Commentary : The Environmental Impact of Pre-Ride Food Choice and Driving to a Bike Ride

This is an Earth Day special commentary that I wrote on my Facebook page. The post was inspired by a similar opinion post along the same lines written by Thorpe & Keith from the Keith Group. They provide a host of reasonable references from where the numbers were picked.

The environmental impact of "getting to a ride" by car is analyzed below. What is also interesting to think about is the environmental burden due to choice of diet, which makes big marginal differences depending on what you put in your mouth.

Attached below are some graphs from a simple estimation of CO2equivalent emissions for a cyclist commuting for a typical 100km weekend ride. 

In one set of graphs, the cyclist is assumed to have eaten a 'typical American' diet and vehicle emissions were derived from test data for assumed 90kph driving speed. 

In scenario 1, driving distance = 20km in a conventional 4 door automatic petrol engined 2L Honda Civic. 

In scenario 2, driving distance = 20km in an automatic petrol engined 3.6L Porsche Panamera 4 PDK (Euro 5). 

In scenario 3, I look purely at impact of driving a fuel efficient, ULS diesel powered 2L Skoda Octavia Hatchback (Euro 5) as support vehicle for the cyclist (commute to ride is neglected). However, due to support function, the Skoda will be driven the 100km at a slow speed matching the cyclist (let's say 30-33 kph). Only the diet for the cyclist is taken into account, while that of the driver's is neglected.

Please note that life cycle environental impact of production of the vehicles, the bicycles and the construction of a public road system that the cyclist and driver utilize are neglected in the analysis.

The comparison is interesting if you account for the slow speed fuel efficiency degradation of any conventional vehicle. If you assume a 15% fuel efficiency derate due to low speed vehicular losses in the Skoda, then on a per km basis, I believe it makes little difference to be driving a Civic fast to the ride or a Skoda slow as a support car - they are more or less equally polluting regardless of what the sticker fuel efficiency is.  Meanwhile, it is approx 30% more polluting to carry bikes on a Porche when driven at similar highway speeds as a Civic, no surprise there.

The takeway? Reduce driving, carpool if possible and keep the luxury car at home. When driving, drive at the sweet spot fuel consumption speed. In urban environments, it helps to live close to a cycle track.

And finally, reduce or eliminate the use of conventional fuel support cars on long rides as pollution is spread over a larger area. If that's not possible, choose lighter cars with smaller displacement engines and reduce the number of start-stops. Start-stops cause relatively more pollution than constant speed driving regime due to the repeated accelerations and decelerations the vehicle must go through.

What is also interesting is to look at the effect of the cyclist's diet for this ride. In the first set of graphs above, I have assumed the cyclist to eat a typical diet with a life cycle burden of 2.6 gCO2eq/kcal. The carbon intensity of that ride on that diet is an average of 30-40 times less than driving the respective cars on a per km basis. 

However, if the same cyclist chose to eat a high protein meat rich Paleo diet with a pollution burden of 5.4g CO2eq/kcal, the difference is halved. For example, in the case of driving the Civic to the Paleo fueled ride, driving is only 15 times more polluting than cycling relative to a normal diet. Stunning if you think about it.

What I'm pointing to (as others have pointed out) is that on a gram of CO2eq per km basis, the high meat rich diet can be worser off than the transportation fuel in terms of the embedded carbon intensity (what goes into the production of the fuels). The reason can be attributed to the carbon intensive nature of raising cattle to produce beef. 

So the takeaway from this second analysis is that when possible, substitute lesser energy intensive forms of protein in your diet for fueling the ride. And while it, keep the beef away from the support car driver!


Post script : 

Just because cyclists reduce or avoid consuming a meat rich diet does not necessarily mean that the product will not be produced. Supermarkets will still carry the meat and someone else will buy and consume it. So on a global level, perhaps we'll see the same environmental burden of meat consumption.

However, if you account for the fact that products are sold because of relative consumer demand, if one segment of the market shifts outlook and reduces meat consumption, we can assume that somewhere else in the chain, production maybe cut. I'm not sure if its as simple an analysis as that and what timescales it takes to shift mindset overall. Something to think about though.

