Environmental Leader

Kumar Venkat is president and chief technologist at CleanMetrics Corp., a provider of analytical solutions for the sustainable economy.

Getting a Handle on Geographic Emissions

With the recent addition of the scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions accounting standard, there is at least a broad understanding of how corporate emissions should be quantified and what the benefits would be – even if only a small number of companies have adopted it so far. On the other hand, emissions associated with geographic regions not ...

When Emissions Are Outsourced

At first glance, CO2 emissions growth from fossil fuels and industrial processes looks fairly benign for developed countries. Compared to a 1990 baseline, emissions peaked in 2007 at just 0.4 percent above the baseline and then dropped for the next two years (based on UNFCCC data). By 2009, emissions for developed countries were 8.7 percent below the ...

Six Lesser-Known Climate Facts

Climate change seems to have taken a back seat lately both in policy debates and business strategies. But this is generally not the case in the research community, where rigorous analyses of climate change mitigation proposals are being published regularly. Herewith are six lesser-known recent findings that help separate the promise from the hype. --About 18% of global warming is ...

Resource Efficiency vs. Carbon Reduction

The dramatic improvements in efficient lighting technologies over the past three centuries have left the energy intensity of lighting unchanged. The higher energy efficiencies have all been used up by ever-expanding lighting applications. And the share of global GDP spent on lighting has remained constant during this period. This is just one example of the rebound effect, ...

Closing the Materials Loop

While shopping for copy paper recently, I noticed that recycled multipurpose paper is often priced 50 percent higher than comparable virgin paper. A pack of mechanical pencils made with recycled plastic costs significantly more than the same brand made with virgin plastic. We have heard a lot over the years about the benefits of closing the materials loop. ...

Scope 3: Pivoting to Material Efficiency

The upcoming release of the scope 3 emissions reporting standard from the GHG Protocol is significant for two reasons. One is the more obvious reason: The larger part of emissions resulting from a company’s operation usually belongs in scope 3, so this is an essential component of a complete corporate GHG inventory. But many companies across the ...

Is Sustainability All about the Supply Chain?

A manufacturer of home decorative items engaged my company sometime ago to conduct a scope 1 and scope 2 GHG emissions inventory, mainly to meet the requirements of a retailer’s sustainability scorecard. The manufacturer was eager to take this a step further and engage 20 of their key suppliers and put together a scope 3 emissions inventory based ...

Framing the Food Sustainability Challenge

Here is a mind-boggling estimate from Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund: We will need to produce 2.5 times as much food in the next 90 years as we have in all of the last 8,000 years combined. Or, more than a factor of three increase in annual production in this century alone. This is a ...