Lean Sustainability

What is good for our planet can be good for business and its shareholders

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Germany Plans To Switch To 100% Alternative Energy By 2050

A new study issued by the Ger­man “Umwelt­bun­de­samt” comes to the con­clu­sion that Ger­many should be able to switch energy pro­duc­tion to 100% renew­able sources within 40 years. Inter­est­ingly the head of the agency, Jochen Flas­barth, states that this is doable with tech­nol­ogy that is avail­able today. Build­ing the nec­es­sary infra­struc­ture would need deci­sive action […]

Green Homes Sell!

Many builders attend­ing the National Green Build­ing Con­fer­ence stated that they have been able to sell sus­tain­ably built homes con­sid­er­ably faster than the tra­di­tion­ally built new homes that have been lan­guish­ing in today’s tough mar­ket. Espe­cially energy effi­ciency remains the fea­ture most impor­tant to con­sumers inter­ested in green build­ings. Good news is also that the price […]

MP3 Beats CD">MP3 Beats CD

2009  Microsoft and Intel com­mis­sioned a study look­ing at envi­ron­men­tal ben­e­fits of dig­i­tal media com­pared to old school CD (or vinyl albums, do you still remem­ber?). Researcher at Stan­ford came to the con­clu­sion that there are energy– and CO2 sav­ings between 40% and 80% when music is dis­trib­uted dig­i­tally as com­pared to send­ing CDs. Another study […]

There Is An App For That

In an ear­lier blog entry I was mus­ing if cor­po­ra­tions gain ben­e­fits if they are act­ing respon­si­bly and in a sus­tain­able way. Being lean reduces waste and saves money, so there you have it. How­ever, another poten­tial big ben­e­fit would be to dif­fer­en­ti­ate one­self as the greener com­pany, let the con­sumer know about it, and […]

Motion Sensors For Mice

Two Ger­man inven­tors intro­duced a new kind of motion sen­sor to the mar­ket. These micro-vibration sen­sors detect motions or vibra­tions and can be inte­grated into many bat­tery pow­ered devices like wire­less PC mice, remote con­trols, or lights for bicy­cles. The sen­sor inter­rupts the con­nec­tion to the bat­ter­ies as soon as the device is not in […]