Trying to Come Up with Green Labels that Matter

Even conventional grocery stores are full of products that claim to be “green,” “carbon neutral,” “eco-friendly,” or the big one—”natural.” But as environmentally friendly labels have proliferated, the meaning of those claims has become increasingly vague. Now some large companies are trying to better define such terms to create something like the environmental equivalent of standard nutritional information. There’s no evidence, however, that more environmental information will get consumers to change their buying habits.

Walmart, DuPont, and General Electric, among other companies, have joined international consortiums that aim to develop a single metric for measuring carbon dioxide emissions associated with a product. They hope that if there’s a single up-front method, it will be easier to distinguish companies that make substantial environmental strides from those with merely a green spin. “If we have a competitor out there making claims, and we’re making claims, we really want to make sure that there’s a standard,” says Robert ter Kuile, senior manager of energy and climate change with PepsiCo International.

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative and the Sustainability Consortium both aim to create international standards to tabulate the carbon footprint of a variety of products. Both projects assert that the best approach is the so-called “cradle-to-grave” life-cycle assessment—a review of greenhouse gases emitted from the first step of producing raw materials to the product’s degradation in a landfill.

Levi Strauss sent its iconic 501 jeans through several life-cycle analyses, including the one developed for the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative. “We were able to see that most of our impact came from consumer use [washing and drying], and from cotton production,” says Barruch Ben-Zekry, an environmental sustainability specialist at the company.

A so-called cradle-to-grave analysis showed that consumer use was the largest contributor to carbon emissions associated with 501 jeans. Credit: Levi Strauss

Levi Strauss couldn’t directly control how consumers washed their jeans and when. But the life-cycle analysis inspired a new brand this January: the Waterless line of Levi’s, which achieve the same “worn” look of other jeans but require 28 percent to 96 percent less water in manufacturing, depending on the style.

A study by Levi Strauss showed that air-drying jeans can cut carbon emissions over their life cycle by 90 percent. Credit: Levi Strauss

Motorola is another company that made changes on the basis of a life-cycle assessment, which revealed that it would take new materials to significantly reduce the carbon emissions associated with its mobile phones. “Eighty-eight percent of the [phone's] carbon footprint resides in the manufacture of materials,” says Bill Olson, director of the office of sustainability and stewardship at Motorola. So the company spent four years developing a light, tough plastic based on materials recycled from water bottles. Olson says the material’s carbon footprint is 20 percent smaller than that of standard plastic.

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New Magnets Could Solve Our Rare-Earth Problems

Stronger, lighter magnets could enter the market in the next few years, making more efficient car engines and wind turbines possible. Researchers need the new materials because today’s best magnets use rare-earth metals, whose supply is becoming unreliable even as demand grows.

So researchers are now working on new types of nanostructured magnets that would use smaller amounts of rare-earth metals than standard magnets. Many hurdles remain, but GE Global Research hopes to demonstrate new magnet materials within the next two years.

The strongest magnets rely on an alloy of the rare-earth metal neodymium that also includes iron and boron. Magnet makers sometimes add other rare-earth metals, including dysprosium and terbium, to these magnets to improve their properties. Supplies of all three of these rare earths are at risk because of increasing demand and the possibility that China, which produces most of them, will restrict exports.

However, it’s not clear if the new magnets will get to market before the demand for rare-earth metals exceeds the supply. The U.S. Department of Energy projects that worldwide production of neodymium oxide, a key ingredient in magnets, will total 30,657 tons in 2015. In one of the DOE’s projected scenarios, demand for that metal will be a bit higher than that number in 2015. The DOE’s scenarios involve some guesswork, but the most conservative estimate has demand for neodymium exceeding supply by about 2020.

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“A lot of the story about rare earths has focused around China and mining,” says Steven Declos, manager of material sustainability at GE Global Research. “We believe technology can play a role in addressing this.” The DOE is funding GE’s magnet project, and one led by researchers at the University of Delaware, through the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program, which fosters research into disruptive technology.

Coming up with new magnet materials is not easy, says George Hadjipanayis, chair of the physics and astronomy department at the University of Delaware. Hadjipanayis was involved in the development of neodymium magnets in the 1980s while working at Kollmorgen.  ”At that time, maybe we all got lucky,” he says of the initial development of neodymium magnets. The way researchers made new magnets in the past was to crystallize alloys and look for new forms with better properties. This approach won’t work going forward. “Neodymium magnet performance has plateaued,” says Frank Johnson, who heads GE’s magnet research program. Hadjipanayis agrees. “The hope now is nanocomposites,” he says.

