Verteego.com Blog | The Sustainability Blog | Sustainability News and Tips

Verteego launches Verteego Construction : the carbon management app for building and public works, urban planning and real estate professionnals

August 30, 2010 – 4:25 pm by Miriam

Verteego is proud to present Verteego Construction, an online carbon assessment application especially designed to meet the needs of the building and public works industry. Based on its various discussions with its customers (Group IDEC, IOISIS Nord, SETEC, VEYER, Le Bon Marché, Communauté d'Agglomération de Sarreguemines-Confluence, Communauté d'Agglomération de Val-et-Forêt (the last two are French local governments) and partners (MEV, CADET, Equinergies, Effet de Levier, Business & Décision, Bossa Verde, SynAIRgis, FTC, FCV Conseil...) Verteego came to the conclusion that project owners, in other word contractors, are progressively including in their specifications clauses regarding low carbon-emitting constructions, not only during the building phase, but first and foremost during the exploitation phase. That basically means that buildings' carbon emissions are monitored during all their life cycle. Nevertheless, and that's how our reflexion started and explains why we came up with Verteego Carbon, the contractors' expectations in terms of carbon efficiency were, so far, ...

Posted in Business, Environment, Take action, Technology, Trendwatching, Verteego, Verteego Carbon | No Comments »

Join us for a Verteego webinar and discover how our GHG management app works

August 26, 2010 – 3:43 pm by Miriam

Dear Verteeblog readers, Verteego is pleased to invite you to join our free webinar, "Verteego: Carbon & Energy Management made easy" on September 2, 3pm GMT - 4:15pm GMT3pm and 4:15pm GMT London time (10am - 11:15am EST, US East Coast time). Through this one-hour+ long interactive presentation, you will get an insight of all the features of our carbon & energy management application. Verteego provides businesses with a cost-effective online solution to enable organizations to manage their GHG emissions. For further information on our carbon management software, please check our website. Our featured presenter will be Mr Rupert Schiessl, cofounder and general manager of Verteego, who manages our software road maps and product teams, including those working on our carbon & energy management application. To book your Webinar seat now, please send me an email (miriam (dot) dounas (at) verteego (dot) com) and we will send you a confirmation email containing information about joining ...

Posted in Business, Environment, Events, Take action, Technology, Verteego Carbon | No Comments »

A summary of the French “Grenelle de l’Environnement” achievements (I/II)

August 16, 2010 – 1:59 pm by Miriam

Environment regulation was for a long time not deemed a top priority for governments. There was this crazy - though widespread- belief that we could do anything with our planet and it would always provide us with all the resources we needed and stay pristine and shiny like we had always known it to be. The unbridled laissez-faire that consequently prevailed is now history. Policy makers, faced with the fierce urgency of global warming ,energy-shortages concerns, are trying to impose legal obligations to force polluters, notably businesses, to take into account and reduce the damage they inflict on the environment, and empowers local governments to take green actions. Of course, the task is tricky, given the growing pressure on businesses to be competitive. To simplify : any new tax or constraining measure or norm impedes national businesses, all the more that there is no such thing as harmonization of environmental taxes ...

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

The REACh European directive, a puzzle for articles manufacturers and distributors ?

August 9, 2010 – 4:59 pm by Miriam

At first glance, it seems that the answer is a plain yes : every actor of the manufacturing industry, every importer has to deal with hundreds, even thousands of suppliers and sub-contractors from all over the world on a daily basis. The latter, understandably reluctant to communicate too much information to their customers' purchasing services, are tempted , when required to remove some substances from their articles, to raise there prices. This is no news to supply chain experts : the more actors are involved, the more difficult, time-consuming and therefore costly the data-collection process is (and , as we will see, the more efficient the resort to information technologies to achieve competitive gains proves to be) . If elegant solutions to seemingly insoluble problems do exist, let us first go through all there is to know about the REACh directive as far as articles manufacturers and distributors are concerned,before talking solutions and ...

Posted in Debate, Environment, Policy, Trendwatching, Verteego | No Comments »

Paris, London and Berlin agree on setting a 30% GHG emissions cut goal

July 19, 2010 – 9:42 am by Miriam

Jean Louis Borloo, Chris Huhne and Norbert Röttgen, respectively the French, the British and the German minister in charge with the environment have agreed on the necessity to set more ambitious GHG-emission reduction targets. Here is a brief summary of their case. This crisis and the economic turmoil downturn that the world and Europe faced should be seen as an opportunity to take a new orientation in our model of economic development. What we face now is a crisis of capitalism, as Braudel described it . In order to preserve itself, it has to make room for change. Greenness, sustainability embody this change. They allow to mitigate the risks linked to the volatility of all fossil fuels'prices not to mention the threats of an instable climate and the potential disasters it may lead to. We are here at a watershed of the EU's economic development, and we have this great opportunity to ...

