Sustainability standards

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Sustainability standards (also known as "sustainability guidelines") are agreed criteria by which the production, transportation and processing of particular bioenergy sources can be assessed for environmental, social and other values.

  • Sustainability standards and certification schemes can help consumers and others judge whether given products are "environmentally friendly" and should be purchased. This type of incentive has been useful in promoting improved environmental and social-economic performance for example, in the production of paper and wood through the Forest Stewardship Council and other certification systems.
  • The establishment of a Carbon Stewardship Council has been proposed. A credible and comprehensive system of sustainability standards for bioenergy is likely to be useful in promoting "environmentally friendly" biofuels and bioenergy, while discouraging the production of bioenergy that harms the environment and local communities.
Rapeseed flowers. Rapeseed is a popular feedstock for biodiesel grown in Europe.

Contents

International initiatives

Panel of experts debates the sustainability of bioenergy at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., 12 January 2010.

Global Bioenergy Partnership

  • GBEP provides a forum to, among others, suggest rules and tools to promote sustainable biomass and bioenergy development.

Inter-American Development Bank

IEA Task Force 40: FAIRBiotrade

  • One of the task forces of the International Energy Agency Bioenergy Implementing Agreement.
  • Task 40 - Sustainable International Bioenergy Trade: Securing Supply and Demand - is working to develop standards and to evaluate the impact of standards on markets and trade.

Responsible Commodities Initiative

Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels

  • A multi-stakeholder process sponsored by the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland

Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil

  • Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil - "RSPO is an association created by organisations carrying out their activities in and around the entire supply chain for palm oil to promote the growth and use of sustainable palm oil through co-operation within the supply chain and open dialogue with its stakeholders."[1]

Roundtable on Sustainable Soy

  • Better Sugarcane Initiative (BSI) - BSI "is a collaboration of progressive sugarcane retailers, investors, traders, producers and NGOs who are committed to developing internationally-applicable measures and baselines that define sustainable sugar cane. BSI is an international initiative with the Steering Committee based around the world."[2]

Sustainable Agriculture Network

  • A coalition of environmental groups, of which the Rainforest Alliance serves as the Secretariat. They certify farmers and farm products with the "Rainforest Alliance Certified seal of approval".

National and supranational initiatives

Belgium

Brazil

Social Fuel Stamp

  • To receive the stamp, producers must agree to:
    • "To purchase minimum percentages of raw materials from family farmers, 10% from regions North and Mid-West; 30% from the South and Southeast and 50% from the Northeast and the Semi-Arid Region; and
    • "To enter into contracts with family farmers establishing deadlines and conditions of delivery of the raw material and the respective prices, and to provide them with technical assistance."[3]
  • Small farmers to join Brazil sustainable cane move, 1 September 2008, by Reuters: "Dozens of small and medium-scale farmers in Brazil's Sao Paulo state will grow sugar cane certified as meeting strict social and environmental standards, the region's cane producers association said late on Thursday."
    • Sugarcane suppliers joining the program "must refuse the use of child or slave labor, limit their use of agrochemicals, and gather their cane with mechanical harvesters as opposed to cutting it manually. Manual cutting involves burning the plant's foliage, which pollutes the air."
    • "Production standards, which will come into force on August 30, were set by Organizacao Internacional Agropecuaria (OIA), a private company which provides inspection and certification services."[1]

European Union

Public Consultation on Biofuels. The European Commission is accepting comments on the following questions as they draft proposals for the 10% mandate for biofuels and the 20% mandate for renewable energy.

  1. How should a biofuel sustainability system be designed?
  2. How should overall effects on land use be monitored?
  3. How should the use of second-generation biofuels be encouraged?
  4. What further action is needed to make it possible to achieve a 10% biofuel share?

News related to EU standards:

