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greenfutures No.83 January 2012

Fair play?

What are the odds on sustainable gambling?

Meet Paul Polman, the man who wants to reinvent consumption It’s 2032: print some energy and drink the sea Jeremy Rifkin: imagine the internet, only for energy

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“Hope and optimism – in spite of present difficulties.”

This old African saying, made famous by Namibian artist John Muafangejo, seems pretty apt just now. Even those of us who resolutely see the glass as half full only have to glance at the news to wonder if, after all, we’re pretty much down to the dregs.

Economies in atrophy… a damp squib at Durban… not to mention the wilful abdication of anything approaching scientific literacy by swathes of the mainstream media. You’d be forgiven for imagining there’s some perverse law of journalism in operation: one which dictates that informed coverage of climate change shrinks in inverse proportion to mounting evidence that, yes: it’s here, it’s happening, and it’s our fault.

(Incidentally, if you’re looking for a quick and dirty response to your friendly neighbourhood climate sceptic, try this: “Every single one of the world’s major national scientific academies continues to endorse the consensus on anthropogenic climate change. So if you don’t agree with them, is it because you know something they don’t?

Or you think they’re all conspirators in some collective climategate scam? Because it has to be one or the other. Or both.”)

But, as usual, I digress. Faced with all these gloomy symptoms, you might imagine that any serious business will have shoved sustainability firmly onto the back burner. If so, this issue should be something of an antidote.

Take our interview with Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever [p20], where he explains just why he’s committed the company to green goals that put most governments to shame with their scale and ambition. (And, yes, I know Pot Noodle is rarely seen as an icon of sustainability, but he manages to come up with an answer to that, too.) The contrast between his rock solid commitment on the one hand, and the wavering signals sent out by the British Government on the other, couldn’t be more striking.

Or take gambling: hardly a green standard bearer for sustainability, you’d have thought. But as Anna Simpson discovers [p16], this least likely of industries is starting to take its responsibilities more seriously – and not just by putting solar on the casino roofs, although that’s happening too.

Or take Majora Carter [p30]: a black woman hailing from the South Bronx – hardly the natural habitat of granola-munching greenies – who has built a powerful personal brand on the back of sustainability.

And if this isn’t enough, you might take heart from the gloriously unbounded optimism of veteran economist Jeremy Rifkin [p26] – credited, among other things, with persuading Chancellor Merkel to set her face against nuclear power. He’s supremely confident that we’re on the threshold of a third industrial revolution, based on an ‘energy internet’, which is poised to make fossil fuels as redundant as a fax machine.

I’m writing this in London on the darkest afternoon of the year – literally and, it feels, metaphorically, too. But the forecast for tomorrow is sunshine, and by the time you read this, (assuming you’re north of the equator) the days are getting longer. We may not be awash right now with reasons to be cheerful, but there’s plenty for scope for hope and optimism – in spite of present difficulties.

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Green Futures January 2012

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Contents 16

Number 83, January 2012

8 00

32

00 21 20 T he Green Futures Interview Martin Wright meets Paul Polman, CEO, Unilever.

26 T he future is lateral Jeremy Rifkin tells Martin Wright why we’re on the cusp of a third industrial revolution, where an ‘energy internet’ will make fossil fuels redundant.

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Green Futures January 2012

26 30

24

Features 16 F air play?

Is there such a thing as a sustainable flutter? Or is gambling by definition a disastrous bet? Anna Simpson weighs up the odds.

44

41

Briefings

Regulars

Partner viewpoints

30 Rocket from the Bronx Carl Frankel meets Majora Carter, America’s environmental justice campaigner-turned-entrepreneur.

The latest in green innovation, including:

4 The future in context Peter Madden

41 Nature nurture Why business loves butterflies The Food and Drink Federation

44 C leansing agents Clothes that clean the air we breathe Ecover

32 It’s 2032: print some energy and drink the sea Twenty years ago, few foresaw the transformative power of the internet and mobile phones. So what similarly massive surprises lie just around the corner? We poll the future gazers.

6 Next generation DIY 3D printers for the home

42 The heart of banking Why the world needs finance on a human scale Triodos Bank

45 O f mud and maps Business and the Environment Awards profiled Pureprint Group

5 A glutton for oil Simple sponge soaks up pollution

8 Space part exchange Harvesting scrap from satellites 10 Groundscraper Deep ambitions for sustainable living 13 E nzyme electrics Biological fuel cells come closer

24 A thousand words The perils and potential of a networked world 35 Forum update Jeremy Darroch learns from future leaders; a new league of ethical agents; and Sally Uren: can luxury be sustainable?

43 Nudging for values Turning consumer preferences into purchases Marine Stewardship Council

46 Feedback Readers respond online and in print

14 U K “could be 60% renewable” Ambitious energy targets “are feasible”

48 Jonathon Porritt Abnormal times need abnormal people…

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Green Futures January 2012

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Peter Madden

Briefings

The future in context

Wireless motoring pads closer World’s first large-scale wireless charging trial to start in London

Reinventing four wheels

If you think it’s strange to plug your car into the mains overnight, then how about this for something even weirder: a recharge that’s completely wireless. Just park over a special pad, and your electric car’s batteries start to charge.

The technology has been developing rapidly in the last few years [see ‘Surface charge’, GF79, p15]. Now it’s being piloted in London, with 50 ‘wireless-enabled’ electric vehicles (EVs) let loose on the city’s streets.

The Wireless Electric Vehicle Charging (WEVC) trial will test technology made by Qualcomm that exploits a phenomenon

Cars are finally taking a new direction

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Green Futures January 2012

i series) but some – like Renault and BMW – are even beginning to experiment with mobility services, too.

So, what are the sustainability impacts of rethinking the car? Clearly, the best outcomes of all for the environment would be reducing the need to travel, or promoting zero-carbon modes of transport, such as walking and cycling.

But there are certainly enormous sustainability gains to be had from lower-emission cars, more passengers per vehicle, and a new economics of car ownership and use.

Questions, of course, remain. Will we move to these green alternatives quickly enough?

And will the fast-growing populations of the developing world, who still aspire to conventional models of car ownership, have to go through the same phases as we did before they fall out of love with the automobile?

Peter Madden is Chief Executive, Forum for the Future.

– Damon Hill, Formula One World Champion

A glutton for oil Meet the nemesis of water pollutants

Photos: iStockphoto / thinkstock

Who needs a chauffeur?

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The trial is backed by the Government, the Mayor of London and the capital’s transport authority, Transport for London, all of whom hope that wireless charging could increase the popularity of EVs. “It’s attractive for public charging points because it saves space and minimises visual impact”, commented Ed Metcalfe, Institute for Sustainability.

Overcoming public suspicion of the novelty of EVs will be crucial to their success.

A technology which does away with the need for charging posts and trailing wires could play a part in that. – Hywel Curtis

“I’ve driven electric cars and they’re fantastic – the silence is really enjoyable, it’s like cycling, you can hear everything else going on, it’s a totally different experience.”

Photos: Brand X Pictures / thinkstock

In the not-too-distant future, we’ll sit back and relax as our cars drive themselves, automatically selecting the quickest route to avoid congestion and cut pollution.

Not that these cars will – strictly speaking – be ours. Who would want the hassle and high-cost of ownership, when we can choose the style of vehicle we need for our particular journey (a singleperson micro-car for a meeting in town or a fourwheel drive for a trip to the countryside) and pick it up at a convenient spot with a wave of our smart phone? Drop them off, and their electric motors recharge automatically – and wirelessly – as they await their next commander...

That’s the vision. But why should we expect something that has hardly changed at all over the last 100 years – a four-wheeled metal box, with an internal combustion engine, which we use for multiple purposes – to undergo such a dramatic transformation over the next decade?

There are some powerful trends pushing such changes. Rising petrol prices are biting hard, while low-carbon policies are gaining teeth. Increased connectivity makes alternatives to traditional car ownership more attractive.

And more and more of us are living in cities, where space is at a premium, and where we are starting to see a layering of costs and obstacles to car use, driven by concerns about congestion and pollution.

However, the thing which will really accelerate change is that some in the auto industry are at last realising that the model of the past is doomed; that they must evolve or face extinction.

There are signals of change already out there. Surveys show that young people today aspire to own the latest smartphone more than a car. Schemes that allow access to car-mobility for short periods, such as Zipcar and Buzzcar, are mushrooming. And big manufacturers are not only launching ever greener vehicles (such as the Nissan Leaf and the forthcoming BMW

called inductive charging to ‘refill’ EVs without any electrical sockets.

It works like this. Current passing through a charging pad in the ground generates an electromagnetic field that induces a current in a receiving unit fitted to the base of the car and connected to the battery. Many electrical toothbrushes are charged in exactly the same way. The charge time is the same as for a standard charge point and is 97% efficient. Similar systems are also being developed by WiTricity in the US, although nothing on the scale of the WEVC trial has ever been attempted so far.

It’s often said that oil and water don’t mix – but all too often they do, like in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, a high-tech chemical sponge has been developed that soaks up oil and other pollutants, separating them from water.

Marketed by ABSMaterials as Osorb, this organically modified silica attracts small organic toxins into its matrix, swelling up to eight times its initial size – but repels water.

It can be cleaned for re-use up to 100 times, and generates no solid waste. Chemist Paul Edmiston, who created Osorb and founded ABS, has been known to prove its efficacy by spiking a glass of water with oil, adding Osorb, and then drinking the water.

The US Department of Energy carried out field tests and declared it highly effective, removing more than 99% of oil and grease

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from water and over 90% of poisonous volatile organic compounds.

ABSMaterials is on a fast track towards success. It was recently listed by Forbes as one of the most promising companies in the US, ranking 67/100. Investment has been raised to the tune of $15 million, and the product is already selling into the US, Canada, the EU, Korea and India.

Needless to say, challenges remain. The main ones, according to Taylor Lamborn, Head of Marketing at ABS, are getting the commercial price right and developing machinery compatible with a radical material. But the potential is massive. The most promising applications for Osorb are environmental remediation (following an oil spill, for instance), and cleaning up water

used in drilling and mining for oil and gas.

These are enormous global markets: an estimated $80 billion or more, according to ABS. Smaller-scale solutions include a soil blend that can capture and break down common pollutants in stormwater runoff, such as pesticides and harsh fertilisers.

– Carl Frankel

Green Futures January 2012

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PV power lifts airship hopes

Bag reinvented

Canadian company proposes hybrid dirigibles with solar electric motors

Compostable carrier goes to market

Slow path to the sun

New concepts keep coming out to boost faith in the future of airships. The latest sees Canadian company Solar Ship touting a proposed new range with electric motors, and a wing surface covered with solar photovoltaic arrays to charge their batteries.

It follows the US military’s investment in low-carbon fuel-efficient hybrids, designed to combine the advantages of airship buoyancy and conventional aircraft propulsion [see ‘Heirs to the air?’, GF81, p5]. The Solar Ships are, in a sense, hybrids as well. While they are helium-filled, they use an aerodynamic wing shape to provide more than half their lift. Solar Ship says there are big advantages in making them heavier rather than lighter than air.

They don’t have to be so bulky to fly, they won’t need mooring to stop them floating away while you are loading, and they’ll cope better with wind.

The company is proposing a range of three sizes. The little Caracal, intended for reconnaissance and getting into remote

places, should cope with a 750kg payload, land on a 50-100 metre airstrip, and cover 2,500km at up to 120kph. The Chui will be three times as big and go twice as far, while the Nanuq is intended as a large freight carrier that can shift 30 tonnes with an intercontinental range.

Solar Ship’s pitch is a powerful combination, offering transport without fossil fuels, roads or runways. So far, though, showing off the reality of solar flight is still the preserve of pioneer planes such as Solar Impulse [see ‘Sun plane conquers the night’, GF78, p10]. Solar Ship has built a working prototype of its revolutionary ‘dirigible blimp’ – but, for the moment, it needs an internal combustion engine to fly.

– Roger East

Plastic bags get such a bad rap that you begin to wonder if they’re just the sustainability scapegoat, or if they actually deserve it. But with between 500 billion and a trillion consumed worldwide every year (around 100 per person), it’s fair to say that they do. Local initiatives to ban them (from Modbury in Devon, to San Francisco) are all very well, but behaviour is a slowmoving bus…

So the commercial development of an affordable, compostable replacement is good news. Start-up Cyclewood Solutions has licensed a technology developed by the University of Minnesota for a bag made from lignin. This is one of the most abundant polymers on the planet, naturally occurring in wood and plant stems. Millions of tonnes

of it are discarded each year as a waste byproduct of the food and paper industries.

“By using a waste stream, we can offer retailers a product that is comparable in price to conventional plastic products”, says Nhiem Cao, President and CEO of Cyclewood. The Xylobag, he claims, biodegrades in 150 days, following exposure to bacteria or fungus. It costs $0.015/bag, only slightly more than the average cost to a retailer of a standard bag made from polyethylene ($0.012).

Ramani Narayan, professor in chemical engineering and materials science at Michigan State University, says Cyclewood will face competition from other biodegradable bags already on the market. But these competitors don’t

Steel gas takes to the sky

Will 3D printers see the end of consumerism?

Virgin converts steel mill emissions into ethanol for aviation fuel

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Green Futures January 2012

domestic gods are dipping towards affordability, with the Thing-o-Matic from US-based startup Makerbot on the market for $1,299. It’ll print anything from a chess set to a model Gothic cathedral, with all the detail of its intricate interior. The Thing-oMatic uses thin threads of plastic as its raw material, including polylactic acid: a compostable, corn-based polymer. The material is heated and then deposited in neat rows, according to instructions from a template on a USB cable or memory card.

Almost any product can now be scanned and transformed into a template using free opensource software from Meshlab.

The environmental implications are considerable. Today’s consumer economy is premised on mass remote manufacturing. In terms of energy and resource consumption, the efficiencies of scale rarely justify the waste it generates.

Then there’s the fuel required to ship the products across the world, and the packaging to make sure they arrive on the shelf in one piece, and the marketing to persuade the consumer that, yes, they really did need a fancy new cheese grater – or, even worse, a set of two…

According to CEO and co-founder Bre Pettis, Makerbot has a “profoundly subversise” mission: to democratise the manufacture of goods.

“It’s a radical notion that has at its heart a bracing vision of people as creators, not consumers. No more marching in lockstep to buy stuff at Wal-Mart!” Instead they’ll be asking, ‘Can I Makerbot it…?’

Next up? Researches are taking homeprinting to scale with building fabrication.

The California Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies hopes to 3D-print a custom-designed house, in no more than a day. – Carl Frankel

Photos: iStockphoto / thinkstock; Virgin Atlantic

There are disruptive technologies, and then there are insanely disruptive technologies.

Without much fanfare, one of the latter is coming down the road, and it could be as transformative as, oh, the personal computer.

The technology is 3D printing, which is exactly what it sounds like. Imagine your standard printer placing one layer of material on top of another, according to a strict template, leaving you with complete objects – mouse traps, shower curtains, whatever you were just about to add to that endless list…

It’s an idea that has sparked scientists’ imagination since 1986, when Charles Hull patented the first apparatus for ‘stereolithography’ (his name for it). Today, it’s almost a case of, ‘you name it: they’ve printed it’. MIT has designed a ready meal printer for waste-free gastronomy, giving you the perfect balance of taste, texture and aesthetics every time; the Forgacslab, University of Missouri, has printed human cells layer upon layer to give the first artificial vein [see ‘Body builder’, GF76, p7]; and German company EOS printed the body of a violin from an industrial polymer that looks (and, more crucially, sounds) like good old wood.

Now, 3D printing is set to take manufacturing out of the factory and into your living room. Price levels for these

Photos: Hemera / thinkstock; David Neff

Next generation DIY

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Within three years, Virgin Atlantic could be powering some of its aircraft with a new type of low-carbon biofuel derived from waste gases from steel mills.

The airline has announced a tie-up with the industrial bio-commodities technology provider LanzaTech to produce the new fuel in India, a country which is one of the world’s largest steel producers.

The new ethanol-based resource is claimed to have half the carbon footprint of traditional fossil fuel. A demonstration flight should take place within 18 months, with Virgin’s flights from Delhi and Shanghai to London Heathrow using the biofuel by 2014.

The LanzaTech process captures gases – specifically carbon monoxide (CO) – which would otherwise have been emitted directly into the atmosphere.

Then, it converts them into ethanol-based fuel. The CO is dispersed into liquid and consumed by microbes before being recovered from the fermentation broth.

Further technology developed by the Stockholm-based company Swedish Biofuels will then convert the ethanol into viable jet fuel.

Virgin Atlantic believes that the project will take it well beyond its pledge to reduce carbon dioxide per passenger kilometre by 30% by 2020. Virgin’s President, Richard Branson, explained: “This partnership is

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aimed at producing a next-generation, low-carbon aviation fuel which is a major step towards radically reducing our carbon footprint. We are excited about the savings that this technology could help us achieve.”

There are several attractive features for the airline. First, the price of the fuel will be similar to the kerosene currently used to power aircraft, making it a commercially

Time to bring it back to earth

do quite the same job: they may release carbon and methane as they decompose, and can’t be thrown onto the compost heap as a useful resource.

The new business was awarded a $10,000 prize in the Austin Technology Incubator regional Cleantech Open, which aims to recognise big business ideas that tackle “urgent energy, environmental and economic challenges”. – Nick Huber

viable proposition for the airline. Second, because it is made from an industrial waste stream, the new fuel has none of the land use concerns associated with biofuels derived from agricultural products. And finally, it is also hugely scalable, with the world’s steel mills capable of producing some 15 billion gallons a year – not much less than the total consumed by US airlines. – Andrew Collier Made of aluminium – flies on steel?

Green Futures January 2012

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The sun in a bottle

Green light

Better than trees?

Miracle water bottle brings light into the slums

Innovators aim for cost-effective removal of carbon emissions from air

‘Appropriate’ technologies such as the wind-up radio are all about clever devices that use less energy than their hi-tech equivalents, with the added benefits of being controlled by local people and easily replicable.

It’s incredibly rare to find examples of technologies that go further and negate the need for power altogether.

But in the slums of Manila a device called the ‘Liter of Light’ [sic] is doing just that.

The design – popularised by a YouTube video – is so brilliant in its simplicity it makes you gasp.