This Changes Everything : A Book Review

This forms a book review titled "Ahead of her time! Klein maybe the Rachel Carson of the 21st century" that I wrote earlier today on Amazon.com. 

Naomi Klein is an award winning Canadian journalist responsible for two other international best sellers, The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, both of which I haven't read. This book, "This Changes Everything : Capitalism vs The Climate Change", becomes her 4th book. Based on reading an original Penguin soft-copy from start to end, my take is as follows :

The crux of the book is simple and complex at the same time. Klein says that most of humanity go on enjoying the benefits of a post-modern, self-gratifying capitalistic life, expecting increasingly greater resource usage but from a finite planet. In doing so, we collectively exhibit a form of cognitive dissonance by not treating climate change as the quintessential crisis it can become. It repeatedly knocks on our door when scientists tell us we got to be doing more to stay within a +2 degree C limit in a warming world, but we conveniently sweep it under our carpets of ignorance. After-all, it's easier to do nothing at all.

Why is that the case? Klein highlights the complexity of inaction , in that it lies in the apparent in-scalability of going against the status quo, the prevailing culture of "tap, exploit and waste" that we are all born into and what we come to pass on to our kids. This is a product of the widespread economic model that powerful elite organizations who own the means of production, who lobby politicians and who pay our own wages directly or indirectly have managed to disseminate. Without significantly changing how this model operates, not much can be done to fight the impending climate crisis.

Rather than being a self-righteous, gloating environmentalist, Klein claims that she was among this crowd of climate deniers roughly until the point when a conversation with Navarro Llanos, the Bolivian ambassador to the World Trade Organization, brought her to the realization of the overwhelming crisis level of the problem as well as the numerous grassroots-level opportunities that lay ahead to bring changes. However, the changes would have to be uncompromising, they would challenge everything we know about our current economic and capitalistic models. Therefore, it would have to change everything we take for granted. Therein lies the background to the book's title.

I'd like to mention at this juncture that there appears to be two underlying emotional themes that made the issue more personal to Klein, and she admits it has been a difficult experience. One was during the reading of a bed-time story to her two-year-old called Looking for a Moose. This event produced an epiphany that her baby boy might never get to see a Moose, thanks to cases she'd heard during visits to Northern Alberta that moose drinking water laced with toxins from the tar sands oil extraction process were showing mutations from within.

The second motivator for her was the deep connection to the ecological crisis that she drew from her experience going through two miscarriages and being suggested by friends and colleagues to explore high risk, unnatural interventions. To her, the climate change response is no different - proposed solutions that are increasingly high risk with unproven technological answers. A famous example (which is cited in the book) becomes the Geo-engineering circle of scientists who claim they can cool the planet by artificially pumping massive amounts of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to mimic volcanic explosions. 

Perhaps more poignantly powerful is her suggestion to look to the earth as our own mother, with her own fertility challenges that are a consequence of our extractivism and our life choices. It interferes with her fertility cycles and her need to regenerate. Putting the earth in compromise draws full circle, until our own existence is compromised.

Between these beginning and concluding emotional chapters, an emboldened Klein beats up several actors of the climate change story with dizzying array of facts and case studies, most of which seem to have been referenced and cataloged at the end of the book. 

For example, she highlights the problem of climate denial, battling world-views and need for ideological shifts in consumerism, the bizarre problems with our current world trade treaties, how toxic extractivist relationships lead to the degeneration and downfall of communities, how to read beneath pulpit messages of businessmen who appear to be messiahs at first, the seemingly illogical solutions proposed by certain segments of climate scientists, the death and destruction laid behind by the Shells and BP's of the world and so on. 

Klein doesn't end without two or three cautionary tales of non-violent community uprisings (called Blockadia) to the ecological crisis and highlights the continuing need for government to support indigenous populations, who unfortunately being poor and powerless, become the prime victims of climate change.

As an engineer, what I admire about this book is Klein's ability to repeatedly portray the earth as a complex system, where a small but artificially induced change somewhere in the system may mean unforeseen chain reactions with the potential to cause chaos somewhere else. Man appears woefully short of tools to predict the full consequence of his actions with any high degree of accuracy, yet we somehow never seem short of solutions that have never been tried before on massive scales.

