K Cup Inventor has Regrets

It seemed like a great idea at the time. It's handy, fun to use, makes a bundle of money for the coffee companies, and "fundamentally changed the coffee expereince." It was the disruptor that designers strive for and businesses salivate over. Nearly one in three American households now own a pod based machine and last year, alone, Keurig sold over 9 billion K cups. Since 2012 when the patent expired, the pod machine business exploded and is on its way to making the pod experience ubiquitous with a new partnership between Keurig and Coca-cola.

But, they are expensive, and not recyclable or biodegradable. One Canadian province says that k cups make up 1% of their garbage. Accoring to a #Kill the K Cup viral video, if placed end-to-end, they would circle the globe 10.5 times. Or 12 times, depending on who you ask. And if you ask the right person, they are recyclable, but you just have to take a minute to disassemble them into paper, plastic, and metal components. This is a bit of a paradox for Green Mountian Coffee, a coffee producer known for its sustainability practices. (Green Mountain bought Keruig in 2006 and recently changed its name to Keurig Green Mountain.)

Sylvan the K Cups inventor and founder of Keurig, who was bought out early, doesn't even use a pod machine. He considers them too expensive and...

“...No matter what they say about recycling, those things will never be recyclable, the plastic is a specialized plastic made of four different layers." The cups are made from plastic #7, a mix that is recyclable in only a handful of cities in Canada. That plastic keeps the coffee inside protected like a nuclear bunker, and it also holds up during the brewing process. A paper prototype failed to accomplish as much

Sylvan knew the pods would sell. As he explains the appeal now, “It's like a cigarette for coffee, a single-serve delivery mechanism for an addictive substance.” But he had no idea at the time how ubiquitous the product would become. And like printer cartridges or razor blades, the Keurig business model was predicated on another type of dependence.

He eventually made a pretty good amount of money off of his invention, but has turned to solar panal manufacturing, perhaps to make up for 

Read the full story of the K Cup at the Atlantic

BPA Alternative Proves to be Harmful

Two studies have determined that the plastic additive, BPS, a substitute for BPA, might be even more harmful than BPA itself.  Researchers have found that BPS has been liked to irregular heart beats and irregular brain growth, especially in boys. BPS has the same endocrine disrupting qualities as BPA, which has already been linked to prostate cancer, infertility, asthma, heart disease and a number of neurodevelopmental disorders. And moth are found to be more harmful the lower the exposure. 

Since BPA and BPS have similar chemical structures and properties, it is not surprising that they have similar toxic qualities, as well. How can a manufacturer or designer truly know what they are specifying. 

“A lot of the alternative chemicals have not been adequately tested because they don’t have to be,” said lead author Deborah Kurrasch. “A compound is considered safe (by the Food and Drug Administration) until proven otherwise.”

"I think it would be prudent to test BPS and other chemicals with a similar structure, instead of just assuming that they are safe,"  said Hong-Sheng Wang, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

Read more about it in the Washington Post

Or the National Geographic

And the Environmental Health Perspectives. 

2015 State of Green Business

In partnership with Trucost, GreenBiz has produced their 8th annual 2015 State of Green Business report. The report finds that progress in greenhouse gas and emissions, air pollutants, water use and solid-waste production are all slowing down compared to past years. However, 2015 has seen a boost in corperate pledges to eliminate deforestation and innovative ways to measure and manage water risks. The report is bullish about the future of corporate sustainability but asks:

• Will companies be held accountable to their commitments and  provide the scientific rationale for their sustainability goals?
• How will companies step up to the plate ... on the world’s most pressing sustainability issues,  such as climate change, food security, ecosystems preservation, resource efficiency?
• Will be companies be proactive ... on political issues that could accelerate the transition to a low-carbon and more sustainable economy?

Read more at GreenBiz

And here is the report

Free Report: How Analytics can Optimize Enterprise-level Energy Management

Another Free Report from GreenBiz. Metrics is the first step towards a more sustainable enterprise.

