By NIGEL KENDALL
Making business green was once seen as a burden. It was what company's that wished to be seen as ethical did. It cost money and stood in the way of increasing a firm's margins. Today, the situation could not be more different. Rich Green, Nokia's chief technology officer, puts it in simple terms. "Green is neither a threat, nor an opportunity. It is an obligation."
Case Study: Sony Ericsson's Green Heart
In a business environment of shrinking margins and spiralling material and energy costs, it is perhaps unexpected that one of the world's leading mobile phone manufacturers should petition the European Parliament to ban the use of hazardous substances in consumer electronics.
Yet this is precisely what Sony Ericsson has done. "We believe the electronics industry has a responsibility to move proactively to find substitutes to replace brominated flame retardants and PVC and are therefore calling on EU legislators to show leadership on this issue by voting to tighten the RoHS directive," says company spokeswoman Holly Rossetti.
The Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment Regulations 2008 (known as RoHS) lay down strict limits for manufacturers on the use of hazardous materials such as lead, PVC, mercury and cadmium.
Over the past 10 years, Sony Ericsson has championed what it calls a "full lifecycle approach", measuring the environmental impact of the phone from conception through to production and retirement. Although all Sony Ericsson phones exceed current European criteria, the company has also developed a range of phones called GreenHeart, which acts as a showcase for innovations that are now starting to filter through to the wider product range, including some of the Xperia Android phones.
GreenHeart phones feature waterborne paint, recycled plastic and optimized packaging. Instruction booklets are included on the phone as a digital file, rather than as printed paper, and the smaller boxes that result not only save on packaging but on transportation costs, since more of them can fit into a shipping container.
The company estimates that by replacing the standard manual in one million phones, it has saved 350 tonnes of paper, the equivalent of 13,000 trees and 75,000 cubic meters of water. Ultimately, says the company, the aim is "not about making one standard phone green. It is about making green phones standard."
It acknowledges, however, that in a market where rapid turnover is the norm, consumer awareness of green issues still lags behind the technology.
However, if it is an obligation, then, says Tim Watkins, vice president of Huawei Western Europe, the growing need for energy-efficient products is a real opportunity to innovate while helping client companies save on operating costs.
"Many mobile operators around the world are now having to reassess their 20-year-old infrastructure and plan for the future," he says. "Modern technology is a lot less power-hungry than it was. The green agenda is making us more competitive and giving the customers we sell to a real benefit, because they have a green agenda they can talk about."
Dirk van den Berg, president of Delft University of Technology, points to the fact that emerging markets are seizing the opportunities that green pressures provide. "The emerging markets, China in particular, will take a lead role. The twelfth five-year plan puts a lot of emphasis on green technologies. In the case of China regulatory provisions combined with massive investment in green technologies will certainly produce a boost in these sectors. China is already the third biggest wind turbine manufacturer in the world and also the solar energy sector is quite substantial," he says. "In Europe the picture is mixed. The European climate change system is driving a new technological market for smart, clean energy in the EU. However, a regulations induced backlash can be feared in the nuclear area as a response to the recent events in Japan." Cisco used the changing regulatory environment to create new opportunities. "We created what we call the Network Building Mediator, which allows companies to understand every energy device that takes energy off the grid in their location," says Chris Dedicoat, president of European markets at Cisco. "Leading companies like Shell are now implementing this across their business." In that inelegant phrase, the company also eats its own dogfood. Thanks to the system, Mr. Dedicoat says: "I now know exactly what electricity is being used. I can monitor it, then we can look at options. You cannot put a figure on savings until you have the information. That old adage, 'If you can't measure, you can't manage.' There's a lot of truth in that. The other aspect is to get the mindset across the company. We reduced air travel by 45%. Huge savings. Then, we decided to provide carbon reports to individual departments in the same way that you provide financial reports. That way, you start to establish a mindset and mindshare across the company. It's through those things that you achieve change, not from having one tree-hugger in a department."
