August 8, 2016. 07:00h a.m. Radio turned on driving to work. Headlines begin. “Today is Earth Overshoot Day”, I hear. Oh. Bad news. The Earth Overshoot day in 2016 has been brought forward again.
I’m sure you are wondering about some things right now: 1) If I am able to understand the radio at that time in the morning, 2) Earth Overshoot day? What does it mean?
The answer to the first question is yes. I can understand if radio plays the summer song or the speech is about an environmental issue, in both cases my attention is activated immediately. And the answer to the second question is broader and deeper. I need to enlarge on this problem. Let’s see.
Earth Overshoot concept was originally developed by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) and Earth Overshoot Day is defined as a mark that indicates when humanity has maxed up all the Earth’s resources for the calendar year. Although it is only an estimation, this day is considered the best scientific approach to measure the gap between natural resources generated and destroyed annually, so that, once passed, Earth is operating in overshoot and everything consumed until the end year is supported by resources that planet cannot produce and contaminants that Earth is not able to absorb (www.footprintnetwork.org)..
The simplest example to understand the concept is thinking about Earth´s resources being money in a bank. Overshoot occurs when we withdraw money from the bank faster than to wait for the interest this money generates.
Just as a bank statement tracks income against expenditures, Global Footprint Network is the organization that analyzes thousands of data points and measures humanity’s demand for supply of natural resources and ecological services every year, that is, it compares income of the Earth (which are achieved by increasing the use of renewable energy, for example) against expenses (which are produced, among others, by massive use of private cars overconsuming fuel) and the result of the equation provides the date when humanity exhausts the nature budget for that year so for the rest months, it will maintain by drawing down local resource stocks and accumulating CO2 in the atmosphere, making climatic change worse.
Therefore it’s not a holiday definitively. Earth Overshoot day has moved from the end of October in 1993 to August 13th last year, which means that the deadline was shortened almost a week in 2016. Therefore each year the problem grows worse, if consumption patterns continue apace, it is hard to imagine that the day when we will have spent all the “credit” that exists in this Earth account could come. If we continue to destroy its natural capital and its ability to renew its environmental services, it will be very difficult to avoid it.
In CARTIF, our year already started with environmental purposes and to encourage companies for “funding” to Earth seems to us to be vital because we are in overcapacity nowadays. One of the most interesting ads to do this is the call Spanish CLIMA projects. The Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment (MAGRAMA) launches this call every year and encourages companies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions with the development of new low carbon activities. It is one of the best funding for those companies that need to receive the last effort to transform their activities towards low carbon technologies, since the MAGRAMA “buys” the CO2 equivalent emissions avoided (expense to Earth eluded), raising the fixed price per tonne each year.
Thus, if you choose to carry out a more environmental process, it will be attractive from the economic point of view and besides, you will contribute to add to the “money box” of the Earth, therefore activities like changing your fossil fuel boilers by other fueled by biomass, transforming your fleet to electric vehicles or using the residual heat of your process, could make an important difference for the future.
Do you dare to bring out the environmental banker in you?
We could read some time ago, as a headline in a national newspaper, that the Chairman of Repsol, Antonio Brufau, literally stated that “It is false that the electric car has zero emissions” and “(…) emissions must take into account not only CO2 emitted by the vehicle, but those produced during manufacture“. With this headline and without realizing, the Chairman of REPSOL was advocating for considering the life cycle of a product to make environmental self-declarations. The fact is that this generalized doubt about the relationship between the electric car and the CO2 cannot lead us to think that it is not one of the most environmental mobility options because it is, what happens is that we should be meticulous when it comes to talk about the environmental performance of products.
One of the first examples of using life-cycle thinking assesment (LCA) in the late 60s, in the USA, when Coca-Cola® decided to explore alternative containers besides the glass bottle through this approach. And this concept arose from a very logical way, due to the emerging companies’ demand for distributing environmental loads, nobody liked being the most pollutant. Companies began to ask about an extended responsibility in this regard and through methodologies such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), one of the most internationally recognized and accepted methods to investigate the environmental performance of products throughout their life cycle, it could be verified that the associated environmental impacts with the manufacturing stage were not the most relevant in some cases.
