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By Alexis Caffrey

Nowadays, incorporating sustainability into your communications plan is a fundamental part of a company’s success. In fact, consumers around the world are more likely to be loyal to a company that incorporates sustainable practices into their business.

Highlighting your company’s sustainability effort, and being transparent to the public, can be profitable for your company. By promoting your company’s green technology, or social and environmental initiatives, your company can benefit by receiving positive PR exposure and connecting with new target markets.

Let’s take a look at how some industries have seamlessly worked sustainability into their communication efforts in order to increase profitability.

A focus on metrics and transparency

Unilever and Heinz are two large brands that have made sustainable living a large piece of their marketing plans and business practices. You’ll even notice on each of their websites that “sustainable living” is a main menu item.

Unilever heavily relies on metrics and reporting to communicate its sustainability efforts to the public. In fact, the packaged goods company's website is filled with updates on its performance in real time. Interactive charts display economic, social and environmental performance data. Stakeholders are given the opportunity to view Unilever’s environmental impacts and data and share information via social media. In fact, stakeholders, including the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan Steering Team, external advisors and consumers, are able to offer feedback about Unilever’s efforts.

Heinz is another company that has emphasizes sustainability on its website. Like Unilever, it focuses on transparency and reporting to convey its sustainability efforts to stakeholders and consumers. According to its website, Heinz's efforts include cutting a ton of energy per ton of product in its manufacturing process, as well as reducing waste to landfill. Its program is so impressive that Heinz has won awards and recognition for being a sustainability leader.

By being completely transparent, and updating reports on an ongoing basis, these companies have been able to reach a broader audience, while capturing the trust of their current stakeholders and consumers. Their sophisticated and interactive websites will set the tone for companies in the future when looking to integrate their sustainable efforts and public facing communications.

Best practice example: Finding a new use for an old product

The gutter protection industry usually advertises that they protect a home from serious and costly damage that is associated with clogged gutters. While this is true, most people are unaware that gutter protection systems help with rainwater reclamation.

By using a micromesh gutter protection system, like Leaf Filter, homeowners can flow fresh rainwater through their rain gutters and downspouts, and into rain barrels. The rainwater can be used for lawn care, gardening, filling swimming pools and, with treatment, brought into the home to fulfill water needs. In return, rainwater harvesting puts less strain on their municipal water supply, and makes it an appealing solution to lessen a homeowner’s water and sewage bills.

Most recently, the gutter protection industry has been able to highlight and promote this benefit across social media and on their websites. By adding green and sustainable communications to their marketing plan, and promoting it on social media and their website, the gutter protection industry has been able to pique a new audience’s attention.

Do your research: Use the right buzzwords

When it comes to communicating your sustainability efforts, incorporating green buzzwords can have real implications on your marketing communication efforts.

The Shelton Group, a leading marketing communications firm focused on energy and environment, tested 11 popular green buzzwords to find out how consumers felt when they saw a certain buzzword associated with sustainability. Interestingly, 67 percent of consumers responded positively to the word “green,” while 63 percent of them noted it was important. “Eco-friendly” and “sustainable” are also buzzwords that resonate with consumers.

The Shelton Group’s research is extremely interesting and helpful when determining what type of green jargon is appropriate to use in a marketing communications plan. We suggest downloading the organization's study to learn more about using appropriate green terms, and conducting your own research with a focus group that is specific to your industry.

Key takeaways

Over time, there will be a greater emphasis and media attention on sustainable corporate practices. We have already seen many successful companies successfully integrate their sustainable efforts into a communication plan through traditional and non-traditional methods.

Undoubtedly, companies that are integrating sustainable efforts – whether it is through lowering emissions, improved energy efficiency or promoting equitable working environments – have a distinct advantage in their industry. Not only will these efforts help companies be more profitable, but their sustainability efforts will also reduce their environment footprint, while increasing their positive social impact.

Image courtesy of Heinz (screenshot) 

Alexis Caffrey is a freelance writer who enjoys writing about all things related to home improvement and sustainability. She welcomes your feedback via email - alexiscaffreywriter@gmail.com.

Around half of employees aware of misconduct do not ‘speak up’ about their concerns, evidence from the IBE Ethics at Work Survey shows. And that’s putting businesses in Europe at risk, it warns.

“Weak speak up arrangements leave companies vulnerable. If boards do not know what is going on, they cannot protect their businesses against crisis,” comments Philippa Foster Back, director of the Institute of Business Ethics (IBE).

The IBE Ethics at Work Survey, which first launched in 2005, helps to discover what employees think about the way corporate values are applied in their workplace in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

Results from this latest survey show that while corporate ethics programmes have matured, and now appear to be embedded in many organizations, nearly half of employees (45%) are not willing to raise their concerns about misconduct. And of those that did speak up, the proportion who say that they were not satisfied with the outcome has doubled.

