Energy

Background

Imagine that the average U.S. dishwasher is only 65% full when run, but you had the power to ensure that all dishwasher loads were filled to capacity.  Massive water savings and reduced energy consumption come to mind, but what about less detergent use, and scaling back on the substantial resources needed to produce and transport detergent?

By replacing wood and plastic pallets with lightweight corrugated cardboard pallets, we can ensure that U.S. truck shipments are much closer to 100% than currently is the case.  And yet we don’t.

Let’s change that, starting with some directional numbers:   

• • Wood pallets weighing approximately 50 pounds each are loaded with product and shipped on semi-trailer trucks (“semi’s”) 
• • An estimated 5 billion such loaded wood pallets are shipped in the U.S. each year (based on 2 billion pallets in circulation, used 5 times or less)
• • Assuming an average of 20 pallets per truck equates to 250 million truck shipments 
• • Applying the conservative assumption of only 400 miles per trip takes us to 100 billion truck miles per year

How much is 100 billion truck miles?  The equivalent of driving to Mars and back...more than seventy (70) times.

These 250 million trucks, each traveling 400 miles -- and hypothetically weighing 65,000 per truck -- will use over 1.66 billion gallons of diesel and emit nearly 170 million metric tons of CO2e(carbon dioxide equivalent) annually.

Lightweight corrugated cardboard pallets are as effective as other pallets. Photo Credit: Change the Pallet

Corrugated pallets weigh only ~10 pounds, so “changing the pallet” would lower the amount of pallet weight alone shipped each year in the U.S. by ~200 billion pounds.  Doing so would theoretically save 205 million gallons of diesel and emit some 21 million fewer metric tons of CO2e annually (based on a 10% drop in fuel consumption).

While intuitive, this model does not hold in the real world, where vast CO2e reductions are driven by filling space, not reducing weight.

As an architecture student at The Bartlett, UCL, I realised that coffee was being wasted everywhere. Coffee pours out of major urban centres: coffee shops, cafes, office blocks, museums, factories, airports. Anywhere people pass through, huge volumes of coffee grounds were being thrown away into landfill at an enormous economic and environmental cost. In fact, over 500,000 tonnes of waste coffee grounds are produced each year in the UK alone, with 200,000 tonnes from London.

Approaching the problem of coffee waste from an outside perspective, and using sustainability as the driving force behind my ideas, I set out to re-imagine this life cycle. The conceptual leap here was to simply turn this problem on its head. I started with the simple premise that there is no such thing as waste, simply resources in the wrong place.

Coffee waste is transformed into useful energy by bio-bean. Photo credit: bio-bean

In two years, bio-bean has become the first company in the world to industrialise turning waste coffee grounds into advanced biofuels. We have raised several million in finance, built the world’s first waste coffee recycling factory and a team of over twenty people.

bio-bean produces biomass pellets, used for heating buildings and in the near future coffee oil that can be refined into biodiesel, used in transport systems. bio-bean’s factory, the first in the world to recycle waste coffee grounds into advanced biofuels at an industrial scale, has the capacity to process 50,000 tonnes of waste coffee grounds each year. That’s one in ten cups of coffee drunk in the UK every year!

bio-bean is a small company interfacing with large corporations that dominate existing systems (such as the waste management industry and coffee supply chain). As the first company in the world to industrialise the process of recycling waste coffee grounds, the policy infrastructure also doesn’t exist to support bio-bean yet. By demonstrating the commercial and environmental advantages of our process has allowed bio-bean to successfully interface with partners at every scale. Most importantly, we have created a fantastic team of people, united under the vision of closing the loop on coffee waste.

The bio-bean process, find out more at bio-bean.com. Credit: bio-bean

bio-bean was set up in response to the challenges of the near future - pollution, transport, housing, food, water, energy, waste, overpopulation, physical and mental well-being equality and climate change - these are not global problems but uniquely urban ones. And if they are caused by cities it will fall to cities to solve them.

The shape of our future and that of our planet depends entirely on how we organise and evolve urban systems. Approaching tomorrow with a spirit of creativity, applying sustainable solutions to create opportunities - this will play a crucial role in all of our futures.

bio-bean is the first company to industrialise the process of recycling waste coffee grounds. Photo credit: bio-bean

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bio-bean is an award-winning clean technology company that recycles waste coffee grounds into advanced biofuels. To find out more visit: bio-bean.com

Whether you’re traveling to work, vacation, or just for a night out, before you reach for those car keys consider these eight benefits of using alternative transportation. Jumping on a train, saddling a bike, or sharing a ride could have payoffs for your health, the planet, and your pocketbook.

