Category: Energy & Sustainability

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, propaganda, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , ,

The latest news from Daichi makes it clear: Nothing these officials say can be trusted:

Highly toxic plutonium has seeped into the soil outside the troubled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power complex in northeastern Japan, officials say. The amounts detected in five different soil samples taken from the facility did not pose a risk to humans, safety officials say.

Yes, I am calling that last sentence an outright lie—a disgusting, damnable, and definitely dangerous dissembling.

Want to know the safe level of inhaled plutonium? Zero. The risks are lower if it’s eaten or drank. Breathing the stuff has a very high deadliness factor because it settles in the lungs.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , , , ,

The news from Japan remains very troubling:

Now…let’s remember that nuclear power is a really stupid way to boil water for electricity generation:

  • Over the entire fuel cycle, starting with mining uranium and ending with attempting to find a solution for safe storage of nuclear waste, the process requires enormous energy inputs, so the actual gain in usable power is very tiny, if it exists at all. One study I’ve seen, by John J. Berger, states that from 1960-76, the nuclear power “generation” industry actually consumed five times as much power as it generated. I cited this study in my first book, Nuclear Lessons, published waaaay back in 1980.
  • If a plant has a major problem, and has to be removed from service permanently, it causes disruption in the energy systems of the communities that depend on it, because a lot of power generation is taken off the grid at once. In the case of Daichi, most of those reactors can never be used again.
  • In the US, nuclear power is subsidized with the Price-Anderson Act, a low-premium accident insurance policy that sharply limits liability. Basically, if you don’t own the plant, you probably won’t collect damages in case of  an accident.
  • And don’t forget: there is no permanent solution to storage of radioactive waste, isolated from the environment for up to a quarter of a million years (I, for one, don’t believe this is actually possible).
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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , ,

I have lived in a housing project of 55,000 people in New York City—so insignificant in the city’s eyes that we didn’t even have a subway stop; we had to bus or walk a mile to one of two different trains, one of which could have easily been extended a mile over Interstate 95. In all, I lived in New York City for about 20 years, including birth to 16. In my early 20s, I lived in four of the five boroughs: Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn.

At the other extreme, for the past 12+ years, I’ve lived on a working farm in a village of about 200 within Hadley, Massachusetts—a town of 4753 people—part of Hampshire County, whose 20 “cities” and towns within 545 square miles increased over the past decade to 152,251. (City, as Massachusetts defines it, refers to a municipality administered by a mayor and council rather than Selectboard and Town Meeting, and has nothing to do with population.) And I actually serve on an official town land-use committee, where we wrestle constantly with shaping the future of our town.

New York City’s five densely populated boroughs comprise just under 305 square miles, and hold 8,391,881 residents. You could move NYC to my county and still have almost half the land area left —maybe to grow enough food for all those residents. My county has 1/55 as many people as NYC, spread out over 1.78 times as much land.

Between the time I first lived outside of New York, in 1973, and settled in Hampshire County, in 1981, I lived in various cities and towns ranging from under 5000 to 1,688,210. All of these communities can offer sustainability wisdom from which other places can learn—either by doing it right, or by doing it wrong (so much so that I could write a book on this—maybe I will, some day). Here are a few of the insights:

