Recently in corporate initiatives Category

Commuting is bad for the environment. Emissions from vehicles both directly and indirectly through fossil-fueled and river-befouling power plants, and from construction and maintenance combined with open space land grabs combine to form a toxic stew that is slowly killing us. Something to keep in mind as a reality check during the insane U.S. healthcare debate and the endless go-rounds what to do about the costs and doctor shortages in Canada.

Transportation typically accounts for 1/3 of emissions, and motor vehicles at 2/3rds of that. Commuting trips are about 20 percent of all travel.

The Canadians have done great work in assessing the health impacts from air pollution and accidents. A landmark study by the Canadian Medical Association, No Breathing Room: National Illness Costs of Air Pollution pegs the pricetag at $8 billion in 2008, killing some 21,000 Canadians per year. 

A fair estimate is $35 million in costs and 915 fatalities from commuting in Canada per year . Or $350 million and 9,150 deaths annually in the U.S. which has roughly 10 times the population.

 Now a new study by Smartrisk, The Economic Burden of Injury in Canada  shows much those so-called 'accidents' add to the pricetag of commuting. It estimates that transportation-related injuries cost $3.7 billion resulting in 3,067 deaths and 30,932 hospitalizations; transportation is the leading cause of unintentional injury deaths.

"Motor vehicle incidents were the most common cause of transport related injuries, accounting for 1,331 or 43% of transport related deaths and over half of all other transport related injuries," said the report. 

Calculating the literal impacts for car commuting comes up with 266 deaths and 3,300 hospitalized injuries and at a cost of $270 million in Canada. And over 2,600 in fatalities, and 33,000 injuries costing $2.7 billion in the U.S.

And who pays the pricetags? The persons in the mirror either through pain and suffering, more bills, higher premiums, and tax hikes. What can that individual in front  can do about it? Go telecommute, locate on busy transit routes, and end free staff parking.

Intercity and commuter/regional rail offers, when done right, a greener alternative to driving and flying not only in reduced energy consumption but also in enabling compact high-density and walkable development on existing brownfield lands as opposed to car-oriented low-density greenspace-munching sprawl.

The Pacific Northwest is an epicenter of rail transportation and land use initiatives, with hits and misses given the beauty and quality of life and the unchanneled growth that threatens to destroy it. Hits that all three of the major cities: Vancouver, B.C., Seattle, Wash., and Portland, Ore. have or will have commuter and urban rail transit systems, are linked by an albeit sluggishly-growing-and-improving intercity rail network, and especially in Portland's case (with some of those most advanced policies anywhere), are encouraging transit-oriented development. Misses in that the British Columbia and to a lesser extent Washington state government continues 1950s-styled sprawl-encouraging roadbuilding and widening policies (in B.C. case's despite its commitment to carbon taxes) and service cuts including in Portland to local transit.

The Discovery Institute's Cascadia Center is sponsoring a conference that is happening soon:  May 27, 2009 - May 29, 2009 and would be worth while to attend to learn about transportation alternatives and developments in the region that can be applied elsewhere: intercity, commuter/regional rail and rail/cycling integration.

The event, the Cascadia Rail Partnership Conference is subtitled Moving Beyond Oil - Connecting Communities - Rails & Trails. Among its agenda items are

* Federal High Speed Rail Legislation-Moving Passenger and Freight Rail Beyond Oil

* Cascades Rail and Interconnecting Bus Service, and the Connect Oregon Initiative

* New Rail Technology from High Speed Rail to Diesel Multiple Units

* Update on Stimulus Package and Rail Opportunities
* Moving Freight and Passengers on the Same Track

There will also be a special-invite launch in Snohomish (north of Seattle) with Sonoma/Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) John Nemeth, Rail Planning Manager for SMART, the builder of a 70-mile rail and trail line, and Andy Peri from Marin County Bicycle Coalition will meet with Snohomish County rail and trail advocates, and the Snohomish Chamber of Commerce to discuss lessons learned.

This last one is quite timely because there have been and continue to be conflicts between both green form of transportation: cycling/walking and rail transit on little-used or abandoned-but-being-brought-back-to-use rail lines. There has been a big battle on the Seattle area's growing, sprawling, and congested Eastside over such a rail corridor that some senior and powerful officials want for bicycles/pedestrians only while others want for a mixed-use commuter/regional rail and cycle corridor. This route is also the only feasible north-south rail transportation alternative should the principal rail line that hugs the earthquake/landslide/tsunami-vulnerable shoreline from Everett to Seattle gets knocked out: a strong possibility in 'shake-rattle-and-roll country'. Or there is a fire or explosion in the aging tunnel that brings the trains under the city center.