The Liter of Light uses discarded plastic drink bottles to bring light into dark slum homes, without the need for a single watt of electricity. The bottles are filled with water and a few spoonfuls of chlorine (to deter algae), and are cut into the corrugated iron roofs of

shacks, where slum dwellers live in near darkness. It’s a highly appropriate technology for a country like the Philippines, where electricity supply is in many areas either unavailable, unreliable or prohibitively expensive.

The bottle doesn’t only let light in, but refracts it; on a sunny day, it provides

Within six or seven years, could we be seeing ‘artificial trees’ in use to combat climate change directly, soaking up carbon dioxide from the ambient air? That’s the hope held out by Klaus Lackner, whose brainchild invention was the star of the recent Air Capture Week at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (ImechE) in London.

Lackner’s ‘trees’ are actually towers designed to hold out arrays of sorbent chemicals, which, he says, can capture a thousand times more CO2 than real trees of comparable size. And he refutes the recent calculation by the American Physical Society (APS) that the costs would be exorbitant.

Lackner, a Columbia University professor of geophysics who also heads the Lenfest Center for Renewable Technology, suggests that it could be brought as low as $30 per ton of CO2. That’s a mere fraction of the APS estimate of $430, and comparable with low-end estimates for carbon capture

as much light as a 50 watt bulb. At just £2, it takes an hour to install. The device was pioneered by the charity, MyShelter Foundation, which trains residents on how to make them, and the City of Manila government supported the scheme. The aim is to light up a million homes in the Philippines by 2012. – Charlotte Sankey

US plans to reuse old satellite equipment still in orbit

New ways to feed the 5,000

Recycling and re-use are novel notions for space programmes. Enough old junk has been left orbiting the Earth to create a real collision hazard for expensive new satellites, but the planned new Phoenix mission isn’t about cleaning up the skies by bringing it all back home – or minimising the threat of big lumps falling on us. Instead, it represents the realisation that geostationary orbit has become a kind of celestial breaker’s yard, a spoil tip

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Green Futures January 2012

in the sky that can be ‘mined’ for spares.

Why bother?

Because all those abandoned solar arrays, antennae and other comms equipment originally cost $300 billion or so, and a lot of it would still work. And putting new payloads into orbit costs around $20,000 per kilo. Reuse in situ could be a whole lot cheaper.

When? How? A first Phoenix mission is planned for 2015, demonstrating the concept of re-use in space by taking a satellite aperture off its defunct ‘host’ satellite while in orbit, using robotic grappling tools controlled from earth, and reconfiguring it to fly independently.

Thereafter, the plan is to develop new tiny ‘satlets’ to send up in a kind of pod as part of the payload of an ‘ordinary’ satellite launch. This would link up with an orbiting tender on the Phoenix ‘mother ship’,

equipped with the tools to strip antennae and other things off defunct satellites (with the owners’ permission) and couple them up with satlets to make new working systems.

Simple to describe, hard to do, robotically, in zero gravity, but that’s the basic idea.

Whose idea? It’s a US military initiative, but the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants “active participation from the international and nontraditional space communities involved in vital technical areas”. Sectors that stand to benefit include micro-electronics, robotics; imaging; connectivity; manufacturing; and memory and data storage.

The space junk industry is not (yet) fully focused on recycling. NASA has projects for zapping debris with earth-based lasers, or sending specialised solar-powered satellites on specific clean-up missions. There could be mileage, too, in a ‘simpler’ mobile repair station, just to get failing comms satellites back on the road. So Phoenix isn’t the only game in town – but it could be the most creative, and spur the development of the most technological solutions. Geoengineers, for certain, will be watching closely. – Roger East

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Photos: Institution of Mechanical Engineers ; Klaus Lackner 2009; iStockphoto / thinkstock

Fish scale

Photos: MyShelter Foundation; Paul Fleet / shutterstock; Simpa Networks

Space part exchange

At current rates, there won’t always be more fish in the sea: the UN estimates that we will need to farm almost half the fish we’ll want to eat in 2020. Aquaculture production is already higher than wild-caught fish, and growing. But the challenge is producing the greatest yield without damaging marine life. A wave of innovations could make it possible.

In the US, salmon reared on a new, more sustainable diet came on sale in September 2011. The trick is a yeast-based feed which is rich in fatty acids, and so reduces by 75% the quantities of feed made from wild-caught fish which are needed.

The new feed is packed with long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, a good substitute for fish oils. Normally, to produce 1kg of healthy farmed salmon, you would need to nourish them with 4kg of fish: with this diet, just one kilo is enough.

This technique, developed by commercial science company DuPont, has been implemented in AquaChile’s commercial farms in Patagonia, Chile.

The partnership came out of the Salmon Aquaculture Dialogue, part of a wider project

by WWF to seek out the leading innovations

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at source in power plants and industrial processes. If achievable, this would make air capture from so-called ‘distributed emissions’, including cars and planes, a plausible carbon control strategy. The cost of capture would also provide a rational ceiling price for the carbon emitted by such polluters in the first place.

Lackner points out that storage of the CO2 after capture need not be an additional cost, if it can be put to positive use in agriculture or other industrial processes. This kind of ‘closed-loop’ approach also typifies the work of two other Columbia professors, Graciela Chichilnisky and Peter Eisenberger, whose Global Thermostat start-up company is among those vying with Lackner for leadership in the air capture field.

Their process, using sieve-like structures and sorbent chemicals, is, however, designed for use alongside industrial processes where CO2 is emitted in greater concentration,

in sustainable aquaculture. AquaChile’s yeast-fed salmon are also reared in more spacious pens, to reduce the risk of disease and the need for antibiotics.

These developments come at a cost to the consumer, though: the fillets retail at $16.99/lb – around twice the standard price.

So who’s prepared to pay? WWF hopes that a new label will win consumer confidence, and persuade them to fork out. It is establishing the Aquaculture Stewardship Council to set and oversee standards for responsible seafood farming.

But the hunt for sustainable practice is a wide one. The Research Council of Norway first looked into the future of marine fishing in 2003. Now, a new programme aims to make Norway ‘the world’s leading aquaculture nation’. One focus of the research is keeping farmed fish healthy, developing medicines and vaccines to tackle the problem of sea lice, for instance.

This in turn improves the health of wild fish, as infestations of sea lice can easily spread from farms to open sea.

Another promising solution is ‘integrated multi-trophic aquaculture’, where complementary stocks are farmed in

Future forest?

such as power stations. It tackles the thorny problem of satisfying its own operational energy needs by utilising the low-grade heat which those industrial processes would otherwise just disperse though their cooling systems. And it looks to put the captured CO2 to good use, too.

One possible route is combining CO2 with hydrogen to make synthetic hydrocarbon fuels [see ‘Air supply’, GF76, p32]. Another, which Global Thermostat is exploring with a start-up called Algae Systems, is to feed it to the algae engaged in producing algal biofuels. – Roger East

close proximity. So, nutrients excreted by farmed fish are taken up by algae, which are then eaten by shellfish. The algae can be harvested for biofuels, diversifying income for the farmer. It’s just one benefit pointed out by Dr Piers Hart, Aquaculture Policy Officer at WWF. “Marine aquaculture gets around many environmental problems in the food system, such as conflicts over land use, chemical fertilisers and greenhouse gas emissions”, says Hart. “If we get it right from the outset, it offers a much more responsible way to feed ourselves.” – Charlotte Owen

Green Futures January 2012

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Ground scraper Deep ambition for sustainable living space

For many, skyscrapers are what make a city skyline. These impressive structures indicate wealth, power and the heights to which human command over technology and resources can reach. But what if this were inverted, with sustainability as a stimulus?

Designer Matthew Fromboluti has turned our conventional perception of the skyscraper on its head with his entry into the eVolo Skyscraper Competition. With ‘Above/Below’, Fromboluti proposes an ‘underground skyscraper’ to fill the 900foot deep, 300-acre wide crater, left by the Lavender Pit Mine in Arizona. The coneshaped inverted tower offers a space where humans can live, work and ‘grow their own’, at the core of a vast cavern with lakes and recreational space, sheltered from the sun by a green dome.

The concept building is designed to maintain a comfortable temperature, thanks to a series of passive systems suited to a

hot desert environment. A ‘solar chimney’ – with pipes jutting through the dome “like a gigantic metal cactus” – provides a natural ventilation system: the sun heats the air at surface-level, causing it to rise, drawing cooler air up through vents at the bottom. The current passes through wind turbines at the top of the chimney, generating electricity.

Sunlight streams through skylights in the dome to growing terraces spaciously stacked in the hollow surrounding the coneshaped ‘skyscraper’.

Green on top

Fromboluti describes it as “a patch that fixes the environment [and] conveniently makes a useful space for people underneath”. His aim is to make up for the former decimation of the landscape by finding new ways to harvest the energy that went into excavating the mine.

Though purely conceptual for the time being, Fromboluti’s vision suggests that construction no longer needs to be flashy, or even visible, to have an impact on our imagination and the way we live.

– Fiona Underhill

Architectural prizes and knowledge transfer initiatives can help bring ‘living roofs’ into mainstream use

A ‘living roof’ can make a vivid green statement. The 1,700 square metres of living, breathing greenery on two long sweeping slopes of roof are the crowning glory, for instance, of the ‘8 house’ in Copenhagen’s Oerestad district. This mixed-use development, combining offices and 540 dwellings, has just won the housing category in the 2011 World Architecture Festival Awards. It’s also been designated the ‘best green roof in Scandinavia’. This is high praise indeed, since Germany and Scandinavia pretty well lead the field in this fast-growing contribution to more sustainable cities.

New York’s equivalent, the Via Verde (Green Way) social housing project due to open in early 2012 (pictured above), offers another beacon for sustainable urban renewal, bringing rooftop gardens to the heart of the South Bronx.

The vertical forests of Milan Ambitious ‘green wall’ scheme for Italy’s industrial heartland

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Green Futures January 2012

• reducing noise pollution to the building • improving the microclimate • s aving energy by sheltering the building from solar radiation in summer • reducing rainwater run-off so curbing flooding.

And all this, claims Brogi, for a premium of just 5% on the cost of normal high rises.

On the surface, it is a simple idea – with growing populations requiring land use for lodgings, why not plant our greenery upwards, rather than outwards? It is certainly becoming increasingly popular,

with schemes in Chicago and Suwon, South Korea [see GF82, p11].

Alexander Felson, Director of the Urban Ecology and Design Laboratory at Yale University, agrees that “there will potentially be microclimate and air particulate removal benefits”, but warns that the “overall energy required to construct a building that would support both trees and the wet weight of soil” places some serious question marks over its overall sustainability. He favours a more modest approach focusing on green roofs [see ‘Green on top’, p11]. – Catherine de Lange

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Photo: Phipps / Rose / Dattner / Grimshaw

Viable green future – or unsustainable fantasy?

Photos: Matthew Fromboluti

In Milan, a forest will soon be planted in the sky. Building works for a pair of skyscrapers that will become home to the world’s first vertical forest is underway. The brainchild of architect Stefano Boeri, the €65 million ‘Bosco Verticale’ is already under construction.

When complete, the skyscrapers will contain luxury apartments, each one equipped with a copious balcony specially designed to hold around 900 small trees and other plants. If planted on the ground the total vegetation would cover an area of 10,000 square metres.

As well as providing green outdoors space for residents, and providing the city with some much needed green views, the project should have a range of other benefits, including: • filtering pollution • absorbing CO2 and dust particles

As these and other award-winning buildings boost their profile, green roofs are increasingly recognised as neither wacky nor whimsical. Their environmental, social and economic credentials are also alerting a wider audience that they can be a smart solution even for the most modest schemes. New build or retrofit, sheds, home extensions, houses, schools, and all kinds of public and commercial buildings are starting to show the benefits.

In Germany, the early establishment of a technical standard for green roofs emboldened the construction industry to roll them out with growing confidence; encouraged by planning policies, they now feature on one new building in ten.

The UK has been more cautious, feeling the lack of adequate evidence on costs, benefits and techniques, says Stuart Connop at the University of East London’s environmental research group. But he sees this slower start as an opportunity to do it better. To maximise the potential of green roofs, he says, we need to evaluate different designs and techniques whose suitability will vary with circumstances, rather than just applying one standard model in a ‘cookie cutter’ approach.

That’s why his university has partnered

with local authorities and businesses to transfer knowledge via the Green Roof Experimental Research Facility at Barking Riverside – an area of east London where redevelopment plans envisage green roofs on 40% of the buildings. Several London boroughs and other local authorities now officially back the use of green roofs, which are specifically encouraged by the 2008 London Plan.

UK-wide sharing of expertise in this area should get a fresh boost from the Green Infrastructure Partnership, launched in October 2011 under the new government white paper on the natural environment.

Green roofs are, of course, more expensive than the traditional tiled variety, and likely to remain so for a while yet. But there’s more at stake than natural amenity and biodiversity. Green roofs can be very energy efficient, keeping buildings cool in summer and warm in winter. They help combat urban heat island effects, absorb carbon dioxide and other pollutants, provide good sound insulation and enable the recycling of secondary waste as aggregate. They are even compatible with solar photovoltaic panels: by providing some shade and minor water runoff, the panels could, at least in theory, enhance biodiversity. And the vegetation could even help maximise panel efficiency by keeping them relatively cool – thanks to evapotranspiration – on hot days.

Even more striking are the benefits for water management, which a joint project between Thames Water and the Greater London Authority aims to quantify.

London’s need for a ‘super-sewer’ could be much reduced by integrating it with green infrastructure, says Connop. Built-in water storage capacity in green roofs takes pressure off both urban drains and reservoirs and aquifers, and their capacity to absorb rain ‘slows the flow’ greatly during sudden downpours, reducing the flooding associated with the spread of ‘hard catchment’ in urban areas.

– Roger East

2016 The date by which wind electricity will be fully competitive with natural gas, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance

“We believe that in the next three to five years you’ll be able to get power cheaper from the roof of your house than from the grid.”

– David Crane, CEO, NRG – one of America’s largest electricity utilities

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Green Futures January 2012

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Pay-as-you-go solar

Concentrating the Saharan sun

New business model for off-grid renewables could revolutionise India’s energy sector

Lenders back Moroccan solar, with wider regional aims in view

Morocco is pushing ahead with an ambitious drive to expand solar power.

Backed by international lenders to the tune of over $1.4 billion, work is about to start on a 160MW concentrated solar power (CSP) project at Ouarzazate in the Sahara.

Developments at this and four other major sites will be central to the country’s $9 billion plan to build 2GW of solar (CSP and photovoltaic) generating capacity by 2020 [see ‘The light at the end of the desert’, GF76, p26]. Solar and wind energy, both seen as crucial in a country with negligible oil and gas, would then account for some 40% of Morocco’s power production.

The Ouarzazate site alone is intended to contribute a quarter of the solar total, with a second CSP plant there, and extensive photovoltaics, adding to the 160MW parabolic trough project.

The funding for this first phase, announced in November 2011, involves seven international agencies including the World Bank and the Clean Technology Fund.

Morocco’s sally into the solar spotlight is not just for domestic consumption. The export potential of renewable energy is a further factor, potentially linking intensely sunny Saharan sources with European grids. So far, Morocco is the only North African country with an electric connection to Europe, in the form of two undersea cables that could soon need upgrading.

But further connections are in the pipeline. In 2010, a French-led consortium launched the Medgrid scheme, which plans to build five such interconnections with North Africa. Now, Medgrid has joined forces with the German-led Desertec Industrial Initiative [GF76, p26] to create a huge network of solar plants in

People with unreliable access to electricity at best, and none at worst, will soon be able to pay for off-grid solar energy ‘as they go’ – if trials of an innovative microcredit scheme in India meet with success. The ‘Progressive Purchase’ model enables customers to make a low-cost down payment for a solar photovoltaic system, which is then topped up in installments using a mobile phone and locally purchased scratchcards.

It works much like putting a coin in the meter – or its modern equivalent: top-up mobile phone tariffs. Users can determine each payment according to their means, and each goes towards the total purchase price of the solar home system, transforming energy expenditure into an asset purchase over time.

In many emerging markets, the poorest are spending up to 30% of their income on inefficient energy sources, particularly kerosene for lighting. Kerosene is not only expensive relative to standard on-grid

Just focus...

the Middle East and North Africa. The aim is to export enough electricity to Europe to meet 15% of the continent’s needs by 2050 – as well as supplying all the power for the (African) region itself.

EU energy commissioner Günther Öttinger hails the collaboration as giving “a truly European dimension” to the prospect of “solar and wind energy being produced for the joint benefit of European and North African and Middle Eastern citizens and markets”. – Roger East

Isle alone

Totally wired

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water, fuel and waste – enabling the community to take its destiny back into its own hands”.

The island currently draws 600GWh a year from the mainland, but Green believes it could be energy self-sufficient by 2020. A £25 million project to install photovoltaic panels on 3,500 social houses, and install over 500 air-source heat pumps, is already underway. Further plans include a waste-to-energy plant, and research into wind, tidal and geothermal has begun, with the ultimate goal of making the island a net energy exporter.

Green Futures January 2012

Eco Island CIC is planning to become a global centre for innovation in smart grid technology, working with IBM, Toshiba and others. Cable&Wireless Worldwide and Silver Spring Networks are working to link all domestic renewable installations, drawing on current communications infrastructure and wireless mesh networks.

Energy aside, Eco Island CIC plans to stimulate a green economy through a number of schemes. Islanders can already apply for the GreenBack discount card which will reward customers for buying from local, responsible businesses – with 65 to choose from so far. Research is also underway into low-carbon transport, including bikes, electric cars and hydrogen vans, and the CIC is working with Southern Water to improve water efficiency and supply. The list goes on.

Chris Huhne, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, has stated he is watching the project very closely to see what the Government can learn from the Isle of Wight. – Tom Forster

www.greenfutures.org.uk Wight cliffs, green island

Photos: Oxford Molecular Biophysics Laboratory / Science Photo Library

The Isle of Wight could become a net energy exporter, if the Eco Island project runs to plan.

Eco Island is an attempt, communityled and bolstered by business, to build a resilient green economy on the Isle of Wight, with energy security at its heart.

The driving force behind the project is David Green, founder and CEO of the Eco Island Community Interest Company, which has already secured £200 million of private funding. Green’s aim is to “use the island’s natural resources to make it self-sufficient in terms of energy, food,

Top up to turn it on

billion global opportunity for small-scale distributed energy solutions, with no clear market leader.”