  • Vibrant neighborhoods require mixed use. In every city I’ve ever lived in, the exciting neighborhoods are those where people live, work, play, and shop in close proximity. The best US examples I know are Northampton and Amherst, MA, New York’s Upper West Side and Park Slope, and the Fox Point area of Providence. Much of Europe uses this model, and European cities are highly livable.
  • Car-centered cultures adversely affect quality of life. Strong mass transit usually enhances it. In New York City (where a car is a liability), commuting time on public transit is productive. People read, write, get through their e-mail, walk a few blocks to their destination, and don’t feel like they’ve wasted the time. Sometimes they even build friendships with the people they see every day on their commute. In Hadley, the shopping district is suburban-style, with big malls and strip malls along a state highway. Almost no one lives on that road, and it’s not a place for cultural events, other than movies. While the largest food stores actually do provide chances to hang out a bit with neighbors (all arriving in separate cars), having a brief chat with an acquaintance you run into in the produce aisle is not the same kind of community building as you can get in a cafe or a bookstore.
  • A corollary: planning must take into account the existing transportation patterns. Mass-transit thinking can’t just be grafted onto a car-oriented culture, and car-oriented thinking won’t work in crowded urban areas. Those patterns can change over time, but it’s a slow process.
  • A real community transcends ethnic and cultural differences. My current neighborhood of Hockanum  Village has a number of families that have been on the same land for 200 years or more. Some of them trace their lineage to the Mayflower. The whole neighborhood gets together every year for a Christmas party that attracts former residents from as far as Florida, and sometimes a summer picnic along the river. A few neighbors gather at the local coffee shop for breakfast once a week. I could knock on any door in the neighborhood with a request, and people would try to help me.
  • Cities lend themselves well to centralized renewable energy collection—but this potential to make a big difference in climate change and oil dependency has barely been tapped. Instead, many centrally heated buildings in New York are overheated to the point where tenants need to open windows on cold winter days, and that’s crazy.
  • Cities could supply a significant portion of their own food, but again, this potential is not tapped much.
  • Farmers and gardeners understand the food cycle. They know what it’s like to grow food for themselves, their families, and their livestock. They’ve seen crop failure. They pay close attention to weather patterns. Localism is not a theoretical construct; it’s an everyday reality.
  • Homeowners and farmers notice details and patterns, so, for instance, they anticipate and address maintenance issues before they become failures. They don’t expect anyone else to do things for them, though they might ask for help on a big project. Tenants (especially in urban areas) are much less likely to have this attitude.
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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , ,

It seems we’ve escaped complete catastrophe at the six failed reactors in Japan damaged in the earthquake and tsunami—for the moment, But it was (and may still be) pretty dicey.

Two of the reactors had to be cooled with seawater, in a last-ditch effort to prevent catastrophic meltdown. Those reactors probably can’t be used to generate electricity ever again. And the chance that the other four will return to service is probably pretty low, considering the extensive damage, high levels of radiation, etc., not to mention the risk of further damage in future quakes.

Thank goodness this happened in Japan, the country with probably the best earthquake-related building codes in the world (imagine what would have happened if a nuke had been sitting on earthquake fault during last year’s quake in Haiti—shudder!)

But here’s my question: WHY in the name of creation are we still hopelessly, haplessly, playing with nuclear fire? Did we learn nothing from the Chernobyl disaster? Or the barely-contained accidents at Three Mile Island, Browns Ferry (Alabama), Enrco Fermi (Michigan) and other near-calamities at nuke plants not only in the US but around the world? The nuclear industry’s safety record is horrible, and as Chernobyl proved, we don’t always get lucky with containing the damage—and when we don’t, large areas are rendered uninhabitable for decades.

Back in 1979-80, I had a monthly column about the dangers of nuclear power. I devoted two of my columns to the possibility of accidents resulting from earthquakes, and that information was taken form commonly available sources (even in the pre-Google era). More than 30 years later, we appear to have learned nothing. And earthquakes are only one of a dozen or more very compelling reasons NOT to use nuclear power. Some of the others include terrorist threat, waste disposal issues that need to be addressed for a longer timespan than human history, the problem (with US nukes of sharply limited liability in the event of an accident), diversion for bomb-making…and perhaps most shocking, the lifecycle analysis that shows that by the time you count the energy and fossil footprint of mining, milling, processing, transporting, running the reactors, reprocessing, waste storage and transportation, etc., you don’t actually create very much energy. One study I saw even claimed it was a negative number! (And another study showed that renewable energy is two to seven times as effective in reducing greenhouse gases.)  For this very dubious benefit, we’re putting our own and every future generation at enormous risk???

Here’s my call to action:

  1. IMMEDIATE world-wide shutdown of any nuclear power plant within 100 miles of an active earthquake fault and entombment in the most solid possible barrier
  2. Phased shutdown of remaining N-plants over perhaps six months
  3. A world-wide Marshall Plan-style initiative toward the high-gain, relatively renewable low-cost energy solutions of the sort promoted by Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute in their “Winning the Oil End Game”: a plan to rapidly exit from fossil fuels without needing nuclear.
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By Posted on Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business Tagged with , , ,

Packing waste is a scourge in our society. Filling landfills, choking birds, littering our streets, it definitely is a problem that needs to be addressed.