Download the report from GreenBiz

CDP reports: Sustainability Better for Bottom Line

A new report by nonprofit CDP, confirms what many in the sustainability focused finacial sector have long believed: a business with an ingrained sustastainablity strategy is likely to out perform one with out. It makes sense that a business with a long term outlook would be more resliliant and better protected from risk or depleting resources.

The study, which coincides with the climate talks in New York, finds that S&P 500 companies that build sustainability into their core strategies are outperforming those that fail to show leadership.

Specifically, corporations that are actively managing and planning for climate change secure an 18% higher return on investment (ROI) than companies that aren’t – and 67% higher than companies who refuse to disclose their emissions.

The findings could help answer the long-debated industry question of whether sustainability undermines or improves financial results....

... Beyond that, those companies investing in carbon reductions achieved a 50% lower volatility of earnings over the past decade and 21% stronger dividends than their low-ranking peers.

Read more at The Guardian 

Read the full report at CDP 

Zero Waste Conference to be held in Atlanta May 7th and 8th

Learn how you can 'create value through zero waste' at the 3rd annual US Zero Waste Business Council conference.

A few highlights:

• Zero Waste Business Successes
• Metrics and Measuring Zero Waste
• Vendor Relations for Zero Waste
• Marketing Zero Waste
• Developing Zero Waste Infrastructure
• How to Certify your business Zero Waste through USZWBC

Check out the full program here.

And find out how to certify your zero waste business though the USZWBC.

Green Packaging Trends: Back to Basics

Green packaging materials from Salazar packaging

The Chicago Pack Expo show, displays 2,000 of the industry’s finest and largest packaging materials.  Dennis Salazar, President & Co-founder of the green packaging firm, Salazar Packaging, remarked that there was not much in the way of new green innovation, but that sustainability was addressed in other forms.

What I find most encouraging is the change of attitude that is more back to basics; packaging design that is green by default...It will be successful because it is based in economics, not guilt and because in most cases the savings they produce are immediate with minimal upfront investment.

The new focus is on thinner, stronger materials able to do the same job with less material and products that require reuse as well as those made from recycled materials. Other trends Salazar is seeing in the market are products with reuse value and an increase in recyclable materials 

Can being economically conscious of our choices lead to Sustainability? 

Read more in the Environmental Leader

See what Salazar Packaging is up to

Sunglasses made from castor bean oil

There are many firsts in the word of sustainable consumer products. Zeal Optics claims to have the first product line of 100% non-petroleum based eyeware frames. Now Zeal has taken it one step further with their E-llume lenses which use plant based bonding agent.

Zeal says "with optimum clarity, this lens is a proof that environmental initiatives are not a deterrent to an incredible optical experience." Furthermore, Zeals says their caster oil based frame resin, which is produced in Switzerland, is the perfect material "because it is [made from] an efficient, fast growing perennial that is easy to grow, withstands drought, and thrives on marginal lands. [Their resin] doesn't compete with food crops and it also significantly reduces the amount of CO2 released during manufacturing."

Read more about Zeal sunglasses at Treehugger here and here.

See more sustainable sunglasses at Treehugger

Read more about Zeal's technology at their website

Read more about castor oil plastic at the Royal Society of Chemistry

Coming Soon (hopefully)... SupplySTAR !

Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)

After kicking around congress for a few years, the SupplySTAR program finally seems to have gained some traction as part of the 2013 Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act recently re-introduced by Senators Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Rob Portman (R-OH). With some tweeks from 2011, the bill now has buy-in from over 200 groups as diverse as the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, Dow Chemical and the Sierra Club, and seems likely to pass.  According to Forbes, many companies manufacturing green products have seen their stock rise in the days after the announcement of the bill, including Phillips and Owens Corning.

The bill strengthens building codes, and provides incentives for businesses and consumers, alike, to invest in renewable energy. The bill also introduces the SupplySTAR Program as an effort to help manufacturers reduce energy costs. With this program, the DOE would work with industry and small business to improve supply chain efficiency through sharing best practices, providing benchmarking opportunities and supporting professional training.  This would be an important step and would help businesses who cannot afford to hire experts to evaluate reducing their energy costs.