The Indian Government has set a target for solar capacity of 20,000MW by 2020, but audit group KPMG believes that breakthrough technologies could help it to exceed this by more than three times, reaching 67,000MW by 2022. In a country with a huge electricity gap and continuing population growth, the demand for reliable, inexpensive energy has never been greater. – Tess Riley

Enzyme electrics Metabolism offers biological alternative to chemical fuel cells

Photos: David Nunuk / Science Photo Library; Jason Hawkes / Corbis

The Isle of Wight shoots for self-sufficiency

electricity but it’s a smoky health hazard with a disproportionately high environmental impact. Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) solar addresses both these concerns.

“It breaks down the barriers of asking very low-income communities to pay large upfront costs”, says Caroline Howe, who has worked extensively in India with UNICEF and the Climate Solutions Project.

Mobile phone money systems are becoming the payment method of choice in several emerging markets. Not only is PAYG a system many are already comfortable with, but it’s relatively cheap to implement, and mobile ownership is widespread. It is estimated that almost 500 million people have mobile phones, but no access to a grid.

The potential for PAYG to revolutionise the off-grid energy sector is clear. Simpa Networks, a venture-backed technology company based in Bangalore, is working to develop the incremental energy payment plan in low-income countries – and vying to lead the market: “There is likely a $100

Experiments with biological fuel cells are bringing researchers tantalisingly close to harnessing useful electrical energy inside the human body. Enzymes create chemical reactions that release energy, by bringing other organisms together. We know it as metabolism, and fuel cells that recreate it – using enzymes or bacteria – are a lively area of scientific research. Could future generations of heart pacemakers run indefinitely off such cells, exploiting the

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action of enzymes within the body to keep the current flowing without a battery?

It’s not a new idea. Back in 2007 Sony announced a ‘bio-battery’ prototype that could power small, portable speakers drawing on glucose from grape juice. Now, a team at the University of Grenoble led

by Serge Cosnier has made the possibility of medical applications more plausible by running a tiny biofuel cell for 40 days in a laboratory rat. Encouraged by this successful proof of concept, the team is scaling up to an implant in a cow, with enough wattage to transmit live information out. Ultimately, even power-hungry implants like artificial kidneys and other prosthetic units could become a practical proposition.

In this biological fuel cell, the anode is a specialised enzyme that can strip electrons from freely available glucose, and the cathode is another enzyme that combines those electrons with oxygen. It could all be made more efficient, researchers say, by finding a better performing enzyme for the cathode end of the process. And

future medical uses still depend on making enzymatic electrodes more stable, warns Bob Slade at the University of Surrey: there’s no point using them in complex operations when they break down in days or weeks.

Slade leads a consortium of researchers at eight UK universities, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council under the Supergen project. The consortium also works on the other main branch of biofuel cell research: harnessing microbes to drive the electron transfer process by their action on organic material (outside the body).

These microbial biofuel cells may also ultimately be developed successfully as an alternative to batteries, Slade explains, but they aren’t going to be a way of delivering power to the grid: the potential is more for self-powering low-energy devices. There are, for instance, attractive prospects for MFCs to drive environmental sensors and waste and water treatment processes, taking their energy from organic matter in the sewage itself. – Roger East

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In Scotland, they even distil the oil

From sump to pump?

Kenyan kick-start

Scottish company raises the bar on waste oil re-refining

World’s first cleantech business support centre to open in Nairobi

Strict control of waste incineration – that’s a good thing, right? And the recycling of old sump oil – that’s good too, isn’t it? But what if the one gets in the way of the other? You need a solution – which is where vacuum distillation comes in.

Scottish recyclers Northern Industrial Services (NIS) handle 80% of Scotland’s waste oil at its Coatbridge plant, and collects over 25,000 tonnes of used lubricant every year. De-watered and cleaned up, this used to be sold as recycled fuel oil (RFO).

The RFO market pretty much dried up, however, when its classification as a waste product was followed by tighter rules that banned power stations and others from burning it without special licence. Nobody

Britain “could get 60% of electricity from renewables by 2030”

in Scotland wants it any more. Now, the installation of a new vacuum distillation unit, a first for Scotland, enables NIS to re-refine waste lubricant into a processed fuel oil (PRO) instead. The process avoids the danger of pollutants escaping to the air. And it yields a cleaner product with a higher spec – meaning, crucially, that it’s no longer classed as waste, and there’s a much wider market for it.

Operating at lower temperatures than other treatments, vacuum distillation uses less energy and emits less carbon. It’s also cheap enough to be economically viable. All in all, it’s an eminently more sensible solution than exporting used sump oil from Scotland to England or Germany. – Roger East

The Kenyan capital is set to play host to the first of a global network of Climate Innovation Centres (CICs). These will provide targeted financing, as well as technical and marketing assistance, to help entrepreneurs scale up innovative cleantech solutions to meet local needs and create jobs.

The initiative springs from the World Bank’s InfoDev programme, and should eventually amount to a 30-strong network of CICs, mostly in developing countries at the frontline of climate change.

The Bank’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, Andrew Steer, said the centres would “harness the creative spark of entrepreneurs to transform climate

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Remanufacturing old floor tiles into new saves resources, carbon and money

One of Europe’s biggest carpet tile manufacturers has launched an ambitious recovery and recycling scheme as part of its plan to eliminate all negative impacts on the environment by 2020.

The scheme, known as ReEntry 2.0, is a project of InterfaceFLOR, a retailer of modular flooring, which has long had a commitment to recovering its own worn tiles. ReEntry 2.0 takes this much further. It takes back carpet tiles from any source at the end of their life, separates out the component parts

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Reinyarnation: nylon pellets

Photos: Martin Wright; InterfaceFLOR

onshore wind farm developments, and increases in the cost of offshore wind power due to currency fluctuations and rises in commodity prices.

The UK is unlikely to be a lead country in solar power because the technology is “relatively mature and has been deployed elsewhere”, said Jenny Banks, an energy and climate change policy officer at WWF, adding that wave and tidal are at relatively early stages of development, and are likely to be 10-15 years behind offshore wind in deployment. The two marine power sources have huge potential, however.

But the biggest obstacle facing renewable energy is political rather than technical, added Banks. Changes to subsidies – such as the Government’s roll-back of support for domestic solar installations – unsettle investors, who may take their money elsewhere. But if the money can be persuaded to stay, there is huge economic potential. The global renewable energy market is expected to be worth $331 billion by 2015, according to BCC Research. And in the UK, the Carbon Trust has estimated that the industry could create about 70,000 jobs by 2020. – Nick Huber

Photos: Comstock / thinkstock; iStockphoto / thinkstock

report estimates that an investment of over £130 billion will be required to install the 29GW outlined for 2030 in the Government’s Renewable Energy Roadmap. However, this does not take into account the potential benefits through new revenue streams and job growth, and – the report argues – it could be significantly reduced by cutting our demand for energy.

“It is time we faced up to the plethora of hidden and unsustainable social, environmental and economic costs of shale gas and nuclear which divert us from the long-term safe, secure and affordable energy provided by substantial renewables scale up”, says Dax Lovegrove, Head of Business at WWF-UK. “Not only that, but we should also recognise it is in the UK’s interests to position ourselves as exporters of clean technology and know-how ahead of the inevitable international clamour for such services. Greening can only be good for our economy.”

The bulk of renewable energy is set to come from wind. By 2020, this is expected to account for 69% of Britain’s renewable energy portfolio. But two things could slow its growth, says the report: resistance to

challenges into market opportunities”.

The Nairobi centre has a goal of creating 70 businesses and 4,600 jobs over the first five years of its operation.

Kenya already faces growing challenges of drought and energy scarcity, and these are expected to be exacerbated by global warming. Over 60% of the country’s electricity comes from hydro power, which has resulted in frequent shortages and blackouts when water levels are insufficient to drive the turbines.

But on the plus side, it is well placed to harvest both solar and wind energy, and small-scale biogas and biomass schemes are also playing a growing role in meeting rural people’s needs. – Gitonga Njeru

Carpet comeback

An ambitious horizon

New report sets out ‘viable’ goal for green power

It’s 2030, and the UK is a world leader in green energy, sourcing more than 60% of its electricity from renewables. Given that the 2010 figure was just 7%, this may seem an unlikely scenario. Not so, says WWF, in a new report. Positive Energy argues that it is within the technical potential of renewables to meet between 60 and 90% of the UK’s electricity demand by 2030 – if the Government takes the right action now.

So what action is that? First off, the report recommends that the Government should make ‘60% by 2030’ its new target, sending a strong signal to investors that renewables will remain a priority post-2020.

This needs to be backed by giving the Green Investment Bank power to borrow before 2015. Further recommendations include absolute targets for reducing electricity demand, complemented by efficiency incentives such as the Green Deal [see ‘Domestic goddess?’, GF81, p30]. The UK should also improve its connection with European grids, says the report, allowing it to export any surplus electricity and to import offshore wind, solar and geothermal sources generated elsewhere.

And what about the capital costs? The

Kenya’s Mount Meru: on the frontline of climate change

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(principally the yarn and the backing) and remanufactures them into new tiles.

The initiative should help to reduce the estimated 30 million square metres of tiles sent to landfill or incinerated as waste every year. To maximise its reach, InterfaceFLOR has signed a pan-European agreement with SITA, the waste management specialists.

In doing so, the company is not only securing a new stream of raw material – it’s also providing a cost-effective service.

“Everyone by law has to pay a price to get rid of old carpet”, says Ramon

Arratia, InterfaceFLOR’s Sustainability Director. “So we go to them and say: ‘this is a cost to you, and we’re offering to take it off your hands at the same price, and you’ll know that it is contributing to a solution, not going to waste’.”

Recycling has huge environmental benefits, he says, with emissions on production almost halved recently from 10kg of CO2 per square metre of tile to 5.7kg. “That’s a big deal,” he adds, “but we’re also looking at more radical options to cut emissions further.” These include using 100% recycled nylon [which can be from sources as unexpected as fishing nets], while cutting tile weight by half thanks to improved design. Together these would cut carbon emissions by a further 50%.

Meanwhile, “this (ReEntry 2.0) technology has the potential to solve the [waste] problem for the whole industry”, says Arratia, adding that InterfaceFLOR is now exploring the best business model for expanding it. The company opened a new plant in 2011, with the capacity to recycle up to 600,000 square metres of tiles per year, though this will increase in the future. It will roll out in the Netherlands before being expanded across Europe, the Middle East and Africa within 18 months.

– Andrew Collier and Martin Wright

Green Futures January 2012

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Fair play?

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Green Futures January 2012

the Australian Government, which faces one of the highest rates of problem gambling in the world: 10% among regular gamblers, compared to 0.5-2% in Europe – ascribed by many to the omnipresence of ‘pokies’ (slot machines) in pubs and clubs.

With so much at stake, is ‘sustainable gambling’ an oxymoron? It’s hardly an industry with social objectives at its heart, or even basic needs. Indeed, its very success rests on the fact that the house usually wins…

But, in recent years, some gambling companies have shown an increasing interest in sustainability. In 2005, Bwin, one of Europe’s largest online providers, entered into a research partnership with Harvard Medical School’s Division on Addiction, with the aim of developing a “gaming line-up that is as safe as it is entertaining…based on empirical evidence”.

Since 2009, Betfair – another large online gambling provider – has set up a Corporate Responsibility Committee, and won Carbon Trust Standard certification for its CO2 reduction plans.

Before we sweep these efforts aside (…green wash, clean wash, call it what you will…), it’s worth asking what ‘sustainability’ could mean for this

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Photo: Thinkstock

“To err is human. So is to gamble”, writes John Adams, Emeritus Professor at University College London, in his influential book, ‘Risk’. Very few of us like to lose, he argues, but many do like to gamble. We’ve all felt the thrill of different possible outcomes as the dice roll across the table, or the ball nears the goalposts. The more we care about the result, of course, the greater the thrill – and for some, putting money on it is a simple way to feel more involved in the game.

But at what cost? For those who casually pick up a lottery ticket or pop into the betting shop before ‘Match of the Day’, the answer is, relatively little.

They risk what they can afford to lose, and feel that the chance of winning is worth the hole that (more often than not) is left in their pocket.

All very well. But when someone develops a problem with gambling – spending much more than they can afford – they pay a high price. It can be the respect of a partner, the security of a job, the basic comfort of a bed at night. And the ripples spread to family, friends and colleagues, too. The actions of one problem gambler typically impact the lives of between five and ten others. That’s the estimate of

Photo: Kushch Dmitry / shutterstock

Gambling companies are aiming for responsible practice, but is there such a thing as a sustainable bet?

Anna Simpson weighs up the odds.

industry. Is it possible to gamble within our means – social, economic and environmental?

The idea of responsible gambling is growing up against the backdrop of widespread indignation against ‘casino bankers’. Public awareness of the risk embedded in our financial system has risen steeply in the last few years. We know that the bankers went too far, and we’d certainly like to see tighter regulation in the future. But we also know that taking a risk can leave us better off... Where’s that happy balance, we wonder?

Let’s take a closer look at the balance sheet.

We know we’re talking big money. According to data from H2 Gambling Capital, the gross revenue of the global gambling industry was over €260 billion in 2010, and this is expected to grow to €340 billion by 2015.

For national economies it’s a net gain, even factoring in the expense of lost work days and problem-related demands on health services.

Deloitte estimates the total contribution to the British economy from the betting industry at 0.5% GDP and 0.3% total employment, including a relatively high number of unskilled jobs. Providers are also obliged to make returns through levies: an estimated £1.5 billion a year is paid in gambling taxes in the UK – although many see this as a regressive tax, in which the poor punter pays much more, relative to their takings, than their wealthy counterpart.

Currently, betting shops account for over 50% of the UK market value, followed by casinos (14%).

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Then there are lotteries, which draw the most players but make up only 3% of the market. They bask in the high profile of the positive initiatives they fund, alongside the odd rags-to-riches tale.

Camelot’s National Lottery gives 28p in every pound to ‘good causes’ – with 50p going to the winners, 12p in tax, and the rest on sales commissions and overheads. But many critics would rather folk enticed by the feelgood factor simply popped their £1 directly in the donations box. A rival ‘health’ lottery set up by Richard Desmond of Express Newspapers, which will donate only 20p in every pound, has been rejected as “deeply unhelpful” by Stephen Bubb of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations.

This charitable veneer means little to any investment fund with an ethical tinge. They lock gambling firmly away in that pantheon of social evils, along with arms, alcohol and drugs. Even those that profit from it do so with a defiant shrug: take the Dallas-based Vice Fund, which invests in alcohol, tobacco, gaming and defence, and brands itself as ‘socially irresponsible’. (Incidentally, the Vice Fund does well enough, with returns a couple of points ahead of the S&P Index. But ethical funds, such as the top 100 in the Newsweek Green Rankings, do better still, outperforming the S&P by nearly 7% in 2010.)

It comes as no surprise that neither the Green Party nor Greenpeace is offering its support to Green Bet, an online bookmaker that channels all its

From Las Vegas, to your local arcade, to your laptop – gambling is a pervasive fact of 21st century life.

We’re talking big money.

Globally, this is a €260 billion industry

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www.greenfutures.org.uk

Photos: Hemera / thinkstock ; Ladbrooks

profits to environmental causes or renewable energy investments. But then, why shouldn’t the gambling industry align itself with the green agenda? Surely a little bet has a lower carbon footprint than, say, a shopping spree or a weekend break?

Well, yes and no. If you’re betting at the races, there’s a whole infrastructure to take into account: everything from maintaining the track, to food and travel for every man and his dog. And take Las Vegas. It’s the epitome of excess: gawdy neons and flashy fountains consuming vast amounts of energy and ravaging scarce water resources in the Mojave Desert. You won’t find natural light in those casinos, there’s no sun to tell the time by as the days and dollars slip away…

But its reputation may be set to change. In the last couple of years, casino company Caesars Entertainment Corporation has scooped up several

Photo: Hemera / thinkstock

What are the odds it lands on green?

environmental accolades for changes to its Las Vegas venues, with awards such as Green Apple, Golden Pinecone and Water Hero recognising progress on several fronts. These include watersaving solutions (from laundry to landscaping), low-energy lighting, extensive recycling and even a tree planted for every bill presented to diners at its restaurants.

I bet some greens were gritting their teeth as they cheered. ‘It’s still gambling, right? The economy and the environment may do ok, but it can’t be worth the social cost, can it…?’

So, down to the nitty gritty. What is it that distinguishes relatively benign gambling activities from those which ruin lives? And can anything be done to minimise the harm?

There’s a common assumption that some forms of gambling are more problematic than others: the slot machines more than the dogs, say, and the dogs more than the lottery. For Mark Griffiths, a chartered psychologist and Professor of Gambling Studies at Nottingham Trent, the reality is more complex.

“It’s not about sectors”, he asserts. “I could design you a lottery that would be the most addictive game on the planet. The structural characteristics of the activity – such as event frequency, the probability of a win and the sensation of ‘nearmiss’ – have a huge part to play [in whether a player develops a problem].”

The most potent factor, Griffiths argues, is the prospect of reward. The more often you might win, the more engrossed you will be.

“On slot machines you can potentially win 12 times a minute; on the internet it’s even higher: 30 or 40 times a minute! If the rewards aren’t that frequent, you can’t become addicted. I’ve never met anybody who is genuinely addicted to a bi-weekly national lottery: the reason being that there are only two chances a week to find out the result.”

One way forward, says Griffiths, would be to modify the design of games to minimise risk, but further research is needed to prove that this would be effective. It would also depend on regulation to enforce its implementation: it’s unlikely a player will opt for the safe machine, if it gives fewer kicks…

The game is one thing. The gambler is another.

However engrossing a game, not everyone will develop a problem. And for the problem gambler, it’s not normally just about the one game, but a combination of a scratch card here, a bet or two there, a few hours on the web when the bookies close… So might it be possible to spot a problem player before the habit becomes a hazard?

There’s no stock type, says Professor Leighton Vaughan Williams, Director of the Betting Research Unit, Nottingham. “Problem gambling can affect anybody, at any age, or of any sex. It’s not about income, either.” He cites Premier League footballer John Hartson, who used to earn thousands a week, but admitted to The Sun that he once owed over £300,000 to bookmakers. Nor is there any evidence that people turn to gambling because of poverty, or in an economic downturn.

