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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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  Cutting GHG Emissions of Industrial Parks by 35% through Corporat ...

  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 visible in the media, even if they do shape most of this blog. Nevertheless, be it in this blog or elsewhere, you hardly ever read anything about reducing the emissions in an entire industrial or comm...

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  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 their trade and actual trends, just exceeds what fits in the odd blog article. Scanning the first 20 pages yourself wouldn't pose too much of a threat to convenience, though, since they're already pretty...

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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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  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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  The Outweighed Efficiency Gain – 13 Rebound Effects in Detail

  December 12, 2012    5 Comments

  According to Tilman Santarius, one essential concept is missing in all the scenarios that lead toward a green economy. It is, so he wrote, that expectations for reduced energy consumption from efficiency gains need to be lowered by 50 percent because not all the energy that could be will actually be saved. How come? The story is called rebound effect and Santarius has researched it profoundly, as his paper “Green Growth Unravelled – How rebound effects baffle sustainability targets when the economy keeps growing” shows. The English version was published in October by the Heinrich Böll Foundati...

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  19 Industry Reports - How Global Compact Promotes Efficiency

  December 3, 2012  

  Energy costs are on the rise. Their increase is so steady that now even the United Nations has established a program to promote energy efficiency in the private sector. Sustainable Energy for All is the newest set of goals for the United Nations Global Compact. The Global Compact claims to be the world's largest corporate responsibility initiative and its newest set of goals has three objectives for business in 2030. First, universal access to modern energy services is sought. Second, energy efficiency is to be doubled. And third, the aspiration is to double the share of renewable energy. In ...

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  31 Innovations for Maximum Resource Efficiency in Manufacturing

  November 21, 2012    1 Comment

  The amount of manufacturing in Germany is vast. To guarantee survival in the global rotation of who is who among industrial nations, companies in Germany are forced to innovate. Every company that aims to stay competitive has to innovate? Yes, of course. But that goes even more so for the ones in well-established economies, than for their emerging competitors. Since the nature of innovation is multifarious, making the choice of what measure to invest in is far from obvious. What's clear, though: true innovations are those that not only save money, but also generate savings in resources – the ...

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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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  6 Options to Maintain Current Lifestyles with Far Less Raw Materi ...

  August 1, 2012    4 Comments

  There is this old, ever repeating view of humanity as a counter-productive force when it comes to nature conservation, and that action toward a sustainable world is therefore doomed to failure right from the start. This view seems tempting, since the reasoning makes sense at first sight. Even if we increased material efficiency noticeably, so it goes, the drastic growth in material demand will override any achievements. This view is what Julian Allwood and Jonathan Cullen called “with one eye open”. They wrote a comprehensive book about sustainable materials called “With Both Eyes Open,” avail...

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  7 Measures for Efficient Climate Control on the Factory Floor

  May 15, 2012    3 Comments

  How, exactly, can a medium-sized industrial company save on energy without negatively affecting production? What are the concrete measures that were taken by a textile company in Germany to increase energy efficiency by ten percent? What approach is needed to calculate the true amortization period for investments in efficiency? Find the answers in this article. Tobias Viere, the brain behind the Enhipro project, knows many ways to achieve “Energy and additive optimized production”. That is what his project deals with, dubbed after the German, “Energie- und hilfstoffoptimierte Produktion” (E...

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  Terminating the End-of-Pipe Era by Simple Means of Process Optimi ...

  December 4, 2011    2 Comments

  In the course of the last three decades, more and more voices have called for cleaner industry. Today, 20 years after the legendary Rio summit, the voices in favor of the environment seem to sound rather like a choir, echoing calls for strict legislation and increasingly low limiting values. When lowering emissions has thus become a concern for everyone, the biggest emitters in particular need to fulfill their obligations. And the biggest emitter? Definitely industry. Industry with its long favored end of pipe technology. End of pipe technology, however, is unproductive, since it has no benefi...

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  Refining Material Flow Analysis: The Arising of Input-Output Econ ...

  October 20, 2011  

  We can be proud of the great wealth of reliable, good quality data that are being produced every day all over the world to inform policies, promote changes and monitor the progress of our societies. Is what proclamed Paul Cheung exactly one year ago. Paul Cheung is United Nations Statistics Division's director, and one year ago was the first world statistics day. So, resuming Cheung's message, statistics answer three purposes: informing policies, promoting changes and monitoring societal progress. In the age of a shrinking resource base and a pressing need to fight global warming, the task...

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  4 Alternatives to Waste Disposal - Increasing Your SMB's Resource ...

  October 10, 2011    1 Comment

  It is no secret, that the Earth's resource base is on a declining track. In the 1970s,  the Club of Rome started to rivet public attention towards "natural resource restrictions" - we all remember the legendary "limits to growth" (also see its 30-year update [PDF]), a corner stone of sustainable development. Some of the well-established industrialized countries have become a little greener since then. However, in the course of the last 20 years, a number of emerging economies joined us in their hunger for raw materials. As a consequence, we face an increase of resource scarcity. Economically s...