Simon Webley, IBE’s research director adds: “Just over 60% of those who did speak up say they were dissatisfied with what happened next (compared with 30% in 2012). Why this happens needs addressing if organisations wish employees to have confidence that something will be done if they raise concerns of a potentially serious ethical problem.”

Access the full report here.

 

For full analysis of the report, read the December issue of Ethical Performance. Subscribe today!
 

It's time for a fresh look at fast fashion. Trendy, affordable brands like H&M, Uniqlo and Zara are often criticized for perpetuating waste by encouraging consumers to buy clothes to match the trend of the season. Indeed, Americans landfilled 19 million tons of textiles in 2013 (PDF). That's 16 pounds of textile waste for every American. But what if the fibers in those clothes could be separated and repurposed into new garments? If the industry creates a closed loop, the waste problem is lessened substantially.

H&M has made a big splash in the clothing recycling community with its partnership with I:CO. The company's goal is to create a closed loop for fashion. It's a pretty audacious goal -- one the retail clothing giant hasn't quite figured out how to meet -- but it's doing it anyway. Clothing collected from drop bins located in every H&M store is sorted, and items that can't be reused are disassembled down to the basic fibers. These fibers can be rewoven into cloth to sew new clothes. Customers are incentivized to participate with coupons and discounts on their purchases.

I sat down with H&M's global sustainable business expert, Pierre Börjesson, at BSR 2015 to get the lowdown on the program. Börjesson explained that there's a large consumer base that loves fashion and wants to lighten their impact too. The company wants to meet them where they are and give them a better product.

To that end, H&M has committed to collecting used clothing in all of its stores around the world and processing it down to the fiber level to figure out how to reuse it. The company may not have the entire loop fully closed, or even know exactly how it's going to get that way, but it's going to try. It's a moral imperative. As Börjesson explained to me when talking about the steps his competitors are taking: "I can understand how a company may not know how to do this, but that's no excuse for not jumping in."

I asked about the "fashion/impact" nexus -- is there a point at which it's too environmentally intensive to process clothes for reuse? Börjesson reminded me that it would probably always be a lower environmental impact than growing cotton from seed with the pesticides and water needed to produce a high-quality crop and gin it to make it useable in the manufacturing process. Touché.

The challenge

H&M is trying to build a market for fiber processing. As Andrew Morlet, CEO of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, explained during a BSR panel on the circular economy: "We want clothing to be more like paper – technical, biological fiber that can work in a reusable system."

For H&M, cotton in particular is a challenge. It's the fiber the company buys the most, and it's delicate. The fibers break easily in the recycling process -- making it difficult to use to produce the same high-quality fabric. But that has not stopped H&M. The company has committed to 100 percent sustainable cotton by 2020. This is a big step up from current levels -- 21 percent sustainable cotton in 2014. Fourteen percent of total materials are sustainable overall, and cotton is the biggest share of textiles.

Sustainable cotton includes post-consumer recycled cotton, certified organic cotton and cotton from the Better Cotton Intiative. Recycled cotton and polyester is currently in use -- up to 20 percent of the fibers in the final product. Those numbers will improve over time as processes improve, Börjesson was quick to explain, and I agree with him. Don't believe me? Look at the recycled paper industry. It once wasn't possible to even find 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper, but now it is very high-quality and easy to find at any office supply store.

Another big challenge is mixed materials like cotton-poly blends. While these garments are more difficult to disassemble, the blending improves durability, so we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Börjesson said: "If we start to design for disassembly [favoring 100 percent cotton or 100 percent polyester over the mix], we reduce durability, so we need to figure out how to disassemble efficiently. [We] want high-quality fibers to reuse."

As Morlet put it: "We need to think about materials as technical flows in a natural system. We make packaging that lasts in recognizable forms for 400 years. It’s a design problem."

Reinventing the system to create a closed loop is a big undertaking, but H&M is approaching it in the correct manner: focusing on customer engagement and education, materials collection, breakdown, and incorporation into new products all at once. Each step must improve, and the company can only improve incrementally, but the entire cycle represents a sea change in the industry.

For example, once the used clothing is collected, all the sorting is quite labor intensive. It must be done manually, which is expensive. I:CO is working with H&M to research and develop mechanical solutions to solve this problem, which will make recycling programs easier to scale.

Becoming a clothing recycler has cost H&M money, but that does not mean that it's a cost center. As Börjesson puts it, this project is an investment in a future opportunity -- to develop the processes that will turn waste into gold and a competitive advantage for the company. There's a lot of room for improvement given that 85 percent of textiles currently end up in a landfill. That's one of the poorest recycling rates of any reusable material.

