Powering Streetlamps with Dog Waste
Very clever—bringing biogas generation down to the level of dog and dog owner. What will they think of next?
https://www.triplepundit.com/2012/05/streetkleen-starts-dog-waste-to-biogas-system/
Category: Energy & Sustainability
Health Care Without Environmental Harm: What a Concept!
I’ve heard of Health Care Without Harm, but this press release reminded me of them. Isn’t it ironic that the people who are supposed to keep us from getting sick have, in general, some very UN-eco-friendly practices? I hope HCWH becomes a catalyst for change, and in three to five years, doing healthcare in environmentally sensitive ways will be the norm. We’ve seen it in other industries, after all.
Meanwhile, congrats to the group on receiving this impressive award:
HCWH President Gary Cohen and Regional Director Bill Ravanesi Accept EPA New England Region
Environmental Merit Awards
Awards for Health Care Without Harm Work on Sustainable Health Care(Boston, MA) Health Care Without Harm (HCWH) President Gary Cohen, of Jamaica Plain, MA, and Bill Ravanesi, HCWHBoston Regional Director, of Longmeadow, MA, today accepted the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) New England Region Environmental Merit Award for their work in the region on behalf of Health Care Without Harm. The awards, which are the highest awards bestowed by the EPA in the New England Region, were presented for “extraordinary accomplishments to protect New England’s environment” in the Environmental, Community, Academia & Nonprofit category. A
NonprofitIn its commemoration of Cohen and Ravanesi’s work, the EPA stated, “Health Care Without Harm, dedicated to helping create a more ecologically sustainable health care industry, consistently has been a leading advocate for green chemistry in the health care industry, locally and nationally. The organization, with Gary Cohen as its founder and executive director, was a major force behind the decision of one of the country’s largest health care providers to convert its intravenous equipment to more eco-friendly alternatives.”
The EPA noted HCWH’s support of the Healthier Hospitals Initiative (HHI), a coalition of major health systems and organizations committed to improving sustainability and safety across the health care sector. Partners Health Care, of Boston, MA, is a founding sponsor of HHI.
“We are honored to receive this award,” said Cohen. “We are proud of the hospitals in the New England region of the country who in many ways have been leaders of the sustainable health care movement. Even though the work of Health Care Without Harm is international in scope, the idea is to make communities healthier for families, and our work in the region, we hope, will make New England healthier for all of those who live here.
The agency praised the work of Bill Ravanesi, who is responsible for working directly with hospitals in the area and is currently working on an initiative organized by the Boston Green Ribbon Commission on extending sustainability throughout the city. “Bill Ravanesi . . . helps New England hospitals in toxicity and waste reduction, green building services, energy efficiency and climate change programs, focusing on sustainability and resiliency,” said the EPA. “He is responsible for organizing program development and implementation, legislative and regulatory advocacy and policy reform initiatives and has engaged hospitals all over New England in adopting new ways of doing business that meet the challenge of environmental responsibility.”
The awards were presented today in Faneuil Hall in Boston, Mass.
HCWH is an international coalition of more than 508 organizations in 53 countries, working to transform the health care industry worldwide, without compromising patient safety or care, so that it is ecologically sustainable and no longer a source of harm to public health and the environment. For more information on HCWH, see www.noharm.org.
Wow! Oil-Eating Sponge Offers Hope for Spill Cleanups
Inventors claim their ultraabsorbent “nanosponge” can take 100 times its weight in oil, without taking up water.
Imagine how much easier it would have been to clean up the BP Deepwater Horizon mess if they had a few million cubic feet of this stuff lying around.
Is Another Global Disaster Waiting at Fukushima?
Testifying before the Japanese House of Councilors, Mitsuhei Murata (Japan’s former ambassador to Switzerland) raised a disturbing threat: 85 times as much radioactive cesium-137 as was released at Chernobyl is at risk of being released into the atmosphere. This is not within a containment vessel, and the risk is fairly serious.