The event takes place in Seattle and Portland with an on-board presentation aboard the 'kickoff' train between both cities on May 27. There will also be a tour of Portland's WES suburb-to-suburb commuter rail; the group will take the MAX light rail to Beaverton, change to WES, ride to Wilsonville, and return. Following that attendees can ride back on MAX and get off near the Amtrak station or ride further directly to PDX for their flight back via Horizon (alas Sound Transit's LINK light rail from SeaTac to downtown Seattle isn't open yet but there are the King County Metro buses). There will be sessions on the 28th and the aforementioned luncheon on the 29th.

 

You would never hear a car maker say 'drive less' or a cookware firm recommend eating raw food to save the planet. Nor would one expect a printer manufacturer suggest that its customers print less or don't buy their goods if they don't need to.

Yet that is what Lexmark, in a remarkable display of corporate responsibility has done in via research and advice, reported on TMCnet.

Among its suggestions are:

* Use two-sided printing to save paper

* Use software like the Lexmark Toolbar to print only the Web pages you need

* Share printers in the home or office through wireless networking technology

* Look for the longest available printer warranty to extend its life cycle

* Improve printer efficiency by switching the device off after use

* Print in draft mode to reduce the amount of ink used

* Use Lexmark high-yield cartridges for a higher yield of ink or toner, resulting in fewer cartridges to manufacture and recycle

* Recycle your printed pages and use paper with recycled content

I do have one complaint with Lexmark and that is over its inkjet cartridges. I own an X2650 multifunction printer--a low-cost unit that is adequate for my needs--but the cartridges can't be commercially refilled such as by Island Inket franchisees and others, and refillable alternatives are next to impossible to find.

Yes, Lexmark does have a free cartridge recycling service and one can get replacements with this at a lower price, but that doesn't help me and other users who are running out of ink, can't wait for the lousy mail service, and who want to lower our TCO.  The last time my ink ran out I had to go to the local WalMart ASAP (where I had bought the printer) and pay full price.

Now I'm using an alternative strategy: sharing my wife's HP OfficeJet J6480, which is a more complex machine for what I need to do but which does have refillable cartridges.

That leads to another and serious issue: home inkjet printers have become so cheap that it is often less expensive to replace them--thereby creating more toxic e-waste--than in buying new cartridges.

Come on, Lexmark, you're almost there. Let your customers re-use rather than recycle the cartridges. 

 

There have been plenty to the point of overload of competing green claims--that some times amount to greenwash--regarding the apparent and supposed environmental benefits of buildings, products, features, technologies, services, and practices: from LEED buildings to telework.

At the same time there have been points raised about the costs both direct and indirect i.e. lost productivity of going green: at what price to organizations especially in this tough economy with limited resources.

To help organizations, decisionmakers, and yes journalists and the public, could some reputable association develop with consensus from all parties: industry, academia, government, environmental groups devise an objective 'GreenDex' to evaluate products, services, applications and practices to help us reduce our environmental footprints?

This 'GreenDex' could be based on a basket of total environmental harm i.e.

--Emissions (CO (2) plus other and more noxious air pollutants: gases, particulate matter)
--Effluent
--Nonrecyclable solid waste
--Physical footprint, including impacts such as erosion, destruction of habitant, removal of carbon-converting plants, creation of heat islands, both for property and for workplace- supporting transportation systems
--Heat production
--Energy consumption, with two models: standard i.e. current mix of fossil-fueled, large-scale hydro, nuclear, and alternative (biomass, small-scale hydro, solar, and wind) and Green made up of alternative, such as that supplied by Bullfrog Power in Canada

--Indirect damage, such as emissions and physical footprint from transportation to/from workplaces (The Victoria Transport Policy Institute is one of the best sources of information on transportation and land use direct and indirect environmental impacts) and healthcare costs arising from pollution-borne illnesses such as asthma

The GreenDex could be then be quantified, based on best available information, with rough assigning of direct and indirect (i.e. personally responsible for but incurred on others i.e. transportation demand, health) costs. It can then be compared with straight line direct/indirect capital and operating costs and productivity gains or losses.

Once we have some idea of the harm that our actions can and are causing, versus what we stand to gain, then we can decide to make responsible and effective decisions on what we buy, what practices we use, and how we choose to accomplish our tasks.
 

