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News & Views From the Front Line
Wednesday, 22 July 2009
Still can't afford this Green Stuff?
I've just been interviewing Paula Widdowson, Director of CSR for Northern Foods for book#2. Their CSR efforts saved them £2m last year, and they expect £4m this year and £11m the year after. Less enlightened companies are still saying "we can't afford to do this in a recession!" How can they afford not to?Great tip from Paula: Northern Foods colour code their machines with small stickers. Red means "leave this on", Amber says "If you think this should/could be switched off, then ask" and Green says "If this isn't doing anything, then switch it off". For one of their factories, this cost £22 to implement. Genius.
Labels: recession, resource efficiency, savings
# posted by Gareth Kane : 11:15
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Monday, 8 October 2007
On the Rebound?
Last week I made reference to the 'rebound effect'. I like to illustrate this concept with a little story. Back in December 2003, I wrote off my Ford Ka in a smallish prang. I replaced it with a Golf TDi, for two reasons:a. I want to have the option of using biodiesel (but that's another story...).
b. It did 55mpg compared with the Ka's 40mpg.
Brilliant - cut my fuel consumption by 28% and saved £250 each year.
But....
1. Statistics show that I'm likely to lose about a fifth of that saving by driving more because it has become cheaper. This is the 'direct rebound effect'.
2. £250 is exactly the cost of a return flight from Newcastle to New York. Given my love of travel, this is a real option. If I take it, then I've just doubled the annual carbon emissions I had in the Ka. This is the 'indirect-' or 'respend-' rebound effect (or, as energy economists call it, the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate). If we save money through efficiency, we can easily wipe out the eco-benefits by choosing to buy or do something even more environmentally damaging with the windfall.
So what effect does this have in practice? The Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate is hotly debated in academic circles - certainly the prominent energy guru Amory Lovins once told me rather tersely that there was no empirical evidence for its existence.
In my opinion this is down to changing consumption patterns. Some time ago I immersed myself in consumer data and found that the fastest growing areas of expenditure were on telecommunications and home entertainment which are less carbon intensive (per pound/euro/dollar) than, say, road or air travel. A back of the fag packet calculation suggested that the rebound effect would not result in environmental damage getting worse, but that only about 50% of expected efficiency benefits would be delivered in practice.
The title of Lovins' own famous book, "Factor 4: doubling wealth, halving resource use", backs this up - a factor 4 improvement in resource efficiency will only result in a factor 2 reduction in resource use - the rest we enjoy in increased quality of life. I haven't seen him since to run this by him!
The bottom line is: with resource efficiency you never quite get the environmental benefits you expect, but it's still worth doing.
Labels: amory lovins, factor 4, rebound effect, resource efficiency, sustainable production and consumption
# posted by Gareth Kane : 08:32
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Wednesday, 3 October 2007
Environment Agency will require Resource Efficiency data from IPPC sites
The ENDS Report is, well, reporting that the Environment Agency in England and Wales is planning to make the reporting of Resource Efficiency data mandatory as part of Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) reporting. Only a lack of funds is stopping them doing it sooner.Resource efficiency* is about getting the most out of every unit of physical input (eg materials, energy, water) into a system. Car fuel consumption in miles per gallon is an everyday example of a resource efficiency measure - miles travelled (output) for every unit of input (gallon of fuel).
The UK Government is extremely keen on resource efficiency as it is very business friendly - increased efficiency will lead to a reduction in operating costs. They have created the Business Resource Efficiency and Waste (BREW) fund which recycles money from landfill tax into schemes that improve the resource efficiency of, well you guessed it, UK business. The schemes include Envirowise (waste minimisation), the Carbon Trust (energy efficiency), WRAP (recycling) and the National Industrial Symbiosis Programme - NISP (industrial symbiosis). The model is quite neat - industry pays for its sins (landfill) and gets 'free' advice on how to stop sinning as a result.
However, there are concerns about how far Resource Efficiency can take us towards sustainability. The high targets required (a Factor 10 improvement over 1990 is the best guess) are extremely challenging on technical grounds, and then there's the dreaded 'rebound effect' which I will discuss at a later date. In the meantime, with it being flavour of the month, British business had better get its head around resource efficiency PDQ and the organisations above are a pretty good place to start.
* Resource efficiency is also known as eco-efficiency
Labels: carbon trust, eco-efficiency, envirowise, industrial symbiosis, nisp, resource efficiency, wrap
# posted by Gareth Kane : 07:20
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A highly accessible, practical guide to those who want to introduce sustainability into their business or organization quickly and effectively.