Japan, by the way, is down to just a single operating nuclear power plant from a high of 54–many of these shutdowns a result of the accident at Fukushima that made nuclear power unacceptable.
And the US is still extending licenses on decrepit worn out old nukes, and trying for the first time in decades to build new ones. What kind of madness is this?
If You Dream It—Will They Come/Going Green When Nobody Notices
A blogger on Sustainable Business, Marc Stoiber, wonders why a major sustainability milestone achieved by Translink, the Vancouver, British Colombia transit system, went almost unnoticed by local and national media.
The funny thing is…transit systems control their own media, one that reaches the two most important audiences they have. If I were the company’s marketing director, I’d put inside placards on the front and back of both sides of every bus and subway (four signs in each car) to reach the actual riders—and exterior signage to reach the next-most-important constituency: Vancouver-area residents not yet using public transit.
The interior placards would not just brag about the accomplishment—they’d say thank you to the riders for their part. And those exterior signs would recruit new riders to join the tribe, e.g., “become part of the greenest commute in North America.” And I’d supplement this with a nice social media campaign, which itself could be a subject for exciting press releases, etc.
Then, the local media and perhaps the national media would almost certainly pick up the story—but even if they didn’t, the message would be out there, and if done right, ridership would grow.
Stoiber goes on to discuss the very creative marketing of another transit advocate, Jason Roberts—who put up a website for the a nonexistent light-rail transit line in Dallas, Texas called the Oak Cliff Transit Authority—and was able to organize so effectively around this public vision that the project actually got funded! You might call Roberts’ story “If You Dream It, They Will Come—IF You’re a Marketer and Organizer Who Can Create and Gather a Tribe.”
Vancouver Transit execs: I’d love to consult with you on how to build big awareness. I already have one Vancouver-based green company as a client.
Nuclear Loan Guarantees Make Solyndra Bailout Look Like a 5-year-old’s Birthday party
Harvey Wasserman has been a staunch and public opponent of nuclear power since the 1970s (as have I, BTW).
He just posted an article on Huffington Post explaining how the loan guarantees the US is offering the proposed Vogtle nuclear plants in Georgia put U.S. taxpayers at risk for many times the amount lost over Solyndra…how the power company has almost no skin in the game, financially, with all the risk on our shoulders…and how even the very earliest stages of site preparation and construction have been fraught with mismanagement and flawed concrete.
His article goes on to give a quick world-wide wrap-up of the many countries abandoning nuclear, and a glimpse at the better alternatives.
And he links to a petition to stop the loan guarantees, to which I added the following comment when I signed:
These loan guarantees are a terrible solution to nuclear’s failed economics. Closing existing operating nukes and putting he money into *real* clean energy is a far better option.
Help maintain our country’s economic and energy prosperity. Read his article, sing the petition,and get others informed.
Game-Changers,Innovation…and Marketing: My Persective
Sunday, I asked for your comments on three inspirations for innovation and creativity. If you missed the original, please take a moment to go back and read it first. If you didn’t, be aware that I give away the ending to the Caine film below.
I’m writing this on Sunday, immediately after posing my question to you, and posting it on Tuesday, as promised. Hopefully a few of you have added your wisdom. And here’s what I think:
1. Chris Brogan is spot on when he says you don’t achieve greatness by following the existing paradigm. You conceive the ultimate goal—hopefully something big and bold—and then engineer a path from today’s world to that goal.
Examples:
- Steve Jobs envisioning a “computer for the rest of us,” or a whole music library that fits in a shirt pocket
- Amory Lovins achieving energy-sustainable construction by creating buildings that don’t need a furnace or air conditioner (and the savings on capital cost pay for the energy improvements)
- Zsolt Varga’s ingenious Kenguru: a tiny car that transports one person in his or her wheelchair, without needing any hydraulic lifts
- A goal of conserving water led Bill and Jane Monetti to enormous water savings without any need to redesign plumbing systems—just from reducing the need to flush
2. A number of lessons to be learned from “Caine’s Arcade”:
- Caine’s parents were wise enough not to interfere, not to assault their son with messages that what he was trying t do was impossible, useless, or even misdirected. They gave him room to follow his dream.
