Quaking Aspen: The End of an Era

Dear friends and colleagues in Sustainability,
 
I’m writing with some exciting news — I recently started a new job as the first Sustainability Product Manager and corporate sustainability leader for SolidWorks Corporation!
 
I’ll be managing SolidWorks’ new Sustainability tool, which is a life cycle assessment (LCA) dashboard integrated into our CAD software that tracks the carbon footprint, total embodied energy, and air and water effects in real time as designers and engineers model and simulate products. SolidWorks CAD is used by over a million commercial and academic users worldwide, so I’m really excited for this tool’s potential to create some pretty incredible sustainable product designs. In addition to launching and managing the SolidWorks Sustainability module, I’ll be leading the company’s corporate sustainability efforts.
 
I hope you don’t mind that I’ll be reaching out to many of you in my new role, both for advice on sustainable-product management and corporate greening, as well as for potential sustainability successes using our product. Please let me know if you use SolidWorks in your company and would be interested in having a conversation about sustainable product design!
 
I started at SolidWorks last week, and it’s already been intense. With my hands full here, I’ll be shuttering Quaking Aspen, my sustainable innovation consultancy. I’m happy with what Quaking Aspen was able to accomplish through from 2008-2010. Along with our partners, we:

• helped the Conservation Law Foundation develop a green-marketing plan for a new service offering around stakeholder engagement towards corporate social and environmental responsibility;
• provided content for eQuilibrium’s enterprise carbon accounting (ECA) software, which was acquired by EnerNOC in 2009;
• guided Avery Dennison in product stewardship decisions using LCA tools (one for a product that sold 40 million units in 2007!); and
• reported on best practices in employee engagement around energy efficiency for the Environmental Defense Fund.

I’ll retain this email address as a general professional networking address, so you can reach me here or at SolidWorks — my new contact details are pasted below. And of course, you can still find me on Twitter, at Babson (where I’ll continue teaching sustainable business as an adjuct professor), in Net Impact, at conferences, and generally around Boston.
 
Look me up at SustainableBrands ’10 if you’ll be there in Monterey in June — otherwise I hope to connect or reconnect with each of you soon!
 
Cheers,
Asheen

Asheen Phansey
Product Manager, Sustainability
Office: +1 978 318 5623
Cell: +1 781 530 7262
Asheen.Phansey@3ds.com
Dassault Systèmes | www.3ds.com Visit us at: www.solidworks.com
Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp.- 300 Baker Avenue – CONCORD, MA 01742, USA

 

Oct 15, 2009: Sustainable Innovation Workshop

Quaking Aspen, in partnership with Collaborative Innovation Services, is thrilled to announce our first Sustainable Innovation Workshop open to the public!

Workshop details:

Date:
Thursday, October 15, 2009
9:00AM – 5:00PM

Place:
Forefront Conference Center
404 Wyman Street Waltham, MA
http://www.forefrontcenter.com/

Cost:
$395 per person, light breakfast and buffet luncheon included
Student rate available

Register at:
http://sustainableinnovation.eventbrite.com/
Registration deadline is Friday, October 9 at 12:00 Noon

Contact:
Asheen@QuakingAspenLLC.com

Bringing a product from concept to customer is an interdisciplinary process that involves a wide diversity of skills: designers’ creativity, engineers’ pragmatism, operations leaders’ effectiveness, marketers’ insight. So why would you use one-size-fits-all sustainability practices?

We’ve developed a Sustainable Innovation Workshop that provides clarity to where each sustainable innovation tool fits into your job and your company.

We will train you in the tools most useful at each stage of the innovation process. You’ve probably heard of some of these sustainable innovation tools, like carbon footprinting, life cycle assessment, and green marketing.

So if you’re a professional working in a design, technical, operations, strategy, or marketing role, and are interested in—or have been tasked with—infusing more sustainability into your job and career, attend our workshop to gain exposure to these tools of sustainable innovation. Keep reading to find out what you’ll learn.

