The Green List: What’s new in sustainable consumer land

Fewer Farts from Fonterra Farms

New Zealand agricultural co-operative, Fonterra, has collaborated with Royal DSM to produce and test a food additive for ruminants that consistently reduces the methane emitted by cows by over 30 per cent.

Just a quarter teaspoon of Bovaer for each animal every day is all it takes. Given that agricultural methane emissions account for nearly half of New Zealand’s carbon emissions, this small change could have a significant impact on New Zealand’s carbon performance.

The five-year program of testing is part of a long-standing relationship between Fonterra and Royal DSM. Mark van Nieuwland, DCM’s global program head for DSM Nutritional Products said, “With Fonterra, we have an important partner to potentially commercialize Bovaer in New Zealand and globally” while Fonterra’s chief technology officer, Jeremy Hill says Fonterra sees it as, “an opportunity to further accelerate our global leadership in low footprint dairy products, and create more value for our New Zealand milk.”

Millieu Property must have read our article about sustainable fashion

Millieu Property has proudly announced that it is now a certified B Corp™, following the need for developers to embrace sustainability that we predicted last year.

A BCorp is a member of a global community of for-profit businesses whose leaders have pledged to use their business as a force for good. Milieu has long claimed an ethos around sustainability, supported by its community and buyers who are similarly sustainability minded. The B Corp certification reinforces Milieu’s credentials.

Further examples of Milieu’s focus is its commitment to commit 0.1 per cent of the sale price of each apartment in its Brunswick East development to supporting Homes for Homes, and being awarded the 2020 Moreland City Council Design Excellence Scorecard last year.

Coffee cup comeback

There is no excuse like a global pandemic to dash your sustainability goals. One particularly galling example for Australia’s coffee obsessives was the almost universal ban on reusable coffee cups leading to a reappearance of towering piles of single-use cardboard cups. It seems that coffee is an essential service, but sustainable cuppage is not.

But, now we know that COVID-19 is transmitted by aerosols, the focus on surface transmission has relaxed overseas. Treehugger is reporting the return of reusable coffee cups to coffee shops across the USA and Canada. And if they can do it in there then surely we will soon do the same.

ICIS’s recycled plastic fantastic

It’s easy to focus obsessively on your own consumption and forget the bigger picture. At the other end of the supply chain, packaging suppliers are facing a global undersupply of recycled plastic.

ICIS (Independent Commodity Intelligence Services) has addressed the shortage by creating The Recycling Tracker – a global database of 1800 medium and large plastics recycling facilities listing location, size, capacity and capabilities. Plastics can be searched on details as granular as product, colour and feedstock source.

The database currently covers HDPE (high-density polyethylene), LDPE (low-density polyethylene), PET (polyethylene terephthalate) and PP (polypropylene) in pellet, flake and regrind forms

“The tracker is designed to help companies source recycled resins globally, tackling one of the biggest challenges we know the industry is facing,” said Louise Boddy, head of strategy Sustainability at ICIS. “We bridge the gap between companies’ sustainability targets and actually finding supplies of recycled plastic on the ground in markets that remain fragmented and unfamiliar to many.”