A Truly Green Building Sector? Sustainable Housing Challenges in Northern Europe

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Tuesday, 21 May 2013

Cooper Union “New Academic Building” in New York City, LEED Platinum standard, photographed by Gavin Schaefer (flickr). CC BY 2.0

A Truly Green Building Sector? Sustainable Housing Challenges in Northern Europe

May 21, 2013

Throughout its lifespan, a building affects the environment in a multitude of ways. How our house is built, how we live in it, and what climate it stands in, has an unbelievably big impact on our personal carbon footprint. Roughly a third of all human carbon dioxide emissions come from buildings! The method of construction plays a big role, of course. Quite obviously, building a building requires ...

5 Clear-Cut Economic Benefits of Sustainability Reporting

May 15, 2013

Business is not responsible for society. Business is society. Entrepreneur, manager, employee, customer – no matter what role you play, there is one fact you cannot deny: as soon as you participate in the market, you are the economy. It has often been proposed that prostitution is the oldest enterprise in the history of humankind, but that's wrong. Actually, even older than prostitution, is tradin...

Picture by Dennis Jarvis, Showing Metlaoui Phosphate Mine in Tunisia. CC BY SA 2.0

How to Recycle Phosphorus, the Most Least-Known Scarce Resource

May 6, 2013 1 Comment

Picking up on “sustainable agriculture”, most people think of free range chicken. They imagine livestock on green pastures. Some better informed would probably imagine a few optimized chemical and physical cycles, drip irrigation, compost based fertilizer, and limited pesticides. Haber-Bosch, the couple of celebrated innovators that revolutionized nitrogen supply, may be a name that quite a few ar...

ISO 14051-Based Material Flow Cost Accounting in a Nutshell

May 1, 2013 1 Comment

The ISO 14000 series has proved to be handy for quite a while now. Companies and public institutions have valued the universal guidelines for all sorts of environmental management procedures – energy management, carbon footprinting and life cycle assessment, to name the most important ones. Two years ago, a new seed was planted in the ISO 14000 orchard, bearing the name ISO 14051. This new norm wa...

Who's Happier – The Proactive Lohas or the Spontaneous Hedonist?

April 9, 2013

The perception that pro-environmental behaviour has negative effects on well-being has made it difficult to make big and concrete steps towards [sustainability] transition. But is this perception accurate? Ask three researchers from the Dutch University of Groningen. In a review published in the last MDPI journal of sustainability, Leonie Venhoeven, Jan Bolderdijk and Linda Steg explored whethe...

The Truth About the Dragon: China's Future is Inevitably Green

April 3, 2013 1 Comment

What if every person in India drove a car? What if all Chinese were to live in their own 3-bedroom house? At the sight of a prospering global economy, many people's trust in the future has been profoundly undermined, especially in the west. Unaware of the ethical paradox, this view grants a wasteful living standard only to the citizens of well-established economies. The old, bipolar world order kn...

Discovering All Environmental Effects: How Life Cycle Assessment with LCA Software Works

March 26, 2013

Environmental effects are extremely complex, that’s why they’re impossible to measure, so let’s not bother about them too much and keep producing and consuming the way we have over the past 100 years! Why should we change that anyway? Isn’t the GDP still growing after all? Don’t we lead a comfortable good life? Even though this approach may seem strikingly ignorant to some of you, it appears to...

Industrial Area Aerial shot by Doc Searls, CC BY SA 2.0

Cutting GHG Emissions of Industrial Parks by 35% through Corporate Collaboration

March 17, 2013

Buy local, drive less, switch to renewable energy – these are just a few of the omnipresent suggestions for reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the personal level. By no means do I aim to discredit their significance, but it strikes me that they are pushed just everywhere, whereas measures on other levels are hard to find. Pragmatic ideas to improve an individual company's climate bills are less ...

National Assembly in Dacca, Bangladesh. Image CC BY SA 2.0 Naquib Hossain

How to Invent the Right Institution to Cut Resource Conflicts

March 11, 2013

Can you resist the impetus coming from a 234 page report that has the promising title “Resource Futures” and boasts a beautiful Sankey diagram on the front page? See, I couldn't either. But before you expect a concise summary here, you had better be warned. I'm deeply sorry, but the report's giant scope of analyzing all the major resource flows in all of the world's bigger countries, including the...

From Green to Blue to Gray to Black: The Chromatics of Water Footprints

March 4, 2013

Because water is the most vital element for life, many contemporary intellectuals expect it to be the most conflict-generating resource of the 21st century. Not water in general, which is present in most places in one form or another. Much rather, it is access to clean freshwater that counts. More than once, bilateral relations have suffered when one nation's hydroelectric dam projects led to the ...

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