One way, of course, is by generating less packaging in the first place. Do companies really need the little plastic baggie inside the pouch inside the form-fitting foam insert inside the cardboard box inside the shrinkwrap inside a forest of packing peanuts inside a shipping box inside another layer of outer wrap? That kind of overpackaging is all-too-common among boxes I’ve opened. 100 years ago, many products were sold in bulk. We could certainly return to bulk packing for more things.

But another way is to deal with the packaging once it is created. As individuals, we can do a lot of this: reuse glass jars and plastic containers, recycle or compost cardboard and paper, bring our egg cartons back to the farmer, and so forth. But for a lot of the products sold through mainstream retail channels—and particularly for the less simple packing like aseptic boxes, snack chip bags, and drink pouches—we simply don’t know what do to with the packaging.

Enter TerraCycle(R). This company actually pays consumers to pack up their trash and send it off, where it gets transformed into a host of interesting products like fencing, picnic coolers, and—isn’t this cute—recycle bins. In all, the company creates 256 different products out of recycled packaging that would have (in many cases) been thrown in the landfill.

Cool, huh?

Also cool is the way the company involves schools in the collection effort.

BUT…with my particular consumption habits, the site doesn’t work for me. First of all, the company only collects 38 different types of waste, out of the thousands of possibilities. And of those 38, 13 require specific brands—not necessarily the brands I buy. I might dispose of one tube of Neosporin in a year, and that’s not worth collecting. But if I could bring all my empty tubes of toothpaste, skin cream, mentholated muscle-relief cream along with my single tube of Neosporin, that would be worth setting aside, if the drop off was convenient.

The company has made big strides since my last visit, in broadening many of the items from specific brands to generic categories taking any brand, but still…

Then there’s the matter of collection. Each of the 38 has a different set of collection sites. I can’t really see that I’m going to drive hither and yon, dropping off three wine corks here, two cereal wrappers there. And I don’t really understand the logic of having multiple collection streams for essentially the same kind of waste (e.g., a cardboard box for macaroni and cheese is handled differently form a cardboard box wrapped around a tube of Colgate toothpaste).

Using schools as an organizing force makes sense, but not all of us have school-age children. I’d love to see the company partner with landfill and transfer station sites around the country, so collection could be streamlined at the place we’re bringing our trash anyway.

And finally, while I recognize that e-mail can go astray and forms can break, it does bother me that I wrote the following and submitted it through the company’s website back on November 21. Six months later, I haven’t gotten an answer yet:

I was hoping to come to your website and determine whether there are collection points near me. I am surprised by how difficult that is–there’s no way to search by geography, only by product. And the products–so many of them tied to specific brands–don’t correspond well with my buying patterns.

Thus, even though I would be delighted to ship off my trash to you, I see no practical way to participate. I’d love for instance to be able to send you the plastic bags my home-delivery newspaper arrives in on wet days. Or sandwich baggies that are contaminated with food residue and no longer suited to direct re-use. Or the pet food bags which are paper lined with plastic.

Still, I wish them well. I’d love to come back in another six months and discover that it’s vastly easier to get rid of my junk and see it turned into great stuff.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government, Politics Tagged with , , ,

What idiots in the GOP leadership decided to get their cafeteria out of the Greening the Capitol program, get rid of the biodegradables, stop composting, and switch to Styrofoam? Eeeeew!

The “party of no” reaches a new low–whose ONLY justification is say “nyah, nyah, nyah to the Democrats. This is not just childish, it’s downright stupid. So much for budget constraints, too—their path, if I could call it that, is going to be a lot more expensive, long-term, than reusable dishes going through a Hobart, composting the wastes, etc.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Ethics-International, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Two stories in today’s paper about high consequences for corporate greed—and both of them have significant environmental as well as business ethics interest.

