DHL Launches ‘Carbon Dashboard’ Emissions Tracker

DHL Global Forwarding has launched the GoGreen Carbon Dashboard, a service for its freight customers to track carbon emissions in their supply chain.

 

The system records carbon emissions coming from both DHL and third party sources, in an effort to provide users with a single carbon measurement platform, the freight firm says.

DHL says that the dashboard uses a “internationally recognized public standard” to calculate carbon emissions and treats CO₂ as an integrated business parameter, putting it into relation with other supply chain parameters such as volume shipped, product density and trade lane efficiency.

The dashboard also enables customers to dry run various carbon reduction scenarios using real data (pictured) and explore the effectiveness of different options for carbon reduction, DHL says. The Carbon Dashboard’s CO2 mapping is web-based and available instantly.

“Up to 50 percent of the carbon footprint of a product comes from the supply chain,” vice president of green strategy Kathrin Brost said. “DHL Global Forwarding, Freight now offers its customers a best-in-class tool to gain transparency on the carbon efficiency within their supply chain. In the future, carbon will become a global currency and DHL makes it easy for companies to integrate it in their balance sheet.”

DHL is committed to improving its carbon efficiency by 10 percent by 2012 and by 30 percent by 2020, against a 2007 base.

As a part of this commitment, in April the freight firm announced that it was introducing 30 electric vans and 50 hybrid trucks to its Manhattan fleet in an initiative that it said will cut CO2 emissions by over 50 percent, compared to traditional vans and trucks. The vehicles should all hit the streets by September 2011.

Both types of vehicles will be manufactured in the U.S. by Azure Dynamics and will use Ford chassis. DHL’s existing Ford E450s will be converted into hybrids, improving fuel economy by up to 40 percent while reducing emissions by about 30 percent, DHL said.

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India's 'recycled' school teaches environmental lessons

JAMKHANDIKAR (PUNE): On a regular school day, four-year-old Kush Bhattacharya can leave his mathematics class to run barefoot on grass, hide from his friends in a cave made of cow dung and return to recite nursery rhymes in a red bus that doubles up as a classroom.

Kush is a student at the Aman Setu school in Pune, an educational and technological hub three hours drive from Mumbai.

Almost every part of the school premises is made out of recycled material, including roofs made out of old hoardings, walls built from plastic bottles and hand-stitched uniforms made out of eco-friendly 'khadi', or handspun, cloth.

"It isn't a marketing thing, it's what we believe and how we live," says Madhavi Kapur, who started the school in 2008 with just four students. The school now has more than 140 students studying up to grade five.

"We didn't have too much money to begin with, and one of my (former) students, who is an architect came up with the idea of using recycled materials to build the school on a piece of land leased to me by my brother," she said.

Starting off with a modest 600,000 rupees ($13,500) Kapur and architect Saurabh Phadke devised ways to build walls from mud and old cement bags. They were then tamped down and plastered with mud.

Consisting of just two one-storeyed structures which house four classrooms, students at Aman Setu, which means bridge of peace, sit on rattan mats on a cowdung-plastered floor, use text books handed down from other students and grow their own vegetables in a small garden.

Children get to feed fish in a tank, watch a robin's egg hatch and travel to school by community transport - all in an effort to make them more environmentally conscious.

Kapur also acquired an old bus from the government transport authority, stripped it down, and refurbished it as a classroom.

"We don't mind them walking out of a maths class, feeding their favourite fish, taking a barefoot walk in the grass and then coming back in. We want them to be one with the surroundings," says teacher Bano Bhagwat, as she teaches a gaggle of excited kids how to make lemonade.

It might sound like a school straight out of a fairy tale, but it wasn't all smooth sailing.

"Parents weren't willing to send their kids to a school which had an old bus doubling up as a classroom. We started off with just four students, and I've had a hard time convincing parents that it was a safe environment" Kapur said.

Now that the school has grown she has an entirely different problem persuading parents that they should not tear down the concrete building down the road -- into which they have already moved some classes -- for a more environmentally friendly structure.

"We have moved to a bigger structure down the road. But that is a concrete building, and parents don't want their kids to move there. They want me to stay here." says Kapur.

"Now, they are giving me lessons in the environment. But for me, tearing down a concrete structure is also not ecologically sound."

For now, Kapur hopes to replicate her eco-friendly teaching methods at the concrete school as well, with plans for a rain water harvesting facility, a vegetable garden, and of course, a fence made of old plastic bottles.'

"This is a way of life, we plan to continue it no matter where we go," she says.

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