- For Caine, it was enough to build it even when people didn’t come—just as for me, I’m driven to write my blog, my monthly column, and my books even though my audiences are small. Because I know that a few people do passionately pay attention to my ideas, it gives me a lot of juice to keep going. Of course, if I had the fame of a Chris Brogan or Seth Godin, I’d reach a lot more people. And that would harmonize with my own goals to change the world. But just knowing that I have changed the lives of a few people and the course of a few communities helps me keep going. I’m not sure I’m as brave as Caine, though. I’m not sure I could do it anymore if I didn’t think anyone at all was listening.
- The missing ingredient in both Emerson’s “build a better mousetrap and people will beat a path to your door” and director Phil Alden Robinson and writer W. P. Kinsella’s “if you build it, they will come” is marketing. While Caine says he doesn’t care if anyone comes to play, he tells us of feeling excluded and teased when he tried to share his accomplishment at school. And his reaction when his lone customer brings a crowd to play shows that while just the achievement had been enough for Caine, sharing it with others is so much more. Nirvan, that solitary customer, did the marketing for him, and did a fabulous job. The happy ending is as much a testament to Nirvan’s social media prowess as to Caine’s creativity and ingenuity—just as the rise of Apple needed both Jobs’ vision and marketing skills and Steve Wozniak’s engineering genius. The lesson for entrepreneurs is that if you don’t have all three elements—vision, engineering, and marketing—you need to partner with someone who has the pieces you lack.
3. The actual ad featured in the going green video is a brilliant example of using big-picture thinking to convey a message. Take a walk—and find your true love. Yes, it’s absurd. But it’s also very compelling. and it talks most elegantly to the way people can change behavior and become greener—achieving both a planetary and a personal good.
Much traditional advertising of for-profit products and nonprofit causes focuses on one or the other: buy this car or smoke this cigarette and you’ll feel sexy, that sort of thing—or “only you can prevent forest fires,” give money to cancer research, etc.—helping-others messaging without a clear direct benefit.
As a green marketer, I constantly say that marketers need to hit both the self-interst and the planetary interest, especially if they want to reach beyond the deep greens. In fact, I wrote my last Green And Profitable column on this very theme. The ad is a nice example, and the opening slides give us some very good framing about the power of art to influence thought, in many contexts.
No Nukes Rallies: Now, the Governor Speaks
On April 30, 1977, I entered the construction site for the Seabrook (New Hampshire) nuclear power plant. The next day, I was one of 1414 people arrested at the site, while arch-conservative Governor Meldrim Thompson, dressed in combat fatigues, gave orders to the police. Under Thompson’s administration, many protestors were held until May 13.While we were in captivity, William Loeb, publisher of the state’s largest newspaper, repeatedy called us “terrorists.”
Fast-forward 35 years. Today, April 14, 2012, I was one of 1500 or 2000 people attending a rally in Brattleboro, Vermont to shut down the deeply troubled Vermont Yankee nuclear plant—which, under Vermont law and agreements signed by the plant owner, should have been shut down and has been operating illegally since its license expired. Ironically, the plant sits on the Connecticut River, which is the border between Vermont and New Hampshire.
Only this time, the governor, and most of the state, was on our side. Governor Peter Shumlin was the featured speaker, and he outlined ten specific lies or broken promises on the part of New Orleans-based Entergy, which owns the plant.
Along with Governor Shumlin, US Senator Bernie Sanders, Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell, and several state legislators from both Vermont and neighboring Masachusetts were on the program or sent greetings. Vermont’s lone US House Representative, Peter Welch, sent greetings, leaving only Senator Patrick Leahy out of the event among Vermont’s three-member Congressional delegation.