I also admire is the lengths to which Klein goes to remind us that change is possible and perhaps the issue of climate change is our best and last shot to re-invent ourselves. For this, she draws on the past - the times of the great Depression, or the civil war, where it so happened that when we collectively as a population got together and understood and recognized there was a crisis, we moved to change it through mass movements and periods of struggle. History, as shown through these movements, would never be the same again.

This Changes Everything is a tireless work of 5 years, bringing to mind a resounding "Rachel Carson" type call to arms. Klein is refreshing and uncompromising at the same time, never sugar coating the roots of this problem with anything more than much needed criticism. In doing so, she has been meticulous to document the sources of her information for those wishing to explore further.

The reason I give 4 stars is not because of the quality of the message, it is in how the message was delivered. It is bit unfortunate that the two emotional themes that Klein highlights as her writing motivation are in two different ends of the book, which may cause several readers to miss if they hadn't read it end to end. Therefore, some readers maybe forgiven for misunderstanding what really pulls Klein so strongly into this subject.

Secondly, in trying to appeal to a wider audience, Klein may want to look into releasing a condensed version of the book. Currently at 450 pages, it becomes a tough read for most unless there was a significant motivator to push through. Its not easy to read at times and there is significant potential to improve.

I'd like to end by saying that I have some strong opinions on this subject, both for and against the current practices in the oil/gas industry. I'd like to analyze if many of the things that Klein proposes in her book can become reality for the industry. This will become the topic for a later post, I promise. Thanks.

U.A.E Fuel Deregulation and Some Implications

July 28 Update : U.A.E Fuel prices committee has released revised fuel prices for August 2015.

In what's most likely a watershed moment in the U.A.E economy, from August 2015 petrol prices will no longer stay regulated at $0.47/liter as has been the case for many years. Diesel prices will decrease. The decision is, as I see it, in line with several precursors steering the U.A.E towards a realistic existence amidst our 21st century issues. Let's take a look at some of these.

The U.A.E government's strategy for a "Green Economy", a vision launched in 2012, aims for a reduction in domestic consumption of oil by 7-10%, natural gas by 7-20% and electricity by 11-15% year on year through to 2030. An 18.4% CO2 emissions contribution from the transportation sector (2011 World Bank data) doesn't appear to support that vision.

The Dubai Strategic Plan 2015 had the Road and Transportation Authority (RTA) setting a target of 30% of the population using public transport in 2020, compared with 12% in 2010 (UAE State of Green Economy Report, 2014).

To cope with the ever-rising traffic volume and road congestion in Dubai, the Salik toll collection system was rolled out in 2007. In October 2013, car-pooling was legalized.

Lots of money was pumped into the vitalizing a metro and the tram system. Biodiesel was investigated for the public buses. In Abu Dhabi, a park and ride system was started whereby someone from the outskirts could park their car and take a shuttle into the interior of the city for free.

Charging stations were introduced in a move to build an infrastructure for electric vehicles.

A Dubai Bicycle Plan aims at providing 850km of bikeways in strategically located areas and other cycle tracks have already been developed for the sports minded.

The U.A.E GDP grew 27 times since the 1975, largely supported by oil and gas revenues. In a double whammy, $50/barrel oil price not only squeezes that share but also discourages the proliferation of renewable energy technologies. It gives an opportunity for everyone to sit up and take notice of the gorilla in the room - regulated pump prices. If you ask me, this has been long overdue.

What might some of the implications be from new fuel prices to be announced soon?

1) Firstly, people taking long trips are going to obviously going to think twice. Let us suppose gas price in U.A.E increases to $1/liter, a 113% increase. Driving a car with an average fuel efficiency of 25 mpg (9.4 L/100km, a figure representative of my 2 year old Mitsubishi), a round trip to :

a) Sharjah (22.08km away) and back would cost 4.2L of petrol and 4.2 x $1 = $4.2 = 15.79 AED versus 7.52 AED with current price of $0.47/L.

 

b) Abu Dhabi (152.4km away) and back would cost 28.66L of petrol and 28.66 x $1 = $28.66 = 107.76 AED versus 51.74 AED with current price of $0.47/L.