H&M is really on to something when it says there's no rule in fashion but one: Recycle your clothes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4xnyr2mCuI

Image credits: H&M 1; H&M 2

Last Tuesday was an election day in the U.S. This is of course off-election year, and therefore this day could be easily ignored unless your kids go to public school and you had to find an alternate arrangement for them -- or you’re Airbnb.

Yes, Airbnb, one of the leading companies in the sharing economy was involved in a fight over Proposition F in San Francisco: “a measure that would have imposed substantial restrictions on Airbnb rentals in the city,” including a reduction of the number of days that Airbnb hosts in the city can rent their places (from 90 to 75 per year).

So, who won? The measure was voted down 56 percent to 44 percent, and Airbnb as you could imagine was extremely happy about the results. "Tonight, in a decisive victory for the middle class, voters stood up for working families' right to share their homes and opposed an extreme, hotel industry-backed measure," Airbnb said in a statement that could easily be used in November 2016 with some light changes by the Clinton campaign, if it will be able to generate similar results.

But did Airbnb actually win? Even though the measure was voted down, and Airbnb wants to export its campaign strategy against the proposition to other cities around the world where it faces similar challenges, I’m not sure the company really won.

Here are five things to consider when answering this question:

Narrative change No. 1: From David to Goliath

With projected revenues of $850 million this year and estimated valuation of $25 billion, Airbnb is no longer a small company by any measure. However, the company has still managed to maintain a narrative celebrating its struggles as a startup: from the many investors that said no to Airbnb (and are probably very sorry about it), to the “Obama O's, the Cereal of Change,” and “Cap’n McCain's, a Maverick in Every Box” cereal boxes that Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia designed and sold in an effort to keep the company floating in 2008.

Airbnb’s is indeed a classic against-all-the-odds story. Now, however, the fight over Prop F has changed the narrative that Airbnb has so carefully been building: This is no longer just a company started by co-founders who couldn’t afford to pay the rent, but also a company that invested more than $8 million to defeat Prop F, “dramatically outspending the measure’s backers, who raised $482,000.”

Just to give you perspective: In 2014 the American Beverage Industry spent about $8 million to defeat a soda tax proposition in San Francisco. In other words, this campaign puts Airbnb in one list with behemoths like Pepsi and Coke, shifting its public image from a not-too-long-ago struggling startup to a not-too-far-away-in-the-future Fortune 500 company.

Narrative change No. 2: Not the nice guy anymore

If Uber is the ‘bad boy’ of the sharing economy, Airbnb was always the nice guy, “investing significantly in creating community and a feeling of partnership” (in contrast with Uber, which doesn’t seem to invest so much in the user experience of the 'dude driving the car'). This perception is also a reflection of the person leading the company – Brian Chesky – a very nice guy; Travis Kalanick – well, let’s just say that he’s working on it.

However, this perception has taken a hit during the campaign. First, there was the bizarre choice to put ads on Muni bus shelters, like this one, which reads: "Dear Public Library System, We hope you use some of the $12 million in hotel taxes to keep the library open later. Love, Airbnb."

Dear @Airbnb These passive-aggressive bus kiosk ads are *not cool* No love, the librarians https://t.co/rdo39E7sdz pic.twitter.com/Lf3TCAYYbw

— jessamyn west (@jessamyn) October 21, 2015

I have no idea what Airbnb was hoping to achieve with this campaign, but unsurprisingly it made many residents angry, and the company quickly recognized this campaign won’t compete for a Clio Award and took the ads down, publicly apologizing for displaying poor judgment.

Second, a day before the elections, activists took over Airbnb’s headquarters to protest against its impact on the housing market in San Francisco, chanting "no more displacement," and floating parody with slogans such as "HOMELESSNESS," “ENTITLEMENT” and "EVICTIONS" followed by "Love, Airbnb."

You can agree or disagree with the protestors’ claims, but one thing is clear: It is very rare to see such a Greenpeace guerrilla-style activity against nice guys. In a way, these sorts of activities draw the line between nice guys and not-so-nice guys.

Finally, if you look at the dichotomy that Neal Gorenflo describes in his piece last week between Platform Coop and Death Stars, the way Airbnb handled the campaign against Prop F (the big money, the ads and even the victory announcement) makes it a more integral part of the Death Stars camp, which includes companies mixing “technology, ideology, design, public relations, community organizing and lobbying in a powerful new formulation that’s conquering cities and users around the world.”

Narrative change No. 3: Airbnb has fucked up the culture

Although only three years passed since Peter Thiel told the Airbnb team “don’t fuck up the culture,” it seem like this advice was forgotten. How else could you explain the Airbnb ad campaign? In its apology on Twitter, Airbnb wrote: “We apologize for Wednesday’s SF ads. They displayed poor judgment and do not live up to the values and humanity of our global community.”

“The culture is strong; you can trust everyone to do the right thing," wrote Chesky. If indeed this ad campaign is a sign that something is wrong with Airbnb’s culture, could we trust the company in the future to do the right thing?