Let’s see an example to summarize this issue. Imagine a conversation between Mary Ecological and Mary Nosy:
Mary Ecological: “Have you seen the garlands I have placed for the party? they are made of recycled paper because I am an ecological woman, you know“ Mary Nosy: “They are lovely, where did you buy them?” Mary Ecological: “In a Chinese online shop, extremely cheap”
A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) applied to these garlands would probably have confirmed us that Mary Ecological is attributing to herself a label that is not true. To buy a product in China can cause that an item made of recycled paper may have a hidden environmental price that is “disguised” using a more environmentally friendly raw material within the manufacturing process. And from the moment we are free to choose what we buy, as consumers, we are sharing the environmental responsibility with the industry, let´s keep this in mind.
When a company asks for what is the environmental profile of its product and / or process, CARTIF always advises to apply this methodology because the obtained results are a detailed environmental picture of the life cycle of its process, product or service (suppliers included), with the consequent opportunity to identify critical points and reduce costs, both environmental and economic. We have been able to check it many times in many of our projects. It doesn’t matter if we are a consumer or a product manager, to take a life-cycle approach to the environmental impact of the products we are acquiring, producing or selling, is essential to make decisions and to put in clear terms our environmental performance.
For this reason, the Chairman of Repsol said the principle of only considering the stage of use in an electric car to confirm that it does not emit CO2 is incorrect. Although it is perhaps the most significant phase (in fuel-consuming vehicles too), the assessment must be extended to its life cycle which, obviously, includes CO2 emissions from electricity production. Strictly speaking, we should either clarify that the electric vehicle does not emit CO2 during the stage of use or apply the LCA considering its life cycle (CARTIF has already done it) so that, based on the results, to generate environmental headlines.
We love the environmental assessments well done and undertaking rigorous environmental claims. Ask us and we’ll tell you how to do this!
“What is the weather like this weekend?”. We ask every week when Friday comes. “Sunny, but we can’t trust on weather” answers our colleague. “You’re right! It’s the climate change fault” both conclude.
In our previous posts, you have been able to know how CARTIF is working to help to mitigate climate change, through the development of new technologies and awareness. And let’s say that, if climate change is responsible even for our change of plans during the weekend, it’s time to know it a little better, to talk about when and by whom was discovered.
Eduard Punset has written an excellent introduction to this issue in his latest book and we have collected here an excerpt:
“The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1995 was awarded jointly to Paul J. Crutzen (Dutch), Mario J. Molina (Mexican) and F. Sherwood Rowland (American), to warn the world of a thinning of the ozone layer surrounding the Earth, between twenty and fifty kilometers above our heads (…). They showed, to the disbelief of many people, that the Earth’s ozone layer was thinning in the region of the poles, especially in the South, over Antarctica, and the cause of this degradation was some gases that don’t exist in nature but, after their discovery, in the early twentieth century, were widely used in the industry as refrigerants and propellants (in aerosol). They are the chlorofluorocarbon gases, also commonly known as CFCs, included in many normal household items like in refrigerators, spray deodorants etc … What Nobel laureates discovered was that, despite being harmless to human health, these gases are so stable and stay in the atmosphere for very long times, long enough to reach the upper atmosphere, where UVB photons turn them into highly reactant catalysts. Ozone depletion is caused by the products of those processes” (extract from Carta a mis nietas: todo lo que he aprendido y me ha conmovido. Eduard Punset, 2015, published by Destino, in Spanish).
And although the alert came in 1974, yet it took a few years for society to become aware of the problemand to increase the knowledge about the possible greenhouse gases. Let’s look back to history.
It’s in Rio de Janeiro, in 1992, where countries joined an international treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a frame for international cooperation that outlines how specific international treaties may be negotiated to set binding limits on greenhouse gases.
Three years later, the first Conference of the Parties (COP1) was held in Berlin and in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in Kyoto, in Japan, with the aim of providing policies and measuring plans for industrialized countries, to reduce emissions by 5 % in the period 2008-2012. In 1999, 84 Parties signed the Kyoto Protocol but to enter into force, the Protocol must be ratified, and this fact was a problem because there was no agreement on how to apply the rules. In 2001, George W. Bush announced that the United States of America was no longer intending to comply with the objectives set out in the Protocol and in 2005, it entered into force without the signature of USA and China, the world’s largest carbon polluters.
