Sunday, December 31, 2006

The splendid WorldChanging (where I periodically contribute) asked its contributors for thoughts on the question: “Looking Toward 2007: What’s Next?” Here’s what I wrote:

The key words I’m watching for 2007: generative feedback. Performance feedback that doesn’t just track behavior; it drives it. And changes the way people talk and think about it.

Just as Prius owners inevitably change their driving behavior (whether they want to or not, whether they intend to watch their energy dashboard or not, and regardless of penalties or incentives) relevant performance feedback can engage stakeholders, steer strategy, and markedly improve implementation – the Achilles heel of most sustainability initiatives.

JM Juran pegged this nearly 60 years ago, when he observed that “To be in a state of self-control, a person must know: what he [or she] is supposed to do, what he [or she] is actually doing, what choices [or she] has to improve results wherever necessary. If any of these three conditions are not met, a person cannot be held responsible.” (I ask for a show of hands in every business audience I speak to: “How many of you have all three in your organization? How many have two? One?” The silence is consistently deafening and the unease palpable, as everyone realizes what a fix we’re each/all in.)

Which is why it’s such good news that technology is conspiring to break this logjam (even if management and organizational culture may still lag the opportunity):

• Business intelligence “dashboards” are all the rage – though how well and how fully they’re used is open to question.
• Web 2.0 mashups, with lots of stuff, both silly and cool, underway, including the geospatial opportunities being cataloged at Where 2.0 (GoogleEarth is the big dog but so much more is going on.)
• What Worldchanger Jamais Cascio has dubbed the Participatory Panopticon.

Where’s the cool feedback on the Worldchanging front?

• Worldwatch Institute has been chronicling planetary “vital signs” for years (but hasn’t yet made the leap to web interactivity)
• FAO’s FAOSTAT offers a richness of breadth and interactivity that one can only hope for from the US government, which is hopefully near the end of its recent phase of constraining rather than expanding information access
• Gapminder’s slick – and dynamic – views of Human Development Trends provides a fascinating way to understand trend and pattern. (For example, look at how differently income distribution changes as China, India and Brazil develop.)
• Buckminster Fuller Institute’s EarthScope offers up trending data in “geostories” rather than charts and graphs, providing dynamic maps with supporting graphics, imagery, sound, and text – all inspired by Bucky’s “GeoScope” vision, laid out in Critical Path.
• Swivel’s preview provides a cool tool for data mashups of all sorts

Our focus at Natural Logic: building on Bucky’s GeoScope inspiration, Jan Hanhart’s early 1990s “EcoFeedback” project in the Hague, our own work with our Business Metabolics sustainability indicators system (delivering live corporate sustainability metrics to help people manage more sustainably, not just report on it), Regional Metabolism Assessments of city and county economies, we’re building a “Regional Sustainability Dashboard” for the San Francisco Bay Area. (And encouraging the formation of a public/private consortium to support real time regulation of environmental performance.) We’re weaving a juicy web of technology-, data- and channel-partners, and we’d love to hear from you if you have a potential role to play.

The point of it all – and the reason I talk about generative feedback – is not the numbers are the graphs, but the conversations they engender and the mindsets they shift. My success metric: when one of our customers (or one of their stakeholders) says “Wow, I never thought of it that way before.”

There’ll be more about this – coming soon – on the Natural Logic web site, at Worldchanging, and of course at my blog (which has a new address; please take note). Stay tuned!

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Monday, February 28, 2005

With so many companies worldwide producing “corporate social responsibility” (or citizenship or environmental or sustainability) reports, it’s relevant to ask both “how good are they?” and “what do they really tell us?”

SustainAbility, the British consultancy, addresses the first question in its biennial benchmark of CSR reporting. “Risk & Opportunity: Best Practice in Non-Financial Reporting” (released late last year in partnership with UNEP and Standard & Poor’s) reviews and rates the top 100 corporate responsibility reports from around the world.

Working in cooperation with SustainAbility, Natural Logic addressed the second question:
- How do the leading reporters compare with the leading performers?
- Is quality of reporting an indicator of better management and performance, or of communications resources?