But where demographics can’t help, a better understanding of how people play might. This is the goal of the Transparency Project, the joint endeavour of Bwin and the Harvard Medical School.

Gambling provider Bwin has made anonymous activity data generated by over 40,000 users available to researchers, so that they can study playing patterns.

Meanwhile, other solutions seek to help players understand their own behaviour. Ten years ago, when internet gambling first took off, behavioural tracking tools were introduced to get more money out of regular players. Griffiths saw potential to put this software to better use. He has been involved in the development of several responsible gambling tools, such as Playscan, which is designed to help people anticipate problems before they arise.

It works by asking the player questions about their technique and habits, and comparing their responses to data generated as they play. If the software concludes that their play is safe, it gives them a green light, whereas a yellow or red light alerts them to a problem.

It’s a voluntary tool, but – because it also gives the player tips and recommendations to help them win – it’s an attractive one. Betfair is planning to integrate such software into its games.

“We want people to make an informed choice [about how they play]”, explains Malcolm Bruce, Head of Corporate Responsibility at the company, and former Director of the Responsibility in Gambling Trust. He wants to support regular gamblers to play within their means for a sustained period, without running into debt or going bankrupt.

“If they do burn up, that’s not in our interest. We want customers for life, not for two weeks.”

But do consumers actually want such a tool?

Yes, says Bruce: “I expected them to be fairly indifferent, but I was completely wrong. Out of 400 customers surveyed, 70% said this was really important. They probably don’t see themselves as problem gamblers, but they want to ensure that there would be help for anyone who might need it.”

Jonathan Parke, a Senior Lecturer in gambling behaviour at Salford Business School, is keen to see more solutions that empower the player, without limiting the appeal of the game.

“Many online providers now offer statements to tell the player exactly how much they’ve spent”, he says, by way of example. “But there’s no consistency in how these pages are set up. In some cases, they are extremely ambiguous and hard to find. Betfair is an example of good practice: the player’s net expenditure statement is clearly visible, in the top left hand corner of the screen.”

Another ‘empowering’ tool already on offer is the option to limit your own expenditure. So, a player could look at their monthly budget and decide they are happy to spend, say, £200, and no more. They could then modify their account so that it refuses play beyond this point.

“That’s great”, says Parke, “but a monthly deposit limit can be changed. In some cases, all you have to do is contact the provider, and they will change it for you within 24 hours… The devil is in the detail”, he adds. “It comes down to things like whether you have to phone the company to limit your budget or self-exclude – which is embarrassing for you [and so may put you off] – or whether you can just click a button.

Of course, it’s possible to limit your budget

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on one site, and then try another game offered by another operator, with nothing to hold you back. The best solution would be a self-limiting facility shared across operators – but data protection is a hurdle.

The crux of the matter is that none of these solutions can be effective without common enforcement. Further research is needed to find out just what will work, but Parke would like to see legislation and agreement across the EU, and he has some support from the industry.

“No one provider can be sustainable on its own”, concurs Bruce at Betfair. “Good governance of gambling requires good regulation. We want to work within a regulated environment.”

Of course Betfair does: no one wants to be the goody-two-shoes while the bad boys have all the fun.

The more chances there are to win, the greater the risk.

Anna Simpson is Managing Editor, Green Futures.

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“ We have the opportunity to reinvent consumption”

Gamble and, more recently, Nestlé, he became Chief Executive one year later.

I meet him in the rooftop offices at Unilever House, overlooking the Thames. Below us, builders at Blackfriars station are starting work on the world’s largest solar bridge; across the river, London’s latest, tallest skyscraper, The Shard, pierces the skyline.

There must be something in the air on this stretch of the river which encourages bold ambition…

First impressions of Polman are of a very tall, unstuffy man, without a hint of the overbearing CEO I was half expecting. Then he sits back, stretches out his legs – and imposes himself on the conversation with the passion of an activist. Polman’s words come in a fluent torrent, with just enough quirks in accent and phrasing to betray his Dutch homeland. I don’t think I’ve ever met a more talkative CEO – or one harder to interrupt once he’s warmed to his theme…

I start by asking him about the experience of setting that 2020 target…

MW: It must have ruffled a few feathers when you were discussing it internally. How easy was it to get everyone on board?

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www.greenfutures.org.uk

Photo: Digital Vision / thinkstock

For years, Unilever has enjoyed a reputation as the quiet giant of sustainable business.

Trying to do the right thing, in a cautious, unflashy manner. Diligent, if a touch dull. The kind of business you could take home to meet your Mum… When it did put its head above the parapet, it made sure it was in good company. Initiatives such as the Marine Stewardship Council [see p43] or the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil [GF82, p9] were object lessons in careful consensus-building.

This was not a company in danger of suffering from tall poppy syndrome.

But in the last two years, something has happened that very few expected. Unilever’s broken cover. It has trumpeted some extraordinarily bold targets, notably that of doubling the size of the business by 2020 – while reducing environmental impact by half.

That’s the kind of target which would, assuming they took it seriously, have most CEOs waking up in a cold sweat. And it’s not the only one. Other flagship goals included in the company’s Sustainable Living Plan [see box] include commitments to bring clean water to half a billion people, and ensure every one of the thousands of ingredients used in its products is sustainably sourced.

If Unilever hits these targets, then such is its size and influence that it will have done more than any other company, ever, to shift the world economy to a more sustainable footing.

If it misses them, it will not only be pilloried with cries of “I told you so”: it will also provoke a surge of cynicism over the potential of business to do good.

No one embodies the company’s new-found passion for public commitments more than CEO Paul Polman. Joining Unilever in 2008, after a professional lifetime with arch rivals Proctor and

Photo: Thierry Tronnel / Corbis

Martin Wright meets Paul Polman, CEO, Unilever.

PP: Well, it wasn’t the easiest target to set! It is audacious, and, yes, it makes people feel a little bit uncomfortable. But if you don’t start with something uncomfortable, I don’t think you’re moving the needle far enough… We live in a world where resources are scarce, and we cannot keep stealing [them] from our children and grandchildren.

So the biggest thing the world needs right now is courage to do the right thing – at a political and business level.

But at the end of the day we have to convince our investors that it’s also a good business model for growth. That’s why I always emphasise that we’re doubling our business, otherwise it doesn’t work.

[And then I point out] that by decoupling growth from environmental impact, we actually accelerate our innovations and so we grow faster. And because we set our standards higher and build them into our business plans, we look at our cost structures differently. To give one example: the yield from sustainably sourced palm oil is three times higher than that from [palm oil from illegally deforestated land], so we get better sourcing at lower costs.

But we can’t make the changes we need to on our own. Say we hit all our own targets, but nothing else has changed around us, then we’ll have failed.

In our own factories, we’re responsible for around three million tonnes of CO2. But if we add in suppliers and consumers, it’s around 300 million. Now, we’re [on track to] reduce our own emissions by 50-60%, but if we take the whole value chain and achieve cuts of just 10%, that adds up to ten times what we can do ourselves. So we have to galvanise change right across industry, and right down the value chain, and we really have to involve consumers.

MW: You’ve talked a lot about the growing clout of consumers – is this really making a difference?

PP: Definitely. Today’s consumers have tremendous power. There are 750 million people on Facebook, making it the third biggest ‘nation’ in the world;

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200 million on Twitter and growing fast. And they’re increasingly aware of their connectivity and the power that brings. We’ve already had the first internet revolution [in the form of the Arab Spring].

Sure, there were food price increases, there was corruption, youth unemployment – but frankly all that had been there for a long time. Why now, and why so fast? It can really be traced back to a few people on the net. Now, if they can bring down a government in weeks, they can bring down a company in seconds…

But on the other hand, if we can harness that power, we are in an ideal position to be a force for good. Unilever has two billion consumers using our products every day. No nation state can reach that many people!

MW: Talking of your products, let’s take Pot Noodle: a very popular, very successful Unilever brand, and the butt of a lot of jokes, too! Are you really reaching the consumers of Pot Noodle with a sustainability message?

Reaching out over a cup of tea: India is a growing market for fast-moving consumer goods

If you don’t start with something uncomfortable, I don’t think you’re moving the needle far enough

PP: Increasingly so. But if I may, I will not take Pot Noodle as the best example, but rather Ben and Jerry’s…

MW: Yes, but that’s the easy one! Everyone knows Ben and Jerry’s as the ethical ice cream brand…

PP: Yes, but I’m using that as the example because that [embodies] the high standard of ethics we want to achieve across all our brands. Each should have a social mission, a product mission and an economic mission – and they should [complement and support] each other… [The most important

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unique opportunity to reinvent consumption; to bring about what we could call ‘mindful consumption’.

We’re looking for what you could call a ‘virtuous cycle’ of growth. We have a target to bring 500,000 smallholder farmers and small-scale distributors into our supply chain by 2020. This will not only help them improve their livelihoods, and address the issue of food security and malnutrition, but it will also create micro communities that are then increasingly buying our other products. In Indonesia, I visited a group of 7,000 smallholders, and I got tears in my eyes listening to their testimonies about the opportunities that we gave them. And it’s not just food. We have programmes there like ‘trashion’, where we help [train local women as entrepreneurs making bags and shoes from recycled packaging].

And not surprisingly, these people feel loyal to Unilever, and that means they are more likely to buy our products. So we are creating a market through our suppliers. That’s the virtuous cycle of growth we are after.

Now when it comes to the governments of places like India and China, we are very clear that they need to take a bolder stance on sustainable sourcing. They cannot keep importing tremendous amounts of palm oil from deforested sources, for example. They are mature enough to extend their influence beyond their own boundaries. And we need them to do so, especially as we see some of the Western countries shrinking or becoming preoccupied with their own issues. With size comes responsibility. This is true for Unilever, but it’s also true for some of these emerging countries. That’s exactly the discussion we have in Indonesia or in China and India.

Pot Noodle: future icon of sustainability?

You talk to any Indian, and they’ll tell you what drought means

MW: Most people only know these as individual brands. They don’t identify them as Unilever products; it still isn’t exactly a household name. So will the word ‘Unilever’ ever feature more prominently?

PP: Yes, I think that by 2020, people will be saying, “I’m not only buying into what the individual brands stand for, but what the company stands for”. So yes, that’s the Unilever brand I’m talking about.

MW: Let’s talk a bit about India. You’ve got some great initiatives there, like Shakti Amma [which fosters a network of village-level women entrepreneurs]. But how do you find the experience of promoting the whole sustainability agenda in India – or any developing countries, come to that – compared to the more environmentally-aware West?

PP: I’m not so sure we are more ‘environmentally aware’! If everyone consumed like Europeans, we would need three planets. We may be very good at verbalising [sustainability], but we’re not very good at living it. So be very careful there! You talk to any

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Indian, even the emerging middle class, and they’ll tell you what drought means to them. Farmers will tell you what falling water tables mean. They may not dress it up in triple bottom line language, but they know what is happening to them – more so than most people realise.

So we have to address that. I talk to many Indian people who say, “I can only shampoo once a week; I would like to do it more often for my own dignity, but I just simply don’t have the water.” That’s why we introduced the [Suave brand] waterless shampoo…

And in Indonesia, one of our big fabric softeners is Molto, which cuts the number of rinse [cycles] needed from three to one. Consumers there might not [describe this feature as] sustainable, but, boy, do they understand the benefits of it.

Now interestingly, in these parts of the world, people have a higher expectation that companies, not governments, will provide solutions. Because for many years, they have had governments that were either corrupt, autocratic or simply not delivering.

So, they are not so cynical about the role of business as people here can be.

MW: How do governments there respond to you saying that? You must meet some resistance…

PP: It’s not the response in meetings that I’m worried about, it is the actions that result. On a rational level, people broadly agree with everything that we are trying to achieve. When it comes to implementation, it’s harder. There are often different interest groups...

[But] I was with the President of Indonesia last week, and we were talking about deforestation. He’s concerned about the image of Indonesia as one of the world’s biggest carbon emitters [because of forest loss]. So support from industry actually helps him to move faster [on tackling it].

Interestingly, the 2008 financial crisis had a big impact in China and India, from governments to consumers. [For years] they had been taught by the IMF and others to mimic the Western model of capitalism. But the crisis really made them question it, and ask what wealth creation actually is.

MW: All the same, there’s a lot of pretty unconstrained growth happening in such places, too. Can it really be sustainable?

PP: Well, there’s incredible consumer demand coming onstream from countries like China, India, Indonesia, Brazil – partly because of population growth, partly because of rising standards of living.

Now, if it’s mindless consumption like we see in the West, it’s not going to be very pretty. So we have a

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MW: Sounds like a classic case of crisis bringing opportunity…

Photo: Stockbyte / thinkstock

aspects for consumers] are price and performance, but increasingly we are able to get other benefits through to them, too. Let’s take the whole Knorr brand [including] Pot Noodle. Consumers are telling us that sustainably sourced vegetables and fruits translates as better taste. It is the same with Lipton Tea: when we achieved the Rainforest Alliance certification, we saw our business growing in all the countries in which we did it, and consumers feeding back that the tea tastes better.

PP: Well, there’s nothing better than a burning platform to galvanise change! I have always said that it was as much an ethical crisis as it was a financial one. I think it’s very clear that any system where the benefits of risk accrue to just a few people, but the costs are borne by the whole of society, is just not sustainable. Overall, I think it did two things: first,

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it made people look again at what I call the ‘real economy’, which includes our very humble sector of growing some materials, putting them into packages and selling them under the Knorr brand or the Lipton brand, etc. It actually increased people’s interest in working in sectors like ours.

Secondly, it galvanised some change in the financial sector. The 2008 crisis was partly a crisis of short-termism. (This is equally true in politics, incidentally. The election cycles mean short-term issues are always the dominant ones. I saw a quote once from the Luxembourg finance minister, who said: “Every politician knows what is right, but equally knows that if you do what is right you won’t get re-elected.”)

Now our business model is a long-term one.

It takes longer than three or six months to get results. So we’ve stopped doing quarterly [financial] reporting, we’re focusing on communicating our long-term goals much more clearly, and we’ve found our investor base increasingly understands them – and indeed, that they want a longer term model of value creation. And that doesn’t have to involve a compromise in business success. We’ve seen a re-rating in the Unilever share price. We are out-performing the market and our competitors. So these things don’t have to be trade-offs.

I think this is a great time for brands which can provide a beacon of trust for consumers. These days, CEOs don’t just get judged by how well their share prices are doing, but by what impact they are having on society. No CEO will ever be remembered for the market share during their tenure. But if you can have an impact which touches the broader society, it’s not only energising for people that work here, but your life has just that little more meaning.

Of course, there’s still an awful lot of cynicism and scepticism out there, among the press, the ‘thought leaders’. They don’t understand what companies like ours are trying to do.

But I always say to the sceptics, “What’s your alternative?” And if it’s better than what we’re currently doing, we’ll be the first to listen. This is a book that still has to be written, and we are educating ourselves very fast.

Every politician knows what is right, but equally knows that if you do what is right you won’t get re-elected

Martin Wright is Editor in Chief of Green Futures.

The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan Comprises 50 targets to be achieved by 2020, with the overall aim to: • h elp more than one billion people improve their health and wellbeing • halve the environmental impact of our products • s ource 100% of our agricultural raw materials sustainably.

It goes far beyond conventional corporate goals, including targets on “halving the water associated with the consumer use of our products”, bringing 500,000 small farmers and distributors into the Unilever supply chain, and making affordable water purification kits available to 500 million people. www.sustainable-living.unilever.com

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Don’t be fooled by the green: those emerald swathes aren’t forests seen from space, but roads joining rural hamlets (too small to be seen here) with urban constellations. The luminous threads trace our flights, and the lonely course of ships across the oceans.

This freeze frame of global traffic is a staggering reminder of our desire to move, whether for trade or tourism or the touch of a loved one… But how we fuel this desire will determine how connected we are in years to come. Could these blue lines mark the routes of silent airships? Will the oceans’ algae power those liners?

Photos: xxxxx

Photos: xxxxx

Motion picture

Image: ‘A cartography of the Anthropocene’, Felix Pharand-Deschenes/ Globaia/Science Photo Library

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The future is lateral

Rifkin: energy is everywhere

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Imagine the internet, only for energy.

Imagine that, as well as tens of millions of personal computers all linked together, exchanging information this way and that, you had tens of millions of personal power stations, pumping electricity to and fro.

Imagine if, working together, they made fossil fuels redundant, resolved all our fears about energy security, and kickstarted a new era of peer-to-peer power sharing. Oh, and made a decisive impact on climate change, too…

Then you’re imagining the sort of future laid out

by Jeremy Rifkin, maverick economist and adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and a clutch of EU leaders.

I meet Rifkin for coffee in London’s Langham hotel, during a flying visit to promote his new book.

He’s affable, relaxed – but speaks with the air of a man who is used to being listened to. And it’s hardly

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surprising, because the vision he paints is a pretty compelling one. In it, the Facebook generation seizes the initiative, tearing up conventional thinking about where energy comes from and how it’s delivered. They apply all their nous in sharing information and building seamless networks to create a new, resilient energy economy in its place, powered entirely by renewables – solar, wind, water and tidal, biomass and more besides. This will be nothing short of a new industrial revolution, says Rifkin, and its impacts will be as dramatic and sweeping as any that have gone before.

“Great economic revolutions happen”, he says, “when new energy regimes emerge that facilitate more complex civilisations and more energy flow.

In turn, they require communication revolutions to manage them. And when communication and energy revolutions come together, historically, they change the economic footprint.”

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Photos: Jason Hawkes; Ulf Andersen / Getty

Jeremy Rifkin believes we’re on the cusp of a third industrial revolution, where fossil fuel giants adapt or die in the face of a bright new energy economy. He tells Martin Wright why this could make the debate over climate change irrelevant – and trigger a new form of capitalism.

It happened in the 19th century, he argues, when steam power helped bring printing costs down, enabling the spread of the written word as never before, while railways unified nations and continents. It meant we could “introduce public [ie state] schools, and create a literate workforce to manage steam and coal power. We couldn’t have done it with an illiterate work-force; it needed that communications revolution.”

Then in the 20th century, electricity and oil combined to trigger a mass-consuming, car driving society, managed and marketed by radio, TV, the telephone…

Now, says Rifkin, we’re on the cusp of revolution number three – one that will sweep away our existing energy infrastructure. It will replace the “elitist, centralised, top-down” model of fossil fuel plants with an ‘energy internet’, where individual power suppliers and consumers seamlessly swap and trade electricity, as and how they need it, across a Europe-wide smart grid. Essentially, energy will move as information increasingly does now – to and from millions of sources and consumers.