Nanocomposite magnet materials are made up of nanoparticles of the metals that are found in today’s magnetic alloys. These composites have, for example, neodymium-based nanoparticles mixed with iron-based nanoparticles. These nanostructured regions in the magnet interact in a way that leads to greater magnetic properties than those found in conventional magnetic alloys.

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The Healing Power of Light

A new polymer material that can repeatedly heal itself at room temperature when exposed to ultraviolet light presents the tantalizing possibility of products that can repair themselves when damaged. Possibilities include self-healing medical implants, cars, or even airplane parts.

The polymer, created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Kyushu University, heals when a crack in the material is pressed together and exposed to UV light. The same treatment can cause separate chunks of the material to fuse together to form one solid piece.

The researchers were able to cut the same block into pieces and put them back together at least five times. With further refinement, the material could mend itself many more times, says CMU chemistry professor Krzysztof Matyjaszewski, who led the research team.

Currently, the polymer can only repair itself in an oxygen-free environment, so the researchers had to carry out the UV treatment in the presence of pure nitrogen. But they hope to develop polymers that heal under visible light and don’t require nitrogen, which should open up many practical applications, including products and components that heal after suffering minor damage. Such a material, Matyjaszewski says, “would be a dramatic improvement over what we’ve already done.”

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Self-healing materials have been made before, mainly polymers and composites. But most of those have relied on tiny capsules that are filled with a healing agent. When the polymer cracks, the capsules break open and release the healing agent, which becomes polymer solid and seals the crack and restores the material’s properties. But once the capsules are depleted, the material can no longer mend itself.

The new polymer relies on carbon-sulfur bonds within the material. “There are thousands of chemical bonds here, and even if you lose a small percent, one can think about potentially repeating the healing a hundred times,” Matyjaszewski says.

The researchers found that even shredded bits of the polymer will join together to form a continuous piece when irradiated with UV light. This implies that the material could also be easy to recycle. The researchers presented the details of their experiments in a paper published online in Angewandte Chemie.

Some research groups, including Matyjaszewski’s, have made polymers that heal when exposed to heat or certain chemicals. But Michael Kessler, a materials science and engineering professor at Iowa State University, says light healing is a superior option. “I think that UV stimulus is particularly appealing as an external stimulus because it’s noncontact, it happens at room temperature, it’s pretty easy to acquire and handle, and, importantly, it’s limited to target areas where the damage occurs,” Kessler says.

Kessler adds, however, that the new material suffers from two of the main drawbacks faced by other self-healing materials: it requires pressure, and the repair process takes hours.

Nonetheless, some self-healing materials are on their way to commercialization. Autonomic Materials in Champaign, Illinois, is readying corrosion- and scratch-resistant coatings containing microcapsules developed by Scott White, a professor at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

White’s colleague Nancy Sottos  has made materials that mimic human skin and that heal themselves using underlying channels filled with healing agents. Sottos envisions the materials being used for structural applications such as airplane parts, car and spacecraft components, and for everyday products such as cell-phone and laptop cases.

UV-triggered healing won’t be suitable for all applications, says Sottos. That’s because the restructuring of carbon-sulfur bonds that allows the material to heal also requires that material to be rubbery and soft.

“You can make materials that are harder or softer,” says Matyjaszewski. “Every self-healing material is somehow unique and has advantages over the other ones. It depends on the properties and area of application.”

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Google’s Video Play

Last week, Google stirred up controversy with a low-key announcement: in the near future, it would drop support for a widely used video format in its Chrome Web browser. Here’s a primer on what Google is doing, why it’s doing it, and how it will affect you.

What exactly did Google do?

Last Tuesday, the company announced on the blog for its Chrome Web browser that it plans to discontinue built-in support for the H.264 video format, which is used by many Web publishers. Google said that instead, it would adopt the free-to-use WebM, a multimedia format that Google has largely developed and funded itself.

How will this affect you?

