2Sustain

If gas prices continue to climb, will you consider making significant changes to your driving habits? Will you consider buying a different car, or maybe even abandoning auto ownership all together?

Interesting new research from Oliver Wyman and the ESB Business School Reutlingen in Germany reveals that for many urban dwellers in Western Europe and Asia, the answer to all of those questions is a resounding “yes.”

The “Future of Mobility” found that, if fuel prices rose significantly by 2030, more than three-fourths (77 percent) of the 3,000 people polled would change their mobility behavior by:

• switching to a smaller car,
• switching to an electric car, or
• abandoning car ownership entirely and replacing it with a mixture of transport modes.

Survey respondents in Shanghai (91percent) and France (82percent) were particularly open to changing their mobility patterns. High-income respondents (71percent) were the least likely demographic segment to consider a switch.

The survey also asked respondents to predict how their behavior would change under a more aggressive “sustainability mobility” scenario. For this particular scenario, those polled were asked to imagine a 2030 with fuel costs at 4 euro/liter (the equivalent of about $20/gallon), more traffic congestion, better quality public transport and the possibility of planning multimodal trips using smartphone apps. Under this “sustainability mobility” scenario: (more…)

The world’s leading chemical company, BASF, has announced new ambitious environmental, health and safety goals.

Since BASF operates in an energy-intensive industry, it makes perfect business sense for the company to mitigate its energy and raw material risks by focusing on energy efficiency and then broader sustainability goals.

For example, by 2020, BASF wants to:

• Increase its energy efficiency –defined as the amount of sales products in relation to the primary energy demand – worldwide by 35 percent, compared to the previous goal of 25 percent.
• Reduce greenhouse gas emissions per ton of sales product by 40 percent compared to 2002.
• Reduce carbon emissions related to the amount and distance of transported natural gas by 10 percent compared with 2010.
• Reduce by half the current amount of drinking water in use for production compared to 2010.
• Establish sustainable water management systems at all production sites in areas of water stress.

These new ambitions mesh well with BASF’s past progress. As of last year, the company had: (more…)

Even though investors and companies increasingly agree on which corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues affect a company’s financial value, there are still disconnects regarding metrics and disclosure. A new study, Finding Common Ground on the Metrics that Matter, released by the Investor Responsibility Research Center (IRRC) Institute, deep dives into these concerns and provides the first comprehensive analysis of which corporate ESG information is tracked by companies and how it is –or isn’t –consistent with analogous information sought by investors, researchers and other stakeholders.

In broad terms, the study revealed that:

• There is agreement on key corporate sustainability issues, but not on the metrics used to measure the management of them, nor on the purposes served by examining corporate ESG information.
• Though ESG metrics routinely are reported on request by many companies, few report all the ESG information they collect internally.ESG researchers, investors and corporate representatives approach ESG issues from a risk mitigation perspective, not a value creation perspective.

In addition, key data from the study concluded that: (more…)

Last week, President Obama visited the Daimler Trucks North America (DTNA) manufacturing facility in Mount Holly, North Carolina, where he announced a new $1 billion National Community Deployment Challenge to spur deployment of clean, advanced vehicles in communities around the country.

DTNA is a partner in the Energy Department’s SuperTruck initiative, which is focused on increasing the fuel efficiency of long haul trucks (aka, 18-wheelers) by 50 percent by 2015.

While these particular trucks represent only 4 percent of the on-road vehicles in America, they are responsible for almost 20 percent of the country’s on-road fuel consumption, and this class of vehicle currently consumes more than 30 billion gallons of gasoline each year.

In order to achieve the SuperTruck imitative goal, companies like Daimler are developing and improving a number of vehicle technologies, including engine efficiency, aerodynamics waste heat recovery and hybridization.  Through these types of improvements, the Energy Department estimates fuel economy increases could save long-haul truckers more than $15,000 per truck per year in fuel costs. (In an earlier post, I reported that MIT researchers also have identified significant cost savings for businesses that use electric vehicles to make deliveries on an everyday basis in big cities.) (more…)

Communications conglomerate AT&T, in collaboration with global sustainability consultancy Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), is continuing its march on environmentally-conscious business practices with the release of a new eco-rating system for its products.

In just a few months, consumers will find AT&T eco-ratings on simple, easy-to-read-and-understand labels included with AT&T-branded mobile devices.

As a recent Deloitte study showed, sustainability is becoming increasingly important for consumer purchasing decisions. In fact, more than half (54 percent) of surveyed shoppers said they consider sustainability to be one of their top decision-making factors.

To provide consumers with information so they can make more educated and environmental decisions, AT&T’s new eco-rating system will cover attributes such as: (more…)