• Building A Sustainable Company — Part I

    by vkanal on April 20, 2010

    Clients who are new to building sustainability in their organizations often ask what their first steps should be. Recognizing that every company has a different set of business goals, hierarchy and culture, we recommend a valuable first step: start by measuring all things related to carbon emission, energy and resource consumption, and waste.

    Even if it's not a precise measurement, a quantified approximation will establish a baseline against which all of your future efforts can be compared. Then, we recommend that you look across your industry and even beyond, to see what leading companies have achieved in lowering their environmental footprint. Based on this external benchmarking, you can begin to set goals and prioritize your own sustainability initiatives.

    This prioritization must include input from, and assessment of the impact on different stakeholders, including customers, employees and investors. Draw up a Materiality Matrix that shows the relationship between impact on stakeholders and the impact on the company. This matrix can form the basis of setting the company’s strategy on sustainability.

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  • The Car, 2.0

    by sskees on April 5, 2010

    Is the world ready for a new generation of cars, particularly the electric kind? There are at least 41 teams hard at work, and competing, on the assumption that the world is not just ready, but that it’s in desperate need for Car 2.0.

    Energy and transportation analysts as well as green media sites like Earth2Tech have begun using the Car 2.0 moniker and predicting a sizable market opportunity. The new electric car infrastructure has implications beyond reducing the highly toxic impact that current fossil fuel transportation has on the environment. Electric cars will link to the smart grid, making them efficient and connected communicating transportation.

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  • New in Sustainable Minds Release 1.2

    by sustainableminds on March 19, 2010

    This release makes it easier to purchase for use on a short-term project, purchase for your school, and distribute and include assessment results in all your presentations.

    Printable and exportable assessment results
    Now just click a button to print results views to a file (such as PDF), or saved as HTML files for inclusion in presentations, web sites, workshops or simply to print to share with the team. Additionally, results from each concept can be downloaded as a file. SBOM items are displayed by life cycle, and include the scores for all items, including impact category results. When you’re designing a greener product, Sustainable Minds LCA results in your presentation means you’ll have quantified information to support your design and manufacturing recommendations.

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  • Sustainable Minds: Candidate for WEF Technology Pioneers 2011

    by sustainableminds on March 9, 2010

    2010 is turning out to be an incredible year for Sustainable Minds. We recently found out that Sustainable Minds has been nominated as a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer Candidate for 2011.

    The World Economic Forum is an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world. It’s motto is 'entrepreneurship in the global public interest.’ The WEF engages world leaders in partnerships to shape global, regional and industry agendas and is well known by its annual meeting in Davos in January every year.

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  • Patagonia – A Good Model for a Post Consumer Era Manufacturing Company

    by Guest contributors on February 22, 2010

    This post by guest contributor Gerard Furbershaw, designer, speaker, co-founder and COO of LUNAR, first appeared on LUNAR’s blog. He has served as President and Chairman of the Board of the Association of Professional Design Firms, Chairman of the San Francisco chapter of the Industrial Designers Society of America, and is a Trustee of the Design Foundation.

    Manufacturing companies interested in transitioning to sustainable business models would benefit from considering what Patagonia has done. Through a combination of their values, mission, life cycle assessments, and actions, they have become pioneers on the path towards sustainability.

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  • Part III: What intrinsic qualities enable sustainable built environments?

    by khall on February 15, 2010

    This is the third of a three-part posting on the concept of intrinsic sustainability. In this post, Ken Hall describes the intrinsic qualities of sustainable built environments.
    Read Part I: What intrinsic qualities enable sustainable societies?
    Read Part II: What intrinsic qualities enable sustainable design teams?

    In the last two blogs I discussed what it took to create sustainable societies and sustainable design teams. I’ll close this series on the idea of intrinsic sustainability by discussing the most obvious and ubiquitous public expression of a society and its culture: the built environment.

    The history of architecture reveals indigenous design solutions that are intrinsically sustainable- they operated on solar income, the materials were local and non-toxic, and comfort was maintained with mass, ventilation, solar energy or seasonal migration.

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  • Part II: What intrinsic qualities enable sustainable design teams?

    by khall on February 8, 2010

    This is the second of a three-part posting on the concept of intrinsic sustainability. In this post, Ken Hall describes the intrinsic qualities of sustainable design teams. Read Part I: What intrinsic qualities enable sustainable societies?

    My last post ended with the thought that the degree to which a society is able to shift its worldviews to become intrinsically sustainable is the degree to which we can achieve sustainability. David Korten calls this The Great Turning.

    As the website devoted to Korten’s ideas explains, “…we humans are a choice making species that at this defining moment faces both the opportunity and the imperative to choose our future as a conscious collective act. We can no longer deny the need nor delay our response.”

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  • Sustainable Minds and MAGNET Partner to Advance Sustainability in Manufacturing

    by sustainableminds on February 3, 2010

    We are happy to announce a new partnership with MAGNET, The Manufacturing Advocacy & Growth Network, a professional organization that is focused on helping manufacturing and technology-based companies in Ohio adopt innovative methods and technologies.

    Manufacturers are struggling to learn how to adopt sustainable practices in their current processes, and this partnership will help advance the adoption of greener product design practices for manufacturers. This partnership will also serve to assist Magnet’s eco-SMART Manufacturing Program to deliver education to Ohio manufacturers about sustainable manufacturing and ecoInnovation strategies.

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  • The AfriGadget Blog: a study in doing more with less

    by lcraig on February 1, 2010

    Are North Americans just a bit too comfortable to design products for the next century? Sure, we can readily see the need for a latte maker that gets firmer foam from organic soy milk, or a computer mouse that lets us spend 4 more hours a day at our Dickensian digital drudge-stations. But is this what the world really needs right now, when a billion people are living on less than $2 a day?

    These are the questions that go through my mind as I read the AfriGadget Blog, a showcase of bootstrap product design (sometimes using pieces from actual boots) as practiced by innovators all across the African continent. A team of blog contributors and readers contribute pictures, videos and stories to this fascinating blog that are “a testament to Africans bending the little they have to their will, using creativity to overcome life’s challenges,” according to the editors.

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  • Greenpeace releases its guide to greener electronics

    by sustainableminds on January 25, 2010

    Technology companies are starting to understand that sustainability is increasingly important to their customers. But as a consumer, how do you measure ‘green-ness’ across products that are sourced all over the world, and are combinations of processes that include hundreds of vendors? Recently, Greenpeace announced its ranking of 18 electronics companies at the Consumer Electronics Show (what better place?), along with a point-by-point breakdown of how they arrived at their scores. Categories include chemicals management , PVC-free and/or BFR-free models, voluntary take-back, use of recycled plastic content, and eleven more. This year, the leaders are Apple, Sony Ericsson and Nokia. Trailing the pack are Nintendo, Microsoft and Lenovo.
    Read more

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