Narrative change No. 4: Airbnb struggles with design for complex relationships

Last year at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Brian Chesky described very accurately the challenge Airbnb faces: “When we designed Airbnb, I thought there were two parties in the transaction – there was a guest and there was a host -- and I match these two people together and that was the end of it. And over time I learned there were many other parties of a transaction – there was a guest, there was a host, there was a neighbor, there was a landlord, there was maybe the building owner … there was the city government, there was the hotel industry … then you had local businesses. You started having not two parties to a transaction. You had 10 or 12 parties to a transaction.”

This challenge, in other words, is how to design for complex relationships, and it is a complex challenge, as it requires a very different mindset from the one currently dominating the sharing economy, moving from a narrow peer-to-peer point of view to a broader stakeholder point of view. The fact that Airbnb had to deal with Prop F in the first place, as well as the way it handled it, show it still struggles with this challenge. What’s more, it’s not clear at all to what degree Airbnb has changed its mindset to acknowledge the multiple parties that are part of every Airbnb transaction.

Narrative change No. 5: The (missing) resilience factor

“Over the next year, Airbnb wants to built 100 community guilds in cities around the world," Chris Lehane, Airbnb’s new head of global policy, explained in a press event last Wednesday. "These 'grassroots' organizations would receive tools, training, support and an undisclosed amount of money from Airbnb to help fight unwanted local regulations.”

The problem is that Lehane, a former political strategist to Bill Clinton, thinks in terms of winning political campaigns, while the actual combat field might be very different. I believe that cities around the world will ask themselves more and more whether companies like Airbnb have a positive or negative impact on their resilience. If the answer is the former, they will be willing to legalize these platforms, but if the answer is the latter they won’t do it. Hence, Airbnb needs to think in terms of resilience and figure out how it could help improve the resilience of communities rather than think in terms of political campaigns and how to win them.

If Airbnb learned the wrong lesson from the fight over Prop F, I’m not sure it actually won.

So, what do you think – did Airbnb won or lose the fight over Prop F?

Image credit: Flickr/Open Grid Scheduler

Cities are the 21st-century battleground for mankind’s adoption of sustainability. It is in cities and their surrounding urban areas where 54 percent of the world’s population live, including 270 million Americans.

Cities, rather than farms or factories, are now the largest driver of economic growth. Our top 20 metropolitan areas account for 52 percent of our national GDP. It is inside our cities where we convert most of our consumerism into garbage, emissions and excretions. Most of the pollution we breathe is either sourced inside a city or created to generate electricity for a city. Our daily lives are now tied to the ability of municipal infrastructure to withstand or repair the damaging impacts of storms made more intense by global warming.

The growing weight of human and environmental health impacts is forcing city governments to push aside the legislative luxury of debating whether climate change is real. The health impacts of mass-marketed food porn is forcing mayors and city councils into local actions that attempt to slow an unprecedented increase in obesity and diabetes. Innovation is now the imperative for city mayors, councils, staff and community leaders in search of best practices that will sustain their economies and the health of their citizens. Their combined quest is to enable a community and business environment where adopting green best practices is the default option rather than a “change-order” from the norm.

'Default to green'

Gil Friend is the chief sustainability officer for the city of Palo Alto, California. He exemplifies how city staffs around the world are pushing innovation’s boundaries to discover, and adopt, sustainable solutions. Friend is leading a strategic assessment and stakeholder outreach to surface Palo Alto’s alternative paths for achieving an 80 percent reduction in emissions. It was from Friend that I first heard of the phrase "default to green."

I had the opportunity to talk with Friend at the 2015 Sustainable Brands conference. The following short video is edited to highlight the many innovations achieved by Palo Alto, including:

• 80 percent landfill diversion


• Innovations by the city's municipal utility to achieve carbon-neutral electricity supplies


• The adoption of a new contracting criteria that makes choosing the green supply option the default selection, rather than a change-order, from normal procurement criteria.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZsOmMCoKcOg

Indianapolis

Default to green is not a “California thing.” It is now emerging as a global mega-trend in cities around the world. I saw it on the streets of Indianapolis while visiting this progressive town as the keynote speaker at its annual SustainIndy dinner, an annual event that attracts 500 attendees.

Indianapolis, like most cities, is in constant search of economic development that will generate quality jobs and taxes that can sustain the city’s economy and community services. Under Republican Mayor Greg Ballard’s leadership, the city has invested in sidewalks and hundreds of miles of bike paths that has successfully sparked residential development. The walkability and bike-ability of the city has made it a tourist destination.

Around town, I found conveniently located bike-sharing stands and plenty of riders pedaling to charming urban centers hosting an eclectic mix of restaurants, shops and theaters. Corporate America has discovered that Indianapolis’s investment in walkability and bike-ability has made it highly attractive to millennials. Cummins is building a new office building, and Eli Lilly is both a major employer and one of the 10 coolest places to work in Indianapolis. (If a town has a list of “cool” places to work then that is a sure sign it is attractive to the millennial generation.)