While official policy-makers and intergovernmental bodies struggle to establish the agreements and frameworks that could, in a few bold strokes, free us from our carbon dependency, a revolution by 10,000 cuts is already taking effect in the private sector.

It is happening in the supply-chains of some of the world's largest corporations. Companies that in the past regarded sustainability and the green agenda as anti-business are beginning to embrace these concepts as a necessity for survival and an opportunity to build competitive advantage.

According to calculations by the CDP, the scope 1 and 2 emissions of G500 companies equates to roughly 10% of global emissions. For most companies, scope 3 emissions, including their supply-chains, are far bigger still. So maximising efficiencies across these supply-chains, re-engineering them as closed energy and resource loops, would make a huge difference. Fortunately, this is already happening, not by implementing a few big, silver bullet reforms, but by making thousands of small changes.

Adapted social media technology is enabling what we at 2degrees call "fully-linked collaboration". This is where anybody in a company with a problem or challenge can quickly and easily find someone else from another company with relevant experience, or even the very solution that they need.

This new, super-connectivity allows best practices to be identified, shared and disseminated very rapidly. In food manufacturing, in Europe alone, it is estimated that €22.5bn could be savedin this way by implementing best practices in energy management across the supply chain. (See 'Joining Forces – the case for collaboration').

However, this is not easy. It requires large-scale sharing of experience, know-how and insights, often between competitors. It requires an online platform, facilitation and processes to enable fully-linked collaboration.

Here are eight non-technology lessons we have learnt from doing this with our clients (including Asda-Walmart, Bord Bia, GlaxoSmithKline, Kingfisher, Royal Bank of Scotland, Tesco) that we believe are critical to making fully-linked collaboration work within a supply chain. They are written from the perspective of the business customer at the top of the value chain.

1. Fully-linked collaboration programmes need to be built from the perspective of maximising value for your suppliers. Get that right, and communicate it effectively, and you will drive engagement by the suppliers. Focus primarily on your needs and you make it hard for yourself. Ever wondered why asking for data from suppliers is so difficult?

2. The most important stakeholders to get involved are the operational managers (those practical folks with responsibility for energy, factory sites, production lines, packaging, waste, etc.). These are generally the out-of-sight individuals with the responsibility, challenges and collective know-how to unlock the hidden savings and reduce impacts. Make your programmes solve their problems and unlock their wisdom.

3. To be really effective, programmes have to be focused on a common measurable objective that all suppliers can get behind. This is where you, the customer, must lead. As an example, in our work with Asda-Walmart's Sustain and Save Exchange, the focus is on making its food supply chain the best-invested, most resilient and sustainable one out there with a clear target of $1bn cost reduction.

4. Benchmarking peers and competitors, as a group, is a very powerful way to get skeptics engaged. Suppliers tend to pay attention and join in if you can show them they are less energy efficient than their direct competitors and promise to share the best practices they are missing.

5. To be in a position where companies are prepared to share their best practices with competitors you need to have commercial teams leading (not CSR), providing a compelling incentive for suppliers to share. The incentive could be a reward in the form of: better terms, longer contracts, more time spent on joint promotions, etc.

6. Only so much happens without active facilitation. This is best done by a third party (we would say that, but see below). You need someone who understands the suppliers as companies and individuals, is trusted and can constantly connect the dots, link people up and encourage participation.

7. Use collaborative purchasing to solve common problems within the supply-chain and take advantage of the potential scale to drive down the cost of solutions. This also creates an important focal point of action for all the knowledge-sharing. As an example, Tesco's Buying Club saves its suppliers on average 25% off the cost of installing LED lights retrofitted into distribution centers. (LED lights cut the cost of electricity and carbon for lighting about 60%.)

8. The big breakthroughs (like Tesco's Buying Club, above) won't happen openly in front of the customer. Suppliers are too nervous that any savings they might make will be stripped away in negotiation if their customers know about them.

This is a further reason why you need third-party, trusted facilitation, that can enable, what some call, blind collaboration where data is collected anonymously so that suppliers feel they can keep most, if not all, of the savings they make.

When all eight of these principles are applied, fully-linked collaboration takes place and something remarkable happens: Firstly, engagement and collaboration levels amongst suppliers soar, with often more than 70% of the key operational management participating, at least once a month. Secondly, suppliers make investments in energy, waste and water reduction initiatives that they would not otherwise make.

In fact, we now have evidence that for every $1 the customer invests in managing fully-linked collaboration programmes, suppliers can invest up to $20, and make savings of $40 (over five years).

If we do this on a large scale, we will soon be removing billions of dollars in costs and related impacts from our supply chains. These cost reductions, as well as the energy and resource efficiencies put in place, will go at least part of the way to make up for the lack of attention to environmental care-taking from our public policy-makers.

Article was originally posted on the Guardian