Very interesting post - 3 challenges of Cleantech

According to Deborah Fleischer, one of the coaches at Cleantechopen semifinalists, here 3 challenges of Cleantech

1. Lifecycle assessment (LCA): LCA is an approach that considers the cradle-to-grave lifecycle chain involved in producing, using and disposing of a product or service. It forces you to consider materials use, energy consumption and related greenhouse-gas emissions of your product, packaging and transportation decisions.

While larger corporations might have the resources to tackle LCA head on, across the board, the start-ups were struggling with easily accessing good data to help them estimate the key impacts associated with their entire value chain.

As a post on SustainableMinds says, “Paper or plastic? Diesel or hybrid? Extrude or blow-mold? Some of the most difficult problems in designing sustainable products involve making the right choices in materials, processes and transportation methods. However, choosing the options that will actually have a lower environmental impact is much more complex that one would think.”

A few LCA resources for start-ups to consider include Sustainable Minds, Earthster and EIO-LCA.

In a recent post, Joel Makower had this to say about Earthster, “…an open-source consortium that is inviting professionals to upload LCA data and methodologies in order to simplify and “democratize” LCA, while improving the quality by pooling nonproprietary information about products and processes. Earthster is garnering buzz within the LCA crowd as a potential game-changing technology.”

My advice–be strategic and focus on the largest pieces of your footprint. Avoid petroleum-based products. Think about the end of life and how the product can be recycled or reused. And don’t forget to consider packaging and transportation choices.

2. Packaging: Many of these clean tech products require packaging and pushing for recycled content and avoiding plastic is a challenge for a CEO with twenty other competing priorities. I argue that companies can maximize market share by making a commitment to greener packaging. Key customers and stakeholders are making demands for sustainable packaging.

The Sustainable Packaging Coalition is a great resource on this issue.

They define sustainable packaging as:

1. Beneficial, safe & healthy for individuals and communities throughout its life cycle;
2. Meeting market criteria for performance and cost;
3. Sourced, manufactured, transported, and recycled using renewable energy;
4. Maximizing the use of renewable or recycled source materials;
5. Manufactured using clean production technologies and best practices;
6. Made from materials healthy in all probable end of life scenarios;
7. Physically designed to optimize materials and energy;
8. Effectively recovered and utilized in biological and/or industrial cradle to cradle cycles.

The Coalition’s new tool, COMPASS , is a free resource to help companies assess their packaging choices.

However, again, I would stress simplicity. Avoid petroleum-based plastics and consider bio-based plastic. Maximize the use of post-consumer recycled content. And reduce the size of your packaging to the maximum extent possible.

3. End of life: Thinking about what happens to these new “clean” products at end of life is challenging. How do you create incentives to get consumers to recycle or return a product? One of the start-ups was considering a rebate program and another planning on using a mailer to make it easy to return the product at the end of its life.

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This seems more in line with making green products. I would add that cleantech is especially challenging if you agree to all these 3 challenges, and at the same time attempt to be cost competitive with existing offerings. To me, cleantech companies should have the mentality that customers are not willing to pay more for the existing offering, eg. more cents per kWh of electricity.

On another post, a very interesting comment by a VC says that cleantech companies seems to make losses first and profits later, which is the opposite of internet companies, which made big winners for VCs but loses later. That's a very interesting comment of looking at cleantech and the challenge is probably looking for the particular approach in cleantech that can be the next wave of disruptive changes.



This seems to go hand-in-hand with what a VC compared cleantech and internet companies with