Telus, which is one of Canada's largest communications companies, has taken an unusual--and correct--path in green marketing. It has gone green first through instituting a telework program for its internal contact center agents, which it calls at-home agents or AHAs and then decided to form and promote its AHA consulting/hosting program to other companies.

Telus has 750 AHAs who presently live within 150 km/95 miles from the firm's eight contact centers: in Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec and come in for training. That number will expand to 1,050 by the end of 2009.  They will represent nearly 21 percent of its contact center workforce from 16 percent currently. The carrier is looking at broadening the network to include communities not in business travel distance and removing the trip-in requirements so it could tap more highly qualified potential agents in other labor markets.

Telus analyzed the impacts of its AHA program, which began in 2006. It has resulted--to date-- $144,500 in savings by team members in fuel and vehicle repairs 1.94 million kilometers/1.2 million miles not driven, 1,250 days of time saved, and 135,000 kg of CO2 not released into the atmosphere.

Telus, prompted by clients who were impressed by its internal AHA program, has parlayed that experience into Telus AgentAnywhere that can also help firms cut down on commuting, and emissions. It offers two different business models: contracted home agents and support for employee agents.
 
Telus's CallCenterAnywhere platform can host, route, and launch inbound and dialler-initiated outbound calls. It partners with LiveXchange to provide contracted home agents either on the Telus's CallCenterAnywhere or LiveXchange's similar platform from Oracle. This contract agent model helps organization supplement their core operations while keeping the operating expenses associated with full time employees down.
 
For companies looking to put their own agents into home office very much like Telus did, its employee agent support program features PSTN voice and DSL broadband connections integrated with CallCenterAnywhere or the customers existing platform, desktops and security virtual private networks along with consulting services to help the customer successfully deploy agents in home settings. The carrier places them together in a simple monthly bill.
 
The Telus home working solution is very flexible and becoming more so. For example it supports private LANs and managed solutions as opposed to conventional ISPs. The carrier will also offer to hire and manage the agents internally at home as its employees and then offer them on temporary outsourced basis to clients.

Yes, there are billions of dollars being pumped into new transit projects and services in Canada and the U.S. A new rapid transit line will open later this year from downtown Vancouver, B.C., where Telus has offices, to the fast-growing suburb of Richmond and to Vancouver International Airport, in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics. More expansions are to come.

Yet even TransLink, the Metro Vancouver region's transportation authority indirectly acknowledges, transit upgrades, along with removing highway bottlenecks, are not the be-all and end-all to traffic congestion and related issues. It has several pages on its site devoted to telework.

Telus has long-running ad campaign featuring various creatures with the tagline 'The Future is Friendly'.

Telus and the firms who signed up its CallCenterAnywhere service, will help make it that way.

 

 

It will be possible, depending on how quickly and urgently the aviation industry acts to develop and roll out the technology, to fly and work on your laptop without worrying about the emissions-related harm being incurred and the life-enabling open space ruined by massive runways. 

The key environmental issue with flying is not so much the CO2 from the engines but from the water vapor emitted at higher altitudes, where jet aircraft operate, which turns into clouds.  Canadian journalist and historian Gwynne Dyer reports that these clouds reflect heat back to the surface "and contribute to global warming".

There is a solution, which he discussed in a recent column carried in a rural Ontario paper ,distributed free in communities located below what are arguably Canada's busiest commercial and military airways, and that is known as 'circulation control'. 

This is a technology whose function is, he quoted Dennis Bushnell, the chief scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center, "'to bleed the engines and inject air backwards at the upper trailing edge of the wing, you can produce lift coefficients which are easily three or four times what we can get out of conventional wings.'"

With circulation control, aircraft can fly more comfortably and with less harm at lower altitudes, reports Dyer. Water vapor turns to rain and bumps i.e. turbulence is minimized.  

"That [also] means very short takeoffs and landings, so short that existing runways could accommodate several aircraft at once. And the same circulation control system, used in flight, has "such tremendous control authority" that it can counter the bumps that are normally part of flying down in the weather and produce a smooth ride."

Circulation control or circulation control wings according to Wikipedia can for the archetypical Boeing 737 airliner cut approach speeds by 35 percent to 45 percent and landing distances by 55 percent to 75 percent, adding that such advances in wing design "could allow for dramatic wing size reduction in large, wide body jets." It can also significantly reduce noise pollution, making aircraft and airports nicer neighbors.