Cities pioneering 100 pecent renewable electricity

Aspen, Colorado, Burlington, Vermont, and Greensburg, Kansas, are now running their cities on 100 percent renewable energy. Austin, Texas, has set a target of sourcing the majority of its electricity from renewable energy in 10 years. That city just recently signed a 400-megawatt solar power contract for an unprecedented average price of 4 cents per kilowatt-hour.

While state utility commissions continue to move at a snail’s pace from their entanglement in 100 years of utility regulatory law, it is city governments that are proving that electrical service can be reliable, cost effective, zero emissions and the default-to-green choice.

21st-century trends shape sustainable development

Default to green is now emerging as a 21st-century best practice. Global manufacturing economies of scale in solar, batteries and smart building technologies are positioning zero net energy buildings as the least cost, and lowest emissions, solution to urban pollution. Autonomous electric vehicles will revolutionize how people move about a city while also dramatically reducing the emissions footprint of urban transportation.

It is our urban millennials that are breaking free from mass-marketed food porn by adopting “lose weight, have fun, live more” obesity and diabetes solutions for themselves and their parents.

It is in our cities where the pioneering 21st-century path away from consumerism’s emissions, excretions and waste is being paved with default-to-green innovations that will enhance human health and our economy.

Image credit: Bill Roth

The world is almost halfway to the 2 degrees Celsius global temperature rise that experts warn we can’t go beyond -- not if we want to maintain life on this planet as we know it.

The U.K.’s Met Office released data this week that shows the global mean temperature at the earth’s surface is set to reach 1 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The data is from January to September this year. In other words, 2015 could be the year we make it halfway toward the 2 degrees Celsius warming level.

Two degrees Celsius is the level of temperature rise countries are working to stay beneath, and next month they will converge in Paris for climate talks. However, even if the warming is limited to the 2-degrees benchmark, sea-level rise would still be a problem that will affect land where 280 million people currently live, a recently released report shows.

A 2-degrees warming scenario could cause 15.4 feet of sea-level rise. If warming reaches 4 degrees Celsius, land where 627 million people live would be impacted as sea level rise would “submerge land,” according to the report. So, clearly reducing carbon emissions to meet the 2-degrees benchmark would reduce the sea-level rise considerably.

The projections in the report, published by Climate Central, are for post-2100 sea levels. If warming is limited to 2 degrees, “the locked-in sea level rise projected would not submerge land home to more than half of today’s population in any listed megacity,” the report states. But out of the 10 megacities listed with the highest populations that would be affected by sea-level rise, five would still be affected: Shanghai; Hong Kong; Hanoi, Vietnam; Mumbai, India; and Osaka, Japan.

Note that all the megacites that would be affected by sea-level rise are in Asia. The continent is home to the six most at-risk nations for threatened land, as measured by a total 2100 population projection, and nine of the 10 most at-risk nations, as measured by population percentage in the same places. A whopping 74 percent of the global population on at-risk land live in Asia.

Twelve countries have over 10 million people living on at-risk land under the 4-degrees warming scenario, and eight of them are in Asia (India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, Philippines, Thailand and Myanmar). Limiting the temperature rise to 2 degrees would reduce exposure by over 10 million people in all but two nations listed (Thailand and Myanmar).

China is the country with the “most to lose from business as usual,” the report warns. The biggest emitter of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the world, China has 145 million citizens on land at-risk of sea level rise if global temperature rise is allowed to reach 4 degrees Celsius. If the 2-degrees benchmark is maintained, China would have 64 million people at risk.

The Climate Central report builds on a paper published in October by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) of the U.S. by the same authors. The paper focused on sea-level rise in the U.S., finding that over 20 million people in the U.S. live on at-risk land. The total area includes 1,185 to 1,825 municipalities “where land that is home to more than half of the current population would be affected,” the paper states. Among those municipalities are at least 21 cities that have populations of over 100,000.

With “aggressive” carbon emissions reductions, over half of the municipalities would avoid risk -- “if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet remains stable,” according to the paper. And over half of the “U.S. population-weighted area under threat could be spared.”

The findings of both the Climate Central report and the PNAS paper highlight the importance of the powers that be hammering out a good climate agreement next month in Paris.

Image credit: Flickr/U.S. Geological Survey

Misinformation from the likes of Donald Trump and B-lister celebs has not helped their cause, but the stubborn fact is that vaccines have made a huge difference in public health for generations. Aggressive vaccination campaigns led to the eradication of smallpox over 30 years ago and has relegated the once-feared polio to only three countries worldwide. In recent years, community-based vaccination strategies have found success in countries such as Ethiopia, with the result that far more children have been vaccinated and child mortality rates have seen a rapid fall over the past decade.

