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!
In the first part of this post, we talked about the conclusions we heard in an interesting conference about air quality. After that, we decided two to do two things. On the one hand, to share the figures and conclusions there exposed and on the other hand, to work at self-examination, thinking about our behavior as citizens. What happens when someone asks us if we are willing to use public transport more often? Or to organize ourselves to reduce the number of our daily trips using the private car? We broached the subject of our rights:
• We have a right tobuy wherever we want. We love e-commerce. We are able to buy Chinese oranges on the internet and to ask for bringing them to our home. And if we were not there when company arrives, we are asking for returning another time. To exercise this right involves the use of vans to our home with very low occupancy rates. And not visit the neighborhood greengrocer, of course!
• We have a right to have the car we want, with a good engine and diesel (don’t forget it is cheaper), even for an urban use such as shopping or bringing children to school
• We have a right tomove anywhere within the urban public space. We intend to arrive to the center of our city driving and to find available parkings there. It is better than largest urban parks.
• We have a right to choose where to live and normally, we prefer the suburbs, with good quality of life (and good air). Moreover, we are moving with our private car whenever necessary, regardless of the reason. And of course, being the only occupant of our vehicle.
• We have a right to have public transport, anywhere and at any time, although sometimes the transports are running practically empty at certain periods.
• We have a right not to meet delivery vans in the middle of the street and we agree on the fact that Authorities restrict the time in which they are able to circulate through the city center. This means that companies have to increase their fleet with vans with poorer quality in order to have more available units and, consequently, to ensure orders. Including our oranges.
• We have a right to have dumpsters on our doorstep, with frequent domestic rubbish collection. If we do not check that truck passes several times a day, we are complaining.
• We have a right to review our vehicles periodically, but we order to companies which carry out the compulsory vehicle tests not take too long in the review and not to be expensive. Implementing appropriate control systems for detecting “big high-polluting cars” would require longer reviews and a higher price.
We are sure that you have ever used these rights to defend your comfort zone but, in CARTIF, we are convinced too that, with a little effort, we could change our habits by more sustainably customs. We know that awareness always takes time, but the same situation happened when the waste separation was legislated or when smoking in public places was banned, and both or them are now fully integrated into our daily practices.
For this reason, we are asking the authorities to let experts advise them both for implementing more measures to encourage sustainable behaviors and to penalize those which are damaging in excess. That is, we should support to have a little less of “individual freedom” in order to have a better air quality.
Because with the use of “our rights” what we are really doing is limiting the freedom of others. The elderly, children or people with respiratory diseases are risk groups and their health largely depends on the quality of the air they breathe.
Miguel de Cervantes wrote in his work Don Quixote: “Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that heaven has bestowed upon men; no treasures that the earth holds buried or the sea conceals can compare with it; for freedom, as for honour, life may and should be ventured (…) “.
We are not angry, of course, what really happens is that air quality issue concerns us greatly in CARTIF. A few weeks ago, we attended a workshop entitled “Technical solutions for reducing emissions from mobility“, held in MAGRAMA (Spanish Ministry). The panel of speakers was made up of a related group of professionals from the mobility sector, in its broadest sense, and all of them exposed several experiences, technical solutions, problems and challenges for the future.
As we drew some conclusions and we heard data which need to be shouted from every corner (although they may irritate us!), we are inaugurating, with this blog post, a series where we are telling you what was said there (part I) to question our rights as citizens (part II) … is our well-being real?
Let’s start from the beginning. The conference opened with a kindly reminder to the assistants about the effects of poor urban air quality. This problem was the common theme of the entire workshop because it is a topic that cannot be forgotten, it concerns our health. Look at these figures: 33,200 people died because of urban air quality effects in Spain in 2013 (390,419 was the total) and 491,000 died prematurely in the EU-28.
With such a strong beginning, and without forgetting there is no exaggeration in these data, we are telling you some considerations:
1.Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMP) are being implemented in cities with the aim of improving mobility and make it more sustainable, or what would be the same, reducing individual transportation by internal combustion engine cars. At this point, the conclusion was unanimous, it should be asked to the municipalities to try to be more ambitious in their actions and one of the main axes of their policy should be to improve urban air quality. It seems clear that necessary management measures will be needed fundamentally. Do you know one of the recent initiatives of the Mayor of London? We love it.
2. It seems clear that new technologies in traffic management as long as to encourage car-sharing will be a help for mobility problems, but their actual impact is very limited. Let’s legislate them for the good of all.
3.Volkswagen emissions scandal was mentioned, of course. It was said that automotive industry has developed important improvements on vehicles during recent years, which have led to significant reductions in fuel consumptions and pollutant emissions (without addressing irregularities thereon). Nevertheless, improvements are still needed.
4. Up to now and according to sales figures, technologies for vehicles and alternative fuels cannot compete without economic incentives against the conventional ones. Once more, to promote Research and Development may be the key factor to achieve it.
5. Greater control over the actual condition of the vehicles and the identification of “big high-polluting cars” are necessary. During the conference, it was mentioned that there are already clear publications showing that a relatively small percentage of vehicles would be responsible for high rates of pollutants emissions, and not only among the oldest ones.
We know that to keep citizens calm is the main objective during this kind of formal conferences but, from our point of view, it should be more taxative and make clear that vehicles combustion engines and heatings mainly cause urban air pollution. And this issue leads us directly to the analysis of citizens’ daily activities.
“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?
