2013-05-25T03:58:34-04:00 Dustin Benton http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=dustin-benton Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Dustin Benton Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2479293 2013-01-15T11:36:01-05:00 2013-03-17T05:12:01-04:00

Dustin Benton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dustin-benton/ excellent report on resource futures last month, which provides a detailed and comprehensive look at how underlying environmental stress contributes to material insecurity. Its diagnosis, that declaring that "the spectre of resource insecurity has come back with a vengeance" is stark. It's based on highly credible, detailed analysis and should serve as a warning to businesses that the raw materials they depend on have major embedded risks.

However, the report's solutions, as I've argued elsewhere, focus too narrowly on multilateralism and international cooperation.

My contention is that addressing material insecurity means tackling the underlying environmental stresses causing it, through the development of a circular economy. Unfortunately, the circular economy is still more of a good idea than a plan for action. To develop a plan, we need to understand where circular systems make the most sense.

This means identifying how and where to avoid material insecurity by measuring the embedded environmental impacts (such as water or land use), which are a major cause of that insecurity.

When the Circular Economy Task Force met in November 2012 to discuss how to measure these embedded impacts, the discussion was about which to focus on. Our thesis is that measuring four impacts - water, carbon/energy, land use, and ecotoxicity - embedded in each tonne of raw material provides a good basis to measure, and then manage, material security risk.

These were chosen from a much longer list and reflect two categories of risk which relate to globally significant environmental boundaries, and which have affected material security:

- Risks that can be priced: embedded energy/CO₂ and water. The increasing relative scarcity of these means rising price floors, which translate into higher raw material prices and potential for volatility. The increasing carbon, energy, and water impact of mineral extraction also increases the likelihood of regulatory restrictions.

- Measurable risks that are hard to price: land use and ecotoxicity. These capture the human acceptability angle, and serve as a proxy for reputational risks such as the impact of palm oil on orang-utans, coltan mining on chimpanzees, and the health impacts of material extraction and processing which have and could affect access to, and the price of, resources.

By applying these risks to materials on a per tonne basis, we can see which matter most for different materials. Take aluminium, for example. Its biggest impact lies in the amount of energy (and CO₂) used in production: creating a tonne of primary aluminium releases around 13 tonnes of CO₂. The energy used in refining and melting iron, steel and aluminium are responsible for ten per cent of world CO₂ emissions.

True costs
These insights can be translated into future price risks for aluminium: if CO₂ were priced according to PUMA's pioneering environmental profit and loss accounts, adding the cost of carbon to the market price of a tonne of primary aluminium would cause its combined price to rise by nearly 70%. By contrast, more circular use of aluminium leads to lower risks: recycled aluminium would only rise in price by seven per cent, and reused aluminium would rise by less than 1%. This huge difference in future price risk reveals embedded CO₂ as a strong indicator of material insecurity for aluminium and enables companies to see the benefit of circular business models. Similar calculations could be made for the impact of rising coal, oil and gas prices for aluminium and steel; or for water demand for a bio-based plastic, for example.

Avoiding risk
The last month has seen a crescendo of reports on the dire consequences of ever increasing human impact on the environment. The underlying science on climate change and increasing resource availability risks aren't new, even if the message bears repeating. What is new is the frame: financial and business risk.

But seeing resource and climate problems as business risks is only the first step. Companies and countries need to connect the underlying environmental causes of risks to the specific materials they're bound up in. By doing so, they can begin to understand why risks arise, and how to mitigate these by designing closed loops. Getting to this level of detail, as the aluminium example above shows, is essential to understanding how and where a circular economy can create resilience to increasing insecurity.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1846995 2012-09-03T05:59:34-04:00 2012-11-03T05:12:01-04:00

Dustin Benton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dustin-benton/ A version of this article previously appeared on businessgreen.com

President Obama had a hard time selling the US's weatherization program to a sceptical Congress: insulation is a lot less attractive than visible clean tech like solar panels. So he relied on his charm, declaring memorably that insulation was, in fact, sexy. "Here's what's sexy about it -- saving money," he said, to laughter and applause.

Few are as charming as President Obama, and here's an even more difficult sell: getting the British press to believe that European ecodesign regulations, which ban energy-wasting products, are a good thing. There's formidable media opposition: the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, and Daily Express have all run stories gleefully telling people how they can get round the incandescent light bulb ban, which came into force on Saturday.