  • Palm oil plantations could be classified as forests, 8 February 2010 by The Ecologist: "European Commission guidance would allow biofuels to be labelled as sustainable even if forests have been destroyed to make way for the palm oil plantations."
    • "According to a leaked document from the European Commission, reclassifying palm plantations as forested land could be justified and allow it to meet sustainability criteria."
    • According to the document, this would mean "'for example, that a change from forest to oil palm plantation would not per se constitute a breach of the criterion.'"
    • "Friends of the Earth said the plans, if accepted, would allow rainforest to be destroyed to make way for palm plantations and the resulting biofuel to still be classified as sustainable."
    • "The EU is due to publish a report on greenhouse gas emissions from biofuel production in March 2010."[2]
  • Biofuel producers warn EU over "unjustifiably complex" sustainability rules, 7 November 2008 by BusinessGreen: "Eight developing countries have written to the EU warning they will complain to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) if it passes proposed legislation designed to improve the environmental sustainability of biofuels by restricting the types of fuels the bloc imports."
    • "The EU is considering legislation that is intended to ban the purchase of biofuels from energy crop plantations that are believed to harm the environment and lead to food shortages by displacing land used for food crops and contributing to rainforest deforestation."
    • "[E]ight countries – Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Malawi, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Indonesia and Malaysia – have written to the EU to protest against the proposals" in a letter that "claims that the new rules would 'impose unjustifiably complex requirements on producers' and argues that environmental criteria 'relating to land-use change will impinge disproportionately on developing countries'."[3]

Germany

  • International Sustainability & Carbon Certification (ISCC) is a multi-stakeholder process to develop an implementable certification scheme for sustainable biomass and bioenergy production and to test these in a process-oriented pilot phase. The ISCC is an initiative of the German Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection through its Agency for Renewable Resources (Fachagentur Nachwachsende Rohstoffe – FNR). The ISCC is managed by Meó Corporate Development GmbH and involves stakeholders from market participants along the value chain, and NGOs and research institutes from different countries in Europe, the Americas, and South East Asia who discuss and develop sustainability criteria, standards, rules and procedures for the certification of biomass and its uses. Once the pilot phase is finished, it is planned that ISCC will become an international and independent organization that will be responsible for the certification of sustainable bioenergy and assessment of greenhouse gas balances for biofuels.

Netherlands

GAVE

  • GAVE stands for Climate Neutral Gaseous and Liquid Energy Carriers.
  • GAVE website

United Kingdom

Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO)

  • Starting in 2008 the RTFO will "place an obligation on fuel suppliers to ensure that a certain percentage of their aggregate sales is made up of biofuels. The effect of this will be to require 5% of all UK fuel sold on UK forecourts to come from a renewable source by 2010."[4]
  • Biofuel producers will have to report on the green-house gas balance, and environmental impact of their biofuels.

Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership (LowCVP)

  • "The LowCVP is a partnership of nearly 250 organisations from the automotive and fuel industries, the environmental sector, government, academia, road user groups and other organisations with a stake in the low carbon vehicles and fuels agenda."
  • LowCVP has done important work in developing a life-cycle analysis tool for green-house gas emissions. This will allow for a real evaluation of the comparative emission benefits or costs of various biofuels.

Related sustainability standards initiatives

Certification systems and organizations

Many organizations certify a range of products based on sustainability standards relevant to bioenergy.

  • Marine Aquarium Council (MAC) "MAC Certification covers both products and practices, in other words, both the aquarium organisms and the industry operators involved in supplying those organisms." [10]
  • Ethanol and Sugar Impact Analysis (ESIA) ESIA Consulting "promotes more effective corporate social responsibility by using tools specifically designed for the sugar and ethanol sectors and the challenges presented to these by globalization." [12]

Other relevant organizations and initiatives

  • Biomass Mark
    • "The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries in Japan has advanced the promotion and use of biomass based on the “Biomass Nippon Strategy” which the Cabinet Council agreed to in December, 2002 and this strategy has triggered a Biomass Mark Program inauguration."
    • "The Biomass Mark is designed to be put on commodities which are produced using biomass totally or partly and is aimed to promote consumers’ use of biomass by their seeing this mark and recognizing that it is a biomass utilized commodity."
    • The Biomass Mark is a registered trademark of Japan Organic Resources Association, an affiliated organization of Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

Publications

See books, reports, scientific papers, position papers and websites for additional useful resources.

  • 2008 White Paper on Internationally Compatible Biofuels Standards Requested by the governments of the United States and Brazil and the EU. Produced by a joint task force after a six-month review process that considered thousands of pages of technical documents produced by ASTM International, the Brazilian Technical Standards Association (Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas or ABNT) and the European Committee for Standardization (CEN). Standards developed by these three SDOs are currently being used in support of biofuels commodities trading between nations.
  • Sustainability Criteria and Certification Systems for Biomass Production by Biomass Technology Group, prepared for DG TREN European Commission, February 2008. The objective of this report is to provide a basis upon which the European Commission could decide which actions to undertake in terms of proposing minimum sustainability criteria and certification systems for the production of biomass in the EU and for imported biomass.
  • LASEN's Review of Biofuels sustainability initiatives (Final draft) (LASEN, EPFL) by Dr. Edgard Gnansounou, Luis Panichelli and Juan David Villegas. The goal of this document is to describe and compare different initiatives on biofuels sustainability standards, in the intention of offering a useful tool for policy makers and different stakeholders already involved or wishing to be involved in liquid biofuels consumption and production. October 2007