More about the Sustainable Innovation Toolkit

Here is more detail about the Sustainable Innovation Toolkit you’ll be exposed to through our workshop:

Biomimicry

Biomimicry, or nature-inspired design, provides a practical, systematic framework used for the design of products and processes using inspiration from Nature. Its principles will also help you develop a sustainable product “gold standard” against which you can compare all future design ideas.

You will learn how to apply this framework during the design process. To really get your design team’s creative juices flowing, we also offer a half-day intensive biomimicry workshop.

Life Cycle Assessment

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is the practice of quantifying a product design’s ecological impact.

You will learn how to make simple tradeoffs to improve the ecological efficiency of your products, such as: do we manufacture with sustainable materials in China, or local nonrenewables? What is the impact of changing from materials? To learn more, we also offer an LCA workshop that will let you really dig into LCA methodology.

Green Chemistry

Is there a science to choosing—and inventing anew—materials along environmental considerations? You bet! Green chemistry “unleashes the creativity and innovation of our scientists and engineers in designing and discovering the next generation of chemicals and materials… [for] increased performance and increased value while meeting all goals to protect and enhance human health and the environment” (ACS Green Chem. Inst.).

You will learn how to develop a Material Preference List for existing materials, and will learn the Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry to evaluate new materials. If you need to delve more deeply into the green beaker, leverage our relationship with Dr. John Warner of the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry.

Sustainable Operations

It takes a sustainable company to make a truly sustainable product. Do you know where the major impacts of your company’s operations lie? Performing a greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory—the formal name for a carbon footprint—reveals the most impactful areas of your operations.

You will learn how to conduct a GHG inventory, and how to use the information gained from this inventory to improve your operations. We can also work with you further to reduce your company’s total GHG footprint.

Industrial Ecology

Industrial ecology refers to a high-level understanding of a business ecosystem, and what makes that ecosystem sustainable. This covers greening upstream in your supply chain and downstream in your products’ value chains.

You will learn about the finer distinctions of the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle hierarchy (like recycling vs. downcycling), and the positive and negative financial impacts of closed-loop (cradle-to-cradle) production.

Green Marketing

Green Marketing is the ability to tell the sustainability story of a product or service believably, to one or more market segments that will be incentivized to buy your offering based on its environmental effectiveness.

You will learn about market segmentation, targeting, and positioning for a green marketing campaign; laws and ethical practices in green advertising; and future trends to watch for, such as product-level carbon footprinting. Interested in learning more? We also offer—you guessed it—an in-depth, hands-on seminar in green marketing.

Your Workshop Facilitators

Read more about Asheen Phansey and Rudy Ruggles.

 

On Sustainable Food at TiECON East

Recently I had the privilege of moderating a panel in the Social Enterprise track at TiECON East called “Feeding 9 Billion People: Challenges and Opportunities in Sustainable Solutions”, sponsored by Babson College. The audience consisted of technologists and entrepreneurs, and the panel featured four great sustainable food experts:

• Janice Brodman (JB), Director of the Center for Innovative Technologies at Education Development Center;
• Dwayne Martin (DM), of Slow Money;
• Chris Reohr (CR), President PatentFreedom and a seasoned entrepreneur in the space; and
• Dorothy Suput (DS), Executive Director of The Carrot Project.

We began with brief introductions from each panelist, during which some very interesting ideas and statistics were already emerging. For example, did you know that agriculture accounts for 25% of the carbon dioxide emissions and fully 75% of methane emissions (a greenhouse gas 20 times worse than CO2)? Or that 92% of farms in the US are classified as small farms, and these hold 73% of all agricultural assets?

Despite the entrenched nature of some areas of agribusiness, the panelists considered this a great business area to enter. To my first question of What are the big entrepreneurial opportunities in sustainable agriculture?, they proposed these 10 opportunities:

1. tracking and traceability of “field to fork”, particularly in the EU, which is beginning to require adherance to traceability standards (JB);
2. purchasing at-risk (especially urban) farmland, and dedicating it as a public trust, like forestland (DM);
3. a Kiva.org microfinance model for American farmers (DM);
4. new CSA (Community-Supported Agriculuture) associations, since most CSAs are oversubscribed and have waiting lists (DM);
5. providing services to increase the efficiencies of existing CSAs (DM);
6. novel farming solutions as we bump into the limits of yield, culture, and space for agriculture (CR);
7. using recent advances in microbiology to promote new sustainable agricultural solutions (CR);
8. ways to train the next generation (the average age of farmers in the US is 54-56 years old) (DS);
9. sourcing local food in supermarkets (2-3% of food is sold directly to people) (DS);
10. urban food production via greenhouses and/or rooftops (DS).