In both these cases, one can expect roughly the same % increase in travel costs as the 113% increase in fuel costs.

2) I see more people investing in GPS units (best "Ecoroute", that kind of thing) and utilizing smart driving services like apps, which give real time traffic information. Trip planning could take more prominence.

3) I hope this sets in motion a massive awareness for fuel efficient vehicles. It makes promise for vehicles such as the Toyota Prius, Nissan Leaf or the Tesla BEV's. It also makes promise for diesel cars. While their first costs might be a bit on the high side, the lifecycle operation costs of using a higher energy density fuel will be low.  I'd like to see these vehicles in U.A.E showrooms ASAP. A hybrid or a diesel should be choices that people can make without having to resort to importing. I'm a bit upset there has been a vacuum in the UAE so far for these models.

4) I hope it allows people to think about methods to economic driving as well.  Less displacement is really better. Turbos are not just for sportscars. Driving slower is good for your pocket. Lower engine RPM's are good. This has the benefit of reducing speeds on Dubai roads as well. And does a family of 2 really need a towering 4x4? An Aston Martin to go to Carrefour? How about a Toyota or a Kia for that purpose? Retailers and showrooms have got some work to do to in educating the masses about these things.

5) I suspect the fuel price hike will change the trend for people to clog up toll-free roads. The difference between money saved by avoidance relative to the extra fuel needed to go the longer toll-free distance will most likely vanish.

6) Bicycle commuting lanes on the roads? Anyone? I'd champion this any day. We'll have to wait and see if the RTA plans on introducing dedicated lanes on the roads so that those who don't wish to drive or take the public transpo have an option. While it's easy to say this, I imagine a single bicycle track, an artery, running from the innards of Deira all the way to Jebal Ali along the Sh. Zayed Road would be just awesome. It could have multiple take off points so people could divert to key locations along the way. I don't see this happening any time soon but I eagerly await a more comprehensive picture of the Dubai Canal works to see what we can expect come 2017-2018.

7) Status boosting is the itch to buy a gas guzzling V8 and a 4 digit number plate to go along so you look good at the water cooler in the office. Well, I for one do hope the fuel degregulation makes a strong attempt to demolish this trend because it borders on discourteousness to the rest of the economizing society.

8) What I would also like to see is a massive turnaround in the trucking fleet in the U.A.E. This is one of the other low hanging fuits for improvement in terms of fuel efficiency and emissions. To see clean stuff coming out of the tailpipe from a rickety Volvo or a people carrier is, I suspect, what many people would also like to see while driving on Sh. Zayed Road. It's about time people in the trucking fleet community started talking about EGR, SCR systems, clean combustion diesel, things of that nature. Educate the drivers as well, especially about proper tire pressures! Why? Because it eats into fuel efficiency!

I'd like to conclude that if you're one among the bunch looking for a vehicle in 2015/16, knock yourself out and go through this handy EPA dataset of vehicles listed according to fuel economy. While I hope there's a datasheet more representative of vehicles in the U.A.E, it should at the minimum give someone a clue about what is the state of the art in fuel economy numbers these days. Thanks.

Exploration in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) : Part 1 Goal and Scope Definitions

Contained here are a series of my technical notes into the study and application of ISO 14040-14043 series of standards. These standards cover the environmental management of engineered products over their entire life cycle.

This "life cycle" as defined by ISO extends from raw material extraction and acquisition, through energy and material production and manufacturing, to use and end of life treatment and final disposal.

Its appropriate to start with Goal and Scope definition and it is nice to have a product entity for study. Let me first consider the product system "150g strawberry yogurt in a polypropylene (PP) cup with an aluminum cover", the first example suggested for review in the new book Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) by Walter Klopffer and Birgit Grahl.

ISO 14040:2006 section 5 gives the methodological framework for applying LCA. Applying sub-sections 5.2.1.1 & 5.2.1.2 to goal and scope definition, they are compiled below.

CHOSEN PRODUCT SYSTEM : 

150 g strawberry yogurt in a polypropylene (PP) cup with an aluminum cover.