To examine those questions, we analyzed the publicly reported data using our web-based KPI (key performance indicators) system, Business Metabolics™. In a moment, what we found for one sector — the eight Technology and Telecommunications companies covered in the report. (You can fly through the data yourself — and read an illustrated version of this article — using our interactive demo.) But first, some background.

SustainAbility found that companies have made a “huge leap forward” in overall reporting quality, since publication of their “Trust Us” report in 2002, with “new highs in transparency and disclosure.” Significantly, half of the top 100 in 2004 are newcomers, suggesting that leadership in corporate reporting is far from static, and that existing leaders will have to work hard to maintain position.

In contrast, the 2004 benchmark found that reports still fail to fully engage stakeholders, particularly financial analysts who continue to struggle to identify the data needed for their analyses of corporate performance. The report also finds that “most companies still fail to identify material strategic and financial risks and opportunities associated with the economic, social and environmental impacts captured by the ‘triple bottom line’ agenda.” SustainAbility suggests that corporate governance, board leadership and integrity are at the heart of the challenge facing business if corporate responsibility is to have real impact on business planning and decision making.

CSR Reporting – Performance Perspective

Business Metabolics makes quick work of charting and comparing CSR performance at facility, company or industry level — with automatic data acquisition, robust and flexible data structure, and an intuitive user interface. A wide variety of easily generated charts make performance comparisons fast an easy. The inconsistency of metrics reported by each company, however, made interpretation difficult, since the companies are often reporting different substances, with different definitions and different system boundaries. This underscores the importance of comparability, and transparency with regard to boundaries, in terms of both what’s reported and how it’s reported. With that caveat, here’s some of what we found.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG)

Some companies (Deutsch Telecom, Sony, tied for #45) show steady improvement in this core sustainability indicator, others show little change (British Telecom, #4, Ricoh), and others are inconsistent (Philips, #39).

We find that indicators are more informative when also viewed in relation to other relevant factors — for example by normalizing the indicator to a traditional measure of business activity or value (e.g., sales, profit, production, material throughput, etc.) If we add context by comparing GHG with Sales, the quality of reporting does not point to better performance, lower ranked reporters Sony and Philips seem to be doing exceedingly well, while some leading reporters, like BT, are now at the bottom of the pack. On the other hand, the two companies reviewed in this sector that didn’t make the top 50, IBM and Ricoh, appear to rank near the bottom of the pack on this measure, while HP (#10) also does very well. Reporting quality may be an indicator of how well sustainability issues are managed, but other factors are clearly involved.

Comparability is especially elusive with regard to GHG reporting, however. Some companies report on several types of GHGs, while some just track CO2. Low performers might simply be accounting for more of their operations more inclusively, and collecting better data; high performers might have outsourced more of their manufacturing — a growing trend with technology companies — and are not reporting impacts that have now been offloaded onto their suppliers. The graphs alone don’t tell the story. Meanwhile, as comparability and boundary standards evolve through the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and other frameworks, reporters should clearly specify the boundaries and assumptions underlying their analyses, so their readers have a better chance at meaningful comparisons; and readers should read and interpret carefully.

Sony, for example, is the only company in the group that reported GHG emissions in a life cycle framework, disclosing that the bulk of their reported GHG emissions — more than 97% — came from the use of their products in the world, not from their own operations. The GHG impact of their contract manufacturers is not reported, so the “life cycle” framework is not complete. But even so, this argues for a strong focus on product efficiency — a goal declared, but not reported on, by HP; Sony has been far more successful, so far, in reducing GHG from operation of their facilities than from operation of their product “fleet”.

Non-Product

Sony was also the only company in the group to report on product yield — the percentage of material throughput that’s turned into product. This Product to Non-Product Ratio — which Sony reports as exceeding 85%, and improving — is so valuable for focusing management attention on the sustainability value proposition that we’ve built it into Business Metabolics as our Throughput Pie™. (It’s disabled in the Global Reporters demo, since Sony was the only company whose data supported the calculation. But we hope to see more companies providing this data in the future — and currently find it more prevalent in Japanese companies’ reports.)