Want to grab one of these ideas and run with it? You might then be interested in my next question: How can an entrepreneur obtain financing for an idea in the sustainable food space? All agreed that funding was a challenge in this space. Farm credit bureaus are designed to support existing farms, not new opportunities. Often, agricultural plays don’t qualify for VC funding or foundation grants. Many suggested the funding itself as an area of great opportunity!

So given the above solutions, Is there a “killer app” technology that could be applied to the problem of sustainable food? I suggested the use of perennial crops, such as The Land Institute‘s wheatgrass, the result of a cross between a perennial prairie grass and annual crop wheat (if you’re ever near Salina, Kansas, you must visit the Land as I was lucky enough to a couple months ago!). Others tossed out ideas as diverse as mobile phone technology in the developing world (JB), a greater understanding of soil chemistries (DM) (“we know more about the stars than we do about soil”), and a very strong emphasis on supply chain logistics (JB, DS).

My curiousity satisfied, I turned to the wisdom of the audience. They asked great questions like:

• How do we deal with the consumption side of the problem of feeding 9 billion people? (logistics, and information)
• How do we recover from low productivity when pesticides aren’t used? (a novel idea: provide insurance to farmers during the three years it takes during the changeover to organic, as the soil rebuilds and before yields come back up)
• How do we combat the growing competing uses for existing farmland? (connect the current generation of farmers with a new generation to facilitate the huge impeding land transfer)

Clearly I’m collapsing much fascinating and productive dialogue, but you’ll get the idea: there’s an amazing amount of good business and business for good that can be accomplished by creative entrepreneurs in the sustainable food space. I think Janice summed it up best: “Entrepreneurs are the way to [sustainable] development!”

Thanks to all four panelists for a great conversation, and to Vithal Deshpande of TiE Boston for introducing me and the panel. So, what do you think? Do you have a comment or an idea for one of my panelists? Leave a comment, and I will pass your note along.

Asheen Phansey is the Founder and President of Quaking Aspen, LLC and an Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at Babson College.

 

The New Era of Corporate Transparency

Imagine, if you will, posing a tough question to the CEO of one of the world’s most recognizable and archetypically American brands, with naught a credential but that of “concerned world citizen”. Imagine further specifying that the exec gets only a couple dozen words to reply. Not bloody likely, right?

Yet that’s just the chance afforded me and several others recently by Scott Monty, Ford’s social media coordinator. Scott approached his boss, Ford CEO Alan Mullaly, after a meeting and asked if he would receive questions via Twitter. Unsure of what to expect, I threw this into the mix: “What is Mullaly’s commitment to sustainability, both personal and professional?” Moments later, Scott tweeted Alan’s response.

Let’s pause to consider what the exchange means to the future of corporate transparency. Behind the shield of anonymity, business leaders have certainly committed antisocial acts. But the public is guilty in the other direction, too: have you ever thought that “the company” can spare you a drink or a month’s cable, ignoring that if this behavior is widespread, real people could lose their jobs? Just as firms can think of us as homogeneous consumer segments and not individuals, we tend to think of companies as anonymous corporations rather than collections of people. Historically there has been a missing sense of responsibility in both directions, between corporations and their stakeholders.

And yet, here’s one small but significant data point: a business leader willing to field a question from his stakeholders about his personal and professional responsibility. Is this an exception, or a growing trend?

I think it’s the latter. It’s no coincidence that the hue and cry for corporate social responsibility and ecological stewardship is rising at the same time that corporate communication is being steadily democratized. We’ve seen a move from the patriarchal corporate identity (“what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa”), to flatter communication via the Internet (if still mostly advertising copy), to increased transparency via employee and executive blogs, and finally now a real bidirectional dialogue via social media.