Fighting talk – so how do we get there?

Entrepreneurs will play their part, says Rifkin: they will gatecrash the energy sector with the same élan that saw the internet start-ups rip apart the complacency of the old computing and music industry giants.

But, unlike some cornucopian optimists, he doesn’t believe the free market alone will whisk us into a resilient future: good old-fashioned dirigisme has a role, too.

Rifkin’s revolution rests on five key ‘pillars’.

First, a commitment from governments to drive renewable energy (as expressed in the EU’s 20% by 2020 target). Second, a massive expansion in distributed energy, with every building transformed into a renewable-power plant. Third, finding a solution to the problem of storing energy – with Rifkin favouring hydrogen as the most practical storage medium. Fourth, creating a smart grid, and fifth, using electric vehicles as a two-way power source come storage ‘tank’.

So far, how revolutionary? If much of that sounds familiar, it’s hardly surprising. Rifkin shares a lot of common ground with the new wave of green optimists who enthuse over the potential of a growing convergence of IT and energy [see GF81, p26]. And it has to be said, a future in which cheaper, more efficient renewables power an all-electric car fleet, and combine with smart grids to transform energy networks is hardly a novel idea.

So where will the juice actually come from?

“Everywhere!”, he replies – then adds an interesting qualification. “My first inclination was, we’ll go to the Mediterranean for the sun; the Irish have the wind, the Norwegians have the hydro, and so on… So, we’ll concentrate it, put it in a high voltage line and ship it. Then, I realised we were using 20th century thinking! If renewables are distributed and found everywhere, why are we only collecting them in [a few places]?”

So, no glittering arrays of concentrated Saharan sun? No vast swathes of North Sea turbines? What about all that Icelandic geothermal [see GF82, p5]…?

“Look, concentrated solar, wind, geothermal parks are all right”, responds Rifkin. “But they’re transitional:

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they’re essential to get us started, but they are a tiny part of this revolution and you cannot run the world on [them]. It can’t be done.”

Instead, he wants us to zoom in on “the number one cause of energy use, the number one cause of climate change: buildings. We have 191 million buildings in the EU. That’s our [energy] infrastructure: homes, offices and factories. The goal is to convert every single building so everyone has their own green micro power plant. So you get solar off your roof, wind off your walls, geothermal heat [from] under your ground, energy from your garbage anaerobically digested, ocean tides if you’re on the coast etc, etc.”

Once you’ve got the power, though, you have to store it. As Rifkin puts it: “The sun isn’t always shining, the wind isn’t always blowing; they are intermittent energies. So I’m in favour of every kind of storage: pumped, flow batteries, fly wheels, capacitors – but I’m putting most of the emphasis on hydrogen. Why? Because it’s the basic element of the universe, it’s the lightest element, it’s modular. You can put it in a home or a big utility. So, when the sun hits the roof of your factory or home, you generate electricity. When you have a bit of electricity you don’t need, you put it in water like in high school chemistry [to produce hydrogen]. When you need [power] you just convert it back. It’s a tiny thermodynamic loss compared to bringing [power produced by] oil, gas, coal and nuclear to us.”

Electric vehicles play their part too. They act as mini storage facilities in their own right, taking electricity from the grid to run, and feeding it back when not needed.

“Now, here’s the key”, Rifkin concludes. “These five pillars together are an infrastructure. They are a mega-technology platform, they are a nervous system for a completely new economic era – they are power to the people. Distributive capitalism, if you will.”

It’s persuasive, heady stuff. It has certainly persuaded many EU leaders. Rifkin is that rare American: an unashamed Europhile. He’s kept the faith even as gloom has descended over the continent, recently remarking that, if the Eurozone splits up, “we’re into a dark age.”

One of his recent books bore the subtitle ‘How Europe’s vision of the future is quietly eclipsing the American dream’. And the compliment has been returned. The European Parliament endorsed the principles of the ‘Third Industrial Revolution’, and many see Rifkin’s fingerprints all over the EU’s ambitious energy and climate targets. He’s served as adviser to successive holders of the Presidency, whose names he drops with an easy familiarity: “When Romano Prodi was there, I told him we had to get this moving, so we put in €2 billion for R&D. Then, under Manuel Barroso, we put in €8 billion as a public/private roll out.

When Chancellor Merkel came in, I said: ‘You’ve got to let Germany lead.’ She put in €500 million…” Some credit Rifkin with playing a key role in influencing the German decision to abandon nuclear power.

His confidence in EU institutions as a springboard for progress might ring a little hollow to European ears just now, but some leading businesses are also on board, with IBM, Cisco, Philips, Bouygues and Acciona all in conversation with Rifkin. And beyond the EU, Rifkin is advising the UN’s Industrial Development Organisation, and starting work with the

Energy will move as information increasingly does now: to and from millions of sources and consumers

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Millions of micro power plants a revolution make

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Photo: iStockphoto / thinkstock

to legislate, then they put in encryptions, then they collapsed.” But as important as the obvious potential is the fact that we simply don’t have a choice, Rifkin believes. Unless we seize this moment to crack our dependency on the fossil stuff, we’re going to be trapped on a vicious rollercoaster ride.

“When fuel costs rise, all the other prices across the supply chain go through the roof, because everything’s made out of fossil fuels: fertilisers, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, construction materials, synthetic fibres, power, transport, heat and light. So, when oil went over $80/barrel in 2007, everything else went up. At $100 a barrel, the speculators came in to gain the market. At $120/barrel we had food riots in 22 countries because [the prices of] wheat, rice, barley and rye were doubling or trebling. We had one billion people in harm’s way, according to the UN. At $147/barrel, it shut down. Prices were so prohibitive, consumers stopped buying. That was the economic earthquake. The collapse of the financial market 60 days later was an aftershock.”

He insists there’s no way out for oil. “Every time we try to re-grow the global economy at the same rate we were growing before July 2008, all the [fuel] prices shoot up, all the other prices for everything else go up, purchasing power goes down and we collapse. And this is exactly what’s happening right now. In 2009, oil was at $30 a barrel because the economy had stopped around the world. As soon as we started replenishing inventories in 2010, oil goes up, all the other prices are going up, purchasing power is going down and the economy is collapsing again. These are four-year intervals. Every time we try to restart the engine and start replenishing inventories, prices rise, and at around $125-150/ barrel, the engine shuts down. I don’t think you can get through this four year cycle of growth and collapse. It’s very dangerous, it’s an endgame. And if there is a way to get through this wall, somebody needs to tell me what it is.”

Photo: iStockphoto / thinkstock

The fossil fuel giants are roughly where the music business was a decade or so ago

Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce, too.

Rifkin’s influence is hardly surprising, because his confidence is infectious. Yet when he pauses for breath, you can’t help but find yourself wondering if it’s all a touch Panglossian. Are we really going to be able to create this best of all possible energy economies?

Are millions of micro power plants going to provide all the heavy lifting we need for industries such as steel, paper and cement? After all, it’s one thing to see a surge of potential for distributed power; quite another to imagine the whole of our fossil-fuelled infrastructure crumbling in the face of the energy equivalent of a bunch of geeks in their garages. With the EU ( – the EU!) as nursemaid…

Rifkin brushes off such scepticism with a practised hand. “That old way of thinking doesn’t address the fact that these [distributed renewable] energies are found everywhere [and] the technology is going to get cheaper and cheaper. It’s following the same curve as mobile phones and desktop computers from the late 70s to 2010. They became so cheap they gave them away: now you buy the service, not the product. The same is happening on this curve right now: we’re just in the early adoption stages. Solar, wind, geothermal, heat pumps, bio-converters – they are all going to get cheaper and cheaper. And once the technology becomes cheap, the sun is free, the wind is free, the heat underground is free, and your garbage is free.

When millions and millions of players are collecting even a little bit of surplus, it just overwhelms any kind of energy you can imagine from these little centralised nuclear and coal-fired power plants. It’s just like desktop computers: when you connect millions of them they wipe out anything you can get from the centralised super computer.”

The fossil fuel giants are roughly where the music business was a decade or so ago, he argues.

“When millions of kids started file sharing, [the music companies] first thought it was a pain in the ass, and then they thought it was a joke, then they tried

Petro-optimists, of course, will point to shale gas, tar sands and the recent mega discoveries of oil off Latin America, which have shaken some of the more simplistic claims of the ‘peakists’. For Rifkin, they merely exacerbate problems: “They’re dirty, they emit CO2 [and in the case of shale gas] there are huge issues of water contamination”.

And what about nuclear? Rifkin is dismissive.

“I don’t even spend time on nuclear energy; it’s a waste of my time.” But wait a minute, what about the arguments put forward by a growing number of environmentalists such as Mark Lynas or George Monbiot, who’ve come to see it as the least worst option in a warming world?

“Look, nuclear was dead in the water after Chernobyl”, responds Rifkin. “Its only come-back strategy was: ‘We could be the saviour on climate change.’ Well, we’ve got 400 nuclear power plants in the world. They’re old, they’re going to be decommissioned, and they only make up 6% of the energy mix. Our climate scientists tell us that, for them to have a minimum impact on climate change, which would be the whole reason for them coming back, they’d have to be 20% of the mix. That means we’d have to have 2,000 nuclear power plants. We’d have to replace the existing 400, and build [some] 1,500 more: that means three power plants every 30 days for the next half a century at a cost of trillions of dollars. Can we really afford that?

“Second, we still can’t get rid of the nuclear waste. We’re 60 years in, and we don’t have an answer. Third, we face [serious] uranium deficits by 2035, just with the existing 400 plants. We could recycle uranium to plutonium, but do we really want plutonium all over the world in an age of uncertainty?

“Finally, we don’t have enough water. That’s the big one. Over 40% of all the fresh water in France is used to cool nuclear reactors. When it goes back it’s heated and it’s dehydrating ecosystems for agriculture.” (During the 2003 European drought, water shortages forced many of France’s nuclear reactors to shut down or operate below capacity.)

But you don’t have to use fresh water… “Yes, you could build salt water plants but then you have the possibility of more violent weather conditions.”

So when you put it together I would be shocked if from the business point of view we replaced half of the 400 plants we have now, and that would get us to 2% [of our] energy.”

And nuclear fusion? “Fusion is one of those pipe dreams. It’s always sometime in the future.”

“But the real point”, says Rifkin, “is that all of this – nuclear, shale gas, whatever – is centralised thinking. It’s the old guard. The real question is: How do you regrow any economy in the world based on an industrial revolution that is over? Answer: You can’t do it.”

Then he turns the question on me: “Where do you want to be in 20 years from now? Do you want to be in the sunset of a dying 20th century infrastructure, or in the sunrise technologies of an emerging third industrial revolution?” Its great strength, he argues, its resilience, lies in the fact that the future of power is lateral. “If you’re of an older generation, like us, you think of power as top-down, but the kids think of it as side-by-side.”

We’ve talked for over an hour, well past the cut

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off time laid down by his publisher. At 65, Rifkin’s impressively energetic. He claims to be tired after his flight, but it hardly shows, and he politely waves away the hovering PR with a smile, “It’s OK, we’re enjoying ourselves…”

Then he winds up the interview with a characteristically optimistic flourish. “Try to imagine, in 2050, you’ll have had three generations growing up on lateral power and the internet. Are they going to allow themselves to be surrounded by these centralised 20th century ideas? Come on, the kids are going to wipe this out!”

Martin Wright is Editor in Chief, Green Futures.

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World is published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Generation lateral

All this – nuclear, shale gas, whatever – is centralised thinking; it’s the old guard, it’s over

Essential Rifkin • Born: Denver, Colorado, 1945 • P rize-winning economics student, underwent a political awakening in 1966, on seeing “my frat friends beating the living daylights” out of Vietnam war protestors.

• B ecame peace activist and environmentalist. Staged ‘Boston Oil Party’ in 1973, on 200th anniversary of Boston Tea Party, dumping empty oil barrels in the harbour.

• L aunched Foundation for Economic Trends (www.foet.org), which works on a range of economic, environmental and climate change issues.

• V ariously described as “a social and ethical prophet” (New York Times) and “the most dangerous man in science” (Time Magazine).

• A dvisor to European Parliament and several EU presidents and heads of state, including Angela Merkel (Germany). Principles of the ‘Third Industrial Revolution’ adopted by the Parliament, influences EU energy and climate policy.

• B ooks include Entropy: A New World View (1980); The Hydrogen Economy (2002); and The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (2004).

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Rocket from the Bronx

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Green Futures January 2012

“And she became very knowledgeable about things.”

Carter went on to found her own non-profit “environmental justice solutions” organisation, Sustainable South Bronx. It helped galvanise local people to restore the waterfront area, provided some with training in environmental skills, and even planted one of the city’s first green roofs on its office building. Majora seemed set to be a successful community activist, albeit on a small scale. But when she picked a fight with New York’s controversial Republican Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, her reputation rocketed.

The Mayor’s office wanted to site a large waste transfer plant in the South Bronx. The project was not, to put it gently, community-friendly. The area already had more than its fair share of waste treatment plants, a common plight for impoverished communities whose residents lack the political clout to effectively resist the powers that be.

The new transfer plant would have brought fresh battalions of noisy, pollution-belching garbage trucks to the area while also denying residents access to the waterfront.

Working with other local groups, Carter persuaded local government officials to let them “get in and tinker with the city’s larger solid waste management plan,” says James Chase, Carter’s spokesperson (and husband). This led to plans for the mega-facility being abandoned and replaced in the South Bronx by elegant alternatives: a park on the site of a former concrete plant, public waterfront access where the shore had been littered with industrial scrap, and cadres of local people trained to protect and maintain the restored environment.

In the process, Carter was bringing a much-needed jolt of civic pride to one of the most economically and emotionally depressed communities in the country. But it wasn’t only her home community that found new hope thanks to her work. To all those trying to bring positive change to troubled areas, Carter’s message was: if you can do it in the South Bronx, you can do it anywhere.

Her achievements attracted widespread attention. In 2005, Carter won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship. A national platform followed. In 2007, she joined forces with another black eco-leader, Van Jones, to launch Green for

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Photos: Sustainable South Bronx

Unlike some activists who ‘parachute’ into a deprived community, Carter was born and raised in the Bronx

New York City’s South Bronx is a district with a reputation.

Gangs, drugs, violence, you name it.

Every inner city cliché in the book has stuck to this particular part of town, making it a strong contender for one of the country’s most notorious ghettos.

But that’s not the whole story. It has also quietly won a reputation as home to some bold environmental experiments – and the launch pad for one of America’s fastest rising green activists, Majora Carter.

This journalist first heard rumblings about Carter in her pre-glory days, from grassroots sustainability activists working north of New York City who spoke admiringly of a dynamic young black woman who was doing amazing things in – of all places – the South Bronx. She was galvanising locals into sprucing up a local park, and mobilising coalitions to clean up the Bronx River and its waterfront.

Unlike some activists who ‘parachute in’ to a deprived community, Carter was born and raised in the South Bronx, the youngest of 10 children in a working-class family. She shone at school, went to university in Connecticut, and could easily have ended up leaving the Bronx far behind – a common trajectory for anyone from the area who makes a success in life.

But she moved back in with her parents when she won a place at New York University to pursue a master’s degree in creative writing – and started volunteering at a community development organisation known as The Point. “She went out and did her research”, Maria Torres, President and co-founder of The Point, told The New York Times.

Photos: James Burling Chase

Carl Frankel meets Majora Carter, America’s environmental justice campaigner turned entrepreneur.

All, a national green jobs initiative. In 2010, her public radio programme, The Promised Land, won a Peabody Award for its “deep, eye-opening conversations about the environment and justice”.

Carter also created a buzz with her 2006 TED talk, which included a public upbraiding of former Vice President Al Gore, who was sitting in the audience, and enjoying a wave of popularity following the release of his film, An Inconvenient Truth. “When I spoke to Mr Gore the other day”, she declared toward the end of her speech, “I asked him how environmental justice advocates were going to be included in his new marketing strategy. His response was a grant programme. I don’t think he understood that I wasn’t asking for funding. I was making him an offer.”

“It wasn’t fun to challenge Al”, says Carter, a congenial interview subject who seems as comfortable talking about her inner life as her public activities. “But I had to do it. He had dismissed an environmental justice component that needed to be part of the conversation. I burst into tears when I realised I would have to be the one to address it.

But you have to seize the moment.” The speech earned her national kudos (tech guru Guy Kawasaki called her presentation skills “every bit as good as Steve Jobs”), and it was chosen as one of six presentations to launch TED’s popular website.

In 2008, she used her new-found celebrity to launch a for-profit consultancy, The Majora Carter Group. “I was tired of watching consulting contracts go to firms that didn’t have talent, or the working knowledge of [communities like the South Bronx]”, she says. “I decided to establish a for-profit consulting firm, because the non-profit ones are not perceived as seriously, even if they deliver the same recommendations.”

Her latest project involves the creation of a national brand of urban-grown produce. “When I was introduced to urban agriculture a few years ago,” she recounts, “I was struck by its potential to create accessible jobs – and healthy food – for inner-city residents. Looking more deeply, however, I found that the sector was more or less a community garden movement, with little to no emphasis on profitability, attracting no outside capital of any kind, or marketing. I’ve been working with [brand specialists] Wolff Olins on a strategy that combines the value of local with a unifying national impact. I believe this initiative will create jobs in places where none exist now.” The programme will be launched under the Majora Carter Group brand, with the longer-term goal of building out the business under a franchise licensing model à la McDonald’s.

Carter also wants to implement innovative real-estate approaches that, in her words, “reverse the unintended consequences of integration”. The Civil Rights Movement, she explains, “enabled blacks to leave the multi-class, racially segregated neighborhoods they’d grown up in and move to affluent white communities. This left generations of people who equate success with leaving. Those who can’t leave often feel like failures in some regard, and act accordingly.” She wants to transform these depressed places into updated, greenedup, ethnically diverse versions of the multi-class segregated communities of yore. In her view, this

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will require healthy doses of intelligent commercial development along with mixed-income and mixeduse housing and the kind of urban amenities that financially comfortable people have come to expect.

“People want to be able to go to a farmer’s market, or walk to a café for a cappuccino.”