 

SupplySTAR coordinates with EnergySTAR and would:

• identify and promote practices, companies and products that conserve energy, water and other resources through highly efficient supply  chains.
• require that the DOE consider the entire life cycle of a product when evaluating its supply chain efficiency, including its production, transport, packaging, use and disposal.   
• permit the DOE to distribute funds to entities for: the study of supply chain energy resource efficiency; demonstrating reductions in the energy resource consumption of products through improvements in supply chain efficiency.
• collect and disseminate data on supply chain energy resource consumption, develop and disseminate metrics for evaluating supply chain energy resource use, and develop sector level guidance for improving supply chain efficiency.

Read the bill itself- scroll to section 3 to read about the industrial and manufacturing implications 

Read More about the business angle at Forbes

Do you support his legislation? If so write to Robert_diznoff@shaheen.senate.gov 

Movement to classify certain plastics as hazardous waste

A group of scientists has proposed a way to eliminate the negative health impacts of plastic: classify it as a hazardous material.

The team, writing in the journal Nature , says the model is the reclassification of CFCs in 1980's.  CFCs had been widely used as refrigerants and was the cause of a growing hole in the ozone layer. The 1989 Montreal Protocol reclassified CFCs as hazardous, leading to their ultimate phase out and replacement with safer chemicals. The team is targeting the 4 most potentially toxic (and difficult to recycle) types of plastics

On the short list are: polyvinylchloride, or PVC, used in making plastic pipes; polystyrene, often known as Styrofoam and used in cups and clam-shell food containers; polyurethane, used in making furniture and car seats; and polycarbonate, a hard plastic used in making baby bottles, electronics and appliances.

Once that is done, the authors say, governments might look at other types of plastic that are not made of particularly hazardous materials, but act like sponges absorbing toxic pollutants once unleashed in the oceans.

Read more in the LA Times

Download the original study at Nature 

Will China's Epic Pollution Force Environmental Reforms?

China is facing rolling shutdowns of its factories and power plants as the country grapples with severe and unprecedented pollution. With the winter weather trapping smog in place, pollution levels have soared 'beyond index', clocking in at 20 times over the WHO's safe levels. Residents are urged to stay inside and, with visibility less than 100 meters, several airports have had to cancel flights during China's busiest travel season.

Xinhua, China's news agency, is reporting that Beijing plans to unveil new policies aimed at addressing the pollution crisis. Surely this has reached an economic tipping point for the Chinese and is a severe health hazard for its for its population. Will the economic impact from factory and power plant closures force Beijing to adopt comprehensive environmental reforms, like the Clean Air Act? Have these shutdowns impacted your manufacturing?

Read more about  the industrial impacts of China's pollution crisis at BusinessGreen

Read more about China's epic pollution in The Guardian

Are Your Clients on the Newsweek Green List?

The annual Newsweek Green Rankings are often met with controversy in the sustainability community. But whether you love them or hate them, they are nonetheless a measure of the shifting sustainability of today's corporate giants. For the 2012 Green Rankings, Newsweek partnered with the environmental research organizations Trucost and Sustainalytics to analyze the top 500 US and Global companies by revenue, using a methodology based environmental impact, environmental management, and disclosure. For as much as it leaves out (supply chain) or ignores (anti-regulation lobbying efforts,) the analysis is able to boil down a company's sustainability to a single score.

Many big players show up at the top of the list, such as, IBM, HP, Dell, Nike. Obviously, some of these companies have inherently environmentally unfriendly practices- like producing e-waste. For this reason, the rankings are better viewed as a relative measure of a firm's sustainability from year to year, or against other firms. 