It’s my hope that social media can midwife a new era of corporate transparency, that the unprecedented level of accountability welcomed by Alan Mullaly — echoed in boardrooms the world across — will transform the identity of the corporation into a living entity reflecting the individuals that make it up. In short, it’s my hope that social media gives corporations back their souls. If business leads this revolution — call it the transparency revolution — it won’t stay in just this sphere (to wit, “Congress’s New Love Affair with Twitter“).

Alan’s reply, by the way, was this: “I’ve spent my entire career focused on safe & efficient transport; sustainability is the future. The future is now.” (You can read the full exchange here.) Ford’s actions will of course scream loudly, but these are exciting words for those of us working daily toward industrial sustainability. Scott Monty was deservedly profiled as a Voice of Innovation by BusinessWeek for his efforts — let’s hope his initiative is an augury of things to come.

 

Why Globalization Is Dangerous for Sustainability

Modern economics says that global trading can often create additional value for all involved. A country’s economy will function more efficiently if it produces an excess of goods that are easier for it to make and trades these for other goods; that’s a basic extension of the concept of division of labor. The obvious negative impacts of global trading are transportation costs, both financial and ecological; but if we can develop cleaner modes of transportation, surely the positive economic effects outweigh the ecological costs?

I had thought as much, until Professor Ben Linder of Olin College of Engineering made me rethink my assumptions. In a sustainability workshop that I’ll be chewing on for a while, Ben said that global trade’s real threat to sustainability has to do not with transportation costs, but with carrying capacities.

First, a brief ecology lesson. Picture a world of three tribes: the Sumerians, Babylonians and Phoenicians. For simplicity, these ancient people need only three things to survive: stones (for building houses), barley, and fruit, say one unit per person. Each tribe practices an internal division of labor and produces some of each resource.

Each tribe’s skills and geography are differently suited for producing each resource, but all three resources are equally necessary for survival, so for each tribe only one resource is the limiting factor to growth. Let’s say in our case, Sumer is always scrounging for stones; the Babylonians are often bereft of barley; and fruits are few and far between in Phoenicia. If each tribe can make 1000 units of its scarce resource, but can make 2500 of the other two, each can still only support 1000 people; so the world population is 3000.

Now the tribes discover trade. Each tribe barters some of its two excess resources to the one deficient in each, so now the resources are distributed evenly at 2000 each of stones, barley, and fruit. Now, each tribe can support 2000 people. Without producing any new resources, the population of the world has doubled! And with further specialization, production will likely increase as well. Clearly, the more tribes you can trade with, the fewer your resource limitations to growth.

So why is in-tribe division of labor a good thing, but cross-country trading detrimental to the planet? Because ecosystems can’t trade natural resources. A tribe’s ecosystem is resilient as long as its resources don’t flow out, but the earth can’t ship fertile soil to Phoenicia in exchange for some cleaner water elsewhere if Phoenicia depletes all of its crop nutrients. Yet that’s surely what will happen if the whole world demands Phoenician fruits from land that wasn’t evolved to support the needs of the trade-burgeoned domestic population, let alone the entire world.

This was happening long before the world “flattened”. Ben is fond of telling the story of the collapse of the Atlantic cod population, a resource that put Boston on the world map. Over the last few centuries, “tribes” from around the world traded their resources for Atlantic cod and literally fished it out of George’s Bank. There are cod species elsewhere, but since George’s Bank can’t exactly trade for this top-tier predator, its entire food web is now going through an unstable flux known as a trophic cascade in the cod’s absence. (Read the fascinating history of George’s Bank.)

There are other ways that global operations can stymie sustainability, such as introducing lags into the feedback loops for optimal production, but this argument of carrying capacities seems to be the main challenge. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, though.

 

New Hope for Sustainability

Tomorrow, American voters turn a historic and hopeful gaze on the next Presidential administration. Here’s what I think President Obama should do to respond to our sustainability challenges.

But first, what to avoid. President Obama already has a climate czar; it would be tempting to recommend a national Secretary of Sustainability with the President’s ear, but I don’t think this is in the best interests of our nascent green movement. Imagine if a central government figure had tried to craft the wild evolution of the Internet — would such an authority have conceived of an elegantly brilliant concept like Twitter? No, the market still needs to let its “rational exuberance” over sustainability evolve.

