Disney’s greener paper procurement, electronic food delivery systems and sustainability at sea
Disney’s new paper policy
The Walt Disney Company is the world’s largest children’s book and magazine publisher, and the most profitable media conglomerate in the world. With such clout, Disney’s new paper sourcing and use policy – which commits the company to sourcing more sustainable fibre – will undoubtedly have a resounding impact on the paper industry.
The new policy spans all of Disney’s operations including its theme parks, resorts, cruise ships, media networks, product packaging, copy paper, book publishing and licensees. In all, the policy will affect 25,000 factories in more than 100 countries.
The policy outlines Disney’s commitment to eliminating paper products containing fibre from unwanted sources (such as illegally harvested wood and conservation areas), decreasing its overall paper use, and increasing recycling.
Disney launched the policy in two phases. The first focuses on addressing paper sourced for Disney-branded products and packaging, while the second tackles paper sourced by the company’s 3,700 independent licensees. Disney will report on its progress annually.
For years, Disney has been pressurised by non-profit groups such as the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) to improve its paper practices, its sourcing of paper from Indonesia via companies such as Asia Pulp & Paper, which has a record of unscrupulous environmental behaviour. RAN, along with other stakeholders, played a key role in helping Disney craft its new paper policy.
PepsiCo’s carbon calculator
PepsiCo and Columbia University’s Earth Institute are working together to create a tool that measures the carbon footprint of thousands of products simultaneously, significantly reducing the time, money and lifecycle analysis (LCA) expertise needed to determine products’ carbon footprints.
Usually, the process of analysing a product’s life cycle requires a specialised team of LCA experts to manually input masses of product data into complex LCA software. Typically, a PepsiCo employee could spend more than 100 hours assessing the carbon footprint of just one product.
Contrastingly, the new tool offers a simple user interface that requires minimal data input, as it combines existing company supply chain data with automatically generated estimates of emission factors for each material used. The estimates are based on an algorithm compliant with the World Resources Institute’s “accounting rules” for bottom-up, full life cycle product carbon footprinting, says Christoph Meinrenken, associate research scientist at the Earth Institute.
“Because much of a company’s entire supply chain and logistics data is embedded in this single, integrated tool, it allows CR professionals to make decisions about their products and services not only with respect to carbon,” Meinrenken says. “Instead, when evaluating the cost and benefits of, for example, light-weighting certain packaging types, the tool helps to support a multi-dimensional business decision process including procurement costs, material consumption, shipping, recycling, and energy consumption – the carbon impact is just one piece of the relevant information.”
Another benefit of the software is that it can be run on companies’ intranets, enabling multiple users to continuously share and improve upon the input data, so the accuracy of the results improves over time.
In the short term, Meinrenken hopes other companies will pilot the software so his team has new, real datasets to test, which also helps fine-tune the software’s statistical algorithms. He also expects to extend the tool beyond GHG to other environmental impacts, such as water.
Pepsi started working with the Earth Institute in 2007 and began its work on this new “fast carbon printing” software in 2009. By 2011 the institute finished the software prototype and could calculate 1,137 PepsiCo products in minutes.
Digital food
MasterCard and the World Food Programme (WFP) have formed a global partnership to launch the Digital Food Project, which harnesses MasterCard’s payment and tech savvy to improve how the WFP delivers electronic food vouchers to communities in need.
The WFP delivers hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food annually, but is continuously looking for ways to enable the world’s poor to buy food directly in their local economies. E-vouchers, which are delivered via mobile phones and banking cards, can be used in local shops and empower disadvantaged members of society to make their own food choices, while supporting local economic growth and cutting delivery costs. And e-vouchers don’t require a local stable banking system to be used.
MasterCard is also helping WFP improve and expand its online donation mechanism. For example, retailers will soon be able to include a donation mechanism at checkout, so customers can donate to WFP without leaving retailers’ sites. Mobile apps and games will be able to integrate a donation feature within their systems.