Nevertheless, the Gates Foundation estimates that 1 in 5 children worldwide still lack access to the most basic vaccines. The result is that an as many as 1.5 million children annually die from diseases, such as pneumonia, which are otherwise easily preventable. Part of the problem is logistics and storage. Refrigeration often becomes a huge problem when vaccines make their way to more remote regions of the world. One Los Angeles-based social enterprise, however, is trying to improve those statistics through the use of technology.

Founded in 2009, Nexleaf Analytics is the brainchild of two UCLA alums who believe cell phone networks and sensors can be paired in order to generate social good. Amongst  projects that seek improvements in potable water, cookstoves and wildlife conservation, Nexleaf’s engineers have leveraged sensors to enable real-time monitoring of vaccine refrigeration to ensure that they remain viable and safe until the exact moment of inoculation.

Part of the firm’s solution is through hardware. Nexleaf has developed a cold chain monitor that tracks the temperature of cold boxes and refrigerators that store vaccines. The monitor’s sensor uses mobile phones to collect and send temperature data from the moment the vaccines depart a warehouse, and then through the various stages of delivery, until they are ready for use. When a shipment of vaccines approaches a temperature that could threaten its safety, the system sends an SMS and email alert. Nexleaf also stores all temperature and location information in order to help improve forecasting, future deliveries and capacity planning.

Hence the development of ColdTrace, which government agencies, NGOs, hospitals and vaccine providers can adopt to improve the deployment of vaccines. The system includes dashboards and reporting capabilities that allow users to monitor a bevy of data points, including historic grid power capacity and temperatures that can be analyzed in order to streamline the delivery of vaccines and medicines.

So far, Nexleaf’s technology has been installed at sites throughout Mozambique, Kenya, Indonesia, Philippines and Laos. This year the company is ramping up its presence in India and Kenya with Tanzania added to the list. With a recently awarded grant from Google, Nexleaf is positioned to expand its reach in even more places, allowing these commonplace technologies to avert an early death, or a lifetime of suffering, for even more people worldwide.

Image credit: Nexleaf Analytics

By Darshan Goswami

There is a green energy revolution underway in India that can increase prosperity for millions of poor families by harnessing the abundant and clean energy of the sun. With the right policies in place, India can easily become a world leader in solar energy. This solar endeavor could also help address acute power shortages, and make a real difference in slowing the pace of climate change.

Since being elected in May 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has outlined his vision for increasing India’s renewable energy capacity five-fold from 30 gigawatts to 175 gigawatts, including a boost in solar power generation from 20 GW to 100 GW. The plan is to achieve these targets by 2022. But to do so, India needs a national energy policy, regulatory programs and innovative financing mechanisms that encourage the development of distributed energy, particularly applications that combine solar generation with energy storage.

India has already taken positive steps by announcing very aggressive goals to meet 40 percent of its energy needs through renewables by 2030. I firmly believe that, with favorable policies and strategic economic investments, India could meet all of its energy needs through renewables by 2050.

Solar power potential in India

India is endowed with abundant free solar energy. Using the country’s deserts and farm land and taking advantage of 300 to 330 sunny days a year, India could easily generate 5,000 trillion kilowatt-hours of solar energy. In other words, India could easily install around 1,000 GW of solar generation — equivalent to four times the current peak power demand (about 250 GW) — using just 0.50 percent of its land. In addition, India can produce over 200 GW from wind power.

As economist and activist Jeremy Rifkin said, while speaking in New Delhi in January 2012: “India is the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy sources and, if properly utilized, India can realize its place in the world as a great power — but political will is required for the eventual shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy.”

India is both densely populated and has high solar insolation, providing ideal conditions for the exponential growth of solar power as a future energy source. With GDP growing at about 8 percent, solar photovoltaic power is the only renewable energy resource that can bridge the ‘gap’ between supply and demand. Solar energy can transform India and help to bring about decentralized distribution of energy, thereby empowering people at the grassroots level and eliminating the need for costly expansion of transmission and distribution systems.

How can india achieve its economic, environmental and energy goals?

Like other developing economies, much of India’s energy currently comes from coal. But, as with other countries, use of fossil fuels has led to crippling pollution, dramatic public health problems and global debate on climate change. However, these countries (especially India), can turn to the sun for a much cleaner source of energy. After decades of promise, the technology now exists to replace our dangerous addiction to fossil and nuclear power plants with cheap, clean solar energy.

For India, a combination of solar power and energy storage is the answer to true energy independence. For their part, the Indian government has taken several measurable steps toward improving infrastructure and power reliability but, more needs to be done — and fast. Along with expediting the adoption of solar and other renewable energy resources, to secure its energy future India urgently needs to implement innovative policies and financing mechanisms (such as capital and interest subsidies, viability gap funding, concessional finance, etc.) to promote increased use of abundant, sustainable, solar energy.

