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  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 whether environmentally friendly behavior poses a threat to your quality of life, as many who struggle with being eco-friendly suppose. De-growth advocates, on the contrary, have argued the opposite for qui...

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  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 knew only two spheres of development: The western NATO-states on the one hand and the eastern USSR on the other. Back then, it was only these two spheres that caused large scale-pollution, and this was ...

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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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  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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  Holistic Sustainability Measurement: The Composite 3-Pillar-Index

  January 11, 2013  

  By the end of the 20th century, a deep conceptual gap had evolved between a destructive economy devouring the declining resource base on the one hand and a poor, protection-needing environment on the other. However, this contradictory approach – economy vs. environment – is misleading. Even the most fundamental environmentalist has to admit that his or her participation in the market by consuming goods and services is inevitable. Well, there is of course a way to deny consumerism - subsistence lifestyles are possible, to a certain extent. However, in my humble opinion, it is virtually impossib...

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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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  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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  “A Balanced Mix of Technologies and Strategies” - The Sustainable ...

  October 16, 2012  

  When it comes to discussing ways to limit human influence on global warming, the most popular reaction is to pass the buck: So who's in charge of making the needed substantial changes in the way things run? The Other. Why? Because they pollute more, because they're more powerful, because they have a historical responsibility, because it's easier for them... There seem to be more excuses for not acting than there are carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere. "Technology Will Save Us" Say Efficiency Advocates Even among those who are concerned with the environment and seek a way to increas...

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  Better, Different, Less – Green Economy Revisited

  September 17, 2012    2 Comments

  “Post Growth Economy or Resource Efficiency Revolution – How Should We Face the Limits of Our Planet?” This question I asked in a blog post half a year ago. On the green growth vs. post-growth front, an interesting publication caught my attention recently. Barbara Unmüßig and Thomas Fatheuer from the “Heinrich Böll Stiftung”, a foundation associated with Germany's Green Party, and Wolfgang Sachs, member of the club of Rome and former Wuppertal Institut researcher, published a “Critique of the Green Economy” in April with a translation to English that followed in June. In it, they discussed the...

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  Integrated Reporting: How Business Can Transform Society through ...

  July 14, 2012    1 Comment

  It goes without saying that providing investors and shareholders with financial performance data is a key responsibility of big companies. Companies also announce goals for the next quarter and this practice is as usual as it can get. Sales and profits are data that the public deserves to know. Nobody doubts that this information is best given through concrete figures. Imagine a CEO telling the shareholders "We have had a successful term and are happy to announce that we gained more profit..." That statement sounds exceptionally incomplete and calls for a number. "More profit" is what we expec...

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  Let's Take the Green Economy in Hand Ourselves - The Conclusion F ...

  July 2, 2012    1 Comment

    One week has passed and the deeply disappointed comments on the outcome of Rio+20 slowly fade from the media and blogosphere. I wonder where all this disappointment comes from. Don't get me wrong, I don't consider the summit the slightest bit a success. I'm with the well-cited Greenpeace press statement that not only called it an "epic failure", but also ironically envisioned that the summit would more appropriately "go down in history as Greenwash+20". Bryan Walsh of TIME.com found less drastic, but more precise words to describe the meaningless outcome: The final statement that wa...

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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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  To Harvest Green Business, Feed Eco Incentives to the Decision Ma ...

  May 7, 2012    1 Comment

  Incentive-based pay isn't new; it's been around for centuries. Ship captains transporting prisoners from England to Australia were once rewarded, not on passenger counts, but on how many survived the journey. Nowadays with major companies, it's usually linked to financial performance. But unless companies begin to connect compensation to sustainable environmental and social performance, they will continue to sacrifice long-term value creation and competitiveness for short-term, unsustainable gains. So argued Andrea Moffat recently. She was also involved in the creation of The CERES Roadmap Fo...