That’s still a long way from happening. “We have to be patient”, Carter says. “When you’re trying to do something that deviates dramatically from the status quo, the naysayers will be all over you if you don’t come out of the box with a winner. We’ll get one opportunity to do this right.”

Are these visions realistic? Hugh Hogan, Executive Director of the North Star Fund, a New York City community foundation that supports grassroots groups, views them as “entirely possible”, but cautions that “the devil will be in the details”.

Over the years, Carter has been criticised for taking credit for achievements that were not hers alone, and for projects not yet completed.

How much these charges have merit isn’t easily determined. The popular narrative – “Carter made all this happen” – is definitely an over simplification: no community is transformed single-handedly.

But the significance of Carter’s role as a hands-on community organiser and inspirational leader can’t be denied. She has star power, and stars are a magnet for detractors. As Hugh Hogan tells the story: “Majora came back to her neighbourhood, saw that her community was getting shut out from good things that were happening in other parts of the city, and said, ‘This is not okay.’

She’s a proud black woman who spoke up. This doesn’t win you lots of friends.”

Planting the talk: a green roof for Bronx Haven High School

She’s a proud black woman who spoke up.

This doesn’t win you lots of friends

Carl Frankel is a US-based writer on sustainability issues.

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It’s 2032: print some energy and drink the sea

trees’, p9] could become routine. Stevenson has plans for “carbon neutral petrol stations” which would “take CO2 out of the air, stick it through some genetically engineered bacteria, and turn it into gasoline”. It’s all part of reframing the way we view carbon, he says. “It is not a pollutant, it’s a resource.

It’s Mother Nature’s preferred building block for just about everything. This is stuff that makes diamonds, graphene… This is a revenue stream that we’re just throwing into the sky! How stupid is that?!”

Sooner or later, says Knowles, someone will stumble on the holy grail of long-lasting, effective energy storage. “Ultracapacitors that charge instantaneously and hold the charge for a long time could change everything.”

Together, such technologies could make today’s worries over energy security fade like mist in the electrifying sun… As Stevenson puts it, “We don’t have an energy crisis: we have an energy conversion crisis. The sun is waving this massive energy paycheck in our face every second, and we’re not banking it. So we go into our savings account, and that’s fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we’ve been raiding it like some credit card crazed junkie.”

If the internet took you by surprise, imagine what might be around the corner…

Whatever you want, print it out

It’s some years since nanotech was front page news – usually accompanied by dire warnings of self-replicating nanobots taking over the world in a tide of grey goo. But it hasn’t gone away. Quite the contrary: it’s present in thousands of products, from skincare to showers to bicycle parts, but its impact may be greatest at a much more basic level of human need: water.

Nano-engineered desalination, based on superstrong, highly efficient membrane technology, could turn the sea into something fresh enough to drink at a fraction of the cost – and energy

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Green Futures January 2012

Too cheap to meter?

Nanotech could help make clean energy affordable, too. Researchers are already exploring a range of ‘organic’ solar technologies, using carbon instead of silicon, which has the potential to be mass produced at a fraction of the cost of today’s modules. Combined with the latest 3D printing technology [see below], this could result in a thin film combining “a solar PV material on top, a battery in the middle, and some LED printed lights underneath”. And the sun wouldn’t even have to be shining… New materials could capture infrared rays (from ambient heat) on the bottom, and ultraviolet on the top.

Jamais Cascio, research fellow at the Institute of the Future, cautions that while solar remains “disgustingly inefficient” there will still be a role for other energy sources – including small, stable thorium reactors, which could revolutionise people’s perceptions of nuclear power. And some still hold a candle for nuclear fusion – which has been predicted as lying 30-odd years in the future for the last, um, 30 years or so. Hugh Knowles of Forum for the Future points to the investment in ITER (International Thermonuclear Experminetal Reactor) and the hype surrounding the E-Cat cold fusion energy catalyst reactor, “which is probably nonsense, but always fun to keep an eye on the big outside bets”.

Air capture of carbon dioxide [see ‘Better than

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Designed for life

Photo: Pixland / thinkstock

Nanotech: the very small gets very big

consumption – of today’s methods. “This could take water wars off the table”, says Mark Stevenson, author of An Optimist’s Tour of the Future. Meanwhile, a filter made of nanofibres and based on a teabag could do the same for pollution. “Stick it on top of a bottle, and it turns a river full of pathogens into clean water for less than a penny.”

Photo: Thomas Northcut / thinkstock

Stick this on top of a bottle, and it makes dirty water drinkable for less than a penny

Extrapolation can get you down.

How often do you hear sentences beginning with the dreaded phrase, “On present trends…” followed by some gloomy prediction of diminishing reserves of this, soaring prices of that…?

So at times like these, it’s worth remembering that present trends rarely stay that way: surprises always lurk around the corner – and they’re not always nasty ones. Cast your minds back a generation. Who would have predicted in 1985, say, the extraordinary transformations brought about by the internet and mobile phones? And who but the most resolute of Luddites would deny the enormous benefits – in terms of connectivity, and access to information, markets, even power – we’ve drawn from them?

So cast your mind forward two or three decades.

What might we be looking back on in 2035, which is now just a glint in the eye, but which will have had a similar impact?

Green Futures polled the opinions of some leading future thinkers.

2012 is already sure to go down as the year when 3D printing comes out of the lab and into the home [see p6]. Fast forward into the future, and we could not only be printing everything from shower heads to homes, but cars, computers – and even skin.

Such “additive manufacturing” uses readily available materials, explains Cascio. “So rather than shipping aluminium halfway across the world, you make use of carbon nanotubes, carbon fibres… In the most full-blown scenario”, he continues, “it becomes vanishingly cheap to produce things that were previously very expensive. If it costs the same to print a laptop as it does a shoe, this leads us to a very different economy. [It also implies] an entirely distributed manufacturing system, a heavily localised system. But it’s not local specialisation; everyone is a generalist.”

Personalised medicine and health advice could become commonplace as the costs of genome sequencing plummet. Stevenson predicts that “the $1 genome” is not far off. Expect “drugs designed to work with a particular genetic code”, says Cascio. And – more controversially perhaps – drugs that allow people “to think more clearly and feel more empathy”.

And if drug-induced empathy is a disturbing notion, other trends are likely to instil it in more organic ways. Take collaborative consumption, one of the internet’s surprising byproducts. “This not only allows you to make money from things you already have” [as with AirBnB or WhipCar], says Stephanie Jacometti of futures strategists Jacometti Associates. “It also takes people right back into their communities. Suddenly they’re enjoying talking to new people, meeting new people, rather than living alone in a lonely box. And environment-friendliness comes as a by-product.”

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Empathy enough for you?

Reasons to be cheerful?

So is time to stop worrying and embrace the future?

As befits someone who’s just founded a ‘League of Pragmatic Optimists’, Mark Stevenson dismisses fears that we’re headed for a Malthusian crunch. “If we stick with the technologies we have now, Malthus is right.

But when have we ever done that? We are at the stage where we can engineer ourselves past this, if we want to.”

Ruben Nelson of Foresight Canada is less sanguine. “Technology in itself is not sufficient. We may have grossly over-estimated the amount of time we have in which to adapt. We need new levels of meta-reflection and meta-insight. Most people are hopelessly trapped in Newtonian models…”

Jack Jacometti, formerly of Shell, agrees. “As Einstein put it, ‘No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it’. The human species has to raise its game, and move towards intelligent living.” He warns that we could be heading for a ‘great disruption’ of the sort envisaged

by Paul Gilding [see GF81, p22]: things will get worse before they get better.

Jamais Cascio remains cautiously optimistic.

“All these technological developments give us a greater capacity to deal with large-scale environmental problems. They mean we reduce our carbon footprint, and increase our ability to use renewable energy and smart materials. They help create a smarter world. So I think we have a real potential to meet the resilience and sustainability demands we’ll be facing by the mid-point in the century – but it’s in no way guaranteed. That’s where the challenge lies.”

We don’t have an energy crisis: we have an energy conversion crisis

Compiled by Martin Wright, Editor in Chief, Green Futures.

Green Futures January 2012

33

Forumupdate

Investment opportunities don’t get much bigger than this.

The sustainable generation

Find out what on earth you should be investing in.

Jeremy Darroch, Chief Executive of Sky, learns from future leaders.

Guide to Climate Change and Ethical Investing The Guide features over 120 climate change and ethical funds, articles from leading fund managers, including Pictet, Sarasin, Henderson, Cheviot, Impax, Meteor, Osmosis, Quadris, Goldfield Partners, Terra Global and Future Capital Partners, plus the unique Holden Runes Ratings.

Request your FREE copy at www.holden-partners.co.uk/guide or call 01603 763 850

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January 2012

8/23/2011 11:36:57 AM

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While we hear a lot from chief executives about sustainability, much less is known about what the business leaders of tomorrow think. That’s why we undertook the Sky Future Leaders Study. We wanted to better understand their attitudes to some of the key issues, including how they think business today is performing on sustainability, whether they feel they’re being equipped with the skills and knowledge they will need, and what they themselves would do differently in the future.

It’s highly encouraging to see that tomorrow’s business leaders are already engaged with sustainability and have a huge appetite for it to be part of their careers. They have coined the phrase ‘the sustainable generation’ as a way of describing themselves, which seems both apt and accurate to me.

One of the biggest challenges they’ll face is dealing with the long-term impact of the economic downturn.

So it’s also encouraging that they see sustainability as a priority, even in tough operating conditions.

But something that concerns me – and it should concern everyone involved in business today – is that too many companies aren’t effectively communicating their motives for acting sustainably. For businesses to maintain their relationships with existing customers, and attract new ones, they need to improve communications around their values. This study shows that, by integrating sustainability into how businesses operate today, we can ensure our future leaders are

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ready to rise to the challenge, so that our companies will succeed, and go on contributing to society for many years to come.

BSkyB is a Forum for the Future partner. To read the report, visit: www.corporate.sky.com/media/publications_and_reports/2011.htm

Future leader viewpoints The Sky Future Leaders Study interviewed 750 corporate graduate trainees, high-potential middle managers and MBA students, and found that: • 96% see themselves getting involved in sustainability in their careers • 7 9% cite the vision and values of a company as an important factor when looking at potential employers • m ore than two thirds (69%) believe that a company’s values and ethics are essential in building personal trust in a business.

“Marking yourself out as someone who’s interested in sustainability is important in terms of your progression.” – MBA student “Sustainability is a growth area, and I think there will be growing demand for people with relevant experience and expertise in it.” – Graduate trainee “The initial work to establish sustainability as something worth tackling has already been done. My role will be to expand what my company does.” – Middle manager

Green Futures January 2012

35

SallyUren

Tomorrow’s leaders Since 1996, Forum for the Future’s Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development has been training the sustainability leaders of the future.

Each issue, we track the career of a Forum alumnus.

Class of: 2007 – 08 Currently: Sustainable Games Project Coordinator at Coca-Cola Why I chose the MProf I had been working for Quest Overseas for about four years, organising voluntary conservation and community projects in South America. It was a very small organisation and I was at the top, so there wasn’t any room for me to progress.

When I started looking for other jobs, I didn’t quite have what it took to get

Career to date After the Masters, I got a job working as a Sustainability Advisor for the Olympic Delivery Authority, which was fascinating, and then worked on a behaviour change project with universities across the country, funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It was quite a contrast moving to a big corporate like Coca-Cola after that, but I love it.

Ship shape The Sustainable Shipping Initiative sets sail Three great challenges face the shipping industry: rising oil prices, structural shifts in world trade, and growing scrutiny of the industry’s social and environmental performance. Forum for the Future’s Sustainable Shipping Initiative (SSI) has been working with WWF and 15 global giants from across the supply chain, to plan how the industry can contribute to a sustainable future, and thrive in it.

The SSI’s ‘Vision for 2040’ describes the changes its members would like to bring about, backed up with commitment to action, and signed by their CEOs and board representatives. These actions include: • developing new finance mechanisms to roll out new technologies more quickly • identifying and overcoming key non-financial barriers to the uptake of low-carbon and energy-efficient technologies

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Green Futures January 2012

Can luxury be sustainable?

Advice for future leaders If there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s this: don’t ever stop thinking of things from someone else’s perspective. It puts you in a much better position to influence them if you do.

Olivia Knight-Adams was in conversation with Katie Shaw.

Look out for the Green Futures Special Edition on the 2012 Games, Olympic Opportunity later this year.

Since the last issue of Green Futures, BSkyB has joined Forum for the Future as a Partner, and Prudential and Technology Will Save Us have become Members.

Sam Kimmins leads the Sustainable Shipping Initiative at Forum for the Future.

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Sally Uren is Deputy Chief Executive at Forum for the Future. @sallyuren

Ethical agents

New to the Forum Network

• r educing the life-cycle impact of ship materials • setting standards and creating a governance structure to manage them.

“We are in business for the long-term and therefore take an active role in defining the future we want to be part of”, said Maersk Line Chief Operating Officer, Morten Engelstoft, at the launch of the Vision last October. “Delivering on a joint vision for our industry will help drive a muchneeded change in operating models – thereby allowing economies to grow, trade to develop and social wealth to spread.”

The SSI now invites progressive companies with an interest in these goals to join us in achieving them.

Can luxury be sustainable? Surely it’s an irrelevant question, given another record leap in levels of global carbon dioxide?

Think again. One of the biggest drivers of carbon emissions is consumption, and a key driver of consumption is the desire for social status. Right now, owning luxury products equals status for many people across the globe. And as entire economies lift themselves out of poverty and aspire to the lifestyles of the West, the demand for luxury goods and services is rocketing. Luxury may not make us healthier or happier, but at least we can show off.

Back to the question then. On the face of it, there’s nothing very sustainable about luxury. From cars (think urban 4x4s), to handbags (crocodile skin, anyone?), to spa experiences (high on energy and water), luxury can often be shorthand for excessive consumption.

On the other hand, luxury products are often built to last. That designer handbag can have a long and fulfilling life, often adorning the arm of multiple owners. Many luxury brands, from Burberry to Jaguar,

New enterprises channel valuable resources across supply chains.

What do these initiatives have in common?

A raspberry farm in South Africa called Haygrove Heaven, which transforms its labourers into smallscale entrepreneurs. CottonConnect, a one-stopshop to help retailers and brands trace where their cotton comes from and solve problems across all stages of production. And The Better Trading Company, which connects small-scale producers from the developing world with Western retailers, bringing them closer to the market and putting new, exotic products on store shelves.

For one, they are all successful sustainable enterprises. But each one has also been codeveloped and co-funded by the Shell Foundation.

Marking it out from traditional corporate philanthropy, the Shell Foundation has decided to stop disbursing money to disparate causes, and start acting more like an ‘angel investor’. It has created ‘ethical agents’: companies that help

Photo: Maersk

Olivia Knight-Adams

What I learnt Before the Masters, I was probably quite naïve and idealistic in my attitudes towards big businesses – thinking, ‘Gosh, I would never work for that kind of company’. But that changed as a result of going on the work placements and understanding the Forum way of thinking. Now, I find it’s best to work with big business to make change, rather than constantly fighting against it – although you do need the whole spectrum, the activists as well as the collaborators.

What I plan to do next I’d like to stay at Coca-Cola and use what the Olympics have catalysed there to drive the sustainability of their operations further forward. I think if you can positively change a big corporation by just 1%, you’re making a far bigger difference than some of the lovely, small charities I’ve worked at before. I believe I’m working in a company that wants to do the right thing – it’s in their interest to, both from a business and a reputational perspective. If they want to be around in 10 years’ time, they have to look after the resources on which they depend.

Photos: Jupiterimages / thinkstock; Haygrove Heaven Ltd

them. I came across the Forum Masters, and it just seemed like the obvious way forward.

have been around for decades, and have helped sustain local economies and local jobs over that time. What’s left of the UK’s real economy actually has a big luxury flavour to it.

But, on balance, luxury isn’t very sustainable – yet. It could be, with values such as sound provenance, longevity, low-impact use and recyclability at its heart – as well as desirability. Imagine the beautiful garment, made from synthetic materials with zero embedded carbon and water; using state of the art zeroemissions technology, brought to market using smart logistics. It’s cherished for more than a season, then either freecycled or recycled…

Or a sleek car, more like a Tesla than a humble Nissan Leaf (which boasts equally low emissions, but has zero sex appeal…).

The luxury sector, on the whole, has been immune to sustainability for too long. While it has been busy growing in emerging markets in particular, it has taken its eye off the big environmental and social trends that many other brands have taken on board. It’s high time for luxury brands to inject their high-growth business models with some of the best sustainability thinking from the fast-moving consumer goods world – the pioneering practice of retailers such as Marks & Spencer and manufacturers such as Unilever.

This would be a great step forward. But, if luxury goods and services are to have a role in a sustainable future, they have to deliver a wider social value. Simply perpetuating our wish to show off isn’t a long-term solution.

www.greenfutures.org.uk

developing world producers earn a secure, dignified living by acting as an intermediary that assists the flow of information, training, skills and/or the goods themselves between the producer and the retailer.

The result? At Haygrove, the fields tended by its ‘Bright Futures’ entrepreneurs (including Charlie, pictured left) have given a greater yield. The programme has taught employees critical skills, from better production methods, to driving and reading.

CottonConnect has trained 20,000 farmers in sustainable production methods, and has a target to train 100,000 more, and impact 500,000 livelihoods, by 2015. And entrepreneurs in southern and eastern Africa are supplying six major retailers and manufacturers across Europe and Australia, through the Better Trading Company.

Now, Forum for the Future and the Shell Foundation are working together to hone the process of creating ethical intermediaries like these, and find out what key factors make them successful.

But the next stage is the most important: scaling up and replicating these initiatives in different contexts.

We are looking to start conversations with partners who are interested in replicating elements of these business models. If you want to engage more directly with your supply chain, then get in touch.