Water

The data show modest reductions in total water use at most of the companies we examined, with substantial reductions at Philips and BT, substantial increases at Matsushita (#34), and a modest increase at HP (once again raising the question of possible shifting boundaries).

As one might expect, the “value to resource” ratio for the telecomm companies (BT, Deutsch Telecom) is better than for the manufacturing-focused technology companies. The exception is HP — which has largely outsourced its manufacturing. Ricoh, Sony and Philips sit in the middle of the pack, with Matsushita and IBM distinctly trailing. Once again, these differences may reflect reporting boundaries, outsourcing (HP), more manufacturing intensive operations (IBM, Matsushita), or true performance differences.

NonHazardous Waste

High ranked BT and lower ranked Deutsche Telecom sit in the middle of the pack for NonHazardous Waste, between larger (but rapidly declining) generators Philips and HP, and smaller generators Matsushita, Sony, IBM and Ricoh. All eight companies improve over time on this metric; Sony and Matushita leadership may be expected due to greater acceptance of incineration in Japan. Note again that IBM and Ricoh, the smallest generators, got relatively low reporting grades, with neither in the Top 50.

But while one would expect the telecomm companies to be more productive than the manufacturers — measured as Sales/NonHazardous Waste — top ranked BT lags well behind lower ranked Deutsche Telecom. Among the manufacturers, lower ranked Sony & Matsushita come in well ahead of HP — which along with Sony shows the most dramatic improvement trend — and the others.

Conclusions

What have we learned from this initial analysis?

• The best reporters are not necessarily the best performers, though — personal speculation here — they have inserted themselves into a process of transparency and self-reflection that could contribute to future performance improvement.
• Despite the good efforts of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), reporting is far from standardized, and lack of comparability across reported metrics (as well as the growing trend to outsourcing) makes meaningful comparisons challenging.
• Even so, side by side performance comparisons — whether between companies in an industry, or facilities within a company — can provide valuable perspective on what constitutes good performance, and raise the bar on what’s possible.

To fly through our analysis yourself, visit our interactive demo at http://www.businessmetabolics.com/GR. (Note: not all functionality is enabled in this demo. Only the Technology and Telecommunications sector are shown at this time.) To learn how Business Metabolics can help your organization reduce the costs and increase the business value of its CSR reporting, to arrange a complete personal demo with your team, or to request a custom analysis of your industry, contact us at demo at business metabolics dot com, or call Natural Logic at +1-510-849-5467.

Next month, I’ll report the results of our recent survey of CSR reporters, conducted in collaboration with greenbiz.com.

(Special thanks to Natural Logic’s David Jaber, who coordinated this analysis, and contributed to this issue of New Bottom Line.)

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Friday, April 30, 2004

“What gets measured, gets managed,” as the saying goes. That’s true of the sustainability journey too. The worldwide interest in sustainability has brought with it a growing and welcome interest in sustainability indicators — but what to measure is far from obvious, as the dizzying array of publications, conferences, reports, tools and systems will attest. How do you find the KEY performance indicators (KPIs) that provide critical leverage amidst the noise.

Some companies still give the subject short shrift. Several thousand companies produce corporate environmental reports (but all too often these are focused as stakeholder communication that miss their potential contribution as management tools). A few have invested substantial efforts in developing meaningful performance indicators, and supporting systems, that can help internal as well as external stakeholders track environmental performance.

The World Business Council on Sustainable Development, the Global Reporting Initiative, and others NGOs have tried to develop shared frameworks and common reporting approaches. But comprehensive frameworks run the risk of being overwhelming (an even more common problem with community sustainability indicators projects, which face a near infinite range of constituency concerns without the mind-focusing anchor of the profit principle).

Drawing from our years of intensive work on sustainability indicators — through analysis (EcoMetrics), workshops (EcoIndicators and The Measures That Matter), KPI software (Business Metabolics), and development of corporate environmental reports (see “Notes,” below), we find that three key indicators consistently rise to the top of the list: Return on Resources; Product to Non-Product ratio; and the carbon footprint. There’s a large universe of indicators possible, but these three — one simple, one sobering, one significant — provide critical leverage for driving behavior toward improved environmental and economic performance.

