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  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 are familiar with. However, although every one of us consumes farmed products every single day, it goes beyond average knowledge that our crops need various nutrients to grow and only a relatively few p...

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  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 was equipped with the powerful claim of combining the material and energy efficiency improvements already known from the other norms with measures to increase cost efficiency as well. In order to match ...

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  Discovering All Environmental Effects: How Life Cycle Assessment ...

  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 be common sense among mainstream business people and a general majority in most societies. And, yes, everything is complex indeed: the supply chains of global retailers, the climate, the just-in-time...

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  From Green to Blue to Gray to Black: The Chromatics of Water Foot ...

  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 another nation's fear of water shortages due to shrinking flows in its incoming rivers. But declining water volumes in rivers and their negative environmental effects are also caused by large-scale ag...

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  When Oil Majors Embrace Material Flow Analysis, New Hope for a Su ...

  February 18, 2013  

  There are manifold approaches to close the apparent gap between a shrinking resource base on the one hand and the ever rising human resource demand on the other. For the longest time, the world's big industrial players have followed a strategy to successfully ignore the former, since environmental and social costs were merely negligible external effects. We could call this approach a procrastinating one, because it is future generations who are forced to deal with the outcomes of today's ignorance. In the course of the last 20 years, however, corporate giants have shifted their strategy. It ...

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  How Sustainable are Europe's 5 Million E-Cars in 2020? New LCA Gu ...

  February 5, 2013    5 Comments

  When it comes to sustainable private transport, the 21st-century-bearer-of-hope number one is called electric car. Unprecedentedly efficient, locally pollution-free and silent, this technology will totally save the environment without compromising our comfort or convenience in the least. So we think. However, even the best technology requires raw materials, energy and industrial processes to make. Green technology or not, technology is technology. Its production, use and disposal will always have an effect on the environment, no matter what size, weight and efficiency rating it has – throug...

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  100% Renewables? How Germany's Energy Transition Is Taking Shape

  January 23, 2013    1 Comment

  What happens when an entire country decides to phase out nuclear and fossil energy? When this energy transition towards 100% renewables is a remarkably stable political consensus, but the time frame for when to achieve it is heavily debated? Well, you then have the current situation in Germany. And now, more than ever, what this situation calls for is a trustworthy set of experts to clarify the facts of the present and analyze the possible paths for the future. Today, let's wander through two, well thought-out publications, written by exactly these experts, and that shed light on the necessa...

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  10 Appropriate Indicators to Measure Green Growth in Industry

  December 17, 2012    5 Comments

  Green Growth, Sustainable Growth, Green Economy – All of these concepts require decoupling. A decoupling, in a nutshell, that maintains economic growth while achieving material de-growth. Instead of consuming ever more resources to produce ever more profits (“traditional” growth), decoupling refers to the idea of consuming less material resources and still generating more profits (green growth). What sounds good in theory, faces some technicalities in practice. The most important one is: how do you measure “greenness”? Which of all the shrinking resources should be saved, in order to merit get...

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  3 Alternative Ideas for Waste Management in Developing Countries

  November 9, 2012    3 Comments

  Unlike the global north, most developing countries have difficulties affording sophisticated industrial machinery. Predictable economic conditions for their funding are just not easy to find. That's why the waste management options I presented in last week's article are not really much of an option outside the OECD. Even for some OECD members, they're far from posing a realistic alternative to the status quo. But that doesn't mean the hazard of small, disorganized garbage patches openly set on fire here and there has to prevail. Different Waste Management Traditions The “waste management” ...

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  Burn or Bury? Analyzing Waste Management Options in Detail

  November 5, 2012    1 Comment

  Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – the waste imperative is as clear as it can get. What's less clear, however, is what we should we do with the remaining stuff. Even the greenest society is, at a certain point, confronted with the unusable leftovers of consumption. What should happen to these? Treatment of the leftovers is a well discussed question and the answer relies on three big alternatives: incineration, dumping and composting. All three have pros and cons, some of which are apparent, others rather surprising. In this article, let me introduce you to a life cycle assessment (LCA) that analyzes th...

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  Europe’s 10 Most Verbiage-Free Master Programs in Sustainability ...

  September 25, 2012    3 Comments

  Almost all interdisciplinary study programs introduced to the teaching universe in the past 5 years contain some form of “sustainability” in the program title – be it from the political, environmental or economic sciences or even engineering. Isn’t that a very positive trend? Well, at first sight, yes. But what about the critics who say all programs related to sustainable development are wishy-washy, since too many different fields are touched upon and not even one subject gets detailed treatment? In this article, I try to prove the opposite by mentioning ten more specialized, but still int...

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  Green Ocean Hunters? The Environmental Effects of Fishing and Aqu ...

  September 11, 2012    1 Comment

  Last week, in part one of this article, we ended with the tragedy of the commons and the question of whether overfishing is a logical consequence of human nature. Luckily, not all things are as bad as they seem. Let's get back to our effort to increase comprehension and scroll to page 18 of Frank Asche's report (Green Growth in Fisheries and Aquaculture Production and Trade). He seems quite confident there. [T]here is no doubt that aquaculture can be carried out in a sustainable manner, independent of the level of intensity. Therefore, the real issue with aquaculture and sustainability is whe...

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  Green Ocean Hunters? The Environmental Effects of Fishing and Aqu ...

  September 5, 2012    1 Comment

  Shrimp farms destroy sensitive mangrove forest ecosystems, salmon escape from designated aquaculture spots and spread parasites, fish trawlers leave nothing but empty seas behind and even organic fish farming could be unsustainable due to dependence on fish meal from wild catch. When it comes to seafood, the message transmitted across mainstream media channels is devastating: there is simply nothing left we can eat responsibly, be it from the wild or aquaculture. Does that mean we all have to go vegetarian? Well, in many cases, the good news is that fish performs better than meat, when it come...

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  What's the Greenest 1 L Packaging? Two Powerful LCAs Give the Ans ...

  August 5, 2012  

  It was a month ago when I heard the surprising news that milk packaged in cartons has the best environmental performance as compared to other packaging materials. Do they, really? Aren't the reusable deposit bottles world famous for being green? Well, actually, milk bottles are white or brown, of course, but environment-wise their reputation is outstandingly green. In order to find some reliable information, I took the time to scan two comparative LCAs on beverage packaging, and guess what: the returnable glass bottle is far from being the best. LCA, for those who aren't familiar with the init...