But it was necessary to keep on working and the COP15 arrived, in Copenhagen in 2009, a crucial event in the negotiating process, remembered as unsuccessful because it was closed with a minimal agreement that did not commit countries. It was in Doha, in 2012, where a new timetable to reach an effective universal climate agreement was set out, choosing 2015 as the deadline. And with this purpose, COP21 took place last December, in Paris, and it has been the first time that a legally binding and a universal agreement on climate have been achieved, with the aim of limiting their emissions.
“Never too late to do well”, says a Spanish proverb, so we are confident that a successful chapter has begun in climate change history. Let’s cross our fingers.
A few years ago, the magic company Pixar® showed us the story about the robot named WALL-E, who was designed to clean up an abandoned, waste-covered Earth far in the future, exactly in the year 2800. What we don’t know is if WALL-E knew the benefits of recycling, that is, the importance of giving a second life cycle to things and, above all, if he knew that all the collected plastics should put into the specific recycling bins. Maybe someone should have told WALL-E plastics are valuable materials characterized by an interesting potential to be recycled many times, without losing value or their functional properties.
Plastic production became widespread in the 50s and it has grown exponentially during recent years (Plastics Europe, 2015). Furthermore, according to Spanish web AEMA, about a third of the current plastic production corresponds to disposable containers that are thrown away after a year of use approximately.
“An efficient Europe resources” is one of the seven flagship initiatives as part of the Europe 2020 strategy, and, to use the post-consumer plastics resources effectively involves to be able to recycle them, whether:
Chemical recycling, that refers to operations that aim to chemically degrade the collected plastics waste into its monomers or other basic chemicals. The output may be reused for polymerisation into new plastics, or
Mechanical recycling, that refers to operations that aim to recover plastics waste via mechanical processes, like grinding, washing, separating, drying, re-granulating and compounding, producing recycled plastics ready to be used again.
And why is so important to promote these actions? Take a look at the following data, extracted from the new report about the future of plastics published by the World Economic Forum last January:
The best research currently available estimates that there are over 150 million tonnes of plastics in the ocean today.
Plastics production has increased twenty-fold in the past half-century and is expected to triple again in the next 30 years, achieving 1,124 Mt.
The plastics waste represents more than the 12 % of the total municipal solid waste, compared with 1 % in 1960.
After a short first-use cycle, 95 % of plastic packaging material value is lost to the economy.
If product components manufactured were reused and no waste was produced, € 625 million would be saved.
If all consumed water bottles in the US in a week were line up, they would do five laps around the planet.
While we are walking towards a future scenario in which the need for virgin plastic is progressively reduced, we should put more effort into R&D and optimizing new recycling techniques, improving their success rates.
We have already talked about the importance of awareness and the individual responsibility in our previous posts, therefore to learn about recycling and reusing, even in our homes, could be a good starting point for that. And what a better way to begin than by our children.
With this purpose and in collaboration with the Valladolid City Council, we have organized an event aimed at children on April 24, in the framework of the project LIFE COLRECEPS, with the aim of raising awareness about recycling, specifically about the plastic named expanded polystyrene (EPS), more known as styrofoam.
A sustainable polystyrene sculpture is going to be created during the event, in the form of mosaic, from a few pieces of styrofoam painted for the occasion by children participating… even they will be able to get a prize!
The aim is to show that technologies, such as the one that is being carried out in LIFE COLRECEPES, could enable infinite recovery for plastics and do not have to end up in landfills.
Follow us on our social networks to know more details about the event… and see you there!
When we work developing environmental technologies, to quantify the advantages to be obtained by using them can be an important added value. And if we put numbers, we are committed to communicate these numbers in an objective and traceable way, and it is when indicators, as environmental footprints, appear.
The most famous is the carbon footprint (after Armstrong’s footprint on the moon, of course!) but recently, another one resonates, the water footprint. This may be the least known member of the group so there are 9 things about it that, perhaps, you don’t know:
To sum up, we celebrate the World Water Day this month, and it is important to remind that the concept ‘water crises’ goes beyond a definition. The World Economic Forum called it in 2014 as the third overall risk worldwide, over climate change and food availability in the world… to give people pause, don’t you think?
