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While you’re waiting for your Fairphone, here are some tips for smartphone sustainability

David Meyer — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 10:16:37 +0000

You may have read about Fairphone, a Dutch startup that is trying to build – as the name implies – as fair a phone as possible. That means building transparent relationships all the way down the supply chain, in order to source conflict-free minerals (tin, tantalum, cobalt, gold) and ensure the handsets are built under acceptable working conditions. The company will also donate €3 ($3.94) from each sale to the establishment of safe e-waste recycling schemes.

Fairphone announced yesterday that it had taken in 5,000 pre-orders, meaning it can now start developing a finalized product. The company is still just over a week ahead of the target date it had set for the goal, so you can still pre-order if you want to be among the first buyers (you’d get a special edition Fairphone, too).

This is a really important scheme. The phones only cost €325 ($426.50) including tax and, if they materialize as promised, they will serve as proof that it is possible to make an affordable modern smartphone in a much more ethical way than is currently the norm. We’re talking a quad-core 1.2 GHz processor, Android 4.2, 960 x 540-pixel resolution screen, removable 2,000 mAh battery, 16 GB of storage and 1 GB of RAM, 8 MP rear-facing camera, 1.3 MP selfie-shooter, and so on.

However, it’s important to remember that – even without the Fairphone – there are steps you can take now to make your smartphone use as sustainable and ethical as possible. These pretty much all come down to this precept: hold off replacing your handset for as long as possible.

Here are a few suggestions for those of you who need to buy a handset now:

Go quad-core: This is almost a no-brainer these days anyway, but I suspect smartphone evolution is entering a plateau phase on the processor front, much as PCs did a few years back. Four cores will suffice for pretty much all applications for at least the near-to-mid-term – in fact, two cores usually do the job; the addition of more cores is more a power-management play than a boost in horsepower.
Shun the omnibody: Fully-sealed handsets may allow for thinner designs and sleeker looks, but if you can’t replace the battery you are likely to find yourself ditching the phone once it wears down. Not only that – it also makes it harder to recycle the device afterwards (the same goes for laptops, by the way).
Minimize fragility: I’m not talking about screens here, obviously, but – from my experience – glass backings for smartphones are a bad thing. Phones get dropped, they get flexed too far, and even Gorilla Glass can get cracked after a while. The less likely you are to break your phone, the less likely you are to require a replacement. Go for casing that will stand up to day-to-day use.

Of course, none of these tips solve the problems of harsh manufacturing conditions and unethically-sourced raw materials – for that, you’ll need to wait for Fairphone and/or the wider changes in the industry that it will hopefully stimulate. But, while you’re waiting, there’s no reason not to favor the most long-lasting alternatives we have today. And remember: only buy that Fairphone if you really need a new handset.

PS – I can’t resist leaving you with this video of the Fairphone team demonstrating their delight at hitting their pre-order target:

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Building energy management systems: overview and forecast

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 17:46:16 +0000

Although there has been a focus on energy efficiency in commercial buildings for some years, the BEMS market can still be considered nascent. The landscape of new entrants, new technologies, and new methodologies is expanding rapidly, and even well-established market leaders are finding new ways to present and market their businesses.

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Key technologies for the smart city

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 06:55:30 +0000

As more and more people move to urban areas there is an escalating need for the smart city, where technology, sustainability, citizen well-being and economic development integrate. Currently five key technology sectors are enabling the smart city: smart grids, smart transport, smart water and waste management, smart building systems, and the enabling ICT platforms for the smart city. This report examines each and provides recommendations to those key players — IT companies, telcos, utilities and real estate developers — that wish to benefit and harness those technologies.

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Using big data to make an MPG for everything

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:02:38 +0000

A young startup called Energy Points is looking to use data streams to calculate the miles per gallon — MPG — of companies’ resource use, from energy, to water, to waste, to transportation. Why MPG? According to founder Ory Zik, who also founded Israeli solar thermal company HelioFocus and Greenpeace Israel, the various sustainability metrics in use — like kilowatt hours, gallons of water saved and metric tons of CO2 saved — can be confusing, and “people already understand MPG.”

Energy Points uses public and private data to create resource maps that calculate all of the relevant sustainability metrics for a region or industry vertical. Then when Energy Points signs up a customer, the customer gives Energy Points its own resource data, and the Energy Points software can then tell the customer what sustainability decisions will be the best ones to make.

The business intelligence is delivered in an MPG form to the customer, which Energy Points calls “the first universal metric for measuring sustainability.” The Energy Points software translates all the different sustainability metrics into this MPG equivalent.

The value proposition behind Energy Points is that many companies have a set aside budget to spend on making their company more sustainable, but they don’t know what decisions to make, said Zik in an interview. Energy Points is targeting Fortune 500 companies, government organizations and environmental service providers.

Energy Points is a really young company, founded half a year ago, and the tech has been under development for about two years. Zik said the company has pilot customers, but he wouldn’t disclose any names of customers. And the startup is still building out its software-as-a-service platform so that the companies can input their data and get automatic feedback.