First, a local company here in Massachusetts, Stevens Urethane, faces a five-year ban on manufacturing a technology used in making solar panels, as well as more than $8.6 million in assorted fines, penalties, and other costs. The company was found guilty of stealing the secrets of a competitor, and the judge’s ruing not only impounded more than a million dollars worth of revenue, but forbade the company from using a $2 million assembly line it had built to make the product. Punitive damages, attorneys’ fees, and reimbursement of the other side’s legal and expert witness fees combined to create the $8.6 million total.

But the cost of this business ethics failure is only 1/1000th of the costs slapped onto oil giant Chevron by the government of Ecuador. While the $8.6 billion amount was less than 1/3 of the court-appointed expert’s recommendation, it is still the largest damage award ere in an environmental damage lawsuit (and probably the first of many more around the world against oil companies, which have been sued for habitat destruction in Nigeria and elsewhere).

Ironically, this suit had originally been filed in US courts against Texaco (now owned by Chevron), and the company’s attorneys successfully argued that the case should be heard in Ecuador.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , ,

Sure has been one cold and snowy winter here in Massachusetts. One morning last week was minus 19 F, and that is the coldest day I can remember experiencing, ever. And January set snow records all over the place.

The cold snap has seized much of the country, including places like Georgia that are decidedly UNused to real winter.

The climate deniers, of course, are latching on to this news with great glee, and kind of a “ha, ha, we told you there was no global warming problem.”

However…what I’ve heard is that this weather pattern actually has a tremendous amount to do with global warming. In fact, the arctic air has become so warm that it’s no longer trapped by low pressure. The pressure is high enough, and the air rises enough that it pushes down into the south, and makes us shiver around here.

So don’t go out and buy a Hummer any time soon. The problem is real, and this is more evidence, not less.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, poverty Tagged with , , , , ,

(This is Part 2 of my report on the Sustainable Foods Summit. If you missed Part 1, please click here.)

And some insights that I knew already, but appreciated the reminders—most of which were echoed by several presenters:

  • Yields, quality, and taste of organics have improved a lot in the last couple of decades—often due to technology innovations that allow packaging more quickly after harvest and longer shelf life.
  • Private-label supermarket brands have moved from their original positioning as generic, low-quality price-leaders to elite niche brands.
  • The best sustainability initiatives combine multiple benefits and create wins for multiple players in the supply/consumer chain (examples include a new packaging process that lowers energy use, costs less, delivers fresher food, and reduces worker risk…a commitment to ship product on trucks with full loads…ways to turn wastes into inputs for a different process, closing the loop and reducing both pollution and cost).
  • The lack of definition for “natural” causes problems.
  • Turning cropland from food production to energy production has unforeseen consequences. For example, the much-heralded corn ethanol movement a few years ago resulted in higher food prices both in the developed markets and, critically, in developing countries where the increases led immediately to greater hunger problems—and ultimately, did not have a positive impact on the energy picture.
  • Just because other people tell you a positive initiative is impossible doesn’t mean it is. Many “impossible” goals turn out to be quite possible, once buy-in spreads through an organization or its customer base—even sourcing from small farms to serve food at big cafeterias.
  • People have a wide range of reasons for going green—from committed environmental or hunger activism to personal and family health.

Although organized by Europeans—they also do one in Amsterdam—most attenders were American or Canadian, with a handful from Latin America (including one presenter who’s part of a large family-owned sustainable sugar plantation and mill in Brazil). It looked to me that about 180 people attended. The conference had only one track, which means everyone got to hear from all the presenters—a nice change.

Despite all the questions that have no consensus answer yet (see Part 1), there was a lot of agreement:

  • GMO is a major threat to organic growers because of its ability to infiltrate and contaminate organic fields.
  • Only 3rd-party certifications (as opposed to self-declaration by a grower or an industry trade group) give the consumer something to trust in, but there’s a problem of certification clutter and oversaturation, leading not only to consumer confusion but also a burden on growers and suppliers trying to comply with and document multiple certifications—and of course, very crowded packaging labels. This is likely to shift as more comprehensive certifications (for example, covering both organic and fair trade) start to come on the market.
  • The best certifications cover not only growing methods but also working conditions—and their attention covers not only the absence of chemicals, but also positive steps to rebuild soil, spread health, etc.
  • The range of practices considered “sustainable” is quite wide, and ultimately the consumer has to decide what’s really important—but any definition of sustainability has to include an adequate livelihood for the growers and their workers.
  • Sustainable products may originate locally, or from far away, though the later can have a pretty big carbon footprint.
  • Sustainable products need sustainable packaging. Many companies have drastically reduced their packaging through careful redesign.
  • Both to save money and to reduce environmental impact, many farmers and producers are moving at least partly toward green energy sources.
  • In the end, sometimes you have to make choices. You may not be able to get organic, local or fairly traded, biodynamic, minimally processed, and appropriately packaged all in the same product—so you do the best you can and help the world reach the point where you can get all the desired attributes without having to choose among them.
  • The sustainable foods industry has a responsibility to make an impact on issues around hunger, poverty, and the economic viability of indigenous suppliers.
  • Sustainability is a process, a journey of many steps. And while all of us need to start taking at least some of those steps, even those who have been on the path a long time still can find ways to improve.

Shel Horowitz is the primary author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green and writes the Green And Profitable/Green and Practical monthly columns.

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By Posted on Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Green Business Tagged with , , , , ,
  • Can you preserve the soil by switching to no-till farming if it means you can’t use organic methods?
  • Which is more sustainable: a lightweight plastic bag made from virgin materials (i.e., petroleum), or a plastic clamshell using 40 times as much material, but made from recycled water bottles?
  • If biodegradable (PLA) plastics are made from GMO (genetically modified organism) corn, are they any better than non-biodegradable plastic?
  • Is organic enough of a standard, or do we hold out for the much stricter but much rarer Demeter Biodynamic certification?
  • Are food-industry giants squeezing out small artisan brands, or opening up new opportunities for them?
  • And can we achieve a food system that combines the artisan quality and chemical/petroleum independence of pre-20th century food production with the massive volume and ability to feed hungry people of the 20th century Green Revolution, while achieving the distribution necessary to end hunger?

These are some of the questions attendees at the Sustainable Foods Summit grappled with on January 18 and 19, 2011 in San Francisco.

Conference presenters included a number of certification agencies and a few consultants (including me on the marketing side) as well as producers and retailers both from major companies like Tesco’s Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market, Safeway and White Wave (whose brands include Silk and Horizon) as well as much smaller companies like Theo Chocolate and Washington State’s Stone-Buhr Flour.

Some of the things I hadn’t heard before:

  • It’s well-known that cows are a huge source of methane emissions (a worse climate change problem than CO2)—but I hadn’t known that cow burps cause almost twice the emissions of cow manure, and that cow burping can be greatly reduced through feeding the cows a healthier organic grass-based diet rich in flax, which also raises the Omega-3 level in the milk (a good thing).
  • Cows fed a healthy organic diet live an average of three times as long and have more lactation cycles; this translates directly into increased profitability of the farmer.
  • Organic farming can sequester 7000 pounds per acre of CO2 per year.
  • By converting some acreage to oilseed crops such as sunflowers, farms can supply a goodly percentage of their energy needs, feed cows, and gather the seeds as a cash crop. (These four bullets from Theresa Marquez of Organic Valley dairy cooperative; the percentages on cow emissions were from Bree Johnson of Straus Family Creamery)
  • Makers of biodegradable plastics often source from GMO corn. (Adrianna Michael, Organic and Wellness News)
  • No-till farming vastly reduces soil erosion (which can lower the altitude of a conventional farm by more than a foot in 40 years), but is difficult to do without chemical weed control.
  • Organic, interplanted, and no-till soil hold a lot more water, and look, smell, and even taste healthier than conventional soil.
  • Some private-label supermarket brands, including Safeway’s O Organics, are now being marketed through other retail channels not owned by the original company. (Alex Petrov, Safeway)
  • Even though it’s more expensive to start with, you get 20% more yield from a natural beef patty compared to a conventional one, which makes progress toward evening out the price. (Maisie Greenawalt: Bon Appetit Management Company, an institutional food service provider for colleges, museums, and corporate cafeterias)

(This report will continue tomorrow)

Shel Horowitz is the primary author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green and writes the Green And Profitable/Green and Practical monthly columns.

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