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"The Eco Index uses environmental guidelines, environmental performance indicators, and environmental footprint metrics to assess the impacts within six product life cycle stages: Materials; Packaging; Product Manufacturing and Assembly; Transport and Distribution; Use and Service; and End of Life. A comparative scoring system at the indicator level provides standardized levels of achievement; a data capture tool at the metric level provides a means to collect quantitative data within seven critical “Lenses” (areas of impact): Land Use Intensity, Water, Waste, Biodiversity, Chemistry/Toxics – People, Chemistry/Toxics – Environment, and Energy Use/Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Designed for use by a diverse group of stakeholders from product designers to suppliers, the Eco Index framework is modular, allowing implementation of the tool within the life cycle stages and level of detail appropriate for each company. At present, the Eco Index does not provide a final score or ranking for finished products. However, this may be incorporated as the index undergoes further development. The Eco Index is being built around five guiding principles that separate it from other environmental assessment tools:
* Collaboration. The Eco Index is the result of thousands of hours of work by more than 100 companies in the outdoor industry.
* Open-Source Information. The Eco Index is completely open-source and available for use by all companies, reflecting the industry’s belief that true transparency is essential to “move the needle” on sustainability.
* Transparency. It is critical that all outdoor industry stakeholders are able to view, understand, and provide input into the ongoing development of the Eco Index.
* Scalability. While the Eco Index is rooted in the outdoor industry, its structure is such that it has the ability to be applied within other industries and sectors.
* Global Reach: The Outdoor Industry Association has partnered with the European Outdoor Group on the Eco Index initiative to ensure a common
"Inside the United Nations' Innovation Overhaul
BY Jenara NerenbergThu Nov 4, 2010
A project called "Global Pulse" is quietly building and taking hold inside one of the world's largest bureaucracies.
The United Nations is one of the world's largest organizations--managing agencies like the World Food Programme, UNICEF, and the High Commissioner for Refugees--but a new and innovative project has been quietly building in the last few months. The "Global Pulse Project" was initiated at the G20 Summit in New York last year, but only recently has the initiative begun to take shape. Having gone largely unnoticed, the shift actually indicates a monumental change, signaling a more participatory and grassroots approach to technology for social change.
Christopher Fabian works for UNICEF in New York. He has been advising the UN Global Pulse for the last six months. The global Pulse is led by Director Robert Kirkpatrick and includes staff from several UN agencies.
"The GP comes at the request of the G20 leaders to the Secretary General and involves a huge web of partners both inside and outside of the UN system," Fabian tells Fast Company. What the GP is, essentially, is a new programmatic approach that seeks to utilize the streamlining tools of technology and the private sector to help the UN do its job better. There is a strong focus on efficiency, innovation, gathering "real time" data, and rapid response to emergencies--in other words an overhaul of old, lagging, outdated, paper-based methods to do the work of saving lives, improving health, and restoring communities.
The UN's history of real-time initiatives spans a number of projects, most notably a few recent ones developed in partnership with students at NYU. At the University's "Design for UNICEF" class--a class spawned and inspired by a single conversation between Clay Shirky and UN staff--mobile phone tools such as RapidFTR have been developed, where aid workers can immediately help families find each other by clicking a photo, uploading onto a database, and
in list: VITO
"NRG Installs Privately Funded Electric Car Charging Network in Oily Houston
BY Rachel ArndtThu Nov 18, 2010
NRG Energy is installing an electric car charging infrastructure in Houston, the first privately funded network of its kind in the U.S.
eVgo car charging station
The U.S. electric car industry is getting a jolt: NRG Energy, Inc. is bringing the nation’s first privately funded electric vehicle charging network to Houston. The New Jersey-based company announced this morning the launch of eVgo, its electric car charging infrastructure and at-home chargers. Though other companies have plans for charging networks in D.C., Phoenix, and other cities, NRG’s is the first that’s entirely privately funded, according to the company.
The charging network is an effort to break what NRG CEO David Crane calls the "chicken and egg cycle around electric vehicles." To let drivers stop worrying which will come first, the electric car or the electric car infrastructure, NRG is taking the first step and investing $10 million into Houston's public system. The city will have 50 fast-charging stations by summer 2011; the first ones will pop up in February.