In addition, microgrids have the potential to change the way communities generate and use energy, can reduce costs, increase reliability and improve environmental performance. Microgrids can be used to take substantial electrical load off the existing power grid and so reduce the need for building new or expanding existing transmission and distribution systems.

By implementing the following nine strategies, India can begin to become a solar super power

1. Develop a national renewable energy (RE) policy: Enact and deploy a comprehensive new energy roadmap or innovative RE policies (e.g., PPAs, Net Metering, FIT, etc.) without delay. In addition, set National Renewable Energy Standards/Policy such as 20 percent by 2020, 40 percent by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050 — to create demand, new industries and innovation, and a new wave of green jobs.

2. Invite international developers to meet the revised JSNM targets of 100 GW of solar and 75 MW of wind by 2022 and beyond.

3. Electrifying transportation: Expedite a move to electrify transportation by encouraging expanded use of electric vehicles (EV) and plug-in hybrids, and deployment of solar-powered EV charging stations around the country. Develop and implement time-of-day pricing to encourage charging of vehicles at night and other times when peak demand is low. In addition, launch the public transportation system of the future with zero-emission battery-powered Electric Buses in all major cities to reduce air pollution and reverse climate change.

4. Energy efficiency: Make Energy Efficiency a high priority by expediting the development and implementation of cost-effective energy efficiency standards. To reduce the long term demand for energy, engage states, industrial companies, utilities and other stakeholders to accelerate energy efficiency investments such as large scale nationwide use of LED lamps.

5. Utility-Scale projects: Phase out conventional energy subsidies, and develop a long term plan to replace fossil and nuclear plants with utility-scale renewable generation.

6. Innovative financing solution: Provide innovative financing (including Tax-Free Solar Bonds or Green Infrastructure Bonds, accelerated depreciation mechanism, and access to credit at globally competitive rates, etc.) to instill more confidence from potential investors and decrease the cost of financing for renewable energy projects . Create and fund a national smart infrastructure bank for renewable energy.

7. Develop large-scale “Solar Manufacturing Hubs” in India to facilitate mass production of PV, CSP and CPV equipment.

8. Decentralized energy: Avoid future fossil fuel investments in India and, instead, emphasize nationwide deployment of community scale solar projects (installing 100 million solar roofs, solar co-operatives, and solar cities, etc.) and microgrids with storage. India’s present 40GW solar target should be extended to include photovoltaic panels on the rooftop of every home in India, generating enough power to reduce the country’s massive dependence on fossil fuels.

9. Develop Energy Storage including thermal, grid battery storage (e.g., Tesla Powerwall home battery backup), compressed air/gas, vehicles-to-grid/home, pumped hydro, fuel cells or hydrogen (H2 - produced from renewable energy only), flywheels, superconducting magnets and super capacitors. Develop a “hydrogen economy” plan. If done successfully, hydrogen and electricity will eventually become society’s primary energy carriers for the twenty-first century.

Conclusion

India is standing on the threshold of a green energy revolution that can light up a new era of energy, economic and environmental security. To achieve this goal India needs to fundamentally transform the manner in which it produces, distributes and consumes energy. By doing so, India can reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, create millions of new jobs, and enhance its global competitiveness while decreasing carbon emissions and slowing climate change.

Given its abundant solar insolation, India has already outlined clear plans for future energy production from the sun. Barriers to implementing this renewable energy plan seem to be primarily social and political, rather than technological or economic. The technology is well established and available. If properly developed and used, India’s abundantly available renewable resources could meet all of its energy demand by 2030. Meanwhile, existing generation could be converted to renewable energy by 2050, and used for maintaining a reliable power supply in the interim.

Solar energy offers India the theoretical potential to provide all its long-term power needs. Toward that goal, India has revised its target to reach 100 GW of solar capacity by 2022 and recently announced that 40 percent of its total energy mix would come from alternative sources by 2030. These targets are realistic, desirable and fully achievable.

All that is needed now to make this concept a reality is political commitment and appropriate investments and funding for building many more solar power systems, solar farms, hybrid solar-natural gas plants, solar thermal storage and advanced battery-based grid energy storage systems. Excess energy generated from solar could be stored in various forms and then used during times of peak demand. Investment in these technologies would provide an economic stimulus of at least $1 trillion, and perhaps much more if all indirect effects are included. Given its abundant sunshine, India could even use solar power to produce “solar fuels” (e.g., using electrolysis to extract hydrogen or liquid hydrogen from water), which could be exported at an unimaginable scale to meet the voracious demand for clean energy from the big north Asian economies.

Solar energy provides a golden opportunity for India to move toward a 100 percent clean energy future while reducing poverty, ensuring energy security and combating climate change. Solar energy has the potential to propel India forward as a “Solar Super Power.” However, for India to meet its future energy needs, it can no longer afford to delay deployment of solar energy.