One of the main problems facing companies in the information and communication technology sector is the lack of clear guidelines and transparency in environmental claims. Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, acknowledges the problem. "A main priority for 'green' ICT is to ensure transparency concerning such figures," she says. "Specifically, in our Digital Agenda for Europe we have asked the ICT sector to develop a common measurement methodology for its greenhouse gas emissions and its energy consumption. Our approach to cutting carbon emissions while maintaining growth is to improve energy efficiency. ICT has the potential to play a central and critical role in helping us improve energy efficiency and thus reduce emissions across the economy. But as a first step to achieving this, we need transparency to understand what works efficiently today, what does not and where ICT can help. Otherwise we risk making the wrong investments."
All very well, says Mr Dedicoat, but "from an economic perspective, Europe has to stop talking about how good it is about supplying green energy in the future and asking practically what it's going to do today. The European Commission should look at sustainability when buying for itself. In Europe or any European country, procurement by the government is a key component of any industry".
"Rather than spending months in internal meetings, all they should do is come up with simplistic approaches that could be gleaned from the work of the MacArthur Foundation and lead by example," Mr. Dedicoat says. "In this, Europe has a chance to lead the world in understanding the whole product lifecycle, and to make money by exporting the expertise to the rest of the world. It's not about making more windmills than anyone else. It's about showing the world that we can make truly sustainable goods. I think government has got to make people understand that the age when we would bury things at taxpayers' expense has got to come to an end. I think people don't really understand that there's more gold in a tonne of IT scrap than in a tonne of ore. All precious metals, among other materials, should be recycled or recyclable."
Wednesday, 4 May 2011
'The recession is a big challenge to electric cars' - film-maker Chris Paine
Mother Jones: Chris Paine, director of Who Killed the Electric Car?, on the electric vehicle comeback, greenwash and China
Kiera Butler for Mother Jones guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 3 May 2011 12.24 BST
Back in 2006, the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? revealed how various industry players—including petroleum companies and car manufacturers themselves—conspired to sabotage the launch of the first electric vehicles. But shortly after the film was released, its director, Chris Paine, began to hear rumblings of an electric car comeback. "I started an email correspondence with GM," recalls Paine. "I said, 'we thought you had a great car and we were upset that you killed it. But if you're going to do it right, I'm going to tell the story, since it's not often that companies change their minds on big decisions like that.'" Sure enough, a few years later the next wave of electric cars have hit the market—and Paine's sequel, Revenge of the Electric Car, tells the story of what happened. I spoke to Paine shortly after his film's Earth Day premiere.
Mother Jones: What's changed since Who Killed the Electric Car?
Chris Paine: There was a lot of blowback after the first programs were killed. Consumers were saying, 'If we have to have cars, why are only bad cars available? Why do we have to rely on the Middle East?' So the right and the left came around—afor security reasons and environmental reasons—and then the car industry itself, which realized no one was buying cars when gas hit $4 a gallon in 2008. And here we are in 2011, with gas prices going nowhere but up, and there is a serious international consensus that you have to have higher miles-per-gallon cars.
MJ: Are oil companies still trying to interfere with electric cars?
CP: I'm sure the gasoline companies would still love to keep their 100 percent monopoly on transportation fuel. But what's changed since then is the fact that almost all the refineries in the US are at 100 percent production right now. They can't even keep up with demands for gasoline. So the last thing they want is to be caught driving up prices while at the same time they are publicly coming down, like they did last time on electric cars. So I think they're staying out of the way this time. I don't know what's happening behind the scenes, but they're not running ads against electric cars or claiming they're unsafe like they did last time.
MJ: Can electric cars save Detroit?
CP: I think electric cars can help save Detroit. They reflect good decision-making, and there has been bad decision making in the auto industry for so long, in my view. In the course of filming Revenge of the Electric Car I became a little more sympathetic to the car industry in terms the way it impacts the global economy. Not just in Detroit in the obvious ways, but the workers in this industry all around the world. Also, lots of things that progressives like, like the show The West Wing, were largely supported by car advertising. This stuff went away when Detroit started to go under.
MJ: But what about batteries? Aren't people still nervous that electric cars can't go far enough?
CP: I like to take folks back to the turn of the century when people said 'gas cars can never replace horses because you can feed horses at your house, you get along with them, they're nice.' Well the same thing is true today. Obviously the horse can still do things that the gas car can never do, and the gas car will always be able to do things the electric car can't do. But they have really different uses and advantages.
