Month: June 2011

Giving credit for certified products

Read the full story in Sustainable Industries Journal.

A new credit in the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system could boost the use of third-party verified products in green building projects.

The Certified Products credit, which was released in June and is in its pilot stage, gives points to projects in which at least 10 percent of non-structural products have third-party verified environmental claims, are certified to third-party verified performance standards, or have a verified lifecycle assessment report or Environmental Product Declaration.

Community solar for folks without sunny roofs

Read the full story in Sustainable Industries Journal.

When Stanley Florek, an M.B.A. student at Bainbridge Graduate Institute, began considering new possibilities for solar-energy businesses a few years ago, he quickly made two discoveries. First, Pacific Northwesterners were surprisingly eager to put their money toward solar power. And second, few residents had both large, unshaded roofs and $20,000 or so available for a home rooftop array. (In Seattle, particularly, 50 percent of residents are renters.)

Florek researched community-scale solar projects that let neighbors add rooftop arrays all at once, saving through bulk purchases. But those didn’t help renters or others without a suitable roof.

What if neighbors, instead, could pool their money and invest in a collaborative project on the roof of a community center or government building? And what if they could gain an ownership stake while doing so?

He settled on the metaphor of a tangerine, divisible into “SunSlices” that would let residents pay $1,000 for an ownership stake in a larger project, earning a return of $100 a year until the investment was paid off. After that, the community could decide what to do with the project.

He launched Tangerine Power (originally Tangerine Solar) on that concept two years ago. Now, with its first project underway in the Seattle suburb of Edmonds, he’s hopeful he’s got a scalable new model for distributed solar.

A new alloy could be a source of green energy

Read the full story at Smart Planet.

About sixty percent of energy produced is wasted as heat. When you rev up your car engine, the heat is emitted into the atmosphere and lost forever. Researchers at University of Minnesota demonstrated in their lab that an alloy can convert heat directly into electricity. If commercialized, it could use waste heat from a car’s exhaust to charge a hybrid car’s battery, scientists say.

Sweet Tooth Pouch

Punkin Patterns posts instructions for making a pouch from used candy wrappers/bags.

The role of Life Cycle Assessment in identifying and reducing environmental impacts of CCS

Download the document.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) should be used to assist carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) planners to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and avoid unintended environmental trade-offs. LCA is an analytical framework for determining environmental impacts resulting from processes, products, and services. All life cycle stages are evaluated including raw material sourcing, processing, operation, maintenance, and component end-of-life, as well as intermediate stages such as transportation. In recent years a growing number of LCA studies have analyzed CCS systems. We reviewed 50+ LCA studies, and selected 11 studies that compared the environmental performance of 23 electric power plants with and without CCS. Here we summarize and interpret the findings of these studies. Regarding overall climatemitigation effectiveness of CCS, we distinguish between the capture percentage of carbon in the fuels, the net carbon dioxide (CO2) emission reduction, and the net GHG emission reduction. We also identify trade-offs between the climate benefits and the potential increased non-climate impacts of CCS. Emissions of non-CO2 flue gases such as NOx may increase due to the greater throughput of fuel, and toxicity issues may arise due to the use of monoethanolamine (MEA) capture solvent, resulting in ecological and human health impacts. We discuss areas where improvements in LCA data or methods are needed. The decision to implement CCS should be based on knowledge of the overall environmental impacts of the technologies, not just their carbon capture effectiveness. LCA will be an important tool in providing that knowledge.

Americans’ Actions to Conserve Energy, Reduce Waste, and Limit Global Warming in May 2011

Download the publication.

Highlights:

Since June 2010, there has been a decline in a few energy conservation behaviors, but an increase in some consumer activism. For example:

  • 45 percent of Americans report that they often or always set the thermostat to 68 degrees or cooler in the winter, an 11-point drop since 2010.
  • Americans say they are less likely to walk or bike, instead of driving, than in 2010.
  • Americans became slightly more pessimistic that their own, other Americans’, or people in industrialized countries’ actions to save energy would reduce global warming a lot or some.
  • 45 percent of Americans say that they have rewarded companies that are taking steps to reduce global warming, by buying their products; an increase of 12 percent since June 2010.
  • Over the next 12 months, 55 percent of Americans intend to either reward or punish companies for their global warming-related behavior, by either buying or boycotting their products.
  • 18 percent of Americans say they have volunteered or donated money to an organization working to reduce global warming, while 13 percent have posted a comment online in response to a news story or blog about global warming.
  • 10 percent of Americans have written a letter, email, or phoned a government official about global warming. Of these, 77 percent urged officials to take action, while 20 percent urged them not to take action to reduce global warming.

Americans’ Actions to Conserve Energy, Reduce Waste, and Limit Global Warming in May 2011 reports results from a national survey fielded from April 23 to May 12, 2011 with 1,010 adults, using the online research panel of Knowledge Networks. The report includes measures of public energy conservation, consumer activism, and political action, and how these have changed since June 2010, January 2010, and November 2008.

2012 Renewable Fuel Standards and 2013 Biomass-Based Diesel Volume for Renewable Fuel Standard program (RFS2): Notice of Proposed Rulemaking

EPA is proposing the volume requirements and associated percentage standards that would apply under the RFS2 program in calendar year 2012 for cellulosic biofuel, biomass-based diesel, advanced biofuel, and total renewable fuel; and the 2013 biomass-based diesel volume. The proposed standards would ensure that transportation fuel sold in the United State contains a minimum volume of renewable fuel as required by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. EPA is required to finalize these standards by November 30, 2011.

