Daily Archives: May 21, 2008

50+ Ways to Greenify Your Classroom and Campus

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Alisa Miller writing at College at Home

With environmental awareness on the rise, so many resources are now available to help transition your school to a greener place. Below are over 50 ways to make your school a more earth-friendly campus. Recruit helpers and get creative to make the job fun.

Educate

The most important way to move your school towards positive changes for the environment is by educating. Once students and teachers alike become more informed and aware, the necessary changes will be easier to implement and will hold more promise for staying in place.

Become Aware

Look around you every day and notice what might be out of place. Becoming aware of potential changes on a small scale can result in huge changes for the environment.

Reduce

Reducing the amount of material the students and teachers use on campus will help eliminate the need for recycling or disposal. Smart selection of products used at school keeps waste to a minimum.

Reuse

Many items end up in the trash or recycle bin long before their life is gone. Get creative with ways to reuse materials at school.

Recycle

The activity that comes to mind most quickly when thinking of going green is often recycling. Recycling bins are showing up more and more in public places and along city streets on trash day. Recycling is easy to do—it’s just a matter of remembering to do it.

Put Ideas into Action

Actions speak loudest. When others see what your school can accomplish, they become inspired to do the same themselves. Get out there and do something to make your school green.

You can find the actual details in the article. Go, check it out.

The Energy value chain business model of Mitsubishi

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Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd details its new business model (PDF) tackling the energy and environments in its latest webcast.

Next page shows how we plan to promote the business by fusing the energy and the environment. Due to the global warming and the high energy prices, we believe that this market of energy and environmental will expand and diversify. This graph shows the value chain of energies. The vertical axis shows the flow of energy. From the top you see fuel conversion of energy and the use of energy. Horizontal axis shows the energy conversion and the load on the environment.

On the right hand side we are showing you the measures to deal with the pollutant, which would be generated through the energy conversion. For example in this value chain, using the natural gas, as you follow the red line you see the gas turbine combined cycle is used to generate, convert the energy, and blue line shows the electricity. And brown line shows the de-nitration and CO2 recovery and storage from the flue gas. And you see the gas to liquid, or GTL. And this can be used as a new alternative energy for the automobile.

In this energy value chain, in the parentheses, you see our business headquarters and we have various products and technologies. We would enhance those products and technologies, and combine them so that we can expand the new solution businesses. In order to do this, in April this year, we established the sustainability, energy and environment strategic planning department so that we can make further growth in the energy and environmental businesses.

I do not understand everything that is detailed here however, I am impressed with the direction that they are taking, the strategic planning and the establishment of a new department to deal with this. They have detailed their CSR strategy which revolves around producing products beneficial to society and the environment and spreading the culture within the organization.

Mitsubishi CSR Strategy

Financing Sustainability

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Lynn Stevens writes in Michigan live.

For corporate decision makers, “it’s not a question of ‘should I pay attention to this?’ but ‘what can I do?’” he said.

To help them, there is institutional-level research into energy-efficient products and processes conducted by such companies as Deutsche Bank Group and Goldman Sachs. For the first time, those entities are seeing real investment opportunity in sustainability, Zeno said.

Second, investors now are looking for better reporting of a company’s environmental record. They want sustainability reporting and financial results in the same document, he said.

“If I know a company is more efficient with its energy usage, that tells me they have intelligent management,” Zeno said.

Finally, values-based investing is growing. Socially responsible investing used to mean screening out companies that deal in products or services that particular investors found objectionable. Now the definition is expanding to analyses of corporations’ social responsibility. A large component of social responsibility is sustainability, he said
[...]

“If there’s money to be made, supply will come,” Pino added.

The last statement is quite important to understand and explains the drive now and in the future for clean tech.