bin.

Now the paper that you’ve written on – do you use both sides?

I often write only on one side and lots of printed material also just uses the one side.

And you feel like you should hold onto it – you might need it in the future, and throwing it away seems so final.

What should you do?

Some time back I went to a dinner and met a person who refurbishes computers.

That seems like such a sensible thing to do – many people replace their hardware every three or so years, but there’s still lots of life left in those machines.

I’m writing this on a seven year old machine, I think, and there’s a functioning Macbook in my collection from 2009.

Running GNU/Linux, of course…

Can we refurbish paper?

Well, I am – and here’s how.

We happen to have one of those paper cutting things – and so all the sheets of paper that I find with one side still usable get cut up into A6 sheets.

All of a sudden you have index cards – for free.

Now, the economics are nothing to sniff at…

An index card costs around 3p.

If you use them a lot – say to write a book, you’ll probably end up using a few thousand cards.

£30, you say, that’s not very much.

But it adds up – and remember, you haven’t had to cut down any more trees.

Then there are the envelopes that come through the door stuffed with bills and junk mail.

I used to just toss these.

Now, I open them carefully and cut them in half.

And you have little folders for your index cards.

Label them, put a few sheets in and you have a nice organisation system building up.

But where do you put those folders?

In the box you get when you trim a cereal packet to size, of course.

Now, you might think that this is all a huge waste of time – but actually there are a few points to consider.

Everything that I’m using has been created for one purpose.

I suppose I’m not really refurbishing them, unless you count erasing marks in pencil, more repurposing them.

But by doing that they are extending their use – and I’m using fewer resources and getting more value out of the junk and packaging that we get anyway.

Now, the point I’m making really, is that we have gone to huge efforts to make things better.

In our efforts to go paperless we use huge amounts of energy to keep data alive in servers forever.

We believe that we’re doing good by recycling everything as fast as possible, when perhaps we could do even more good by reusing them first.

Even junk mail has its uses.

Many paper based systems work pretty well actually – the reason we move them to digital is not to be more effective but to get more control.

That may be a debate for another time…

We have such effective methods of production – everything is just so much better and there’s no shortage of stuff.

But would we be better off if we just used things for longer?

Is there anything you could do to reuse the things around you before you recycle them?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

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How some companies are creating opportunities from CO2

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Many of us see emissions as a problem to be resolved – at some time – by someone else.

Yes, there is the Paris accord and, in theory, the world is going to try and keep carbon dioxide levels to a safe level, although it appears that we are already past those levels, according to some models and measurements.

So, is there anything that can actually be done, or is being done?

It turns out there is, and an article by R.P Siegal pulls together some interesting and innovative work being done by companies out there.

It turns out there are three main ways these companies are trying to make carbon work for them:

  1. Putting it somewhere where it is more useful
  2. Creating raw materials out of it
  3. Creating products

1. Carbon capture and storage (CCS)

The first approach is the one that most people are familiar with and, in the UK, has had money thrown at it.

The CCS association says that the main components of CCS are extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere, transporting and then storing it underground in depleted oil and gas fields or aquifer formations.

Another approach is to inject the CO2 into rock formations, where it becomes part of the rock eventually.

2. Creating raw materials

Some companies reuse materials – in effect reusing the CO2 that went into making them in the first place rather than creating new emissions – creating things like carpet tiles.

A more direct approach, however, extracts CO2 from the air and turns it into plastics or fuel.

3. Creating products

Siegel then points to companies that turn pollution into products – such as an Indian company that turns exhaust particles into carbon black for ink.

Other companies create concrete, cement and bricks.

Early stages – but a promising start

It’s still early days for these kinds of innovations – but they are coming. Smart people are spotting opportunities and creating companies to take advantage of the pollution in the air.

As the saying goes – where there’s muck, there’s brass.