The same temptation holds for reigning in the likes of Big Oil. In light of AIG’s arrogance and the automakers’ jet-set solicitations, it’s easy to suggest that industry is underregulated, greedy, broken. However, when it comes to sustainability, strict regulation is not the answer. Witness the biofuels debacle: we pushed for pro-ethanol legislation only to find that we were locked into a fuel source far less beneficial than we’d imagined. Local legislation like San Francisco’s ban on plastic grocery bags is similarly heavy-handed.

Here’s the crucial distinction: President Obama should determine the rules of the marketplace, not the marketplace itself. In order to function smoothly toward a sustainable future, industry must be made to shoulder its own externalities by legislating for an ecological allowance standard.

Many methods of internalizing ecological costs to align public and corporate interests have already been put forth, with most centering on carbon taxation or cap-and-trade; economist Gilbert Metcalf makes a decent case for a carbon tax in this month’s MIT Technology Review. However, I’ve never been overly hot and bothered about carbon (ah, global warming puns). Although it’s a better proxy for a company’s overall environmental footprint than, say, the number of green Skittles consumed, it’s still an incomplete measure. Should a company increase its use of formaldehyde-based adhesives to lower its greenhouse emissions? How many gallons of clean drinking water balance a pound of CO2? These complex questions require lifecycle thinking that can’t be answered by the most thorough carbon footprint.

So, the Obama Administration should adopt an ecological metrics standard based on life cycle assessment (LCA). Several independent lifecycle measurement systems currently exist, from the light Okala design tool to full-blown LCA software. I don’t really care what the standard is, as long as it’s well-vetted, consistent, and adaptable. Companies can then be charged taxes or tradable allowances based on the full lifecycle impacts of their entire product systems — supply chain and all.

Once a standardized system for measuring product sustainability is adopted, the road will be paved for a freer market — a more open and honest one that accounts for the true costs of doing business. Imagine the price of coal power if the cost of its electricity includes the rise in marginal health care costs from increased cases of asthma and cancer; would coal-powered energy still be in anyone’s best financial interests?

If we factored in the costs and values of the natural capital that goes into the products we make, we couldn’t afford to keep poisoning ourselves and our world. That would be a fitting legacy for the most powerful change agent of our generation.

 

The Brand Risk of Unsustainable Packaging

Lately I’ve found myself picking up the remnants of Burger King bags, sandwich wrappers, and beverage cups from my yard. These weekly papery invaders got me thinking about the negative sentiments that such unsustainable packaging engenders, and the resulting brand liability.

On the surface, it isn’t Burger King’s fault that some irresponsible lout chooses my lawn (or at present, my snowbanks) as his dumping site. But let’s read between the lines: the very fact that Burger King enables its customers to turn its products into everlasting debris speaks to the company’s lack of understanding of the greater societal ecosystem in which it operates.

You’ve seen that little note on the packaging that requests that you dispose of this properly, showing a responsible-looking stick figure throwing her neat, compact trash into a cavernously empty bin. This is nothing like reality; chances are the real trash bin is already bursting at the seams — as is its eventual landfill destination. There’s really no “away”, anyway, so all that trash ends up somewhere, whether it’s in my yard or on a trash barge bound for nowhere.

Corporate social responsibility is no longer just about installing compact fluorescents, buying carbon indulgences and recycling your company’s soda cans. It’s about developing the mindset that your company is an integral part of this world and all its chickens, dandelions, sand, polar bears, ocean currents, grasshoppers and rainy days. It’s about examining every point of interaction with the world and making certain that each interaction is meaningful — and, eventually, that each is restorative.

So what’s the solution to BK’s ubiquity of soon-useless packaging? Perhaps it’s using organic, compostable ware, like these beautiful Verterra plates that sustainability/social media consultant Paul Smith pointed out to me. Maybe it’s using reusable plates for eat-in customers, if comparably-priced options can be found.

The point is, adopting the mindset that your products’ sustainability is your responsibility is your brand will make all the difference in the world.