An international initiative this fall will encourage hundreds of organizations to assess their use and recycling of plastics in a push to call more attention to the vast amounts of plastic waste entering the environment.

While many companies and organizations are familiar with their “carbon footprint” and are taking steps to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, the founders of the Plastic Disclosure Project say there is less awareness of just how many non-biodegradable plastics in the global supply chain end up in the planet’s ecosystems.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), only about 10 percent of the roughly 300 million tons of plastic produced each year is recycled, and about 7 million tons end up in the world’s oceans.

The new plastics project, created during last year’s Clinton Global Initiative, will send annual surveys to participating organizations to assess their use of plastics and their recycling programs.

“What we’re trying to do is to have companies manage and use plastic much more wisely, and to receive recognition for doing so from both customers and investors,” Doug Woodring, a Hong Kong-based entrepreneur and one of the project’s leaders, told the New York Times.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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Municipal fleets, including buses and other forms of city transportation, use a heavy amount of energy every year.  Much like the military, we’ve seen a steady decline in the rate at which they consume. Factors include:

As part of a systematic attempt to increase fuel efficiency through technology, the CGI (Clinton Global Initiative) has partnered with ESRI and NAVTEQ to decrease our carbon footprint.

Brainchild of Doug Band, the CGI is a large collaborative unit of corporations,  non-profits, and political figures that are aiding in the process of route optimization. Route optimization can be clearly be defined as the fastest route from point A to B; the algorithm used be these companies (ESRI and NAVTEQ) is similar to that of consumer GPS systems.

In a partnership with the city of San Francisco,  the CGI and Doug Band provide a call to action approach at incorporating plans to decrease greenhouse gas emissions from fleets in the San Francisco Bay Area through Fleet Route Optimization Software. This includes anything from public transportation to work-force vehicles. NAVTEQ actually distributes digital maps and content that drives navigation- and location-based services solutions worldwide, including:

Congruently, ESRI utilizes GIS mapping software – this helps the user interpret data, further aiding in transportation-based decision-making, reliant on the best information and analysis. Much of this is similar to what the average consumer finds on his/her portable GPS. Furthermore, it’s important to note that this technology has been around and is widely used.

Most of the time, these feature will be labeled as “alternate routes,” and will allow the user to view multiple paths, along with other elements like fuel cost, distance, time and gas station stops. Similarly, developers incorporate mechanisms that permit users to view weather/traffic in their area. This is greatly beneficial for travelers as nobody likes to get in bad weather, or a traffic jam for that matter! Typically, users will have to pay a little extra for these features, and may even have to attend to a monthly fee for traffic/weather updates.

Both forces hope to provide powerful solutions for cities like San Fran. Once a seamless integration of communication and navigation has been implemented, transportation will become much more efficient. Again, this is something that has already taken effect and will continue to improve energy efficiency in regards to transportation fuel costs. As we technology progresses and becomes more affordable, individual consumers will begin seeing GPS as longer just an option, but rather a integral part of any vehicle.

Article by Jack Lundee, appearing courtesy 2GreenEnergy.

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The week before last was the culmination of a labor of love for Sunil Paul and Claire Tomkins with the launch of the Gigaton Throwdown in DC after 18 months of hard work, researching and – as I witnessed first hand – coralling the efforts of other researchers.

What is the Gigaton Throwdown?

The Gigaton Throwdown Study was launched as a Clinton Global Initiative in 2007. It was started as a project to educate and inspire entrepreneurs, investors, and policy makers to think big about solving the climate crisis.  It was an effort to answer Sunil’s question, “What does it take to make a difference with clean energy technology?”

A team of entrepreneurs, investors, and business leaders teamed up with leading academics to answer this question.  I was privileged enough to join the writing team. Specifically, we asked how could any one of nine technology “pathways” scale up so each could avoid one billion tons – a gigaton – of greenhouse gas emissions per year, and do it by 2020.  We refer to this as “gigaton scale.” For an electricity generation technology, this is equivalent to an installed capacity of 205 gigawatts (GW) of carbon-free energy (at 100% capacity) in 2020.

These are the 9 technologies we analyzed in order to find out if they have the potential for achieving  gigaton scale:

I was honored to contribute to the book by offering the national security perspective for supporting the adoption of clean energy and energy efficiency, it is a position I discuss a bit in my Memorial Day blog entry.  I tried to incorporate the perspectives of Jim Woolsey and others like him that chant about the importance of clean energy regularly.  I hope I managed to include a few issues that we don’t often think about in terms of national security… like how we will stretch our nation’s already strained military to patrol the newly exposed Northwest passage and energy resources in the Arctic.

The DC launch was a star studded event which was attended by some contributors and authors (alas… I was stuck in San Francisco on a project), lobbyists, entrepreneurs, investors, policy wonks, key members of the DOE and the White House Staff (Van Jones, John P. Holdren) and some of the  legislators (Senator Kerry) that the book was hoping to engage.

Dan Kammen, one of the lead authors in a number of the chapters, was there at the launch and described the endeavor nicely:

“The Gigaton Throwdown sets our collective sights on game changing combinations of science, technology and policy that can turn the needed levels of climate protection and energy security into a roadmap for laboratory-to-industry partnerships.”

I can’t say it much better. The fact is that this is a huge issue that requires a massive mobilization of our technical, financial and educational resources – and achieving gigaton scale in any of the technologies will require forward thinkers (like you?) in policy, research, finance, engineering and business.

I was very encouraged while working on the book, as I feel that we’ve reached a tipping point of sorts in terms of society acknowledging the magnitude of the challenge. I just hope we can come together as a community to continue to support policy makers that are trying to lay the foundation for this radical shift in our approach to consumption, energy, and lifestyle.

I’d suggest you take the time to at least read the overview or the chapters of the book that interest you most.  I challenge you to  free up the bottlenecks the book addresses in your own small (or big) way, because as Sunil says…

“We are at a crossroads, and the U.S. has an opportunity to become a leader in this new global sector if we act now. To us the choice is clear.”

For non-American readers, I challenge you to beat the US, this is healthy competition at it’s finest.

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