Lean Sustainability

CHANGE FOR THE BETTER – What is good for our planet is good for business

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Sustainability Concepts

Setting Goals Not Methods

In a press release today Google is said to lead the charge against tougher energy effi­ciency stan­dards for data cen­ters. Google? Is this not the com­pany tout­ing green ini­tia­tives and try­ing to not be evil? It is worth to dig a lit­tle deeper into this issue. Data cen­ters house tons of heat pro­duc­ing com­puter equip­ment, and […]

The Cost Quagmire

Wher­ever you stand on the global warm­ing debate, one thing is indis­putable: Car­bon diox­ide con­tent in the earth’s atmos­phere increased over the last 100 years by more than 25%. And again, wher­ever you stand on the global warm­ing debate, it should be clear that such a change in CO2 does trig­ger changes. Whether you think […]

Litter

Last week­end my kids tried to count the pieces of lit­ter they spot­ted while we were dri­ving down 280 from San Fran­cisco to San Jose. They counted at a fran­tic pace, but had to give up pretty soon: There were way too many pieces of garbage. Back at home they did a quick we web-research […]

Big Numbers And Tiny Areas

Accord­ing to the U.S. Energy Infor­ma­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (I did not even know that such an admin­is­tra­tion exists) the United States as a whole con­sumed almost 100 Quadrillion Btu energy in 2008. There you have it, 100 Quadrillion Btu!!! All right, small prob­lem here. What does this mean, 100 Quadrillion Btu? I mean this sounds like […]

12 Principles Of Green Engineering

In 2003 sci­en­tists pro­posed ideas for green engi­neer­ing. Based on work done to artic­u­late prin­ci­ples for green chem­istry, Anas­tas and Zim­mer­mann devel­oped prin­ci­ples for “Green Engi­neer­ing”. I do like the prag­matic approach inher­ent in these prin­ci­ples. I think it is worth to look at these prin­ci­ples: 12 Prici­ples For Green Engi­neer­ing: Inher­ent Rather Than Circumstantial […]