Month: August 2014

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GreenBlue

Earth Overshoot Day 2014 – We did it!

Once again, we have proved to ourselves that we can always do it bigger, faster, and better. This week, we continue our 40+ year streak of exceeding our annual biocapacity – our ability to supply the resources we are consuming and process the waste we’ve generated – with August 19 marking this year’s Earth Overshoot Day. If we can think about earth resources in terms of annual budgets, we are over budget for about the 45th consecutive year, and the next four months are on credit…
See what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_aguo7V0Q4
We did this. We have failed miserably. The only way forward is to be accountable and recognize the incredible pressure we are putting on our surroundings. We continue to make decisions based on unbalanced equations. We have a perceived understanding of the value of material outputs and services, while the value of the inputs are disconnected and not completely understood. Without a deeper comprehension of this relationship, we can never hope to stay within budget.
And to some extent, we’ve told ourselves this is ok – we’ve been overshooting for longer than I’ve been alive. Which leads me to ask if the problem is being over budget, or if our budgets are limited by our material and service preferences and the traditional inputs necessary to provide them? Can we grow and strengthen our earth resource budget or at the very least, the reserves? What does the budget look like when all energy inputs are renewable?
Can humans rethink the global material economy to include the costs associated with consumption that are externalized, those burdens passed on to nature and society to balance the economic equations? We will explore aspects of sustainable materials management in the coming blog articles in an attempt to elaborate on the missing pieces of the sustainability equations.

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Uncategorized

Advancing the Conversation on Forest Certification

Members across the forest products supply chain met in Charlotte, NC on June 12 for GreenBlue’s first-ever Forest Certification Innovation Summit. The workshop brought together representatives from across the forest products industry including forest owners, loggers, paper manufacturers, printers, brokers, retailers, publishers, professors and more to discuss the value of forest certification and strategies to help drive this value.
Having members from across the entire supply chain in one room provided a unique opportunity to hear diverse perspectives and ideas as participants discussed the challenges of growing forest certification. For example: recognizing the need to better understand value drivers for small landowners in the United States; understanding which customers in the value chain are best positioned to drive adoption; and how to leverage constructive dialogue across the supply chain to grow forest certification.
A day of lively discussion produced interesting takeaways. One of the most valuable takeaways came from small landowners who expressed the need to include or reinforce value drivers outside of those typically associated with forest certification. For example, innovative ways to demonstrate and verify responsible forest management that are more aligned with how their land is being managed, as well as mitigating sourcing risk and concerns about illegal sourcing. At the other end of the supply chain, brand owners communicated the value of forest certification in helping to establish trust with consumers. In this regard, there could be strategies for brands to help make the connection between forest certification and consumer values. By introducing strategies that better align with the most important drivers of forest certification for each link in the value chain, we can begin to achieve the shared goal of responsible forest management.
Since the summit, staff and committee members have been working to utilize the day’s output  to develop strategies to deliver the value that supply chain members have indicated would best drive growth. GreenBlue will publish these results and ongoing efforts in an online resource outlining the project process and results up to this point, as well as the strategies to develop and deliver better value moving forward.
We will also continue to conduct outreach with stakeholders across the forest certification supply chain including a workshop at SPC Advance, Thursday, September 11. SPC Advance will give us our first opportunity to share the Summit results with a larger audience, and will help identify participants for the next step in the process – engaging the most important customers. If you are interested in learning more, please reach out to me via email at tom.pollock@greenblue.org.

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GreenBlue

Top Five Fun Facts: August – Use Wisely Edition

The next three issues of Fun Facts will focus on GreenBlue’s mission alignment to Sustainable Materials Management, a robust lifecycle framework with three main focuses: 1) Use Wisely looks at material sourcing; 2) Eliminate Toxicity from products and packaging, and 3) and Recover More value from the waste stream.
Eric DesRoberts continues his series of facts and tidbits he’s uncovered during his research to better understand materials used in products and packaging. You can check out his past Fun Facts here.

Use Wisely: Material sourcing and using less material inputs.
Use Wisely is shorthand to explain that at each step of the production life cycle, we must seek to conserve material resources and to keep the embedded energy investment in circulation. The concept of dematerialization means combining various conservation strategies such as reducing the amount of materials needed to provide the function required, extending the service life of products, and eliminating the concept of waste by ensuring that there are robust markets to reutilize post-industrial and post-consumer materials.
 

    1. Material input can be defined as the total quantity of material “stuff” moved from nature to create a product or service. Many common materials in today’s society have incredible amounts of inputs from nature, not to mention energy, water, fuel and other demands. Here is how much raw stuff it takes to make these common materials:
      MATERIAL kg of stuff / kg of material
      Virgin Aluminum 85
      Recycled Aluminum 3.5
      Copper Virgin 500
      Copper recycled 10
      Cotton 22
      Glass 2
      Gold 540,000
      Plywood 2
      Diamonds 5,300,000
      EPS-foam 11
      Polyethylene 5.4
      Paper 15

      Table source:

    2. Research found an average of 17,000 bits of tiny plastic particles per square kilometer in Lake Michigan. One of the primary sources is believed to be microbeads used in personal care items such as exfoliants. It’s been shown that fish mistake the microbeads for food, demonstrating that these microbeads are polluting the water ecosystem and disrupting the food chain.microbeads
    3. Of the 751 million acres of forestland in the US, 56% is privately owned. Nearly ⅔ of this land is owned by families and individuals. When considering fiber sourcing or land development, the family forest owners are key players in forest sustainability.
    4. In 2012, there were roughly 6.3 billion mobile phones in use worldwide. For every 41,600 phones recycled, 1 kg of gold is obtained and kept out of landfill. In the US, only 11-14% of all e-waste is recycled, which if applied to the global setting would mean that 5.4 billion phones are not being recycled, and roughly 131,374 kg of gold ($5.3 billion assuming $1,263 per ounce) is not being collected.
      pile-of-cellphones
    5. Magnets are the single largest application of rare earths, taking up 21% of the total rare earth production by volume and generating 37% of the total value of the rare earth market. Rare earth metals are used in electronics making e-waste recycling an imperative.