Ivana Gazibara is a Principal Sustainability Advisor at Forum for the Future. i.gazibara@forumforthefuture.org

Green Futures January 2012

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RE-ENERGIZE AT NEMEX

Forum for the Future’s Network brings together business and government to create a sustainable future; inspiring new thinking, building creative partnerships and developing practical innovations to change our world. We aim to transform the critical systems that we all depend on, such as food, energy and finance, to make them fit for the challenges of the 21st century. For more information, visit www.forumforthefuture.org ABN AMRO www.abnamro.com

David Lloyd Leisure www.davidlloyd.co.uk

AECOM Daniel Hobbs, daniel.hobbs@aecom.com www.aecom.com

Delhaize Group Ben Davies, bdavies@delhaize.be

Alliance Boots Ltd Andrew Jenkins, 0115 968 6766 AMEC Francesco Corsi, 0191 272 6128 www.amec.com/ukenvironment Arjowiggins Graphic Shannan Hodgson, shannan.hodgson@arjowiggins.com Ashden Jane Howarth, 020 7410 7023 Aviva Investors Steve Waygood, 020 7809 6000 Balfour Beatty plc Jonathan Garrett, 020 7216 6837 Bank of America Merrill Lynch Matt Hale, 020 7996 2054 Benchmark Software Simon Harvey, 01458 444010

John Lewis Partnership Moira Thomas, 0207 592 4413

RWE npower Anita Longley, 01793 892716

Johnson Matthey Sean Axon, 020 7269 8400

Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Ltd Jack Cunningham, jack.cunningham@sainsburys.co.uk

DSME www.dsme.co.kr/en

Kingfisher Becky Coffin, becky.coffin@kingfisher.com

SC Johnson Ltd Chris Lambert, 01784 484100

Ecover Mick Bremans, +32 3 309 2500 www.ecover.com

Kraft Foods and Cadbury Jonathan Horrell, 01242 236101

Skanska Jennifer Clark, 01923 776666 www.skanska.com

Delphis Eco Mark Jankovich, 020 3397 0096, www.delphisworld.com

EDF Energy Darren Towers, 07875 110 289, darren.towers@edfenergy.com Ella’s Kitchen Alison Lindley, alison@ellaskitchen.co.uk Energy Saving Trust 020 7227 0398 www.energysavingtrust.org.uk The Environment Agency Brian Francis, brian.francis@environment-agency.gov.uk Fife City Council www.fifedirect.org.uk

Birmingham City Council Sandy Taylor, 0121 303 4026

Finlays Michael Pennant-Jones, 020 7802 3239

Bottletop Cameron Saul, cameron@bottletop.org

Firmenich SA Neil McFarlane, +41 227802435

BP Shipping www.bp.com/shipping

FirstGroup plc Terri Vogt, 07799 885171

BSkyB Daniella Vega, daniella.vega@bskyb.com

Food and Drink Federation Nicki Hunt, 020 7420 7132 www.fdf.org.uk

BT plc Richard Spencer, 0773 663 6882 Richard.a.spencer@bt.com

Friends Life Sandra Latner, 08452 683135

Kyocera Mita UK Ltd Tracey Rawling, Tracey.Rawling.Church@KyoceraMita.co.uk Lafarge UK Emma Hines, www.lafarge.co.uk Leeds City Council www.leeds.gov.uk/ London Borough of Croydon Bob Fiddik, Bob.Fiddik@croydon.gov.uk Lloyd’s Register www.lr.org Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) James Simpson, 020 7811 3315 www.msc.org Marks & Spencer plc Rowland Hill, 020 8718 6885 Maersk Line www.maersk.com Mars Drinks www.marsdrinks.co.uk National Grid Mike Elmer, mike.elmer@uk.ngrid.com O2 plc Simon Davis, simon.davis@O2.com Panasonic UK Ltd Simon Eves, 01344 853325

Sony Ericsson Gustaf Brusewitz, gustaf.brusewitz@songericsson.com

Tesco Ltd Ruth Girardet, 01992 644053 Technology Will Save Us www.technologywillsaveus.org Tetra Pak international Rupert Maitland-Titterton, 0870 442 6000 Thames Water Utilities ltd Helen Newman, 0118 373 8343 Thomson Reuters Julia Fuller, julia.fuller@thomsonreuters.com

Cafédirect Whitney Kakos, 0207 033 6022

GSH Group Lee Price, 01782 200 497 www.gshgroup.com

Pret A Manger ltd Nicki Fisher, 020 7827 8888

Capgemini Ltd James Robey, 0870 904 5761

Heineken UK Richard Heathcote, 01432 345277

Pureprint Group Richard Owers, 01825 768811 www.pureprint.com

TUI Travel plc Jane Ashton, 01293 645911 www.tuitravel.com/sustainabledevelopment

Cargill Fiona Cubitt, 01932 861916

Hewlett-Packard Scott Nyulassy, www.hp.com

Prudential UK & Europe community@prudential.co.uk

United Utilities Gary Adkins, Gary.Adkins@uuplc.co.uk

Carillion plc Louise Perry, 01902 316258

Quintain Estates and Development Plc Louise Ellison, 020 7478 3430 lellison@quintain.co.uk

Vodafone Group Joel Roxburgh, www.vodafone.com

Carnival www.carnival.com

The Highways Agency Dean Kerwick-Chrisp, Dean.Kerwick-Chrisp@highways.gsi. gov.ukhttp www.highways.gov.uk/

Certis Europe www.certiseurope.co.uk

IGD Dr James Northen, 01923 851919

Chi Group www.chilondon.com

IBM John Rushton, John.Rushton@uk.ibm.com

The Converging World Wendy Stephenson wendystephenson@theconvergingworld.org Danone www.danone.com

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* Sustainabilitylive! ABC figures 2011

Tata Global Beverages Ria Kearney +44 (0)20 8338 4596

Tsakos www.tsakos.net

The Co-operative Group Chris Shearlock, www.co-operative.coop

The Environment and Energy Awards celebrated a 40% increase in attendees

Target (US) www.target.com

Powys County Council Heather Delonnette, 01597 827481

City of London Simon Mills, 020 7332 1431

Over 100 leading energy industry speakers

Unilever UK Helen Fenwick, 01372 945000

Volac Andy Richardson, 01223 208021 Warburtons Sarah Miskell, 01204 556600

Rail Safety and Standards Board Shamit Gaiger, 020 3142 5380

Wärtsilä www.wartsila.com

22-24 May 2012 NEC Birmingham, UK

Ingersoll Rand www.ingersollrand.com

Rexam Plc sustainability@rexam.com, www.rexam.com

Wessex Water plc Dan Green, 01225 526000

www.nemex.co.uk

Innovia Films Lucy Cowton, 01697 342281

Rio Tinto www.marine.riotinto.com

InterfaceFLOR Europe Ltd Ramon Arratia, 020 7490 3960

Royal Dutch Shell plc Elfrida Hughes, +31610974798

Wm Morrison Supermarkets plc Steven Butts, Steven.Butts@morrisonsplc.co.uk

Interserve Constuction Ltd Chris Williams, chris.williams@interserve.com

Royal Mail Group James Kokiet, james.kokiet@royalmail.com

WWF-UK Dax Lovegrove, 01483 412395 www.wwf.org.uk

Green Futures January 2012

“Thought this year was excellent, it’s getting better and better. A must attend event on the annual calendar for any environmental/energy professional.”

Gareth Williams, Energy Solutions Manager, Northern Rail

Swire – China Navigation Co www.swireos.com

Gearbulk www.gearbulk.com

RAC Foundation Elizabeth Box, Elizabeth.Box@RACFoundation.org www.racfoundation.org

37% increase in NEMEX visitors over the last 2 years

Sony Europe www.sony-europe.com

Triodos Bank William Ferguson, 0117 980 9770 www.triodos.co.uk

Bupa Andrew Smith, 020 7656 2343 www.bupa.com

5,081 visitors interested in energy products and services

NEMEX provides the ideal platform for you to showcase your energy solutions to over 9,000* attendees.

Small World Henry Rawson, +852 2799 3998 www.interiorsourcing.com

PepsiCo UK & Ireland Andrew Slight, Andrew.Slight@pepsico.com

Bunge www.bunge.com

GallifordTry Infrastructure Guy Wilson, Guy.Wilson@gallifordtry.co.uk

HIGHLIGHTS OF 2011

RSA Insurance plc Paul Pritchard, 020 7337 5712

part of Sustainabilitylive!

Co-located with

Willmott Dixon Ltd George Martin, 07814 003046

www.greenfutures.org.uk

22-24 MAY 2012 HALLS 3 & 3A NEC, BIRMINGHAM

Photos: xxxxx

AkzoNobel Elizabeth Stokes, 01928 511695 www.aksonobel.com

Jaguar Land Rover Fran Leedham, fleedham@jaguarlandrover.com

30 years as the leading energy, procurement and renewables exhibition, help write a new chapter at NEMEX

GET INVOLVED TODAY! www.greenfutures.org.uk

“The level of support that we received from the NEMEX team was really helpful and the exhibition proved to be a really great success. The show delivered exactly the customer base and decision makers that we wanted to engage with. We walked away with over 230 very hot prospects and have signed up for next year.”

Paul Greenwood, Managing Director, LEDi Solutions Ltd

For more information on exhibiting or the range of sponsorship options For more information on exhibiting available please contact or the range of sponsorship options Paul Fitzgerald on 0151 334 6763 or email paul.fi tzgerald@fav-house.com available please contact Donna Bushell on 020 8651 7112 or email donna.bushell@fav-house.com Paul Fitzgerald on 0151 334 6763.

Visit www.nemex.co.uk

paul.fitzgerald@fav-house.com Green Futures January 2012

39

Nature nurture

A new name for a sustainable future Last year, Green Futures partner Entec joined AMEC, one of the world’s leading engineering, project management and consultancy companies.

With seven billion mouths to feed, the food industry can’t be fussed about biodiversity.

Think again, says Andrew Kuyk.

Having integrated Entec with AMEC’s existing UK environmental business, we’ve now changed our name and look forward to the future as AMEC Environment & Infrastructure UK, building on existing strengths while maximising the benefit of being part of a strong and vibrant worldwide business.

Photos: xxxxx

Acting personally, thinking globally, delivering locally

Photo: John Brackenbury / Science Photo Library

Sustainability is a guiding principle, central to our values as a business. If you’d like to discuss how AMEC can help shape your sustainable future alongside ours, call us on 0800 371733 or email francesco.corsi@amec.com, your Green Futures partner contact.

Why should the number of other species on the planet be an issue for food manufacturers?

After all, the fossil record tells us that there have been five previous waves of mass extinction, including the dinosaurs – and if it wasn’t for these wipe-outs, we might never have evolved! So why worry now, if a few birds and insects are going the same way…?

Because the habitats and resources around us are ultimately as vital to our survival as they are to that of many other species currently under threat. And because that threat is largely the result of our own actions. To some extent, we can use technology to insulate ourselves – and other life-forms – from the more immediate consequences of our behaviour.

We can pollinate plants without the aid of insects, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere without rainforests, and purify water without healthy soils…

But we won’t be able to stand in for all of these ‘ecosystem services’. They rely on the interaction of myriad plants, animals and micro-organisms: it’s not a one-man job. And without them, our food system will become less diverse and less resilient. As climate conditions change, it’s increasingly important that we have a biodiverse world: a sort of genetic reserve on which we will almost certainly need to draw to cope with the challenges ahead.

The problem is that we have no way of knowing now which species we can ‘afford’ to squander, or what the unintended consequences might be of allowing small but vital parts of larger systems to be lost. In the words of Joni Mitchell, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”. Or, as John Beddington, Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government, put it in the Foresight Report: “The implications of failing to act [to protect biodiversity] are grave and potentially irreversible, not least for the global food system”.

This is why food manufacturers should take the question of biodiversity seriously, and consider it integral to the food security debate. Cereal company Jordans is a great example of a business that has fully incorporated its commitment to biodiversity into its operations. For over 25 years, it has worked only with grain farmers who dedicate 10% of their land to wildlife habitats.

On a much smaller scale, Nestlé’s award-winning butterfly meadow at Fawden, Newcastle Upon Tyne, demonstrates how to raise awareness and engage employees. The meadow aims to encourage indigenous wildlife, including Large White and Red Admiral butterflies, to an area where there had been little focus on natural habitat.

However, translating awareness into wider action is

a challenge. Not only do market mechanisms currently fail to capture the costs of environmental impacts: they often appear to incentivise habitat destruction, by rewarding an increase in cultivable land, or the overuse of chemicals to increase yields.

Buying from certified sustainable sources frequently involves a price premium, reflecting not only the more limited pool of supply, but also the additional costs of segregation and identity preservation. For many global commodities, the impacts will vary enormously according to where, when and how they are grown and what the alternative land uses might be.

It’s an issue the Food and Drink Federation (FDF) recently addressed in a workshop in collaboration with Forum for the Future, which looked at the practical implications for sourcing wheat. This followed another workshop with WWF, which set out the rationale for food manufacturers to act on supply chain and biodiversity issues.

The supply chain has been a key focus for FDF in the past year, following a review of our Five-fold Environmental Ambition, which has also been effective in cutting waste and reducing the emissions of UK food manufacturers.

Now, we are working on guidance for our members to ensure their environmental performance continues to improve, so that they can feed those seven billion, and counting…

We have no way of knowing which species we can ‘afford’ to squander

Andrew Kuyk is Director of Sustainability and Competitiveness, Food and Drink Federation.

Food and Drink Federation is a Forum for the Future partner. www.fdf.org.uk

Supply chain in flight

amec.com/ukenvironment 40

Green Futures January 2012

www.greenfutures.org.uk

www.greenfutures.org.uk

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The heart of banking

Nudging for values

It’s time to rethink the role of banks in society, says Bevis Watts.

For the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and, by default, for fish, 2011 was a good year.

The number of fisheries in the MSC programme grew by a third, and products certified as made from sustainably sourced fish passed the 12,000 mark.

Meanwhile, research across the major countries where MSC-certified products are on sale showed that nearly one in four adults (23%) now recognises the label, up from 9% in 2008. Recognition is highest in Germany, at 52% of the populace. France comes in at 22%, Britain at 18%, and Japan was least aware at 16%. “The growth in awareness is incredible. While Japan is currently behind other countries we are tracking, the awareness there has doubled since 2008,” says Simon Edwards, global head of communications and marketing at the MSC. “The level of support we are seeing in Japan from retailers, fisheries and the young middle class perfectly illustrates the growing value consumers place on seafood sustainability across the globe.”

However, recognising a label isn’t the same as understanding it. The MSC tests whether consumers can accurately describe what its ecolabel signifies when all the text has been removed. In Britain, only 3% of people could describe the MSC ‘fish tick’ as a mark for sustainable seafood, compared with 17% in Germany. In an ideal world, they would be more informed. But, as Chris Sherwin, a sustainability consultant with brand development agency Dragon Rouge, points out, “a label is a short cut. Consumers don’t have to know the detail, the intricacies of whether a standard is the right one. They’re looking for a badge of trust saying someone else has done the work.”

Edwards concedes there is also a gulf of difference between recognising a brand and buying it. “With all products that have a price premium, including environmentally and socially responsible products, you have to establish the value of it to overcome any barrier to purchase.” For the MSC, this involves a lot of communications activity to build awareness with consumers that their purchasing decision rewards sustainable fisheries.

The latest survey certainly points to a public appetite for this, with 44% claiming to be “very concerned” about seafood sustainability, and agreeing that buying eco-labelled products made a difference.

Yet MSC-labelled products still only account for 6% of the seafood market. Why? In part, of course, it’s due to supply constraints, but research shows that consumers can all too easily forget their values in a retail environment where there are so many other choices on their minds.

Hence the MSC’s new tool: joint marketing campaigns in store, notably with French retail giant

Times Square: Triodos replaces stock market information with social messages

We need smaller banks, and more of them

42

The combination of activists occupying streets across the globe, and the pull of an ever worsening economy, is brewing up the perfect storm for banking. With liquidity pricing at its highest since the fall of Lehman Brothers, it could well get a lot worse. But, despite this, the fundamental role of banks in society still isn’t receiving the attention it deserves.

Perhaps as a society we’ve become so blind to banking’s potential for good that, while we express frustration at the unacceptable behaviour of banks, we can’t actually imagine them doing anything else.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The role of banks is no longer an academic exercise, but a timely and fundamental question.

Picture society as a human body. If money is its lifeblood, then banks should act as society’s heart, pumping it around as needed. If the heart is healthy, the body will be able to access the resources it needs to remain healthy. But without a conscious approach to the flow of money, the malaise in the society will feed back to the banks and infect them. The financial crisis has proven that, when the banks fail, the whole of society suffers. And, after bringing the economy to its knees, it’s morally and practically right that banks take an active role in helping to build it back up again.

So what should the future of banking look like?

We believe that banks should act as enablers of positive change, focusing more on the real economy and supporting its future, rather than short-term shareholder returns. Research commissioned by Triodos shows that five in six people believe their

Green Futures January 2012

How can we persuade consumers to put their money where their mouth is, asks Andrew Purvis.

bank should play a role in helping society. Two thirds (64%) wanted to see more investment in communities. Just 3% of savers feel banks are transparent about what happens to their money.

We can guess why. At present, only a fraction of the money lent and invested by the main banks is used to bring about positive change. Clearly the banks’ customers do not think this is good enough. It’s a call to action for policy-makers, shareholders, and bank executives: they have to ensure the banking sector gives more back to society, rather than just taking.

A compelling alternative would see a shift towards smaller banks, and more of them. This would deliver benefits to society while limiting the financial sector’s potential to harm it. These smaller banks could operate on a human scale. They could specialise, and pass expertise onto their customers. The more focused they can remain on the direct impacts of the finance they provide, the more emphasis they can place on its environmental and social advantages.

The Global Alliance for Banking on Values is an independent network of banks which aims to use finance to deliver sustainable development for people, communities and the environment. It demonstrates how a new model made up of smaller, interconnected banks can work. While they serve very different communities, from urban San Francisco to rural Mongolia, they learn from each other, sharing ideas on long-term sustainable thinking, new forms of ownership and economic cooperation.

Crucially, scaled-down banks would be small enough to fail. One of the cruellest ironies of the financial crisis has been that banks – which often act as judge, jury and executioner for struggling businesses – have not been forced to play by their own rules. Arguably, smaller banks would not benefit from the economies of scale enjoyed by today’s banking behemoths. But, while it’s questionable whether these savings are passed on to the consumer, there’s no doubt what the cost of their failure has been.

The banking industry owes an awful lot to society.

A little open heart surgery is exactly what it needs to start making repayments.

Bevis Watts is Head of Business Banking, Triodos Bank.