Image credit: Flickr/hjl

Darshan Goswami has more than 40 years of experience in the energy field. He worked as a Project Manager for Renewable Energy, Microgrid and Smart Grid projects at the United States Department of Energy (DOE) in Pittsburgh. Mr. Goswami is a registered professional electrical engineer with a passion and commitment to promote, develop and deploy renewable energy resources and the hydrogen economy. In dedication to his life serving humanity and poor people, the author supports: India Foundation for Children Education and Care, Inc. 

By TJ Faircloth

We are at the same tipping point now with Big Oil and its dirty partners that made Big Tobacco a pariah decades ago. Just as federal investigations unearthed the outrageous extent to which the tobacco industry lied, deceived and cheated its way around commonsense public health protections, so, too, will the New York attorney general's investigation into ExxonMobil allow us to see the dirty truth behind big polluters and their PR.

1. Tip of the iceberg

If it’s anything like what happened with Big Tobacco, this investigation might well spur other attorneys general to investigate the actions of not just ExxonMobil, but also a suite of fossil fuel corporations that may also have obscured information about the role fossil fuel extraction and combustion have played in driving climate change. Not to mention the ways these corporations have used that information to slow, water down and block climate policies.

2. Parallels to Big Tobacco

We're at the same tipping point that we faced with Big Tobacco in the 1990s. At that time, investigations by attorneys general resulted in a massive legal settlement, known as the Master Settlement Agreement, and forced the release of millions of internal documents. And in 2006, a federal judge ruled that tobacco corporations had knowingly deceived the public. These and other legal actions shaped the current public climate, in which Big Tobacco is barred from participating in public health policymaking. We can now see a future in which fossil fuel corporations will be regarded in the same light.

3. What this means for COP21 and beyond

This investigation dovetails with the growth of a global movement to address the conflict of interest inherent in allowing polluters like ExxonMobil to have a seat at the negotiating table. To date, ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel corporations have heavily influenced climate policymaking -- at the U.N. and in national governments -- via their lobbyists and front groups like the American Petroleum Institute. This development peels back any veneer of impartiality and reveals their true intentions. After decades of taking lessons in deception from Big Tobacco’s playbook, it’s Big Oil’s turn to reckon with its abuses. This is Big Oil’s Big Tobacco moment. Image credit: Flickr/Mike Mozart TJ Faircloth is deputy director of campaigns and research for Corporate Accountability International. He has a background and focus on international policy and strategic corporate research.

While Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people have greater ambition than their white colleagues and enjoy their work more, 30% of employees in the UK have witnessed or experienced racial harassment in the workplace in the last year alone, an increase from previous years, according to a new report from Business in the Community (BITC).

The Race at Work report, undertaken with research partner YouGov, heard from 24,457 people in employment across the UK, making it the largest survey of race at work ever undertaken in the UK.

Sandra Kerr OBE, race equality director at BITC said: “It is clear that ethnic minorities’ experiences of work are still not equal to their white peers. Despite having greater enjoyment and ambition for work, the experience of the workplace processes and cultures for BAME employees is certainly not ideal.

“This is compounded by the extremely worrying finding that incidents of racial harassment and bullying appear to be on the rise. The scale of this challenge is immense and needs immediate action. As a result, we are making specific recommendations to both government and employers to ensure that the voices of 24,457 people are heard.”

The report calls for the government to commit to ensuring that the UK Corporate Governance Code’s definition of diversity for listed companies includes ‘and race’ as well as use its procurement spending power to ensure that businesses that tender for public contracts can demonstrate a commitment to race diversity.

The BITC also urges the government to draw up a policy framework on race to promote good practice and close the persistent unemployment gap and consider commissioning a review into race equality in the workplace with focus on promotions at senior management levels, similar to Lord Davies of Abersoch’s review of women on boards.

Rebecca Hilsenrath, ceo of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, commented: “We welcome this report as it provides further evidence of the roadblocks to opportunity that ethnic minorities still face in our workplaces.

“Is Britain Fairer?, our wide-ranging report of progress towards equality in Britain published last week, shows that people from almost every ethnic minority group suffered higher rates of unemployment and received lower pay than their white colleagues. Over the five year period to 2013, African/Caribbean/Black people had the largest drop in hourly pay (a fall of £1.20), bringing their pay down to £10.20 compared to £10.60 for White workers.

“This is why we have set challenges for government and others to improve fairness at work by encouraging fair employment practices, closing pay gaps, improving race diversity at senior levels and tackling racial harassment.

“There is no room for complacency. We must all take concerted action to create a country where merit and ability, not race or skin colour, determine your opportunities.” 

 

Picture credit: © Konstantin Chagin | Dreamstime.com