News

2010

'Just four per cent of biofuels imported from abroad are sustainably produced - the vast majority are causing deforestation and land use changes that are increasing climate changing emissions and pushing people off their land.
'Biofuels are not the answer to our energy woes - the UK should scrap its targets and must focus our attention on developing greener transport alternatives to cars, such as fast and affordable rail services and cycling and walking.'"[13]

2009

  • Unilever starts tea origin certification program in Brazil, 01 October 2009 by FoodBizDaily: "World demand for tea is growing at a faster pace than its supply this year. But consumers, particularly in Europe, United States and Japan want to make sure that by drinking their cup of tea they are not helping to destroy the environment or encouraging the use of slave labor. This situation has led Unilever, world’s largest tea company, to certify the origin and production of its tea in countries such as Kenya and Argentina. It is a process that begins to be deployed in Brazil."
    • "Teramoto states that if Brazilian producers adopt Imaflora recommendations - a package that even includes the commitment to preserve an area of the original forest - certifications may be granted in the first quarter of 2010. With the Sustainable Agriculture Certification seal in hand, producers, which export 90% to the United States, Canada, England and Chile, may charge a higher price of Unilever, which accounts for 80% of Brazilian black tea exports."
  • Environmental Groups Spar Over Certifications of Wood and Paper Products , 12 September 2009 by New York Times: "For more than a decade, the nonprofit Forest Stewardship Council generally has been viewed as the premier judge of whether a wood or paper product should be labeled as environmentally friendly."
    • "But to the dismay of major environmental groups, that label, known as F.S.C., is facing a stiff challenge from a rival certification system supported by the paper and timber industry. At stake is the trust of consumers in the ever-expanding market for 'green' products."
    • "This week lawyers for ForestEthics, a nonprofit group dedicated to protecting forests, filed administrative complaints with the Federal Trade Commission and the Internal Revenue Service challenging the credibility of the rival label, known as the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, or S.F.I."
    • "The complaints, which challenge S.F.I.’s nonprofit status, accuse the certification program of lax standards and deceptive marketing intended to obscure the standards and the S.F.I.’s financial ties to the forest industry."[15]
  • Roundtable seeks international sustainability input, 13 January 2009 by Biodiesel Magazine. The Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels will be holding RSB outreach in the Americas meetings in order to gain input on last fall's Version Zero of the RSB’s principles and criteria for sustainability.
    • "The first meeting in the Southeast is scheduled for Jan. 28, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., at Southern Growth Policies Board in Durham, N.C.; a second meeting will follow the National Biodiesel Conference on Feb. 4 at the Moscone West Convention Center in San Francisco. A meeting in Iowa is being planned for the first week of March and one in Washington, D.C., is being planned for later in March, according to the RSB Americas Coordinator Matt Rudolf."
    • "The RSB is proposing a voluntary system to certify sustainable biofuel production. An implementation working group has already begun working on certification plans for the standards, which are expected to be adopted in June." [17]

2008

  • Human rights, rare species on EU biofuels agenda, 1 July 2008 in The Guardian.
    • "The European Union is near to agreeing standards for biofuels that put human rights and endangered species high on the agenda"
    • "Biofuels that do not meet the EU's strict new standards will not be banned, but member states will not be able to count them towards their renewable fuels targets."
    • "But several key areas are still being debated, such as the level of greenhouse gas savings a biofuel would have to achieve as well as how to calculate the performance of different crops and different methods for converting them to biofuels."

References

  1. ↑ http://www.rspo.org/Our_Aspirations.aspx
  2. ↑ http://www.bettersugarcane.org
  3. ↑ National Program on Biodiesel Production and Use Pamphlet (English)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roads/environment/rtfo/


Sustainability standards edit
Organizations/Initiatives: Better Sugarcane Initiative | Forest Stewardship Council | Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels | Responsible Commodities Initiative | EU: GAVE | LowCVP

Policy proposals: Green Biofuels Index
Key terms: Ecological Footprint | Life-cycle analysis | Eco-labelling

v • d • e
Standards related to bioenergy
Sustainability edit
Sustainability standards | Sustainability initiatives (Better Sugarcane Initiative, Forest Stewardship Council, Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels, Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil)


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