Triodos Bank is a Forum for the Future partner. www.triodos.co.uk

www.greenfutures.org.uk

www.greenfutures.org.uk

Carrefour and seafood brands Findus, Connétable and Labeyrie. Known as Les Jours Bleus (Blue Days), the French campaign features evocative images of abundant marine life and colourful front-of-store displays of MSC products. “The in-store campaigns we run in partnership with retailers and brands around the world remind consumers of values that are very important to them”, says Edwards, “at the point of a purchasing decision.” `The campaigns seem to be working. Les Jours Bleus – which Carrefour will host for the third time in 2012 – had a significant effect on sales in 2010. During the 10-day campaign, Connétable sold 10 times more MSC products than in a typical year. Findus reported a 47% increase in sales of MSC-labelled unbreaded products. For Stephanie Mathey, Sustainability Manager at Carrefour, sales are not the only function of Les Jours Bleus: “It’s more an institutional mission, something that enhances Carrefour’s image and makes us stand out. It also raises consumer awareness of responsible fishing.”

So is this the way forward? Chris Sherwin is impressed by the results, but cautions that raising awareness alone may not be enough. And he sets out a challenge for the next stage of MSC’s campaign.

“Our recommendation to nearly every brand is that ethical issues must be a support to a primary benefit.

The big question for the MSC is what is the primary benefit that a good fisheries standard supports? It’s got to be about a direct benefit such as health, quality or taste. Only by addressing that will sustainable seafood become mainstream.”

Shoppers want a badge of trust saying someone else has done the work

Andrew Purvis is a freelance journalist specialising in food, travel and sustainability.

The Marine Stewardship Council is a Forum for the Future Partner. www.msc.org

Supermarkets sway shoppers, says the MSC

Green Futures January 2012

43

Cleaning agents

Of mud and maps

Can a simple laundry additive take pollution off the streets?

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Green Futures January 2012

Ecover is a Forum for the Future Partner www.ecover.com

www.greenfutures.org.uk

Photo: iStockphoto / thinkstock

The aim is to allow us to ‘breathe more beautifully’

Imagine you’re walking down a busy city street. And as you walk, the air around you becomes cleaner. Not because the mere sight of you stops people swearing. The air is literally being cleansed of pollutants, thanks to you. Or rather, your clothes.

Because your jeans, your top – any fabric you’re wearing – are coated in a certain nanoparticulate: titanium dioxide (TiO2) to be precise. This acts as a photocatalyst, using energy from sunlight to break down various pollutants, notably nitrogen oxides from car exhausts – a key constituent of today’s rising quantities of urban smog. The process converts NOx to nitric acid, which in turn reacts with calcium carbonate, locking the gases up in calcium nitrate, while also releasing (very small) quantities of CO2 and water.

It’s a well-established, proven process, increasingly used on a number of buildings [see GF82, p16] and there are experiments underway to incorporate it in road surfaces too.

If it were applied to clothes, though, it would massively increase its pollution-cleaning impact.

Studies have shown that the cleaning properties of TiO2 on buildings only extend to a range of around 25cm or so or so from the wall. People, on the other hand, could act as mobile cleansing agents, covering an area far larger than anything possible with a (static) building as they go about their business around town.

The idea of incorporating photocatalysts in clothes sprang from discussions between Professor

From waterproofs to smooth landings: there’s always a better way to do business.

Photo: iStockphoto / thinkstock

Street cleaners in action?

Tony Ryan of the University of Sheffield, a specialist in polymer nanotechnology, and designer Helen Storey, currently Professor of Fashion and Science at the London School of Fashion. She designed the first ever ‘purifying dress’, displayed as an art installation entitled ‘Herself’, with the aim of allowing us “to breathe more beautifully”. Subsequently, she came up with a ‘Field of Jeans’ – a multitude of denims strung on lines.

Designing a pollution-eating dress is one thing; taking it to scale is another. You can’t realistically (or sustainably) expect people to invest in a whole new photocatalytic wardrobe! So Storey and Ryan approached Ecover, with a view to seeing if the chemical would work as a laundry additive.

It had immediate resonance with the company’s high ecological standards, explains Tom Domen, international products manager. Research is now under way to see just how the TiO2 will perform in practice; in particular, how long it will last after being applied to clothes. At first, researchers considered simply adding it to detergent, but decided it wasn’t necessary to apply it in each washing cycle. So the focus now is on an additive, to be used in the regular wash every now and then.

Inevitably, there will be unease among some at the thought of adding anything ‘nano’ to their wash, although it wouldn’t be the first time that nanoscale TiO2 has been worn close to the skin. As Dolmen points out, it’s already present in a wide range of applications, notably suncream, toothpaste and bright white paint. (The line markings on Wimbledon tennis courts, for example, contain TiO2.) But to allay fears, Ecover is planning on having open discussions with NGOs such as Greenpeace, “to help assure people”, in Dolmen’s words, “that we’re not just replacing one pollutant with another”.

It’s early days yet, but Domen is confident that neither technology nor price will be a major obstacle. “The biggest challenge”, he says, “is how we persuade people that they want to have this.

After all, we’re asking them to do something which, while completely harmless to them, won’t actually be bringing them any direct personal benefits. Rather, they will be a bringing a benefit to the community.”

Time will tell whether people will be prepared to pay for this – and if so, how much. It raises the tantalising question as to whether there’s a business model in altruism. But it would be nice to think that some people at least will be prepared to pay to help others “breathe more beautifully”. – Martin Wright

It’s not about what you do, but how you do it.

Which is why a boot wax company shared the podium with air traffic control at the inaugural Business and the Environment Best Practice Awards, presented by RT Media, chartered architects Scott Brownrigg, and DECISION magazine.

Nikwax is one of those enviable businesses that managed to get quite a lot right from the outset. It was set up by Nick Brown, who’d grown up trekking in the Derbyshire Peaks with his dad, and then discovered the wets and the wilds of Scotland. You don’t get very far up there without a good pair of waterproofed boots, but Brown found that traditional sprays would soften the leather. No rambler wants to choose between dry feet and firmly gripped ankles, so he came up with his own boot wax. It gets round the softening problem by coating the fibres with an elastic polymer, which has similar properties to a boot sole: it’s flexible and resists tear, but draws the fibres back to their original position.

This was the early 80s, when the hole in the ozone layer was just beginning to hit headlines. Brown took note, replacing traditional solvents with a non-aerosol applied water-based emulsion. But what marks his business out now from other 80s start-ups is that Brown also looked at all its potential impacts: from the raw ingredients (preferring vegetable oil or wax-based water repellents to fluoro-chemical ones) to the waste stream – all of which is recycled or converted into fertiliser. He’s exploring ways to cut carbon relative to turnover, and has teamed up with the World Land Trust to offset unavoidable emissions. It’s a business with a pretty sound overall aim, too: making sturdy outdoor clothing that will last a long time so that you don’t need to buy a new pair of hiking boots every time you head for the highlands.

If you’re handing out prizes to green business, you’re likely to spot a friendly firm like Nikwax before you get to NATS, an air traffic control company which handles 2 million flights a year from 15 airports in the UK. But the thinking at NATS is no less bold. It was

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the first air traffic controller in the world to work out the amount of CO2 emitted by planes as they travel through the 2.5 million square miles of airspace it controls: 70,000 tonnes a year. And it was the first to set a target to reduce it – by an average 10% per flight, against a 2006 baseline, by 2020.

One carbon-cutting solution NATS promotes is a better flight profile to optimise fuel consumption.

It teamed up with British Airways and BAA to run a commercial trial flight from Edinburgh to Heathrow, demonstrating potential carbon savings of 10%, by cutting 0.35 tonnes of fuel.

The company estimates that cutting the carbon footprint of flights under its control by just 1% today would save the airlines £45 million a year: not a bad way to encourage change in an intensely competitive field.

“NATS don’t operate the airports, and they don’t own or fly the planes”, observes Larry Dilner, Publisher of DECISION magazine, and a judge for the Business and Environment Best Practice Awards.

So why are they doing it? “NATS will tell you it’s about leadership”, explains Dilner – and this is what impressed the jury.

Other ‘world firsts’ to be recognised by the Awards included overall winner IBM: the first company ever to publish an environmental policy, some 40 years ago. By 2013, it will require all its 28,000 suppliers to do the same; some of them, representing 80% of its $37.4 billion annual spend, already do, measuring their performance and publicly disclosing the results.

Pureprint also received an award, as the first printers to become carbon neutral and early adopters of waterless and alcohol-free printing.

So, good news for those having a green epiphany.

You don’t have to change your day job: just do it differently. – Anna Simpson

Cutting carbon of flights under NATS’s control by just 1% would save airlines £45 million a year

Pureprint Group is a Forum for the Future partner. www.pureprint.com

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No.82 October 2011

No.82 Octo ber

2011

Material world Mate rial world What will we use to build the future?

What will we us e to build the

future?

Big brother gone green: can surveillance save the planet?

Big brother gonefor Shopped out: a world of difference tomorrow’s consumer gree Shopped n: can surv out: eilla Bouncing ideas: the creative power of ld warm bodies in a nce room a wor save the Bouncing of differenc planet? ideas: the creative pow e for tomorrow’s con sumer er of warm bodies in a room

Missed opportunities in the carbon market It is great that the board of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is making it easier for pro-poor technologies [such as clean cookstoves] to get funding [see ‘Funding boost for small-scale renewables, GF82, p7].

Unfortunately the price for CDM credits is headed south, and unless political leaders take clear action to protect and grow the carbon market, great opportunities will be missed.

Europe needs to strengthen its Emissions Trading Scheme by tightening the cap on emissions (so reducing the supply of carbon permits), and climate negotiators need to make real progress on climate finance and the long-term future of a global deal.

In a few short years – despite teething problems and controversy – the carbon market has demonstrated its ability get things done. We must build on that progress, not throw it away.

Michael Buick, ClimateCare

Recession rider There’s logic in Sally Uren’s argument [‘How to ride high through a double dip’, GF82, p37]. Realistically, though, it’s hard to imagine that most people will take her advice. Instead, it seems likely that attention to green issues and the take-up of green solutions will decline further, as the economic climate continues to suffer. Matt

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Green Futures January 2012

Materials and methods As Skanska has recognised [‘Prize supplies’, GF82, p42], it is incredibly hard to identify and then weigh up the sustainability features of innovative products. It might be recycled, but is it low on embedded water? It could be low-carbon, but does it provide the amenity value required? Buyers who understand that sustainability is an interdependent web of features are constantly faced with questions like this.

Now the Environment Agency, British Waterways, Halcrow, Interserve and GallifordTry Infrastructure have been working together to build a methodology that robustly assesses the sustainability credentials of a given material. We’re hoping this method will be made available across the industry, once it has been piloted fully by the EA, BW and their supply chains.

You can see updates on the project – including the criteria groups we’re proposing – at: http://www.forumforthefuture.org/ project/engineers-21st-century/more/sus.

Anna Warrington, Senior Sustainability Advisor, Forum for the Future

Beyond the peepoor Whilst the peepoo bag [‘When plastic bags save lives’, GF82, p7] might be useful for emergency relief work, it can only ever be a short-term solution. It’s no substitute for people having access to clean water and safe sanitation which is a far more sustainable outcome – and far better for people’s health. Julie

Electric uncertainties With regard to ‘City break out’ [GF82, p40], I would like to know whether anyone has actually provided – or indeed seen – any real data or calculations which demonstrate that electric vehicles using charge points will: • h ave a beneficial impact on the planet, for example in terms of carbon footprint, infrastructure requirement affecting the landscape, etc • b e any cheaper than fossil fuels for the end consumer • w ill not end up being taxed in exactly the same manner as fossil fuels are at the moment.

Why are we still focusing on constantly recharging equipment via

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a huge infrastructure? Why are we not concentrating on ‘true’ sustainability, whereby cars can recharge themselves on the go, using self-generating energy technology?

Whilst I appreciate that products have an evolutionary nature, which means that they grow in sophistication as time goes on, the electric charge point debate has been running for some time. Given the fact that politicians are notorious for having shortterm mindsets, I fear that what looks like a good idea now will be redundant in fiveten years’ time. Paul Stuart Brennan, Ecotricity, replies: Most of the infrastructure requirements in terms of power supplies already exist; all you need is a post in the service station grounds. We supply electricity from our windmills, so it has a relatively small carbon footprint. As to [running] costs, electric cars cost about 2p per mile compared to a small petrol car that costs about 14p per mile.

On the question of whether cars could recharge themselves “on the go using selfgenerating energy technology”, I’m pretty sure this would contravene the second law of thermodynamics.

Apply now for 2012-13 Deadline: Weds 14th March 2012 Course dates: Sept 2012 – July 2013

Correction In ‘City break out’ [GF82, p40], you state: “A fast top-up [at the electric recharging point] can take around 20 minutes, which can get some modern batteries up to 80%...”

This is incorrect. We’ve always been fairly vague about how much energy you could get in 20 minutes, mainly because there is much variation between vehicle types, between different batteries and between the same types of batteries depending on their age.

A more accurate line would be: “A topup using fast charge can take around 20 minutes, or there’s a full charge available if you’ve got two hours, a more likely option for those enjoying a lazy lunch.”

Stuart Brennan, Ecotricity

For more details and to download the application form please visit:

forumforthefuture.org/masters-course

Do you see your future in a leadership role, transforming the systems that currently prevent individuals and organisations from behaving sustainably? Then this is the course for you.

The Forum Masters programme gives 12 recent graduates the opportunity to develop their theoretical understanding of sustainability, as well as gaining practical experience through work placements with Forum for the Future’s partner organisations. Students receive tuition from a diverse group of experts, including Jonathon Porritt, Sara Parkin, Ian Christie and Paul Ekins.

Paris moves Glorious photograph, and beautifully written, thought-provoking article about a forward-looking debate [greenfutures. org.uk/articles/paris-move].

Thank you for sharing. I enjoyed watching the TV version too. Joyce Simpson

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Photos: xxxxx

greengfutures reenfutur es

www.greenfutures.org.uk letters@greenfutures.org.uk @GreenFutures Comments may be edited for publication.

This MA programme is run jointly by Middlesex University and the sustainability non-profit Forum for the Future. www.greenfutures.org.uk

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Experiential, work based learning has been one of the fundamental cornerstones of this year.

I do not think I have ever learnt so much, from so many extraordinary experiences, and people, in such a short space of time Celia Cole, 2009-10

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47

We do need growth. But we absolutely don’t need heedless growth

48

I normally kick off with the good news.

This time, let me start with a bit of the bad. In fact, quite a lot of bad news.

The official CO2 figures for 2010 tell us that overall emissions increased by 6%, at a time when half the world’s economies were flat-lining in terms of economic growth. China and India were of course responsible for much of that increase – no flat-lining there.

Did any world leader, on hearing this news, even twitch? Make a speech? Press a panic button?

Not one.

Welcome to the ‘new normal’. I nicked that phrase from Vice-President Al Gore, who I heard give a cracking talk back in October. He did something I’ve not heard anyone do before, by concentrating purely on the weather-related data from the first eight months of 2011. During that time, 387 million people were affected by drought. More than 2,000 US cities experienced their highest ever temperatures. More than a dozen countries experienced the ir worst ever flooding – which doesn’t include Pakistan, by the way, because the 2011 floods in Pakistan displaced a mere 10 million people, in comparison to the 20 million displaced in 2010. Massive media coverage in 2010.

Come 2011, however, we heard next to nothing from that devastated country. Welcome to the new normal.

The worse the news gets, the more adept people become in letting it bounce straight back off them. As US political scientist George Lakoff puts it: “We may be presented with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise, facts go in and then they come right back out. They are not heard, or they are not accepted as facts, or they simply mystify us.”

Global leaders are presiding more or less helplessly over another massive economic crisis. To which the standard response is: grow, grow and grow again. It doesn’t matter if this growth drives up emissions of greenhouse gases, exacerbates inequalities, creates new commodity bubbles, erodes life-support systems, and leaves billions of people even more vulnerable to water shortages, rising food prices, and diminishing quality of life. Growth at any cost is better than no growth at all…

The uncomfortable reality is that we do need growth, but we absolutely don’t need this kind of heedless growth. We need growth that drives billions of dollars of new investment and creates millions

Green Futures January 2012

of jobs in energy efficiency, renewables, retrofitting our built environment, smart grids, electric vehicles, storage technologies and so on. Indeed, this is the only way we can both sort out the economic mess and simultaneously start building the foundations for the genuinely sustainable economy of the future.

Back in November, Forum for the Future teamed up with the Energy Institute at UCL and investment company WHEB Partners to launch Jeremy Rifkin’s new book, ‘The Third Industrial Revolution’ [see ‘The future is lateral’, p26]. And here comes the good news.

Many of the most creative people we’re working with at the Forum can barely contain their enthusiasm for innovation in almost all areas of cleantech. The Briefings section in each issue of Green Futures offers just a glimpse of that pipeline. And many of the most creative minds in ICT are equally excited about the contribution they can make in a low-carbon world, through smart meters and grids, local area networks, distributed energy systems, and so on.

This is the synergy that underpins Rifkin’s case that we’re on the cusp of the Third Industrial Revolution.

Efficiency, renewables, storage and smart grids will add up to an energy revolution. All the constituent parts are already out there, or ‘in emergence’. But, Rifkin argues, the full impact will only be felt when the whole system is transformed into a new kind of “energy internet”, through peer-to-peer networks.

This is the easy bit! Unfortunately, getting politicians to start thinking strategically about this kind of transition remains a nightmare. Jeremy Rifkin has built up good political contacts in Europe, particularly in Germany, but I don’t share his optimism that this is an agenda that has already seized hold of the majority of politicians. There’s certainly no sign of it here in the UK. Our Treasury-dominated Coalition Government would appear to have no intention of doing more than the bare minimum on the Green Economy, let alone on some new industrial revolution. As George Osborne so witheringly put it, when explaining the Government’s new strategy: “We’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business”.

There you have it: that’s what ‘leadership’ looks like here in the UK. And the US. And, to be blunt about it, most other countries, with Germany the exception to the rule of mediocrity.

Which explains why so much of the drive and creativity around the low-carbon agenda can be seen in small cleantech start-ups and social enterprises. These are the real ‘revolutionaries’, cursing dysfunctional politicians and rejecting any sense of ‘the new normal’ out of hand.

Abnormal times summon forth abnormal people.

Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future. www.jonathonporritt.com

www.greenfutures.org.uk

Photos: xxxxx

JonathonPorritt

www.greenfutures.org.uk

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