Read the full post from ACEEE.
In its recent budget outline, the new administration proposes to eliminate funding for the ENERGY STAR® program. An earlier leaked draft suggested that the private sector should take over the program and that a government role is not needed. Others have suggested that ACEEE should run the program. We strongly disagree.
Legal solutions are needed to ensure that government decision-makers, engineers, architects, planners, and other stakeholders account for known climate risks when making decisions about the built and natural environment. The Sabin Center has compiled this database of legal resources for adaptation, which includes information about specific legal provisions that could be interpreted as requiring consideration of climate-related risks, articles discussing the nature of legal obligations to adapt, and resources to facilitate adaptation planning efforts undertaken by government and private actors. This database is intended as a complement to their Handbook of Adaptation Advocacy Strategies.
Read the full story at EnvironmentalResearchWeb.
At first glance, combined heat and power (CHP) plants sound ideal. Heat that would otherwise go to waste can drive industrial processes or heat buildings. And as gas prices fall and electricity prices rise, installing CHP is becoming more attractive to businesses to help keep energy costs down. But now a study shows that in some locations increasing CHP could boost greenhouse-gas emissions.
Read the full story in Environmental Leader.
Water-saving technologies at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant, implemented toward the end of 2016, helped the facility reduce water usage by 13 million gallons last year, and the automaker expects to that number to be significantly higher in 2017 after a full year of use.
Ford implemented two projects at the plant last year: an increase in the re-use of water in the plant’s pre-treatment system and the addition of a cooling tower side-stream electrolysis (water softening) to remove calcium and magnesium.
Read the full story in the Washington Post.
The rusty patched bumblebee’s path to the endangered list was as up and down as the way it flies.
After a years-long run-up to a determination early this year that it was eligible for the list, and a month-long delay for a newly required review by the Trump administration, the rusty patched on Tuesday became the first bumblebee — and the first bee overall in the continental United States — to be listed under the Endangered Species Act.
Read the full story at NPR.
Advocates of grass-grazing cattle say it’s better for the environment and the animals. But there’s another upside: Grass-fed meat and dairy fetch a premium that can help small farms stay viable.
Read the full story at Waste360.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), with support from The Rockefeller Foundation and the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA), has launched a series of pilot projects aimed at further reducing food waste in the hotel industry.
Read the full story at GreenBiz.
A new report by ING bank, a member of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s CE100, a coalition of corporations developing the circular economy, urges companies to implement the circular principles of reduce, reuse and retain to relieve water shortages around the world.
Read the full story at GreenBiz.
Today marks the annual celebration of one of the world’s most precious, and most wasted, resources. The theme for World Water Day 2017 is wastewater, and the urgent need to reduce and reuse it.
Wastewater is any water that has been used in the home, in a business or as part of an industrial process that is returned to the natural environment — and the world’s mismanagement of wastewater is putting the health of humans and the environment at risk.
Currently, over 80 percent wastewater flows back into the environment untreated. This has severe, cascading effects. For example, it exacerbates the rates of water-related diseases, and the World Health Organization reports that every 90 seconds a child dies from such diseases. It can cripple marine and freshwater life, creating poisoned, unproductive areas called “dead zones” that plague the ocean. One of these “dead zones” that forms annually in the Gulf of Mexico can be as big as the state of Connecticut; a result of excess nutrient loading influenced by poorly treated wastewater in the Mississippi River basin.
Dates: May 31-June 2, 2017
Location: Cobo Center, Detroit, MI
For more information: https://www.regonline.com/builder/site/default.aspx?EventID=1945821
The Great Lakes & St. Lawrence Green Infrastructure Conference is the first conference to focus on using green infrastructure across the landscape with a primary goal of protecting the surface waters in the Great Lakes region. The time is right for a comprehensive look at this important topic.
The conference location is in the middle of the Great Lakes chain and at the forefront of many innovative green infrastructure projects. In fact, much of Detroit is being recreated from the ground up. Together, City leaders, industry experts, universities, and non-profits are finding ways to reduce the burden on combined sewers for less than the cost of storing and treating combined effluent. They are making neighborhoods feel safer and more inviting by increasing green acreage throughout the city. These efforts benefit not just the City, but also the Great Lakes – by reducing nutrient inputs to Lake Erie, and all Great Lakes’ and St. Lawrence waters downstream.
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