Offsetting Your Website’s ‘Immaterial’ Carbon Footprint - A Material Game

There are several sexy eco plugins/widgets/apps/gadgets on the market but if you are a Facebook fanatic you’ll no doubt have come across Greenbook. The tool allows you to ‘green up’ your Facebook presence.

Its creators claim their sponsors offset the carbon footprints of all the people that sign up. I.e., you will have ‘cleansed’ your very presence there. Submit some green living tips and you’ll be endearing the sponsors even more; the more eco tips you publish, the more sponsor contributions increase! To assure you that what you’re doing is not just ‘hot air’, you can also vote on other Greenbook users’ tips.

There are a few other carbon footprint applications that also claim to calculate and offset the Co2 emissions of immaterial (online) living. The logic of such tools is compelling but makes you wonder if they are substantially more than just marketing ploys. Yes it’s true that surfing the net burns real electricity. That a PC or laptop monitor creates harmful emissions every second that it’s running. And how wonderful that we’re made to feel being informed that clever sponsoring can offset.

But who guarantees any of this? The Forest Stewardship Council, which is considered the world’s most stringent Forest certification agency, is looking into producing labels for this type of business.

So for the time being it’s up to your own savvy instincts. Check out search engine Click4Carbon.com or Co2stats.com. Click4Carbon is a comprehensive online shopping platform/search engine and donates at least 50% of all profits to the planting of trees worldwide.

Click4Carbon is a case in point illustrating the crossroads we are coming to. It’s clearly a commercial venture but it makes excessive use of people’s tendency to act out of the goodness of their hearts when the environment is concerned. “We hope that you will help us by promoting the site to your friends and work colleagues as all ‘free’ advertising of Click4Carbon helps increase the minimum % of profits donated,” the message on its website reads. And next a brilliant tool is provided which allows you to check how much you need to spend on its products to achieve on environmental goals such as saving an x amount of trees. If you think that we should look into the company some more, shoot us an email.

Co2Stats does not have any products on offer for direct purchase and offers you a website widget (which despite its HTML script still doesn’t seem to work on this WordPress.com blog) that will certify your website as ‘environmentally friendly’, based on the number of visits. “CO2Stats monitors how much electricity is being used to power your site”, the company claims. The emission offsets are invested in renewable energy projects.

Office Retailer Staples Sees The Wood For The Trees

The paper sector is an obvious a target for green activism, so this weekend’s breaking news that office supplies retailer Staples severed all ties with its Singaporean paper supplier because of environmental concerns shouldn’t be that surprising. But the events that led to Staples’ move are an eye opener; a Wall Street Street Journal reporter discovered that the company was going to use its Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) logo and tipped off the FSC about the environmental policies of APP.

APP’s paper producing methods incited environmental concerns first in 2004 when Greenpeace pointed out that it in part relies on natural rainforests for its production of paper. A hoist of US, Asian and European companies terminated their contracts with APP, one after the other in recent years. All cited environmental concerns as their reason. The giant retailer Office Depot Inc. is also in the list.

The WSJ reporter’s action resulted in the FSC’s objection to Staples’ use of its label. The certification is considered the world’s most stringent, and ensures responsible management of the world’s forests at miller level. A Staples spokesman last weekend told the Wall Street Journal “We decided engagement was not possible anymore. We haven’t seen any indication that APP has been making any positive strides [to protect the environment.]”. He added that staying in business with APP would come “at great peril to our brand.”

It’s obvious; Staples is concerned that its customers won’t be enamored with forest destructive paper production methods. APP has a policy of producing paper from newly planted forests but says that due to huge demand, it needs to cut trees from mature rainforests as well. This practice is, in the Wall Street’s Journal’s terms, ‘having an impact on big U.S. paper buyers’.

The big question now of course is whether APP, one of the world’s largest paper manufacturers, will stop its destruction. Its policy thus far has been to deny that it’s doing anything wrong. The incentive is rather limited; Staples purchased only around 9% of its total paper supplies from APP and roughly 5% of this concerned paper. The WSJ didn’t manage to get a reply from APP immediately, but perhaps later this week, when Staples officially announces its decision, there will be more information. Stay posted by subscribing to this feed.

The energy and pollution factors of various differing paper types can be calculated down to the amount of trees via a model devised by Environmental Defense. The calculator lists all the main paper types and enables you to compare them on energy usage, waste production, trees chopped down, greenhouse gases produced and waste water. For instance, the difference between 100 tonnes of normal copy paper compared to 100 tonnes of glossy magazine paper is a whopping 509 trees and 34,943 lbs of greenhouse gases, not to speak of the other measures.

Despite these stunning numbers, the alternative to wood-sourced paper is recycling, but this is not entirely eco friendly either. Recycling paper involves use of chemicals like sodium hydroxide (for de-inking) and hydrogen peroxide (for bleaching). The ensuing pulping process also involves plenty of chemicals.

For a detailed guide on various virgin and recycled papers’ production methods, check out CeleryDesign. The breakdown is by papers’ fiber content, chlorine and weight:

There are three types of FSC certified papers, including a recently introduced ‘recycled’ label. To carry this label a material must be made from 100% recycled paper. To see which papers come with what kind of certification, visit the UK recycling debunker site LovelyAsATree.

Hybrid Electric Cars Are Unclean And Developing Costs Block Better Technology

Hybrid electric cars are nowhere near as clean as people think. A new report by French researchers has pointed out that vehicles that run on both conventional gasoline and stored electricity are at most a stop gap solution.

A research report in the prestigious Inderscience publication International Journal of Automotive Technology and Management, points out that adoption of hybrid cars is not even desirable. If the technology is entered into production, it almost certainly will slow better technology involving electric cars.

The writers cast a shadow of doubt over hybrid vehicle technology particularly in the USA. They do not believe it is environmentally sustainable.

At the moment, manufacturers are integrating hybrid electric technology in car manufacturing mostly to please consumers, evidence shows. Because there’s no proof of significant profitability of the technology. That’s is a shame, because due to these illogical motivations, the money for better technologies might be spent before it’s seen the light of day.

The researchers writing in Inderscience say that viable fuel-cell cars are a better alternative. Especially hydrogen power is advisable. But the problem is that these technologies only likely will reach maturity at around 2025. Earlier studies have also pointed out as much. And also there are disadvantages to fuel cell technology.

What’s most worrisome is the dynamics that are evolving in the debate surrounding cleaner cars. The various lobbies of manufacturers and pressure groups are so hyper charged that they dominate strategic decisions as if they are purely marketing based.

“There is a general convergence of strategies towards promoting hybrid vehicles as the mid-term solution to very low-emission and high-mileage vehicles. This is largely due to Toyota’s strategy of learning the technology, while building up its own ‘quasi-standard’, thanks to its high-quality and reliability reputation and its high market share on the North American market.”

Political lobbies are also in on the game. The three major US manufacturers - GM, Ford, and Chrysler - recently urged President Bush to financially and politically support a national technological solution for hybrids. The researchers say this was independent of the currently dominant solutions initiated by Toyota.

The researchers believe that the next five years will be crucial in the development of cleaner cars. We’ll see industry trends shaking out and get our feet back on the ground.