GOALS :

The intended application is that of a PP cup to store strawberry yogurt and hermetically seal it with a tear-off aluminum lidding. This is not a comparative study of two systems.

The reason for carrying out the study is only for information sharing and the intended audience are engineers and students of the LCA methodology. Using derivable facts for decision making and competitive assertions are beyond scope.

As far as possible, data for the study will be obtained from the internet.

I encourage readers to dispute the methods used or offer additional advice on improvements.

SCOPE :

Identification of Functions :

The service delivered by the product system can be divided into primary and secondary functions.

Selection of Functions and Definition of Functional unit :

Within the scope of the study, functions above that are more relevant to the study must be identified according to Section 5.2.2.

The product system originally specified by Klopffer and Grahl is interpreted as pointing to a generic PP cup containing 150 g strawberry yogurt with the intent of storing and sealing.

We will assume that this product is intended to be made for distribution and so considered within the study scope is the labeling and printing of dates.

ISO defines a functional unit as the quantification of the relevant functions of the product in order to assign a reference to the inputs and outputs of the product system. For a start, we know that 150 g of strawberry yogurt is the unit to be stored.

But does assigning time to the functional unit matter?

Fruit yogurt would last 7-10 days past its sell date in a refrigerator and 1-2 months past its sell date when stored in a freezer. So for assigning a time to the PP container, what time is to be considered? This is a case for further discussion but for this post, I take 2 weeks of yogurt life past its sell date.

A note here is that it is not the product but the product system that is under consideration. So it is not necessarily the yogurt that has the maximum time.

Depending on the health and life of the cow and the constituents of the plastic cup, either the cow or the plastic may outlive each other to put the most environmental burden. For example, if the plastic cup is made of part recycled material that could break down sooner than conventional cups, perhaps the cow whose lifetime is 15 years would govern the LCA study as far as time goes. This given the idea that the time line that is important is the time necessary to remove the waste from the environment.

This is a significant factor and will be revisited in later parts of this post.

Identification of performance of the product and determination of the reference flow :

The quantity of product necessary to fulfil the defined functional unit constitutes its performance. The questions here is whether to define the reference flow to fulfil the "product system" or the product. The intent of defining the reference flow below is the quantity of product needed to hold 150g of strawberry yogurt.

With a small amount of research, I found that a standard cup of 150mL capacity with a heat sealable aluminum lid will do the trick.

Qualitative System Flowchart & System Boundary:

Below is what I consider to be a system flowchart (or product system tree) and system boundary for the yogurt product system. All man made products, systems and processes relevant to the product system are bounded by a dotted line, the region considered as the "Technosphere".

The product tree starts on the extreme left by considering all processes necessary to get raw materials used. This includes the polypropylene granules, the starter yogurt, the aluminum for the lidding, the strawberries.

As you move towards the right, you see process boxes for the production of the cups, the lidding and the strawberry yogurt. Distribution of the final product is followed by use, disposal and (perhaps) incineration or a trip to the landfill, or a reclamation process that puts back recycled raw material into the raw material box.
This is closed loop recycling. Any recycled product that is an input to external products flows out of the technosphere.

Cut-off Criteria:

For simplicity, the recommendations of Klopffer and Grahl will be followed by using the 1%-5% cut-off criteria. This means that any inputs to individual process boxes that constitute less than 1% by mass fraction can be safely ignored provided that the sum of the ignored inputs do not add up to more than 5% of the total mass of the output.

I would also like to add that for simplicity, the inputs to secure, maintain or repair capital goods used in the production processes, for example the injection molding machine , are not considered.

Geographical and Temporal System Boundaries:

It is assumed that all processes are within the boundaries of the United States of America. In analyzing the system, we'd also like to bound input data to a temporal boundary greater than year 2000. It hardly makes sense to consider outdated data for analysis when process technologies, energy efficiencies etc change year by year.

This concludes the goal and scope definition of the product system "150 g strawberry yogurt in a polypropylene (PP) cup with an aluminum cover".  It is not my intention to have neglected factoring in any important element to the scope but you are free to give your inputs and critique of the process thus far.

In part 2 of this series, I'll investigate the next phase of the ISO LCA methodology, which is Life Cycle Inventory.

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