May 25, 2010

Quaking Aspen: The End of an Era

Posted by asheen under Life Cycle Assessment, Quaking Aspen | Tags: , , , , , |
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Dear friends and colleagues in Sustainability,
 
I’m writing with some exciting news — I recently started a new job as the first Sustainability Product Manager and corporate sustainability leader for SolidWorks Corporation!
 
I’ll be managing SolidWorks’ new Sustainability tool, which is a life cycle assessment (LCA) dashboard integrated into our CAD software that tracks the carbon footprint, total embodied energy, and air and water effects in real time as designers and engineers model and simulate products. SolidWorks CAD is used by over a million commercial and academic users worldwide, so I’m really excited for this tool’s potential to create some pretty incredible sustainable product designs. In addition to launching and managing the SolidWorks Sustainability module, I’ll be leading the company’s corporate sustainability efforts.
 
I hope you don’t mind that I’ll be reaching out to many of you in my new role, both for advice on sustainable-product management and corporate greening, as well as for potential sustainability successes using our product. Please let me know if you use SolidWorks in your company and would be interested in having a conversation about sustainable product design!
 
I started at SolidWorks last week, and it’s already been intense. With my hands full here, I’ll be shuttering Quaking Aspen, my sustainable innovation consultancy. I’m happy with what Quaking Aspen was able to accomplish through from 2008-2010. Along with our partners, we:

  • helped the Conservation Law Foundation develop a green-marketing plan for a new service offering around stakeholder engagement towards corporate social and environmental responsibility;
  • provided content for eQuilibrium’s enterprise carbon accounting (ECA) software, which was acquired by EnerNOC in 2009;
  • guided Avery Dennison in product stewardship decisions using LCA tools (one for a product that sold 40 million units in 2007!); and
  • reported on best practices in employee engagement around energy efficiency for the Environmental Defense Fund.

I’ll retain this email address as a general professional networking address, so you can reach me here or at SolidWorks — my new contact details are pasted below. And of course, you can still find me on Twitter, at Babson (where I’ll continue teaching sustainable business as an adjuct professor), in Net Impact, at conferences, and generally around Boston.
 
Look me up at SustainableBrands ’10 if you’ll be there in Monterey in June — otherwise I hope to connect or reconnect with each of you soon!
 
Cheers,
Asheen

Asheen Phansey
Product Manager, Sustainability
Office: +1 978 318 5623
Cell: +1 781 530 7262
Asheen.Phansey@3ds.com
Dassault Systèmes | www.3ds.com Visit us at: www.solidworks.com
Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp.- 300 Baker Avenue – CONCORD, MA 01742, USA

 

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.

 

January 19, 2009

New Hope for Sustainability

Posted by asheen under Corporate Sustainability, Policy and legislation | Tags: , , , , |
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Tomorrow, American voters turn a historic and hopeful gaze on the next Presidential administration. Here’s what I think President Obama should do to respond to our sustainability challenges.

But first, what to avoid. President Obama already has a climate czar; it would be tempting to recommend a national Secretary of Sustainability with the President’s ear, but I don’t think this is in the best interests of our nascent green movement. Imagine if a central government figure had tried to craft the wild evolution of the Internet — would such an authority have conceived of an elegantly brilliant concept like Twitter? No, the market still needs to let its “rational exuberance” over sustainability evolve.

The same temptation holds for reigning in the likes of Big Oil. In light of AIG’s arrogance and the automakers’ jet-set solicitations, it’s easy to suggest that industry is underregulated, greedy, broken. However, when it comes to sustainability, strict regulation is not the answer. Witness the biofuels debacle: we pushed for pro-ethanol legislation only to find that we were locked into a fuel source far less beneficial than we’d imagined. Local legislation like San Francisco’s ban on plastic grocery bags is similarly heavy-handed.

Here’s the crucial distinction: President Obama should determine the rules of the marketplace, not the marketplace itself. In order to function smoothly toward a sustainable future, industry must be made to shoulder its own externalities by legislating for an ecological allowance standard.

Many methods of internalizing ecological costs to align public and corporate interests have already been put forth, with most centering on carbon taxation or cap-and-trade; economist Gilbert Metcalf makes a decent case for a carbon tax in this month’s MIT Technology Review. However, I’ve never been overly hot and bothered about carbon (ah, global warming puns). Although it’s a better proxy for a company’s overall environmental footprint than, say, the number of green Skittles consumed, it’s still an incomplete measure. Should a company increase its use of formaldehyde-based adhesives to lower its greenhouse emissions? How many gallons of clean drinking water balance a pound of CO2? These complex questions require lifecycle thinking that can’t be answered by the most thorough carbon footprint.

So, the Obama Administration should adopt an ecological metrics standard based on life cycle assessment (LCA). Several independent lifecycle measurement systems currently exist, from the light Okala design tool to full-blown LCA software. I don’t really care what the standard is, as long as it’s well-vetted, consistent, and adaptable. Companies can then be charged taxes or tradable allowances based on the full lifecycle impacts of their entire product systems — supply chain and all.

coal_anthraciteOnce a standardized system for measuring product sustainability is adopted, the road will be paved for a freer market — a more open and honest one that accounts for the true costs of doing business. Imagine the price of coal power if the cost of its electricity includes the rise in marginal health care costs from increased cases of asthma and cancer; would coal-powered energy still be in anyone’s best financial interests?

If we factored in the costs and values of the natural capital that goes into the products we make, we couldn’t afford to keep poisoning ourselves and our world. That would be a fitting legacy for the most powerful change agent of our generation.