1. Return on resources (ROR) — the ratio of profit, revenue or intended result to energy, water, toxics or other critical resource inputs. This indicator directly links economic and environmental performance: How much money are we making (or how much product are we shipping) per unit of critical resources used, or unit of environmental burden generated?

Examples include profit per kilowatt-hour, revenue per ton of raw material, units of product per pound of hazardous “waste.” Which ratios should you choose? That will vary with your industry and company, and perhaps with your role in the company. Ideally, KPI users should be able to explore different ratio sets, to see which disclose meaningful patterns for their particular needs; they could even include return on “non-product” — such as profit per pound of solid “waste.” The test: does the ratio provide insight, and help drive better decisions that drive better performance?

(We favor putting the intended result in the numerator so that resulting ratio has the same “up is good” directionality of most financial indicators like revenue, profit, and market share, rather than the “down is good” vector of most environmental indicators.)

2. Product to Non-Product Ratio (P2NP). This ratio can be seen as a special case of ROR — the ratio of productive output to what Bruce Cranford of US DOE labeled “non-product output” (NPO) — all the stuff that companies produce but don’t sell, and ship out instead to smokestacks and sewer lines and “waste” dumps.

Comparing the proportion of output identified as “product” (or “intended result”) vs “non-product” (or “unintended result”) is most usefully conveyed as the ratio of product to total output (P / (P+NPO)). The result is always sobering, and often staggering. The ratio for the US economy as a whole is 6% product, 94% ‘non-product’ according to Robert U. Ayres, National Academy of Engineering.

The ratio varies by industry and by company, of course, but it my experience is always far worse than companies estimate. And confronting the stark reality of this ratio is one of the most powerful change drivers I’ve seen, since it becomes obvious to environmental managers and financial managers alike that producing NPO makes no business sense at all. (In fact, we’ve seen this single metric convince companies to adopt “zero waste” policies.)

3. Carbon Footprint (CF): the GreenHouse Gasses (GHG) — commonly expressed in CO2 equivalents — generated from a company’s activities. This measure ties to global warming impacts and Kyoto Treaty targets, and has tradable economic value; more importantly, it will drive deep process and strategy innovation that can have significant impact on profit and future market share.

It’s easiest to determine this from your company’s direct activities (eg, plant, equipment, fleet), and that’s a good place to start, since the data is readily at hand. Indirect GHG impacts (e.g. upstream suppliers, products in use in the world, disposal/recycling), however, may have a significantly larger footprint — an order of magnitude larger, in some companies we’ve studied; understanding this has been a powerful driver of Design for Environment (DFE) product efficiency improvements in companies as varied as Hewlett Packard and Electrolux.

There’s a difference, of course, between eco-efficiency indicators and sustainability indicators. ROR and P2NP are more of the former; CF begins to touch the latter. I’ll have more to say about sustainability indicators (and the Ecological Footprint) in a future column.

But I’ll close with a hint: My first choice for a “leading” sustainability indicator (the analog to the leading economic indicators that “change before the economy has changed”) would be Carbon Productivity (CP) — the ratio of your intended results to tons of CO2 equivalents generated.

For more information:
Analysis (http://www.natlogic.com/resources/publications/index.html)
The Measures That Matter™ workshops and advisory services (http://www.natlogic.com/offerings/metrics&performance/index.html)
Business Metabolics™ KPI software (http://www.natlogic.com/offerings/metrics&performance/metabolics.html)
Corporate environmental reporting (http://www.natlogic.com/offerings/metrics&performance/csr.html)

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December 1, 1997

The final runup to the Kyoto conference on global climate change seems burdened with familiar positional warfare that seems inevitably inadequate to the unpleasant challenge of facing the facts. (See NBL 5.15, Weather or not: Risk and the physics of climate change)

The folks who do “ecological footprint analysis” estimate that we would need the area and resources of three planets like this one to sustain earth’s current standards of living…this at a time when only 20% of the world’s population “consumes” some 80% of the world’s resources. You don’t have to be very good at math to understand the challenge of a billion people moving into the ranks of the global middle class during the next century or sooner. It’s not a question of whether people should live better lives; they should, and hopefully they will. It’s a question of how we sustain rising standards of living without hauling half a dozen planets in tow behind us for spare parts.