The technology still needs to be perfected. "The main problem with the circulation control wing is the need for high energy air to be blown over the wing's surface," explains the Wikipedia entry. "Such air is often taken from the engine however this drastically reduces engine power production and consequently defies the purpose of the wing. Other options are taking the exhaust gases (which must first be cooled) or using multiple, lightweight gas generators, which are separate from the main aircraft engines."

Aircraft design and technology have taken amazing leaps in performance. Isn't it time for engineers, manufacturers, and airliner customers to aim for the sky in reducing emissions?

It is gratifying to see many countries, such as Australia, Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. plan to spend money on expanding their broadband networks.
 
The Canadian Parliament passed that country's 2009 budget on Tuesday with C$225 million to be spent over three years to develop and implement a strategy on extending broadband coverage to unserved rural and remote communities. 

Public assistance is needed, says the government, which is controlled by the Conservative party led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, because companies cannot turn a profit on the investments needed to reach out to these individuals and businesses owing to density and distance from major hubs.

Only with broadband can consumers and businesses effectively access information, goods and services, and yes work i.e. telework via the information highway by riding on the equivalent of paved roads to and from their homes, storefronts, and factories as compared with the dirt tracks of dial-up and plank roads of satellite.

Yet it would be nice for governments also to offer tax incentives, either tax deductions to corporations or grants-in-lieu of taxes to nonprofits, to nudge these organizations to provide teleworking i.e. 'GreenWorking'. The Telework Coalition has called for just that, pointing that there are parking and transit deductions but none for telework.

One of the factors holding telework back has been less-than-competent managers who are unable to supervise others without seeing them Victorian-style. Tax deductions/grants may be just what the C-suite needs to finally crack the whip on theses individuals: go home or go home, for good.

In fairness to office building landlords there should also be grants or deductions available to them to compensate for their losses. These can go to conversions to other uses, like apartments for the swelling numbers of people who can no longer afford owning single family homes, for schools, or to plowsharing: tearing down buildings and restoring the land to productive greenspace.

The money would be well-spent from a public policy perspective. It costs far less to transport a worker over broadband than over an expressway or in an express train, bus, or ferry from the direct i.e. infrastructure and indirect i.e. healthcare through accidents and illnesses perspectives. Telework also makes infrastructure investments last longer through reducing demand and congestion, which also avoids emissions incurred in maintenance and upgrades. 

Compared with the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into what is becoming obsolete modes of getting around, the actual amounts to be allocated in these incentives would be a clear, clean, drop in the bucket.

Cellphone recycling is beginning to take off and that's great news for the environment and ultimately for all of us.

The latest such move is Recycle My Cell, a new Web-based nationwide initiative launched by Canada's wireless industry that lets users find out where and how to properly dispose of their cell phones and other wireless devices - regardless of carrier, brand, or condition. 

The free program in the country that brought us the BlackBerry incorporates numerous existing cell phone recycling initiatives is being organized by the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) in conjunction with cell phone service providers, handset manufacturers, and recycling companies.

Recycle My Cell can be adopted by provinces and municipalities as part of their initiatives to manage e-waste. Nova Scotia, on Canada's east coast, is the first province to have done so.

Canadian retailers are already on board with cellphone recycling. BestBuy in Canada, through a partnership with Greentec, allows consumers to recycle their unwanted wireless devices, along with MP3 players, batteries, ink cartridges, and CDs by visiting a Best Buy store and dropping their items into their recycling stations. Best Buy doesn't accept computers (desktop and laptops), TVs, DVD players, and speakers.

The CWTA, the province of Nova Scotia, and retailers like Best Buy deserve praise for their actions to curb harmful e-waste through their recycling programs. Yet shouldn't the wireless and other electronic equipment manufacturers do their share to address this issue at the source by:

--Using less harmful substances 

--Making products repairable and easily remodeled i.e. taking a page from the automotive industry and change the casings to reflect fashion shifts rather than the guts

The wireless carriers, telcos, and ISPs are in a position to insist on such standards. Make these goods right or we won't buy, sell, or support them.  With the economic downturn manufacturers will have little choice but to go along. 

The hard truth is that bandwidth and services i.e. 3G, 4G, data, video, IP over wireless, and web services like mobile CRM matter more to consumers than the boxes they are carried on. 