MJ: Sure electric cars are greener than gas cars in states that use lots of renewable energy. But what about in coal states?
CP: There are studies that show that EVs still result in overall savings on energy and emissions, even in coal states. Plus, what oil companies don't want you to know is that refineries use a huge amount of electricity in refining gasoline. And that's usually not even figured into reports about gas cars' overall energy use.
MJ: How much of the electric cars push is just car companies greenwashing?
CP: In the case of all the carmakers, there's a certain amount of greenwash. Take Toyota: They were pushing the Prius while they were meanwhile marketing the hell out of the Sequoia and other models with terrible gas mileage. And they were using the Prius to trade off on their emissions standards. All these guys use the environmental car to greenwash the rest of the label. But the reality is that this is actually where we should be going. And if these cars gain traction, they'll start making money on them. And instead of making their margins on the SUVs, they'll start making those margins on electric cars, and that will become their bread and butter.
MJ: Do you think China will beat the US in the race to develop the best electric car technology?
CP: I think China is set up to surpass the US on the even more critical industry of green power. Thomas Friedman says it's not red China anymore, it's green China. And not because they care about the environment necessarily, but because they want to dominate this industry where they see everything going to once they hit peak oil. They hope we waste a lot of time arguing about whether global warming is man-made or not, because every day we waste time they get another day ahead with windmills and solar panels and electric cars and charging infrastructure. Our electric cars are still better. They're much better than China's BYD. I think the US has an arguable advantage right now in this area and I hope we can keep it.
MJ: Of the electric cars currently on the market, which do you think is the best?
CP: Really they're all for different purposes. I bought one of each of these cars at full market price. My girlfriend primarily drives the Leaf. It's a high-riding car—makes you feel like you're almost in a mini SUV. It's much roomier than I expected. I traded my Prius in to get a Volt. I was most skeptical of the Volt, and I've probably also been the most impressed by it. When the doors shut you feel like you're in a submarine. It's very well insulated.
MJ: What are the biggest challenges for electric cars?
CP: We're still in the midst of a recession. There are not a ton of people buying cars—cars are expensive. So people usually go for the cheapest car they can get. And if the price of gasoline falls again, it makes the savings that you get with an electric car harder to realize. Low gas prices could really delay this. The other thing that could delay it is people not wanting to take a chance on changing what they think of as a car. Resistance to change is always the biggest obstacle.
MJ: What's your next project?
CP: We just launched it—it's called CounterSpill. We're taking on the biggest non-renewable energy disasters in the world and keeping them on the front page rather than buried in the news cycle or the corporate spin cycle. Oil companies earned a permanent enemy in me when they messed with the electric car the first time around, and I think they continue to do a disservice in making it seem like fossil fuels are cheaper than they really are in terms of total cost. We want to point out that solar, for example—which has typically been thought of as so expensive—is cheap when compared with, for example, the cost of cleaning up the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Gulf.
Kiera Butler for Mother Jones guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 3 May 2011 12.24 BST
Back in 2006, the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? revealed how various industry players—including petroleum companies and car manufacturers themselves—conspired to sabotage the launch of the first electric vehicles. But shortly after the film was released, its director, Chris Paine, began to hear rumblings of an electric car comeback. "I started an email correspondence with GM," recalls Paine. "I said, 'we thought you had a great car and we were upset that you killed it. But if you're going to do it right, I'm going to tell the story, since it's not often that companies change their minds on big decisions like that.'" Sure enough, a few years later the next wave of electric cars have hit the market—and Paine's sequel, Revenge of the Electric Car, tells the story of what happened. I spoke to Paine shortly after his film's Earth Day premiere.
Mother Jones: What's changed since Who Killed the Electric Car?
Chris Paine: There was a lot of blowback after the first programs were killed. Consumers were saying, 'If we have to have cars, why are only bad cars available? Why do we have to rely on the Middle East?' So the right and the left came around—afor security reasons and environmental reasons—and then the car industry itself, which realized no one was buying cars when gas hit $4 a gallon in 2008. And here we are in 2011, with gas prices going nowhere but up, and there is a serious international consensus that you have to have higher miles-per-gallon cars.
MJ: Are oil companies still trying to interfere with electric cars?