The irony is that there are still powerful forces whose thinking is locked away in decades old misconceptions masquerading as “facts.” Case in point: Canada’s Imperial Oil <http://www.esso.ca/mainindex.html>; recently issued a special supplement to employees titled “Climate Change” (October 1997), “devoted to helping employees and annuitants understand the climate-change debate [associated with the Kyoto conference] and the recommendations Imperial is making to Canada’s policymakers.” In it Don Smith, Imperial’s director of environment and safety, insists that the need for economic growth cannot be decoupled from an increase of energy consumption. He calls it a “virtually unbreakable link,” and concludes that “limiting carbon emissions in the next decade inevitably means slowing economic growth.”

Each point of view has its validity of course, seen from its own experience and self-interest. Those whose wealth derives from fossil fuel tend, with a few notable exceptions, to oppose any attenuation of its central role in the global economy. Advanced economies look with concern at the rapidly growing energy appetite and corresponding carbon exhaust of the emerging economies–projected to exceed OECD carbon output by mid-century–and expect those emerging economies to shoulder their share of international restraint. Developing countries want to see the lion’s share of restraint come from the advanced economies, who both generate the lion’s share of greenhouse gases and in any case have benefited most from decades of unrestrained combustion of fossil fuels.

My attention turns though (no surprise to regular readers of NBL) to the innovators who are more interested in innovation than accounting, in leadership than compromise. Case in point: Factor Four: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use by Ernst von Weizacker (of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy <http://www.wupperinst.org/WI/homee/> and Amory B Lovins and L Hunter Lovins (of the Rocky Mountain Institute <http://www.rmi.org> .

“The purpose of this book is practical change,” the authors note, and go on to chronicle 50 examples of quadrupling resource productivity — 20 each for energy and material productivity, and 10 for transportation productivity. This is not a pie-in-the-sky futurist report. Most of the examples noted — energy efficient homes, office buildings, kitchen appliances, lighting, farming systems, and motors — exist today as widely available, off-the-shelf, competitively priced technologies. Others are well-reasoned technical arguments of possibility, poised for implementation. A few years ago, for example, Lovins’ “hypercar” concept was just a well reasoned design exercise; this year Toyota is first on the market with a hybrid powered vehicle, with other manufacturers in the pipeline behind them.

Yet the Factor Four metaphor, as outlandish as it may seem to some, has been surpassed. A “Factor Ten Club” of business executives and scientists (mostly in Europe) is researching and promoting 90% reductions in resource use. What’s reasonable then? Simply this: whatever you can manage to accomplish and profitably implement.

True, the pressure for change is eased by low apparent energy prices in North America and some developing countries. (I say “apparent” because the price at the pump doesn’t reflect real costs of either military protection of resource supply lines or social subsidy of health and environmental costs.) In addition, many companies still dismiss energy and resource costs as a relatively insignificant factor of production. But other firms recognize that realizable reductions in energy expenditures and other environmental costs can yield noticeable (and largely risk-free) improvements to the bottom line.

The point of all this is that there is a logic looming here, understood by a small but growing number of business executives but perhaps still relatively few policymakers: it makes no business sense to spend money on resources that are not absolutely necessary to produce the desired results. Companies — and nations — that are smart enough to consistently generate more value from less stuff will gain a financial and competitive advantage over those stuck in the philosophical comfort of allegedly “unbreakable links” that ignore the laws of physics.

# # # NOTE: You can now order Factor Four online — along with other interesting books on business and environment — directly from the Natural Logic/Amazon.com Bookstore.

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November 17, 1997

I think often lately of what I’ve come to call “the secrets hiding in plain sight,” the answers to challenges of both business and personal life that seem so hard to see because they are so obvious, so familiar. Central among them: that industrial society can learn invaluable lessons from the 3.8 billion year experience of living systems in evolving complex, efficient, resilient and adaptive systems. Why should industry re-invent the wheel, I wonder, when the R&D has already been done?

So imagine my delight to come across Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (William Morrow and Company, NY), a new book by science writer Janine M. Benyus, echoing this theme, and others I explored in a column eighteen months ago (NBL 5.04, Ecomimesis: Copying ecosystems for fun and profit .

