Climate Action Resources

Janine Benyus, “Biomimicry’s surprising lessons from nature’s engineers” [17 min]

https://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action

 

https://asknature.org/innovation/wind-turbine-tech-inspired-by-owl-feathers-and-maple-seeds/  [4 min]

 

Kate Raworth, Oxford economist [15 min]

https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_should_be_designed_to_thrive_not_grow   

      

Interface carpet - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBfG6W6yv48 [3 min]

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You hear a lot of claims about recycling these days, and it can be hard to separate fact from fiction, rumor from reality. "Recyclable" is often just a promise, unless you are talking about ReEntry®, the only 3rd party certified recycling system among North American flooring manufacturers.

 

In fact, over four billion pounds of carpet ends up in landfills each year in the US. While about 14% of post-consumer carpet is collected (according to CARE), less than 5% of that is recycled. But at Interface we have been actively collecting and recycling post-consumer vinyl backed carpet tiles for over 20 years, and now all of our CQuest™ backed carpet tiles and LVT on Sound Choice™ backing are 3rd party certified as recyclable by GreenCircle Certified.

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Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a multi-step procedure for calculating the lifetime environmental impact of a product or service. The complete process of LCA includes goal and scope definition, inventory analysis, impact assessment, and interpretation. The process is naturally iterative as the quality and completeness of information and its plausibility is constantly being tested.

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LCI is the life cycle inventory, which is the data collection portion of LCA. LCI is the straight-forward accounting of everything involved in the “system” of interest. It consists of detailed tracking of all the flows in and out of the product system, including raw resources or materials, energy by type, water, and emissions to air, water and land by specific substance. This kind of analysis can be extremely complex and may involve dozens of individual unit processes in a supply chain (e.g., the extraction of raw resources, various primary and secondary production processes, transportation, etc.) as well as hundreds of tracked substances.

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LCIA is life cycle impact assessment, the “what does it mean” step. In LCIA, the inventory is analyzed for environmental impact. For example, manufacturing a product may consume a known volume of natural gas (this data is part of the inventory); in the LCIA phase, the global warming impact from combustion of that fuel is calculated. There are various methods globally for categorizing and characterizing the life cycle impact of the flows to and from the environment, which can somewhat complicate the comparability of different LCA studies. Other variables in LCIA include the system boundary (how far upstream, downstream and sidestream does the analysis go), the functional unit (what is the volume/mass/purpose of the object being assessed), and specific LCIA methods such as allocation (how are impacts assigned to the product and by-products, on what basis). When comparing two LCA studies, these factors are critical to understanding if the comparison is apples-to-apples.

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LCI and LCA should not be confused with life cycle costing. LCC is another life cycle approach (i.e, cradle to grave) but it looks at the direct monetary costs involved with a product or service and not environmental impact.

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Athena Sustainable Materials Institute

http://www.athenasmi.org/resources/about-lca/whats-the-difference/

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Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) by Interface - Find online by entering wc_am-cquestgb-epd.pdf in your browser search engine

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Ikea video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZvpCyjQTQ [8:20]

 

An innovative way to recycle coffee cups  [7:13]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWWfKNBTikc

 

Circular economy TED Talk – Gary Cooper [19 min]

https://www.ted.com/talks/garry_cooper_how_to_make_sure_materials_get_reused_again_and_again?user_email_address=f5df9ca8002a8dfc4a89dabcd2af3913

 

What if we could harness the power and value of all that we discard? Circular economy builder Garry Cooper presents a compelling vision for transforming cities into sustainable, circular economies, citing real-world examples of how repurposing materials from buildings to office furniture can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, create jobs and foster economic growth. A hopeful reminder of the profound impact individual actions can have on our shared future.