Yes, we’ve won over at least one state government. But our work is not done until this very dangerous plant—a plant that was unsafe even when it was new, and which uses the same totally discredited GE Mark I design as Fukushima-Daiichi—is shut down. Until Entergy honors its promises. And until all nuclear plants in the US and around the world are shut down before catastrophe happens.
How Southwest Airlines is Greening Their Planes
As I repeatedly point out in my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, going green can reduce costs and boost profits, as well as provide numerous marketing hooks. Here’s a great example.
From reusing the aluminum seat frames when replacing seats to changing to modular carpeting where only the worn spots get replaced, Southwest—often a pioneer—has shaved weight by more than 600 pounds per plane, drastically lowered its consumption of resources, and shaved costs. The long list of improvements Southwest has made toward greener flying can be seen here.
BTW, did you know that Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green (list price: $21.95) comes with more than $2000 worth of bonuses? Like going green, I try to make buying the book a win-win; click the link and see what else you get.
Starting Thursday, 3/22, the Vermont Yankee Nuke has been Operating Illegally
Entergy’s Vermont Yankee nuclear plant’s license expired Wednesday night, after 40 years. 40 years of leaks, collapsing cooling tower, tritium in the water, unexpected outages…in short, 40 years of a very poor safety record.
I’m looking at the first page of the official Atomic Energy Commission report on Abnormal Occurrences for the 1973–the last year a full report is available, because after that the AEC (which then became the so-called Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC). Only a year into its use cycle, when it should have shaken out all the problems and long before radioactive corrosion, old age or other more recent stress factors, Vermont Yankee reported 39 separate incidents–that’s nearly one per week. Page one of the report, reprinted in the classic book No Nukes, by Anna Gyorgy and Friends (page 107 in my 1977 edition), shows that the first six included:
- A switch in the Emergency Core Cooling System that failed to activate (potentially extremely serious)
- Four miscalibrated radiation monitors
- Power supply failure of a gamma radiation monitor on the perimeter
- Discovery that some instrument sensor tubes were connected wrong, because the plant’s designers produced faulty drawings
- Unplanned shutdown following an explosion that fractured the air ejector rupture disc, and release of radiation
- A second air ejector rupture disc fracture and release of radiation
Again, these are just the first six of 39, during a single year of the plant’s 40-year operation.
Meanwhile, as a condition of operation, Entergy agreed a few years ago to be bound by approval of the state legislature to continue operation past its license expiration. Yet, when the state senate voted 26-4 in 2010 to close the plant, Entergy (which had expected at the tine it signed the agreement to win the legislative approval) reneged, sued the state, and actually found a judge–John Murtha–who issued an idiotic decision in the company’s favor, saying the legislature was clearly concerned about safety and nuclear safety was reserved for the federal government–specifically, for the NRC, which has so far NEVER to my knowledge turned down either a new or renewal license. (They should rename themselves the Nuclear Rah-Rah Cheerleaders)
So much for democracy, state’s rights, etc. The legislature, the governor, and a large majority of the state’s population (not to mention numerous government officials in both Massachusetts and New Hampshire, both of which are within four miles of the plant) all want to see this monstrosity shut down.
The state is appealing, but somehow, there’s no injunction to keep the plant from operating until the suit is resolved.
Along with about 1600 other people, I went up to Brattleboro, Vermont today to protest Yankee’s continued operation. Some 130 people got arrested. I didn’t, but my 93-year-old friend Frances Crowe did. I first met Frances, a Northampton, Massachusetts hero and living treasure, in 1977, when we were both incarcerated in the Manchester, NH National Guard Armory when 1414 of us were arrested at the construction site for the Seabrook, NH nuke. I saw a number of people today who I remembered from that and other Clamshell Alliance actions in the late 1970s.
Nuclear is a really dumb idea. I wrote a whole book on it. From a safety, economics, fuel efficiency, or even carbon footprint point of view, nuclear power is a disaster. And the GE Mark I design used at 23 US reactors including Vermont Yankee–the same one used at Fukushima–is particularly bad. Why are we mortgaging our future for no benefit?