Biomimicry explores the quietly gathering trend toward what Benyus calls “doing it nature’s way,” — using nature as model, or inspiration, for design to solve human problems; as measure of what works, what’s appropriate, and what lasts; and as mentor, focusing us on what we can learn from nature, rather than extract from it. Biomimicry, Benyus suggests, “has the potential to change the way we grow food, make materials, harness energy, heal ourselves, store information and conduct business.”

There is of course a long lineage of literature groping to link human endeavor with its biological underpinnings. Gerardin’s Bionics and other books tended to focus on specific material engineering analogs. Dresser’s Landscape for Humans and McHarg’s Design with Nature looked at patterns of human settlement. The hundred year legacy of organic agriculture — from Howard’s An Agricultural Testament to Jackson’s Altars of Unhewn Stone — probably came closest to explicitly bio- or eco-mimicry. Rothschild’s Bionomics sought economic principles in the ordered chaos of ecosystem, while Holmberg’s and Robert’s Natural Step went so far as to look at the physics that underlies the chemistry that underlies the biology that of course underlies the ecology that underlies the human economy.)

Benyus attempts to bring coherence to these threads, finds that “…we can begin to divine a canon of nature’s laws,” and echoes the design principles that have been identified by Tibbs, McDonough, this author and others…. “Nature runs on sunlight. Nature uses only the energy it needs. Nature fits form to function. Nature recycles everything. Nature rewards cooperation. Nature banks on diversity. Nature demands local expertise. Nature curbs excess from within. Nature taps the power of limits.”

The exciting thing about Biomimicry is that it is chock full of practitioners, not mere theorists — people putting these ideas into practice in a broad range of fields. The examples Benyus draws on are diverse and fascinating:

“How Will We Feed Ourselves?” ranges from the Land Institute’s perennial prairie-grass polycultures to Masanobu Fukuoka’s “do nothing” farming in Japan, from New Alchemy Institute aquaculture to Australian Permaculture; these and other food producing strategies characterized by their biomimetic design and local adaptability, offering low input, high output, stable systems.

“How Will We Harness Energy?” probes the “solar alchemy” and molecular design of learning to “gather energy like a leaf,” and explores surprisingly diverse efforts to develop technical systems that match — or exceed — the elegance and efficiency of photosynthesis.

“How Will Me Make Things?” explores the material science guiding development of alloys, ceramics, plastics and other “high-tech organics” that follow nature’s “tricks of the trade” when it comes to manufacturing materials: “Life-friendly manufacturing processes; Ordered hierarchy of structures; Self-assembly; and Templating of crystals with proteins.”

“How Will We Heal Ourselves?” considers not only the race for “rainforest cancer cures” between biodiversity mapping and biodiversity decline, but also explores how “animal pharmacists” may guide humans in “smart eating” and “biorational drug discovery.”

“How Will We Store What We Learn?” explores the neurochemistry of mind; the prospect of computers that evolve at their own, um, hand; and molecular computation that uses DNA’s nucleotide alphabet in place of semiconductor information storage.

“How Will We Conduct Business?” (the chapter with content probably most familiar to regular readers of NBL) explores the challenges, principles and emerging practice of industrial ecology, in industries as diverse as consumer goods, automobiles and finance, among others.

And in “Where Will We Go From Here?” Benyus quietly muses on what she has seen, and offers “four steps to a biomimetic future.”

Each chapter tells a facet of the tale with style and clarity. An accomplished author, with five other biology related titles under her belt, Benyus’s technical savvy, writing skill and fascination with the subject show through–since, in contrast to most business and environment books, this one reads like Story. Which I maintain is far and away the most powerful human technology…one which is perhaps not “biomimicked”…but then honeybees danced long before our bards began to sing.

# # # NOTE: You can now order Biomimicry online — along with other interesting books on business and environment — directly from the Natural Logic/Amazon.com Bookstore.

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January 15, 1996

This week, we continue our periodic listing of valuable “business and environment” sites on the WorldWide Web. This can only be a snapshot of a rapidly evolving information resource, out of date as soon as it hits print. But it should help to get you pointed in some useful directions.