Of course the major issue in quantifying sustainability is who owns the pollution. As manufacturing is outsourced so is its pollution leaving the US with cleaner air and water. But would Apple perform as well if it had to 'own' all of the pollution associated with its product line. Newsweek elaborates:

The Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, along with other suppliers, manufactures Apple’s iPhone 5, which has sold millions of copies since its release this fall. The manufacturing of the iPhone produces pollution; who is responsible for that pollution? Is Foxconn responsible, since the emissions and waste derives from their plants? Or is Apple responsible, since it depends on the services of Foxconn? Both have some responsibility. Without Foxconn or the other suppliers, Apple would not have the iPhone to sell. Some responsibility also sits with the financial institutions that benefit from the shares of Apple stock they own. As the old saying goes, you are what you eat, or in this case, what you profit from...

According to Trucost's analysis for the UN, 49% of the environmental impacts of the top 3000 firms come from hidden impacts within the supply chain. This year 20% of the firms in the Newsweek list volunteered some supply chain information, even if incomplete. 

Find the full Newsweek rankings at thedailybeast.com

Read more about supply chain sustainability at thedailybeast.com

Download Trucost's UNEP report on environmental externalities

FTC Revises Green Guides

After 20 years, the FTC is updating their Green Guides to reflect the changing market place and dubious use of 'green marketing' language by manufacturers. The Guide stresses avoiding broad claims, tightens the definitions of terms such as 'recyclable', and reminds manufacturers that a third party endorsement does not exempt them from backing up their product claims.  

Make sure your marketing claims are meeting the new FTC guidelines.

Method Uses Ocean Plastic for Structural Packaging

Method has produced the first structural packaging made from plastic salvaged from ocean debris. The dish and hand soap bottle, which is a limited edition for Whole Foods, is intended to demonstrate that using recycled plastic is "the most viable solution to our plastic pollution problem".  The plastic was collected by from the beaches of Hawaii and recycled into high quality plastic similar to HDPE. The grey color is the recycled plastic's natural state.

Method partnered with Envision Plastics to develop a new recycling process to make the bottles. The process allows rigid, opaque plastics recovered from the ocean to be cleaned, blended and then remanufactured into high-quality recycled plastic of the same quality as virgin high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic

Read more at Sustainable Brands

Learn more about Envision Plastics

Read more about the problems of ocean pollution at Method

Pepsico and the Earth Institute develop new carbon calculator

For a company like PepsiCo, which oversees more than 20 brands and hundreds of different products around the world, calculating the carbon footprint of just one of its products can take weeks, and at a significant cost to the company. To save time and money, PepsiCo teamed up with researchers from Columbia University’s Earth Institute to create a tool that can measure the carbon footprint of thousands of products all at once.

The calculator... can calculate the carbon emissions of different materials and activities in a company’s supply chain and operations, and within minutes pinpoint which of these carries the largest carbon footprint.

The Pepsico tool uses data mining techniques to estimate carbon emissions for a variety of products based on the information from previously analysed materials. Pepsi is not the first to prduce a calculator in fact Danone has developed a calculator with SAP to identify the carbon emissions of individual products. Pepsi says they hope to make the tool available to other companies in the future. 

Read more about the Pepsico calculator at Green Biz

ICFF: Chemical maker now in the wood business

Council's Perennial Wood lounge chairI think the big material news out of the ICFF is Eastman chemicals new Perennial Wood. Yes, that is right wood from a chemical company. Eastman says they have been developing this technology for years. Perennial wood is made from domestically sourced southern pine, which is treated with acetic anhydride under heat and pressure. If their claims are accurate Perennial Wood will endure the elements. The Eastman process is said to be non-toxic, transforming the wood on a molecular level and leaving behind only a small amount of a vinegar-like substance. Any chemists want to weigh in on this?

Eastman showed a selection of student work in their booth and a few booths down, Council's Eric Pfeiffer had a lovely line of outdoor furniture using Perennial Wood. The wood has a soft elegant look and feel. Pfeiffer used the wood with both a plain polyurethane finish and a white wash.

Check out Council's work with perenial

and Eastman's website for more info

ICFF

Safe To Make toured the ICFF and Stationary shows this week looking for new, and hopefully, sustainable materials! With little in the way of 'green' design, we still found a lot to cover. For that reason, we will leave it to the awesome folks at TreeHugger to bring you the flat-pack, multi-purpose, tiny-living discoveries and Core77 to bring you the latest in awesome design.