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It probably won’t, unless you’re one of the roughly one in 10 people who use the Chrome browser. Even then, you might not notice. What’ll happen is that video clips embedded in Web pages using the new HTML video tag—part of the emerging HTML5 standard—won’t play if they’re encoded in H.264.

Today, most Web video is served not via a video tag, but through Adobe’s Flash player, which Google bundles with Chrome. So most video sites won’t look any different. It’s also possible to serve H.264 video using Flash.

Google has announced forthcoming WebM plug-ins for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari. It’s a given that Firefox will also play WebM videos. Several major chipmakers, including AMD, ARM, and Broadcom, have pledged to support the format, as has Adobe for its Flash player. But without WebM being available by default in Internet Explorer, one Microsoft evangelist likened Google’s move to throwing its weight behind Esperanto. In response, Google has pledged to supply browser plug-ins for Internet Explorer and Safari that will enable them to automatically play WebM video.

Eventually, engineers could build downloadable add-ons for Chrome that would enable it to play H.264, circumventing Google’s move altogether. So for now, Google’s move won’t have much of an effect. And importantly, if you have a Google-powered Android phone, nothing will change on your device.

Unlike Apple’s refusal to support Flash players on its iPhones and iPads, Google’s removal of H.264 support from Chrome will be much less high-profile. Google’s massive YouTube site will still stream video in H.264 (except for users who click a button to opt to use WebM). “That Chrome has dropped H.264 is less important than YouTube [dropping it],” notes Informa analyst Andrew Ladbrook.

In that case, why is Google doing this?

The H.264 format is commercially licensed by an organization called MPEG LA. Companies that make video software and hardware pay license fees to MPEG LA in order to build H.264 support into their products.

Google’s stated aim is to shift Web video away from H.264 and toward WebM, in order to drive the Internet toward a royalty-free standard over which Google would have a large influence.

Interestingly, MPEG LA’s members include Microsoft and Apple, which are pushing for H.264 to be used as the standard format for the video tag in HTML5. “Microsoft had announced that it was firmly backing HTML5 and H.264 as the codec of choice for the video element,” says Ladbrook.

There’s already another royalty-free video format, Ogg Theora, supported by Mozilla’s Firefox and other browser makers. But Microsoft and Apple have refused to build in support for it, and so far have not announced support for WebM. And Steve Jobs has written that he’s concerned that Ogg Theora will invite patent lawsuits from other companies, which would undermine the point of using it.

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A Question for Quora

Silicon Valley’s most talked about new Web company, Quora, offers a novel spin on an old concept: it takes a standard QA site and adds Twitter-like social networking to the mix. The site has grown rapidly in recent weeks in part because of the quality of its content and community—but now its newfound popularity may jeopardize the content that made the site a success in the first place.

Quora was founded by two Facebook alumni: Adam D’Angelo, previously the social network’s chief technology officer, and Charlie Cheever, the engineer and manager responsible for creating Facebook Connect and the Facebook Platform.

Their new site launched in an invitation-only beta in January 2010. Quora’s easy-to-use interface, as well as the founders’ impressive connections, rapidly attracted an elite group of early users, many from Silicon Valley’s most innovative companies. That meant Quora users could read the opinions of high-profile people from within the tech world, including former AOL chief Steven Case explaining the dot-com bubble, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz’s opinion of The Social Network, or well-sourced gossip on Google’s in-development social tools.

Quora has social networking features similar to those of microblogging service Twitter. Users can “follow” one another and receive notifications when people they know submit questions or answers; they can also follow certain topics or questions to keep track of new content.

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Cody Brown, founder of Kommons, a QA site that allows people to publicly pose questions to Twitter users, says Quora’s design and features create a more “structured” space for sharing thoughts than most blogging or social networking sites. That design encourages contributions from people who might steer clear of social websites, he says. “It’s not like a conventional blog or Twitter, where you are looking at a blank space and have to come up with something,” says Brown. “You get a more specific prompt to contribute, and so it feels less narcissistic.”

This approach generated the insider content that led to a recent surge in users and media attention. Yet Quora’s success could endanger the very thing that caused that success, says Eileen Burbidge, a London-based investor in startups who previously served as product manager for Yahoo Answers.

“Quality of content and community is diametrically opposed to mass market success,” says Burbidge. “Having worked on Answers, I can tell that the level of quality is going to drop from the very high level it is at now as more people sign up.”

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