Last time, we suggested Web sites addressing Sustainable Development, ISO 14000, Design for Environment, Clean Technologies and Manufacturing, Pollution Prevention, Waste Minimization and Recycling. This time we survey Energy, Data Resources, and Life Cycle Assessment.

The wealth of energy related sites on the Web probably has to start with the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Network (EREN) (http://www.eere.energy.gov) with a wide range of energy information resources, with endless links to other sites offering technical assistance, product information, ideas, research, and searchable data bases. Check out DOE’s Office of Industrial Technology (http://www.eren.doe.gov/ee/industrial/anl/oit_top.html), the database of thousands of Industrial Productivity and Energy Assessment audits maintained by Rutgers University (http://128.6.70.23/), and the National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL) (http://www.nrel.gov). Of course don’t forget the main DOE page (http://apollo.osti.gov/home.html).

Mentioned last time, but worth noting again is Solstice: Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology (http://solstice.crest.org). Other energy related sites of interest include the California Energy Commission (http://www.energy.ca.gov/energy/html/directory.html) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) (http://www.epri.com:80/).

Energy and Environmental related data resources include the Center for Economic Studies (CES): Energy and Environmental Issues (http://www.census.gov/ces/prog2.html), which provides research papers on energy and environmental problems, using unique merged plant and firm level data sets from the Census Bureau, and the Energy Information Administration (EIA) (http://www.eia.doe.gov/) which presents energy data, analysis and forcasting, including manufacturing, residential transportation, commercial buildings, alternative fuels and residential energy consumption surveys; manufacturing related data can also be found at the Manufacturing Energy Consumption Survey (MECS) (http://www.eren.doe.gov/ee/industrial/anl/#MECS1). A massive and more general data resource can be found at STAT-USA (http://www.stat-usa.gov/) which includes the National Trade Data Bank, the National Economic, Social, and Environmental Data Bank, the Economic Bulletin Board Lite Edition, the Global Business Procurement Opportunities, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

For more broadly focused environmental technology sites, check the Environmental Technology Gateway (http://iridium.nttc.edu/environmental.html), Australia’s National Environment Industries Database (http://www.erin.gov.au/net/neid.html), MIT’s Technology, Business and Environment (http://web.mit.edu/org/c/ctpid/www/tbe/tbe/index.html), and the White House Technology for Sustainable Future (TSF) Initiative (http://iridium.nttc.edu/env_tsf.html).

Life Cycle Assessment is the focus of a growing number of sites, including the Centre for Technology and Social Development at the University of Toronto (http://www.io.org/~lca/), the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology which reviews CLA software, and provides a building materials containing and other tools (http://www.cfd.rmit.edu.au/Research/LCA.html) and the Canadian Government’s Eco-cycle Program (http://www.doe.ca/prod/ecocycle/eecocycl.html).

Last but not least, we’ve just come across a site humbly named “Best Environmental Directories” at http://www.ulb.ac.be/ceese/cds.html (put up by the Belgian Federal Office for Scientific, Technical and Cultural Affairs) that may actually deserve its name!

Some logistical reminders: Be sure to enter the URL (Universal Resource Locator) exactly as presented here; spelling and punctuation count, and some Web servers are case sensitive, so don’t capitalize or decapitalize letters and expect the same result. (Note: while sentences may end with periods, URLs do not.) Web “browsers” don’t all handle formating the same way, so be prepared for some visual inconsistency if you’re not using Netscape, by far the most common browser and design standard. Finally, remember that the Web is a rapidly evolving resource; check favorite sites, directories and search engines often.

Watch for additional URL recommendations in coming weeks. Meantime, surf’s up.

Read more…

January 2, 1996

The media have hailed it as the Year of the Internet. In fact it’s the first of many, since the globally accessible resources of the net promise to change the way business is done.

Within the much publicized explosion of the Internet’s WorldWide Web (WWW, or Web) has been a quiet, steadily growing gold mine of environmental management resources. No article on the Web, least of all a brief newspaper column, can do it all justice, of course. But with that caveat, here is a small sampling of Web sites that we have found particularly valuable.