Posted in Debate, Environment, Policy, Take action | 1 Comment »

“Greenness”, a mere marketing asset ?

June 28, 2010 – 9:37 am by Miriam

I know this is going to sound nerdy, but hey, I don't care : I am a huge fan of Tolkien's novels and I was thrilled to hear they were about to start shooting a pair of epic fantasy movies based on “The Hobbit”. To be even more accurate, these movies are currently shot in New Zealand at the exact same place where the "Lord of The Rings" Trilogy was shot. Because I am also a business student with an interest in "serious" economic issues, I did a bit of research on that, and found out that those films did a great deal to promote New Zealand as a must-see ecotourism destination and spur the country’s tourism trade (Air New Zealand even branded itself the “airline to Middle Earth”), fitting nicely with the country ’s “100% Pure New Zealand” marketing slogan, first used a couple of years earlier. And then ...

Posted in Debate, Environment, Policy, Take action | No Comments »

Buy green, buy local… or not

June 21, 2010 – 10:26 am by Miriam

It began in America, and is now spreading among the environmentally conscious,well-educated and generally well-off European consumers : "it" is the locavore trend. Locavore was the 2007 Oxford's word of the year, but here is a quick definition in case you missed it :a locavore is someone who exclusively (or at least primarily) eats foods from their local or regional foodshed or a determined radius from their home (commonly either 100 or 250 miles, depending on location). By eating locally, most locavores hope to create a greater connection between themselves and their food sources, resist industrialized and processed foods, and support their local economy. Still, the key purpose of locavores is to achieve a reduction of global carbon emissions. At first, it seems to make perfect sense: global food trade, because it involves long-distance shipping,conditionning and other processes, is supposed to have a very heavy carbon output. By consuming locally grown food, the locavores reduce shipping distances and consequently, carbon emissions. On a closer look though ...

Posted in Social sustainability, Trendwatching, Verteego, Verteego Carbon | No Comments »

Heat counting

June 14, 2010 – 3:31 pm by Miriam

The concerns brought about by phenomena such as global warming and depletion of natural resources are starting to be genuinely taken into account by governments. This results in the adoption of various regulations and so called green legislations aiming at achieving GHG emissions cuts. Recently, public pressure has prompted more companies to register and disclose the results in their annual reports or to specifically created organs such as the Carbon Disclosure Project. In Britain for example , the Carbon Reduction Commitment will come into effect this year. Among other things it requires firms that use more than 6000 megawatt hours of electricity a year to measure and report the energy they use. But apart from these exogenous factors of change, endogenous forces are also at work in the area of GHG emissions management. Even while governments are still arguing over the amounts of emissions cuts, many firms already carry out hands on ...

Posted in Business, Debate, Environment, Policy, Verteego | No Comments »

“Carbon Management Software to reduce costs”, Keenan Hahn, Vice-President of Verteego Carbon North America

June 6, 2009 – 8:03 pm by Jeremy

Here's an interview of Keenan Hahn, Chief of North American Operations at Verteego Carbon, a carbon accounting and management enterprise software solution, on French web TV decideurstv.com. According to Keenan Hahn from Verteego Carbon, the inventory, measurement, management, analysis, reduction and reporting of green house gas (GHG) emissions is an increasingly important business issue in the United States, even though adopters of software solutions still belong to a club of happy fews that will drive tomorrow's economy. Corporates and large public sector organizations increasingly invest in GHG footprints to assess their climate change impacts. Keenan believes demand for carbon management software will take off seriously in 2010 as soon as the Environmental Protection Agency will have officially passed its GHG Inventory law at Congress right before the Copenhagen Summit in December 2009. The payback for early adopters will then be massive since income statements will be hit by the regulation. Keenan ...

Posted in Environment, Policy, Verteego Carbon | No Comments »

Verteego Calculates its Carbon Footprint

May 4, 2009 – 6:50 am by Keenan

Using Verteego Carbon, our online carbon management software, Verteego has calculated its carbon footprint. We are proud to report that Verteego was responsible for emissions of just 3.153 tons of carbon equivalents in 2008. Sustainability and reducing our impact is in our blood here at Verteego, and the results of our carbon assessment were low, as expected. Highlights of our report include: 1) Extremely low home-work travel emissions of 208 kg carbon equivalent due to the fact that all employees take the subway to work. 2) Very low emissions from electricity consumed on-site (544 kg carbon equivalent) due to minimal use of heating and lighting. 3) Exceptionally low emissions from business travel by car (47 kg carbon equivalent) due to the use of lower-emission options, such as rail travel. Because we are conscious of our impact in the VerteegOffice, we have picked all the low-hanging fruit in terms of reducing our impact. We are ...

Posted in Environment, Verteego | 7 Comments »