CP: I'm sure the gasoline companies would still love to keep their 100 percent monopoly on transportation fuel. But what's changed since then is the fact that almost all the refineries in the US are at 100 percent production right now. They can't even keep up with demands for gasoline. So the last thing they want is to be caught driving up prices while at the same time they are publicly coming down, like they did last time on electric cars. So I think they're staying out of the way this time. I don't know what's happening behind the scenes, but they're not running ads against electric cars or claiming they're unsafe like they did last time.
MJ: Can electric cars save Detroit?
CP: I think electric cars can help save Detroit. They reflect good decision-making, and there has been bad decision making in the auto industry for so long, in my view. In the course of filming Revenge of the Electric Car I became a little more sympathetic to the car industry in terms the way it impacts the global economy. Not just in Detroit in the obvious ways, but the workers in this industry all around the world. Also, lots of things that progressives like, like the show The West Wing, were largely supported by car advertising. This stuff went away when Detroit started to go under.
MJ: But what about batteries? Aren't people still nervous that electric cars can't go far enough?
CP: I like to take folks back to the turn of the century when people said 'gas cars can never replace horses because you can feed horses at your house, you get along with them, they're nice.' Well the same thing is true today. Obviously the horse can still do things that the gas car can never do, and the gas car will always be able to do things the electric car can't do. But they have really different uses and advantages.
MJ: Sure electric cars are greener than gas cars in states that use lots of renewable energy. But what about in coal states?
CP: There are studies that show that EVs still result in overall savings on energy and emissions, even in coal states. Plus, what oil companies don't want you to know is that refineries use a huge amount of electricity in refining gasoline. And that's usually not even figured into reports about gas cars' overall energy use.
MJ: How much of the electric cars push is just car companies greenwashing?
CP: In the case of all the carmakers, there's a certain amount of greenwash. Take Toyota: They were pushing the Prius while they were meanwhile marketing the hell out of the Sequoia and other models with terrible gas mileage. And they were using the Prius to trade off on their emissions standards. All these guys use the environmental car to greenwash the rest of the label. But the reality is that this is actually where we should be going. And if these cars gain traction, they'll start making money on them. And instead of making their margins on the SUVs, they'll start making those margins on electric cars, and that will become their bread and butter.
MJ: Do you think China will beat the US in the race to develop the best electric car technology?
CP: I think China is set up to surpass the US on the even more critical industry of green power. Thomas Friedman says it's not red China anymore, it's green China. And not because they care about the environment necessarily, but because they want to dominate this industry where they see everything going to once they hit peak oil. They hope we waste a lot of time arguing about whether global warming is man-made or not, because every day we waste time they get another day ahead with windmills and solar panels and electric cars and charging infrastructure. Our electric cars are still better. They're much better than China's BYD. I think the US has an arguable advantage right now in this area and I hope we can keep it.
MJ: Of the electric cars currently on the market, which do you think is the best?
CP: Really they're all for different purposes. I bought one of each of these cars at full market price. My girlfriend primarily drives the Leaf. It's a high-riding car—makes you feel like you're almost in a mini SUV. It's much roomier than I expected. I traded my Prius in to get a Volt. I was most skeptical of the Volt, and I've probably also been the most impressed by it. When the doors shut you feel like you're in a submarine. It's very well insulated.
MJ: What are the biggest challenges for electric cars?
CP: We're still in the midst of a recession. There are not a ton of people buying cars—cars are expensive. So people usually go for the cheapest car they can get. And if the price of gasoline falls again, it makes the savings that you get with an electric car harder to realize. Low gas prices could really delay this. The other thing that could delay it is people not wanting to take a chance on changing what they think of as a car. Resistance to change is always the biggest obstacle.
MJ: What's your next project?
CP: We just launched it—it's called CounterSpill. We're taking on the biggest non-renewable energy disasters in the world and keeping them on the front page rather than buried in the news cycle or the corporate spin cycle. Oil companies earned a permanent enemy in me when they messed with the electric car the first time around, and I think they continue to do a disservice in making it seem like fossil fuels are cheaper than they really are in terms of total cost. We want to point out that solar, for example—which has typically been thought of as so expensive—is cheap when compared with, for example, the cost of cleaning up the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Gulf.