Page 53 - Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development

32 Chapter Thr ee

GHG levels in the atmosphere (see Chapter 20). Moreover, the Kyoto
Pro tocol placed the principal responsibility for GHG reduction on
developed nations with a history of industrial activity, but it has
now become essential to include participation by rapidly developing
nations such as China and India.
There are actually a number of mechanisms whereby companies
can strive to meet GHG reduction targets without undue economic
hardship. These include emissions trading, purchase of offsets, and
investments in GHG reduction projects such as wind farms. The U.S.
will most likely adopt a mandatory national “cap and trade” system
for GHGs, and the Chicago Climate Exchange has already estab-
lished a thriving voluntary system for carbon trading. Already, many
third parties are offering elaborate procedures for verifying the
authenticity of carbon trading schemes. However, such mechanisms
remain controversial because they may provide a means for delay-
ing progress and preserving the status quo. There is a continuing
debate over “additionality” of carbon offsets; in other words, whether
the same GHG reductions would have been realized without the
offset purchase.
As a consequence of growing public expectations, even in the
absence of regulatory drivers, many companies have initiated pro-
grams to assess their “carbon footprint,” to set reduction goals, and
to include GHG emissions as a key component of their environmen-
tal performance measurement systems. The World Business Council
for Sustainable Development has teamed with the World Resources
Institute to publish a detailed GHG Protocol for performing an
inventory of GHG emissions at a corporate or facility level [4]. The
“carbon-neutral” label has become increasingly popular to describe
products, processes, services, or events which attempt to eliminate
or offset their GHG emissions. For example, Terra-Pass enables trav-
elers to purchase carbon credits that offset the emissions associated
with the energy used by their transportation. Some companies have
set aggressive goals for their operations to become carbon-neutral
and waste-free.
In point of fact, most carbon offset schemes only address a com-
pany’s direct use of energy in the form of fuel or electricity, so the
“carbon-neutral” label may be misleading. If a company were to con-
sider all of the energy expended in the supply chain to provide pur-
chased goods and services, its overall carbon footprint could be as
much as 10 to 20 times larger [5]. As pointed out in Chapter 1, the root
cause of our enormous carbon footprint is not direct energy use but
material throughput, which drives the consumption of energy through-
out our economy. (Chapter 9 provides a more detailed discussion of
life-cycle environmental footprint assessment.) The GHG Protocol
has launched a new, multi-stakeholder initiative to produce two new
international standards for product life-cycle accounting and corpo-
rate value chain accounting, expected to be released in 2010. In any