The truth is that regulation is boring at best and occasionally unpopular - EU regulation doubly so. But, in Obama-speak, here's what's really sexy about it:

- £158: the amount that ecodesign regulations could save each household per year by 2020.
- £26 billion: the total UK savings over the lifetime of proposed EU ecodesign regulations.
- 2x (well, nearly*) greater savings expected from EU ecodesign than the Green Deal, ECO and smart metering programmes combined.

These aren't fairytale numbers either. Efficiency regulation works: the compulsory shift in 2005 to condensing boilers has saved UK consumers £800 million this year alone. But, unlike condensing boiler regulations, ecodesign regulations are decided in Europe and as a result are mired in Eurosceptic objection. The addition of Europe into the mix makes the largely uncontroversial - saving money - controversial.

In Japan, where there is no such controversy, the most efficient air conditioner is 20% more efficient than in the EU, largely because widespread public support allows the government to push manufacturers to make products more efficient. In the US, President Bush banned products with energy wasting standby modes 8 years before the EU managed it, because everyone agreed it was so obviously good for consumers.

In the UK, media campaigns against light bulb regulations and broader tabloid antipathy towards Europe sap the political will to push for better products. Even the most hardened British Europhile won't pick a fight with the Mail when those opposing regulations like the light bulbs ban pose as consumer champions, defending plucky homeowners from 'Eurocrats' bent on meddling.

The truth is that opposing efficiency just because it's decided in Brussels leaves consumers much worse off: an extra £158 worse off per household per year. This is gesture politics we can't afford in the UK, especially as the rising price of gas has just put energy bills up by another nine per cent, a trend which shows little sign of slowing.

The US and Japan rely heavily on efficiency regulation because it's common sense. Ecodesign gives consumers what they want - clean clothes, fast computers and warm homes - and a lower energy bill. You don't have to love the EU to love lower energy bills: be Eurosceptic, but don't be daft.

*It's actually 1.75x - £158 from products policy vs £90 from Green Deal, ECO, and smart metering combined.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1661283 2012-07-11T19:00:00-04:00 2012-09-10T05:12:03-04:00

Dustin Benton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dustin-benton/
The BBC's environment analyst Roger Harrabin, who chaired our event to launch the Circular Economy Task Force last week, posed a great question about the practicality of getting to a circular economy: how do you make a mobile phone which can be disassembled and remanufactured so it fits into a circular economy?

A trend to design out repair
This isn't primarily a technical question. It reflects the fact that industrial design for fast moving consumer electronics has moved away from reparability toward fully integrated units which are nearly impossible to take apart. Apple is furthest ahead in this trend: the iPhone and iPad have always been sealed, making it very difficult to replace their batteries and limiting the lifetime of their products to around two years.

Apple's newest products, the Macbook Air and Retina Macbook Pro take this to a new level. To save one millimetre of screen thickness, they have glued the screen to the case. The result is that the company charges 50% more to replace the battery on these models compared to the previous ones. And this is far more fuss than being able to change a battery without having to send your laptop away.

The crucial millimetre between repair and landfill
But the new Nexus 7, a competitor to the iPad designed by Google, bucks this trend. It's a slick, attractive design but, as the technology repair website iFixit has shown, it's been designed to be repaired. As iFixit puts it:

"One millimetre. That's the difference in thickness between the 9.4 mm glued iPad and the 10.4 mm retaining-clipped Nexus. That's the difference between extending the life of your device through repair, as opposed to tossing it in a landfill."

The design difference is one millimetre, but the difference in mindset is enormous.

Both Apple and Google are highly profitable, innovative technology companies. Neither, I'd suggest, have designed their products with a circular economy in mind, but both could. Apple has optimised its design for sleek consumer appeal and ignored repair, reuse, and remanufacturing. Google has optimised for a more engineering-aware audience who might want to tinker with their tablet. The fact that it's compatible with a circular economy is an accidental benefit. The big question is how do we change the business model of these companies so they intentionally design their products for reuse, remanufacturing, and recovery?

The panel at the Task Force launch suggested some tentative answers, which ranged from the provocative to the pragmatic. One panellist said that waste is worse than theft and we should criminalise it; Nick Folland of Kingfisher suggested that B&Q will trial tool rental to reduce sales of single-use tools that end up as waste after a weekend DIY project. There were many other interesting suggestions made in the discussion, a video of which is available on Vimeo.]]>