The True Cost of Our Daily Bread

Here's a competition you can really sink your teeth into.

Sustainable Ventures is offering a $10,000 prize for a study on "Our Daily Bread, What Does It REALLY Cost?" The competition aims to encourage the development of integrated social, environmental, and financial metrics.

Sustainable Ventures is a nonprofit dedicated to inspiring and educating "beneficial owners" -- those lucky souls with pension and trust funds invested in their names -- to take an active role in the management of their investments. It develops curricula to inspire these individuals to influence their fund managers to achieve integrated performance -- social, environmental and financial -- rather than financial performance alone.

The winning study of the "Daily Bread" competition must provide an analytical framework of "integrated performance metrics" -- the social, environmental, and financial costs associated with a loaf of bread. (Why bread? "Because many people eat some form of grain-based staple on a daily basis," says the group.)

The first phase of the effort invites individuals and teams of researchers to identify the integrated metrics for bread. The second phase will be to disseminate these metrics to the marketplace "so people can make more informed choices about the products they buy and the services they use."

"These metrics will underlie the evaluation of integrated business performance and create the tools to encourage people to make choices that protect and restore our world," say the organizers.

There are two dates that qualified individual candidates or teams of researchers can submit papers for prize consideration:

Individuals or teams who deliver the first drafts of research papers by April 26th will be considered for attendance at the June 5th Candidate's Forum at Tufts University in the Boston area. Sustainable Ventures will sponsor one team leader or individual participant for each paper.

Candidates who produce final papers by August 23rd may be considered for the $10,000 prize to be awarded in the fall of 2006.

Throughout the award process, a Candidate Online Forum is available to encourage participants to work in teams, add materials for discussion and initiate and participate in new discussion topics.

Sounds like a worthy exercise, any way you slice it.

Comments

[Matteo Civiero]

Hi Rob
I'm an italian researcher and I'm in Berkeley for six months as visiting scholar. I'm working on sustainable development through clean technologies in a cluster environment. That's why I like your blog very much, and I'm very interesting in knowing what's going on in the Silicon Valley in these fields. I discovered this site some days ago, but I hope to partecipate to discussions, also when I will be back in Italy.
I have been searching cleantech clusters informations since some weeks, and I would like to let you know my findings as soon as I can, if you want.
In Italy we are trying to stimulate the creation of a new cleantech cluster, specialized in green buildings, renewable energy and land management (do you say land management or environment management, referring to water cycle, forests, energy...?). I'm not sure I'm using correct terms to translate the sectors we are trying to develop. Would you tell me if are you familiar with these?
- green buildings (low energy consumption, low production, management, maintenance and final recovery costs);
- heat production and management technologies (higher outputs and ‘intelligent’ use of thermal energy – distribution networks and transformation systems of traditional combustibles, but also new technologies);
- ‘intelligent’ systems for the management of buildings and urban services (domotics, air conditioning and purification, monitoring and security);
- ‘intelligent’ systems for integrated land management (infrastructure, community services and urban functions – geomatics, mobility, planning, etc.);
- ‘intelligent’ systems for integrated management of the water cycle (utilisation technologies, control and enrichment of the flows for industrial, farm and civil uses);
- ‘intelligent’ systems for energy transfer and telecommunications (electrical networks, broad band etc.);
- technologies for the production of electrical and thermal energy from renewable sources (mini-hydro, micro-hydro, hydrogen, biomass, photovoltaic, wind, etc.).
I would apreciate your help a lot. Thanks for reading
Matteo