Check out the next few posts for ICFF coverage. And check back soon as we will be adding new posts.

Thanks, Mom!

My mother is a blogger. This is still hard for me to imagine, and is not--I swear--why I started a blog of my own. But it is why I am writing this post. She recently posted on Amy Ephron’s "One for the Table" blog (also published in the HuffPo, yay Mom!) about her own mother’s chicken-fried steak recipe in honor of Mother’s Day. I figured it was only fair to ‘pay it forward’ and attempt my own Mother’s Day post in honor of my mom.

I tried to make a connection between my mom and industrial design and sustainability, the tent poles of my blog. But aside from my decade-long attempt to get her to stop buying bottled water imported from Fiji, I came up short. I can, however, write about why I started this blog, and that's because I'm a mother. My first blog, "Safe For Humans," is about toxins in consumer products. As an industrial designer visiting the factories that made my products, I was always aware of the noxious materials in use. When I became a mother I realized that as a community of consumers, we need to know more about the products we (and our kids) are using. The inaugural post in SFH, about a child dying of lead poisoning after accidentally swallowing a cheap piece of jewelry, struck me both as a mother and as an industrial designer. How could a manufactured kid's product contain enough lead to kill?  What went wrong? From BPA leaching into baby bottles to toxic flame retardants in our children's pajamas, the message is clear: No one is looking out for us.

Consumers need information, without hyperbole or hysteria. "Safe For Humans" attempts to make the topic of toxins a more detached and serious conversation grounded in the kind of academic sustainability that I studied at Columbia University, while at the same time considering the complications that go into mass-producing a product. That endeavor led me back to my roots, as a designer, in order to seek out the space between design and sustainability at this blog, called "Safe to Make." As designers, we need this information, too. We are the specifiers, and it is no longer acceptable to be unaware of (or complacent about) the impact that our products have. What is lacking is a more reliable bridge between the worlds of sustainability and design. There is a fantastic amount of information and research being done- green chemistry, life cycle analysis, etc-  it just doesn't always make its way to the troops on the ground. I hope that, along with your help and feedback, "Safe To Make" becomes that bridge. And so, here, in a roundabout way, is my Mother's Day post. Happy Mother’s Day!

Walmart puts more muscle in their sustainability score cards

Walmart is pressing their vendors for even more sustainability data. Developed with the help of the Sustainability Consortium, the new score cards go beyond the 15 questions of the original Sustainability Index and dig much deeper into category specific information. The scorecards will cover 100 categories with more to be rolled out in 2013. Walmart states that vendors who produce positive sustainability results will be rewarded, but those that lag will have to face "family meetings" and the results will be incorporated in to buyer reviews. So far it seems that the sustainability guidelines, although data driven, have been fairly benign in terms of purchasing impacts. Do you think these new score cards will add teeth to Walmart's sustainability initiative? Will score cards spread to other members of the Sustainability Consortium?

Green Biz has a great article on their newest version of the sustainability score card:

If other retailer members (of the Sustainability Consortium,) such as Safeway, Marks & Spencer and Best Buy, develop similar scorecard programs, consumer product sustainability will be pushed to record heights... “The move to build sustainability into the merchandising side of the business is a game changer for the consumer products industry.”

...For each category, suppliers will be ranked according to sustainability progress and action items. Scorecard items will include many of the traditional questions for greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency and waste, but will also include questions relevant to each category. For example, for laptops, the surveys will include questions about the energy used during component manufacturing and chemical exposure to workers; for laundry detergent, the surveys will ask about cold-water-wash messaging
and chemical ingredients.

Read more at GreenBiz

Learn more about Walmart's Sustainability Index

Or check out the Sustainability Consortium

What's in my Product: Recycled Plastic

So what really goes into the products we are designing and manufacturing? Today's edition of what's in my product looks at recyled plastic. Here is a great video of the transformation from soda bottle to polyester fabric. Hat tip to hipstomp and Core77.com

For more info check out our friends at Core77.