In addition, the corporate sustainability space has gotten increasingly crowded over the past few years. Startups like Hara and C3 have raised tens of millions of dollars and have signed up large corporate customers like Coca-Cola and utilities like PG&E. Other companies, like Opower, work with utilities on delivering energy efficiency reports and tools.

Energy Points recently closed its own funding: $3 million led by Plan B Ventures.

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Hacking solutions to the world’s resource problem

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 04:10:53 +0000

This weekend in New York City, dozens of developers gathered together for the second Cleanweb Hackathon, where programmers spent the entire weekend building mobile and web apps around new ways to manage energy, water, food and fuel. As Sunil Paul, the founder of the event and a partner with Spring Ventures, put it in a short talk on Sunday afternoon, the idea behind the project is that “Information technology is the most powerful lever we have to address resource constraints.”

Over the weekend, the Cleanweb hackers created applications like NYC BLDGS, a web data base of the energy consumption of buildings in New York that pits the best and worst buildings against each other in friendly competition. Econofy, a web site created over the weekend that enables consumers to compare the energy consumption of appliances, won both the audience choice award and the judges’ award for best overall hack.

The first Cleanweb Hackathon was held in San Francisco in September of last year, and the New York event this weekend was a slightly more high-profile affair. Judges of the hacks included investor Fred Wilson and Rachel Sterne, New York City’s chief digital officer. United States Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra made an appearance as a special guest.

The event is the latest sign the ecosystem around clean technology is changing. As investors look back at the mistakes that have been made and money lost in capital-intensive investments like next-gen solar, biofuels and electric cars, some investors are taking a different route and looking to make cleantech investing look a lot more like web and mobile investing — literally. Paul’s firm Spring Ventures invests in Cleanweb companies like Solar Mosaic.

The Cleanweb is an attractive way to attack the problem of climate change and resource management for an age of 9 billion people. Information technologies are available now — compared to the science experiments in biofuels and parts of clean power — and thanks to Moore’s Law they are cheap, and will get increasingly cheaper. Now it’s time to tap into the innovation of the developer community to try to create new ways to leverage IT to solve the world’s problems.

Check out the video of the event below and Paul’s explanation of the Cleanweb at our Green:Net 2011 event:

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Oil giant BP backs CoolPlanet BioFuels

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 16:06:45 +0000

Oil and gas giant BP has invested in biofuel startup CoolPlanet BioFuels through its venture arm, according to an announcement on Thursday. CoolPlanet BioFuels is the biofuel startup you have never heard of but that has unusually famous investors like GE, Google, NRG Energy and ConocoPhillips (NRG, GE and ConocoPhillips have an investing group called Energy Technology Ventures). Venture firm Shea Partners led the Series C round.

CoolPlanet BioFuels makes what the company calls negative carbon fuels, using a technology it calls biomass fractionator. The technology essentially takes nonfood biomass (plant waste, energy crops, etc.) and turns it into a drop-in replacement for gas and diesel. That process sounds similar to what biofuel company KiOR is doing.

KiOR uses a catalyst to carbonize biomass (called its Biomass Catalytic Cracking Process), which was originally developed to help the oil industry break down heavy crude oil into more-easily refined products for the oil industry. Drop-in replacements for gas and diesel will be more attractive to the oil industry, because they can use the current infrastructure for transport and use.

BP has invested in a variety of biofuel companies including Verdezyne, which engineers yeast that eats plant sugars and excretes biofuel and biochemicals, and Synthetic Genomics, Craig Venter’s firm that is using genetics to tweak algae to produce fuel. BP also has a joint development agreement with Martek Biosciences to work on making microbial oils for biofuels, and earlier this year BP spent $98 million acquiring the biofuel arm of Verenium, a startup that makes enzymes that break down cellulosic biomass into sugars.

While there are dozens (likely hundreds) of next-gen biofuel companies, almost none of them have produced biofuels at any scale. The Environmental Protection Agency said this week that once again, only a tiny fraction of the biofuels required by the U.S. mandate will come from next-gen cellulosic biofuels: less than one-tenth of 1 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal. The mandate was for 3 percent.

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Flash analysis: lessons from Solyndra’s fall

Ucilia Wang — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 18:48:24 +0000

Solar technology startup Solyndra, which has raised more than $1.5 billion in private and government funds, has suspended manufacturing and laid off 1,100 full-time and temporary employees. We conducted a survey and asked GigaOM readers for their views on the fallout of Solyndra’s decision to file for bankruptcy and what the future holds for the company. This research examines the survey’s results. It also includes an analysis of Solyndra’s struggles over the past two years to move into mass production, and to do it amidst difficult and volatile economic conditions. Companies mentioned in this report include Evergreen Solar, First Solar and SpectraWatt. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Car data needs standards, too

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 15:04:10 +0000

Ford and Toyota announced Monday morning that the car companies are working together on standards for the next-generation of networking and Internet-connected services in their vehicles. In a press conference, executives at Ford and Toyota said that the standards they are working on would cover areas like connectivity for WiFi and bluetooth in the car, and back-end infrastructure that provides the data for the in-vehicle services.