The same goes for computers. As Microsoft demonstrated over 20 years ago by 'becoming the dog' in its relationship with IBM, it's not about the hardware, it's about the software and what it can do that matters. And with more software going on the web i.e. hosted/SaaS rather than in boxes, the less often nasty stuff there needs to be in those compartments, which means ultimately less e-waste and pollution.

 

 

I have long been skeptical about electric or other alternative-fueled vehicles as truly green technologies because they all consume vast amounts of life-giving open space to transport comparatively few people and goods, drives more sprawl, which does likewise, and incurs air-killing construction and upkeep and requires hydrocarbon-based paving materials.

Peter Foster, a columnist in Canada's National Post, along with associated commentators have come up with a few more points to consider, in his column Wednesday subtitled 'Today's alternative vehicles are all profit graveyards or subsidy pits'.

Mr. Foster correctly pointed out one of the fallacies behind assuming that people will buy electric vehicles (EVs) and that is it isn't the average amount of driving per day that matters but the farthest that one usually wants to go.

"Apparently, Americans on average drive their cars less than 35 miles a day, but to suggest that this supports the viability of short-range electric cars is like suggesting that a five-foot tall person should be in no trouble if forced to spend alternate one hour periods in water six feet deep and two feet deep. After all, the average depth is only four feet. What is critical is not the average but the farthest distance you want to travel.

"With gasoline-powered cars or hybrids there is no distance limit, since there is a vast network of gasoline stations at which you can fill up in minutes. With electric cars, you have to plug in for a matter of hours. Battery exchange depots are an obvious idea but likely an impractical one.

I can attest to Mr. Foster's point. I work from home and the farthest I drive is 15 miles and that is on those days when I have to pick up my wife late at night from her part-time job, when the buses stop running. Yet we live in a small city in a rural area, so when we need to do shopping or conduct other business in a larger metro, or to just get out of town for something to do, our journeys are 100 miles to 150 miles round trip.

Mr. Foster's column also points out about controversy over ethanol whose fuel-driven demand has sparked starvation and food riots. And one of the commentators said that they had once read that a Prius has 37 pounds of copper wiring.  A standard gas powered vehicle has 25 pounds of copper.  "Did copper start growing on trees or is it ok for us to feel green while some guy works in a hole in South America?" asked the respondent.

What would be handy is to have a reasonably objective report from a well-respected organization (by environmentalists and industry alike) that cuts through the greenwash and the charges and PR and compares the total direct and indirect green impacts of transportation and transportation alternatives: i.e. private vehicles, transit, and telework. That way consumers and government decisionmakers spending their money would have a fair basis on which to choose the greenest option, weighing that factor against cost, need, and convenience.

 

A well-timed (day after Christmas) article in Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper pointed out the obvious--that today's gadgets are meant to be disposable--but also at one part of the solution to curb the consequences i.e. e-waste  that is already in play, which are growing numbers of repair shops.

The paper cited Jesse Hirsh, a Toronto-based technology analyst, who is amazed at what he calls a "boom" in the past couple of years of iPhone/iPod fix-it shops. They allow people to get eight, 10, 12, 18 more months out of products that are really designed to last a year, maybe two at tops."

Even so fixing last year's iPod goes against the grain of consumer technology, which has morphed the masses into a disposable gadget society. 

"There is a tragedy to that," Hirsh told the newspaper. "It makes it more difficult, and sometimes more expensive ... to fix it. So clearly there is interest there [to fix older technology] but at the same time a lot of this stuff is junk - and is designed that way."

To illustrate the Canadian newspaper's point I have a Lexmark X2650 printer that was priced so low it cost less to buy the unit than to purchase the replacement cartridges--which are practically impossible to find, and the original ones can't be refilled. The printer now sits waiting for me to chuck it out on the street; I have since then purchased an HP J6480 that uses refillable cartridges (a Canadian company, based in Courtenay, British Columbia called Island Inkjet runs a great chain of refill kiosks, with over 230 locations across North America).

The other part of the solution is for manufacturers to get it together to create common standards on commodity components that do not add user/market-distinguishing features to make hardware repairable and parts interchangeable. These can include AC and car power supplies and cellphone plugs and receptables to avoid the search for the (expletive deleted) cord, plus keyboards, screens, rollers, and cartridges.

The upshot is making items repairable also provides domestic i.e. onshore/local skilled employment. At the same time it increases affordability of technology, enabling more people to benefit from these tools.

How about it? Let's be part of the solution rather than a contributing cause to the problem...