A few logistical details: Be sure to enter the URL (Universal Resource Locator) exactly as presented here; spelling and punctuation count, and some Web servers are case sensitive, so don’t capitalize or decapitalize letters and expect the same result. (Note: while sentences may end with periods, URLs do not.) Web “browsers” don’t all handle formating the same way, so be prepared for some visual inconsistency if you’re not using Netscape, by far the most common browser and design standard. Finally, remember that the Web is a rapidly evolving resource; check favorite sites, directories and search engines often.

Sustainable Development is a vast overarching topic. Three very different views are presented at Solstice (http://solstice.crest.org), where the Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology (CREST) maintains one of the most thorough, and useful, sites on energy technology and policy; IISDnet (http://iisd1.iisd.ca/) where the International Institute for Sustainable Development offers resources on sustainable development, including sourcebook on strategies; Chattanooga Tennessee’s “Sustainable Development Progress” (http://www.chattanooga.net/SUSTAIN/index.html); and the UN Environment Program (UNEP) site (http://www.unep.ch/), which also offers pointers to the vast universe of United Nations Web sites.

ISO 14000 is also covered by a growing number of sites. ISO Online (http://www.iso.ch/) provided by the ISO Central Secretariat, presents information on ISO structure, technical committees, meeting calendars, catalogue, but little substance on the ISO 14000 standards. Better information on ISO 14000 drafts, developments, strategies is found at Stoller’s ISO 14000 Information site, (http://www.stoller.com/iso.htm); also, check out the ISO14000 Discussion Group (http://www.quality.org/qc/lists/iso14000.faq).

Design for Environment is well represented by the Consortium on Green Design and Manufacturing (CGDM), an industry/government/university partnership to develop linkages between manufacturing and design and their environmental effects and to integrate engineering information, management practices and government policy-making. Check out UC Berkeley entry point (http://www.me.berkeley.edu/green/cgdm.html). Other academic Green Design sites include Carnegie-Mellon Engineering’s Green Initiative (http://www.gsia.cmu.edu/research/green.html) and University of Windsor’s Environmentally Conscious Design and Manufacturing Infobase, (http://ie.uwindsor.ca/ecdm_info.html).

Related “Clean Technologies/Clean Manufacturing” sites include UCLA’s Center for Clean Technology (http://cct.seas.ucla.edu/cct.2info.html) and the National Center for Clean Industrial and Treatment Technologies (http://www.civil.mtu.edu/organizations/cencitt/index.html) which includes demo Clean Process Advisory Software for delivering information on clean technologies and pollution prevention methodologies to product designers.

Pollution Prevention, waste minimization and recycling sites include

Battelle’s excellent directory (http://www.seattle.battelle.org/services/e&;s/moresite.htm), the Automotive Parts and Accessories Association site (http://www.apaa.org/pollut.html), which offers a report on pollution prevention initiatives by auto companies, and a well-focused directory of other P2 web sites, and Rutgers University College of Engineering (http://128.6.70.23), with a downloadable database of thousands of industrial energy and pollution prevention audits conducted by Energy Analysis and Diagnostic Centers around the US.

Also check out EnviroSense, EPA’s pollution prevention server, (http://wastenot.inel.gov:80/envirosense/) and the Solvent Alternatives Guide (SAGE) (http://clean.rti.org/) an expert system designed to provide general information on solvent and process alternatives for parts cleaning and degreasing.

Recycling Materials Exchanges provide a potentially powerful resource for matching recyclable “waste” products with those who can use them. Three services we’ve located include: http://grn.com/grn/ora.html (Global Recycling Network), http://www.earthcycle.com/g/p/earthcycle (National Materials Exchange Network)

and http://granite.sentex.net:80/recycle/ (Recycler’s World).

We’ll offer additional URL recommendations in coming weeks. Meanwhile, you can find a few of the many WWW Environmental Directories at http://www.gwu.edu/~greenu/
(National Environmental Information Resources Center), http://www.rain.org/~eis/
(Environmental Organization Directory), and http://www.lib.kth.se/enviro/envsite.htm

(Environmental Sites on the Internet).

Happy surfing!

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