Monday, July 2, 2007

Green dream... embodied?

An environmentalist's pipedream: Products and services can and should be rated according to how much greenhouse gas (GHG) is emitted in the course of their creation and distribution.

The quantity of GHGs required to manufacture, and supply to the point of use, a product, material or service, is termed that product's, material's, or service's "embodied GHGs." Measuring embodied GHGs -- a process also known as "carbon footprint labeling" -- is fairly easy to calculate when it comes to actually burning fuel. This is why some rock bands now purchase renewable energy credits to compensate for the power they use in concerts and the bus fuel they burn.

Greenwashing is rampant already, though, so this kind of thing is easy to mock, as the Globe's Alex Beam has done a couple of times.

But if there actually were a standard way to measure embodied GHGs -- so that a consumer could compare and contrast the embodied GHGs of 10 different tourism packages or boxes of cereal or pairs of sneakers -- millions of us around the world would consume differently. Greenwashing would remain a problem, and -- as Drake Bennett has pointed out in Ideas -- buying green is by no means the only or best way to protect the environment... but this would still be huge. It would affect production. And imports and exports. It's a pipedream.

That's why I was amazed to read the following, today, in a Dutch design newsletter to which I subscribe:

Carbon Trust and the UK's Environment Ministry, Defra, have joined with the British Standards Institution (BSI) to develop a standard method for measuring the embodied green house gas (GHG) emissions in products and services. Once completed, a "Publicly Available Specification" (PAS) will ensure a consistent and comparable approach to supply chain measurement of embodied GHGs across markets.... PAS creates an important part of the architecture for a global system that will enable people to make a meaningful comparison between whole-system environmental performance of competing products and services.

Pipedream realized? Not quite, but we're closer than ever seemed possible. On, then, to another pipedream: Extended Producer Responsibility! EPR is a strategy, one reads, designed to promote "the integration of environmental costs associated with products throughout their life cycles into the market price of the products." Farewell to all those cheap plastic doohickies we Americans love to buy. And if you think that $3 is too much to pay for a gallon of gas, just wait...

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:05 AM

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