Toxic Compounds in Groundwater

Vinyl chloride is a cancer-causing compound formed from solvents in groundwater systems under anaerobic conditions. These solvents are used in many industrial applications around the world and often belong to the most encountered groundwater pollutants in industrialized countries. Groundwater is a major drinking water resource, and it is vital to determine if vinyl chloride can be further degraded into harmless compounds.

A group of scientists at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausannne (EPFL) and the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, has studied the degradation of the toxic compound in a laboratory setting mimicking a natural groundwater system. This work has been funded by the Swiss Federal Office for Education and Science within the framework of the EC Environment/Water Program.

In this experiment, solutions containing vinyl chloride, as well as some mineral salts, were pumped through laboratory columns. The toxic compound was regularly analyzed in inlet and outlet samples. After several weeks of cycling, vinyl chloride concentrations began to decrease, reaching zero after about four months. Ethene, an organic compound often used as a plant hormone, is one of the possible degradation products.

Christof Holliger, Director of the EPFL laboratory, explained that ethene’s outlet concentration was always lower than the inlet vinyl chloride concentration.

The complete results from this study were published in the May-June 2011 issue of Journal of Environmental Quality.

The full article is available for no charge for 30 days following the date of this summary. View the abstract at https://www.agronomy.org/publications/jeq/articles/40/3/915.

Who Wins an Energy Deathmatch Between Renewables & Efficiency?

Read the full story at GreenBiz.

EnerNOC’s Gregg Dixon compares the competition between on-site renewable energy generation versus reducing energy demand to an MTV celebrity death match.

Which is more valuable?

In one corner we have on-site renewable energy projects that tend to carry more sex appeal, largely due to the industry’s great job of marketing itself; there’s even a renewable girls calendar. In the other corner are demand response and energy efficiency, which many would agree are anything but sexy.

The complex answer is both, Dixon said during a webcast held at GreenBiz.com’s VERGE virtual conference. Employing many strategies and technologies are going to ultimately maximize energy management programs, but companies have to find a way to “reduce before they produce.”

How M&S Found Sustainability & Profits in a Carbon-Neutral Bra

Read the full story at GreenBiz.

No company approaches sustainability more comprehensively — or more creatively — than the British retailer Marks & Spencer.

M&S is the U.K.’s largest clothing retailer and a big seller of food, too (market share: 3.9 percent). It operates about 1,000 stores and employs about 78,000 people. Its supply chain includes 2,000 factories and 20,000 farms. Some 21 million customers visit the stores each week, and revenues last year were £9.7 billion ($15.7 billion).

The company’s sustainability effort, which is called Plan A — because there’s no plan B to protect the planet — touches executives, rank-and-file employees, customers and suppliers. Executive pay is based, in part, on meeting sustainability targets. Store managers compete to save energy and waste. Factories and farmers that sell to M&S are rewarded for going “green.” Increasingly, customers are invited to get involved, too.

Are Supermarket Rooftop Farms the Killer App for Local Food?

Read the full story at Triple Pundit.

Every time gas prices go up, local food gets another shot to make its breakthrough to the mainstream. At $4 a gallon, when food in a supermarket travels an average 1,500 miles to get to the store, local food becomes more economically competitive. Still, no matter how high gas prices go, local food is still marginal in terms of market share (though we don’t know yet what the results of Wal-Mart’s local food initiative will be).

One of the main reasons for this failure was that the right model was never found to make local food a genuinely feasible alternative. Now BrightFarms, a NYC-based company, says they finally found the right model – building and leasing hydroponic farms on supermarket rooftops.

EWG’s 2011 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce

Eat your fruits and vegetables! The health benefits of a diet rich in fruits and vegetables outweigh the risks of pesticide exposure. Use EWG’s Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides to reduce your exposures as much as possible, but eating conventionally-grown produce is far better than not eating fruits and vegetables at all. The Shopper’s Guide to Pesticide in Produce will help you determine which fruits and vegetables have the most pesticide residues and are the most important to buy organic. You can lower your pesticide intake substantially by avoiding the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables and eating the least contaminated produce.

Also available as a downloadable PDF.

Sherwin-Williams’ Paint Made from Plastic Bottles and Soy Nets EPA Award

Read the full story at GreenBiz.

Sherwin-Williams’ water-based paint made from recycled bottles and soybeans, and two companies making safer chemical building blocks are among those being recognized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Researchers Create Tool to Put the Lid on Solar Power Fluctuations

Read the news release.

How does the power output from solar panels fluctuate when the clouds roll in? And can researchers predict these fluctuations? UC San Diego Professor Jan Kleissl and Matthew Lave, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Jacobs School, have found the answer to these questions. They also have developed a software program that allows power grid managers to easily predict fluctuations in the solar grid caused by changes in the cloud cover. The program uses a solar variability law Lave discovered…

The model development was sponsored by DOE’s High PV Penetration Program grant 10DE-EE002055. Further information is available at https://solarhighpen.energy.gov/project/university_of_california_san_diego and http://solar.ucsd.edu.

Water, and where

Read the full post at Blog U.

The Union of Concerned Scientists today released their interactive global Climate Hot Map. Icons on the map correspond to locations where the effects of global warming are already evident — the geographic distribution is pretty wide.