NEWS: Last Week @ SSC

Last week's developments can provide you with lots of resources and food for thought: from how businesses can effectively manage their water use to how they can conduct a waste audit, from analysing Wal-Mart's sustainability index challenges and dissecting the diverse green building standards, to presenting a new carbon accounting free software and portraying the air-powered cars of the future. And last but not least, we presented how knowledge sharing can directly lead to a good deed. Our podcast sharing through CSRwire.com granted us with a GlobalGiving gift certificate! We decided to donate to the Environmental and Advocacy Education for Teens project by Teens Turning Green. Read below to get all the details!

Resources for SMEs:

  • Water & Sustainability Pocast - Matthew Savage presents how businesses can more effectively manage their water use and provides great examples of how we can make water use a part of every organization's green plan.
  • How to Conduct a Waste Audit - New recorded webinar available for download. This webinar (along with 7 other spreadsheets, tools, templates, and reports) will take you through the steps of a do-it-yourself waste audit. Designed for employees working in organizations "going green", it is a one-stop shop for measuring your office waste and creating a waste reduction plan.
  • Free Carbon Accounting Application - Intuit Green Snapshot. Intuit automatically analyzes your Quickbooks data, gathers the various payments you've made, and taps an online database that assigns a rough carbon equivalent to each of the payees. It instantly creates a carbon footprint analysis and also provides a set of recommendations on how to lower it.

Analysis:

  • Green Building Standards -  With all these emerging trends in green buildings (or greening buildings), one can get confused about which model to follow. Green building standards such as "Living Building", "Passive House" and "Net Zero" have become increasingly popular and have diversified the benchmarks in the sector. For this reason, John Linnemann, from Aedi Construction, set out to provide a comprehensive view on each of the aforementioned standards, in addition to analysing how they compare to LEED certified buildings.
  • Wal-Mart's Sustainability Index Challenges -  The retail giant hopes to create an index which will measure the environmental and social impact of all its products, which would then be communicated through an "eco-label" attached to these products. But how will this work?
  • Cars Running on Air - These cars use compressed air to push the pistons in the engine and gain extra range by using a supplemental energy source of gasoline, ethanol, or biodiesel. Some of the models that MDI has developed do run on air only, however, these cars do not attain the performance levels that the dual fuel source vehicles do. What will the future of personal automobiles look like?

Doing good by doing good:

Stay tuned as more interesting sustainability happenings will follow!