“All donations will be tracked and credited to both the brand and the consumer, offering new opportunities for consumers and brands to work together and have a meaningful, measurable impact on the fight against hunger,” MasterCard says.
Charter companies in uncharted waters
Three of the world’s biggest ship-chartering companies including Cargill, Huntsman Corporation and Unipec UK have joined together and committed to exclusively chartering energy-efficient vessels for their global operations. This is the first such agreement in the shipping industry to reduce fleet carbon emissions. Combined, these companies ship more than 350m tonnes of commodities annually.
The companies will use a third-party ratings system called Existing Vessel Design Index, developed by shipping vetting specialist RightShip, to assess the greenhouse gas emissions of more than 60,000 container ships, tankers, bulk carriers, cargo ships, cruise ships and ferries. The system also employs a simple greenhouse gas emissions rating – from A to G – to categories vessels’ energy efficiency. The data can be easily navigated on ShippingEfficiency.org, a joint venture of RightShip and the non-profit group Carbon War Room, in an effort to make this information more accessible and utilised across the shipping industry.
“Those that lead the curve on presenting more eco-efficient vessels will benefit from the choices charterers are making, and the charterers who pay the fuel bill on around 70% of all vessels will see lowered operating costs through fuel efficiency – a win-win-win decision for the owner, the charterer and the environment,” says Peter Boyd, chief operating officer of the Carbon War Room.
Toxic chemicals in phones
A recent study by the environmental organisation Ecology Center and ifixit.com, a community of technology tinkerers, analysed the toxicity of 36 mobile phones from the past five years and found that Motorola’s Citrus model ranked least toxic, while the iPhone 2G was the most toxic.
For the study, the phones were disassembled and all their components analysed, totalling in 1,106 sample parts that were tested for 35 chemicals and elements.
While the Motorola Citrus took the least hazardous spot, the iPhone 4S and the LG Remarq were the second and third least toxic phones respectively. The new iPhone 5 ranked fifth, while its oft-called main competitor, Samsung Galaxy S III, ranked ninth. The most toxic phone, in 36th place, was the iPhone 2G, preceded by the Palm m125 and Motorola Moto W233 Renew in 35th and 34th place respectively.
In all, 10 mobile phone manufacturers were covered in the study: Apple, HP, HTC, Huawei Technologies, LG Electronics, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Research in Motion and Samsung Electronics. Every phone sampled contained at least one hazardous chemical, including lead, bromine, chlorine, mercury and cadmium.
“Even the best phones from our study are still loaded with chemical hazards,” says Jeff Gearhart, research director at the Ecology Center. “These chemicals, which are linked to birth defects, impaired learning and other serious health problems, have been found in soils at levels 10 to 100 times higher than background levels at e-waste recycling sites in China. We need better federal regulation of these chemicals, and we need to create incentives for the design of greener consumer electronics.”
First e-store for used oil
A new ecommerce site has been launched to serve as the first online marketplace for recycled oils worldwide.
StayGreen Oil allows buyers and sellers of used lubricants and cooking oils across the globe to connect and find the best available product and price on the market.
The site was co-founded by Brian Davis and Michael Griffith, who work for the largest fuel and lubricant distributor in Florida and were constantly being approached by used oil collectors for access to their client base, and by customers seeking the best price for their used lubricants. That demand led to the launch of StayGreen Oil, which, Davis explains, offers a single platform for the reporting, contracts, and communications required in the buying and selling process.
The site offers three options for sellers to connect with buyers. Open Auctions provides the greatest exposure to sellers, as the platform automatically alerts all registered buyers of the new auction. Preferred Auctions enable sellers to select specific bidders to participate in the offering, while a Private Auction is used to manage an existing vendor relationship, or to interact with a single buyer, where sellers propose a price per gallon and the buyer can accept, reject, or counter-offer the price offered.
Since the company’s beta launch in August the site has accrued 410,000 US gallons (1.8m litres) of used oil for sale, and is well on its way to meeting the founders’ first-year collection goal.
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