The move shows just how important connectivity is becoming for car companies, as vehicles are becoming the latest devices to have an always-on wireless connection (see our video below of an interview with Ford’s chief technology officer Paul Mascarenas below). As the market for these connected services matures, the car companies realize the importance of collaborating on standards to help grow the ecosystem for the connected car.

Standards will be crucial to enable car companies to work with third party developers, device makers, cell phone companies and Internet companies to create applications that are actually compelling to drivers. Drivers will want to move their data, digital entertainment and Internet services from their homes and cell phones to their cars, and this will rely on a standardized format.

By 2016 consumers will expect all cars to be connected, according to Thilo Koslowski, Gartner’s Automotive Practice Leader, and this trend is being pushed by digital convergence, sustainability, changing demographics, and increased mobility. Koslowski said on a panel recently that connected cars will represent “a new era for the auto industry” and car companies that don’t move aggressively on it will have a competitive disadvantage.

Beyond digital entertainment and Internet services, Ford is separately working on a technology that will enable cars to wirelessly talk to each other, helping to reduce crashes as well as potentially fuel consumption. The tech is based on a souped up form of Wi-Fi and GPS, and we got a demo of that tech back in June (see video below).

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How Big Data Tools Are Shaping Sustainability Software

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 00:00:09 +0000

More sustainability software services have emerged in recent years than online dating sites, but the next trend for these companies is to turn to next-generation analytics tools to manage the massive of influx of real-time data emerging around sustainability.

Choose Greener Gadgets … Easily!

Georgina Laidlaw — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:00:56 +0000

Every year, Greenpeace releases its “Guide to Greener Electronics” — the one released last September was the 13th edition of the publication. I’m a long-time Greenpeace supporter and personal electronics user, yet I’d never even heard of the guide. Have you?

If you’re purchasing a computer, phone, TV or games console, this guide is essential reading. Download the full report in PDF format, and you’ll see electronics manufacturers in a whole new light.

What’s the Point?

According to Greenpeace, “The guide ranks the 18 top manufacturers of personal computers, mobile phones, TVs and games consoles according to their policies on toxic chemicals, recycling and climate change.”

Helping you to support electronics manufacturers that are ahead of the pack in terms of their environmental policies and practices is the whole point here, though it won’t make your next purchase a no-brainer.

Firstly, the average web worker uses many other electronic devices than just computers, phones, TVs and consoles, as our “What’s in Your Bag?” series showed — cameras, voice recorders and music players are just a smattering of the gadgets we own. So if I’m buying a camera, for example, the guide will be useless…or will it? A key benefit of the guide is that it rates manufacturers on the known aspects of their operations, not the products themselves. However, in an imperfect world, with imperfect information, I feel happy enough to infer the environmental credentials of the rated producers onto the other electronics products they produce.

The other snag is that you may be looking to purchase an item produced by a company that doesn’t rank in the 18 market leaders, like BenQ for example. You won’t know where the manufacturer sits relevant to the others in the guide. The answer here is, of course, to do your own research on the products you’re considering. But I expect I’d need to do that, no matter which items or producers I was considering.

How to Use It

Some of the web workers I know are extremely brand loyal. When their preferred company brings out a new computer, for example, they queue to buy it. Others are more impulse-driven, finding a great sale or markdown on a model they’ve been coveting for months, and pouncing.

Whether you’re brand loyal or a bargain hunter, buying in-store our online, this guide will help you navigate your way to the more environmentally sound brands. So, for example, if you’re buying a new phone, you might decide to opt for a Nokia, Samsung or Sony Ericsson, which are the only brands to have scored above 6 in the guide. From there, you can conduct your own research on the product’s features and benefits.

Other Considerations and Limitations

Greenpeace points out that the guide is, in part, designed to encourage manufacturers to “take responsibility for the full life cycle of their products, including the electronic waste that their products generate”, so using this advice to help make your purchasing decisions is a good way to actively support greener producers by voting with your wallet.

However, as Greenpeace acknowledges, “The guide does not rank companies on labor standards, mining, or any other issues” — it covers environmental criteria only. Greenpeace points us to Good Electronics, the international network on human rights and sustainability in electronics, and Make IT Fair, both of which produce reports that will help to answer your questions on the community- and mining-related issues that surround the electronics industry in general, and certain manufacturers in particular.

Spend a few minutes comparing this information with the data provided in the Greenpeace guide, and you should have as clear a picture as is reasonably possible of how your choice of gadget impacts the people who make it and dispose of it once you throw it away.

From there, you can start to look at specific models, researching their practical, environmental and social benefits and features, and weighing up the pros and cons of each, and make an informed, responsible decision about how you’ll spend your money.

How important to you are the environmental and social credentials of the electronics products you buy?

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