September 28, 2009

Oct 15, 2009: Sustainable Innovation Workshop

Posted by asheen under Biomimicry and Natural principles, Corporate Sustainability, Green chemistry, Green marketing, Industrial Ecology, Life Cycle Assessment, Quaking Aspen, Sustainability philosophy, Sustainable entrepreneurship, Sustainable operations | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Quaking Aspen, in partnership with Collaborative Innovation Services, is thrilled to announce our first Sustainable Innovation Workshop open to the public!


Workshop details:

Date:
Thursday, October 15, 2009
9:00AM – 5:00PM

Place:
Forefront Conference Center
404 Wyman Street Waltham, MA
http://www.forefrontcenter.com/

Cost:
$395 per person, light breakfast and buffet luncheon included
Student rate available

Register at:
http://sustainableinnovation.eventbrite.com/
Registration deadline is Friday, October 9 at 12:00 Noon

Contact:
Asheen@QuakingAspenLLC.com

Bringing a product from concept to customer is an interdisciplinary process that involves a wide diversity of skills: designers’ creativity, engineers’ pragmatism, operations leaders’ effectiveness, marketers’ insight. So why would you use one-size-fits-all sustainability practices?

We’ve developed a Sustainable Innovation Workshop that provides clarity to where each sustainable innovation tool fits into your job and your company.

We will train you in the tools most useful at each stage of the innovation process. You’ve probably heard of some of these sustainable innovation tools, like carbon footprinting, life cycle assessment, and green marketing.

So if you’re a professional working in a design, technical, operations, strategy, or marketing role, and are interested in—or have been tasked with—infusing more sustainability into your job and career, attend our workshop to gain exposure to these tools of sustainable innovation. Keep reading to find out what you’ll learn.

Sustainable Innovation graphic

More about the Sustainable Innovation Toolkit

Here is more detail about the Sustainable Innovation Toolkit you’ll be exposed to through our workshop:

Biomimicry

Biomimicry, or nature-inspired design, provides a practical, systematic framework used for the design of products and processes using inspiration from Nature. Its principles will also help you develop a sustainable product “gold standard” against which you can compare all future design ideas.

You will learn how to apply this framework during the design process. To really get your design team’s creative juices flowing, we also offer a half-day intensive biomimicry workshop.

Life Cycle Assessment

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is the practice of quantifying a product design’s ecological impact.

You will learn how to make simple tradeoffs to improve the ecological efficiency of your products, such as: do we manufacture with sustainable materials in China, or local nonrenewables? What is the impact of changing from materials? To learn more, we also offer an LCA workshop that will let you really dig into LCA methodology.

Green Chemistry

Is there a science to choosing—and inventing anew—materials along environmental considerations? You bet! Green chemistry “unleashes the creativity and innovation of our scientists and engineers in designing and discovering the next generation of chemicals and materials… [for] increased performance and increased value while meeting all goals to protect and enhance human health and the environment” (ACS Green Chem. Inst.).

You will learn how to develop a Material Preference List for existing materials, and will learn the Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry to evaluate new materials. If you need to delve more deeply into the green beaker, leverage our relationship with Dr. John Warner of the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry.

Sustainable Operations

It takes a sustainable company to make a truly sustainable product. Do you know where the major impacts of your company’s operations lie? Performing a greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory—the formal name for a carbon footprint—reveals the most impactful areas of your operations.

You will learn how to conduct a GHG inventory, and how to use the information gained from this inventory to improve your operations. We can also work with you further to reduce your company’s total GHG footprint.

Industrial Ecology

Industrial ecology refers to a high-level understanding of a business ecosystem, and what makes that ecosystem sustainable. This covers greening upstream in your supply chain and downstream in your products’ value chains.

You will learn about the finer distinctions of the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle hierarchy (like recycling vs. downcycling), and the positive and negative financial impacts of closed-loop (cradle-to-cradle) production.

Green Marketing

Green Marketing is the ability to tell the sustainability story of a product or service believably, to one or more market segments that will be incentivized to buy your offering based on its environmental effectiveness.

You will learn about market segmentation, targeting, and positioning for a green marketing campaign; laws and ethical practices in green advertising; and future trends to watch for, such as product-level carbon footprinting. Interested in learning more? We also offer—you guessed it—an in-depth, hands-on seminar in green marketing.

Your Workshop Facilitators

Read more about Asheen Phansey and Rudy Ruggles.

 

February 13, 2009

Why Globalization Is Dangerous for Sustainability

Posted by asheen under Biomimicry and Natural principles, Sustainability philosophy | Tags: , , , , |
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Modern economics says that global trading can often create additional value for all involved. A country’s economy will function more efficiently if it produces an excess of goods that are easier for it to make and trades these for other goods; that’s a basic extension of the concept of division of labor. The obvious negative impacts of global trading are transportation costs, both financial and ecological; but if we can develop cleaner modes of transportation, surely the positive economic effects outweigh the ecological costs?

I had thought as much, until Professor Ben Linder of Olin College of Engineering made me rethink my assumptions. In a sustainability workshop that I’ll be chewing on for a while, Ben said that global trade’s real threat to sustainability has to do not with transportation costs, but with carrying capacities.

First, a brief ecology lesson. Picture a world of three tribes: the Sumerians, Babylonians and Phoenicians. For simplicity, these ancient people need only three things to survive: stones (for building houses), barley, and fruit, say one unit per person. Each tribe practices an internal division of labor and produces some of each resource.

Each tribe’s skills and geography are differently suited for producing each resource, but all three resources are equally necessary for survival, so for each tribe only one resource is the limiting factor to growth. Let’s say in our case, Sumer is always scrounging for stones; the Babylonians are often bereft of barley; and fruits are few and far between in Phoenicia. If each tribe can make 1000 units of its scarce resource, but can make 2500 of the other two, each can still only support 1000 people; so the world population is 3000.

Now the tribes discover trade. Each tribe barters some of its two excess resources to the one deficient in each, so now the resources are distributed evenly at 2000 each of stones, barley, and fruit. Now, each tribe can support 2000 people. Without producing any new resources, the population of the world has doubled! And with further specialization, production will likely increase as well. Clearly, the more tribes you can trade with, the fewer your resource limitations to growth.

So why is in-tribe division of labor a good thing, but cross-country trading detrimental to the planet? Because ecosystems can’t trade natural resources. A tribe’s ecosystem is resilient as long as its resources don’t flow out, but the earth can’t ship fertile soil to Phoenicia in exchange for some cleaner water elsewhere if Phoenicia depletes all of its crop nutrients. Yet that’s surely what will happen if the whole world demands Phoenician fruits from land that wasn’t evolved to support the needs of the trade-burgeoned domestic population, let alone the entire world.

This was happening long before the world “flattened”. Ben is fond of telling the story of the collapse of the Atlantic cod population, a resource that put Boston on the world map. Over the last few centuries, “tribes” from around the world traded their resources for Atlantic cod and literally fished it out of George’s Bank. There are cod species elsewhere, but since George’s Bank can’t exactly trade for this top-tier predator, its entire food web is now going through an unstable flux known as a trophic cascade in the cod’s absence. (Read the fascinating history of George’s Bank.)

There are other ways that global operations can stymie sustainability, such as introducing lags into the feedback loops for optimal production, but this argument of carrying capacities seems to be the main challenge. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, though.