The chargers, made by energy- and defense-company Aerovironment, will also be available in home garages for monthly fees and a three-year contract. The cheapest payment plan gives drivers access to Level 2 chargers, which give a car about 25 miles of electricity in an hour. The faster urban chargers take about 30 minutes to fully charge a vehicle, and will be set up along highways and in parking lots of NRG’s retail partners--Walgreens, Best Buy, and two Texas chains, H-E-B and Spec’s Wine, Spirits, and Finer Foods.
"We think electric vehicles are the next great disruptive technology," Crane told Fast Company. To make that come true, NRG wants to make charging electric cars as convenient as getting them. And the timing couldn't be better: The Nissan Leaf--the first mainstream, all-electric car in the U.S.--hits roads in January 2011, and the Chevy Volt arrives in less than
"Why Don't Regular Joes Care About Sustainability?
Comment
Day by day, there's no visceral sense that we're actually destroying the planet. And that's the biggest problem we face, when it comes to fixing the environment.
I was in a videoconference last week with our offices in Boston, Los Angeles, Milan, Seoul and Shanghai when we ran into a major technical problem – potato chips. Boston had ordered chips for lunch. Between the crinkling of the bags and the crunching of the chips it was a disaster. Finally Los Angeles spoke up, “Hey Boston, lay off the chips, we can’t hear a thing.” The meeting got back on track.
Noise pollution: in this case a simple problem, easily detected by our senses, and with a simple solution. If only global warming were that straightforward. Part of the challenge of our impending sustainability disaster is that our usual problem-solution process isn’t working. Sustainability is a complex problem: we cannot see, hear or otherwise sense what is happening real-time, and there are no easy solutions – it is a classic “wicked” problem. Designers excel at the creative processes needed to take on complex problems, are blessed with extraordinary communication skills, and are looking to help tackle our global sustainability challenge, but I’m not sure we have been doing it right.
Design has been so focused on making things better that we have neglected to use our talents to show what is bad.
A couple of years ago at Continuum we made a study of how regular people think about sustainability. We learned that basically, people care most about themselves and their family, and then they care about problems they can see. People focus on recycling because they can see the stuff they recycle; they are concerned about plastic because they can see that it is not a natural material. People cannot see greenhouse gasses, and they cannot see the history of what they use, so it is difficult for people to care as much about meat, lighting, travel, heat, air conditioning, etc. Even though these element
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"Whipsaw-designed Pano Device (computerless computer) is smaller, greener, and award-winning
Posted by hipstomp | 7 Oct 2010 | Comments (5)
0panodevice.jpg
The Pano Device is like a computer with nothing inside it. You plug your monitor, keyboard and mouse into the back, but it contains no CPU, no memory, and no software; all of that stuff resides on a Pano Manager server, which hosts the OS and virtualizes it to the Pano Device.
So what's inside the thing? Damned if I know, I think if you dropped it and it shattered there'd be little leprechaun bodies all over your floor. But the bottom line is this two-inch tall device is projected to cut business computing costs by 70%; "compared to a PC it consumes 3% of the energy, uses 4% of the material to make it, and is one hundred times smaller."
Designed by ID consultancy Whipsaw, the Pano Device has won a 2010 Green Good Design Award, which is conferred by the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies. (Sadly, the Good Design website was not working properly at press time so no direct link is available.)"
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"Learn a thing or two at Autodesk's free online Sustainability Workshop\nPosted by hipstomp | 8 Oct 2010 | Comments (0)\n\n0adswf.jpg\n\nAutodesk's Sustainability Workshop is a free online site with short videos to educate viewers on the environmental impacts of design. Right now they've got a section up for Intro to Whole Systems design, which encourages viewers to think through the entire lifecycle of a product, and the self-explanatory Intro to Lightweighting and Material Reduction.\n\n While the project was built specifically for mechanical engineering undergraduate students, the team thinks it would also be interesting to industrial design students (who may not get this technical with their sustainability approaches), mechanical engineering and industrial design teachers (who are looking for a quick resources to supplement their already super full curriculum), other young students, and adult engineers and designers who are retooling and learning new tricks.\n\nSays sustainable design strategist Jeremy Faludi, "[The videos] could be used for a design class, or a mechanical engineering class, or even a management class that wants to educate managers about the more technical aspects of sustainability. The combined Whole Systems & Life-Cycle thinking process could potentially be a very powerful tool for designers and business executives to innovate their products and services."\n\nCheck it out here."
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