As anyone who drives a gasoline-powered vehicle knows, the rest is history. Americans have since accepted the economic and environmental consequences.

Had Ford’s plan to use ethanol been realized, America might have looked very different today. However, ethanol still has many benefits and its not to late for America to take advantage of them, said Mark Dunn, director of the Northwest Ethanol Fuel Association.

“Ethanol is fermented and distilled from agricultural products like corn, wheat, barley and potatoes,” he said. “This makes it a renewable resource — unlike fossil fuels.”

By combining gasoline with 10 percent ethanol, the new mix will actually gain a higher octane rating and burn more efficiently, Dunn said. Equally important, however, vehicles burning this fuel called “gasahol” will emit about 25 percent less carbon monoxide.

Since roughly 60 percent of all carbon monoxide pollution is created by vehicles, these reductions can be significant. Several U.S. cities already have started “gasahol” programs and have noticed the benefits of ethanol in dealing with air pollution problems.

Ethanol has other environmental advantages, as well. Some production methods can use agricultural waste like potato skins. Sending these wastes to an ethanol manufacturer can keep them from contributing to America’s solid waste problem.

Ethanol also has some impressive economic advantages. In Bend, Ore., the Oregon Ethanol Co. is building a small refinery that will employ more than 40 people.

“From our workforce, even more jobs will be created,” said Terry Lynch, president of the company. “For every job we create, another seven will be created indirectly.”

A study by the Illinois Corn Growers Association revealed that for every 100 million bushels of corn used for the production of ethanol, 2,250 new rural jobs would be created. Additionally, the ethanol industry could put 50 million idle farming acres back into production.

Last year alone, 34 states sold more than eight billion gallons of ethanol, which was blended into only eight percent of the gasoline burned in the United States.

Perhaps it’s time to put Henry Ford’s original plans back on track.

Tip/Stat — For more information on ethanol or other alternative fuels, call the Renewable Fuels Association at 1 (800) 543-3802.

Technorati Tags: fuel efficiency, ethanol, ethanol industry, environmental consequences, renewable fuels, renewable energy, gasahol, carbon monoxide pollution

By encouraging U.S. corporations to install state-of-the-art lighting in their facilities, the EPA is promoting both energy efficiency and pollution prevention. Companies that join the program will profit by lowering their energy bills and improving lighting quality. As a byproduct, these companies also will help reduce the air pollution caused in the generation of electricity.

Lighting consumes nearly 25 percent of the electricity used each year in the United States. And commercial and industrial lighting represents 80 to 90 percent of that electrical demand.

By installing “green lighting,” companies can reduce the electrical power required for their lighting systems by 50 to 75 percent, said Maria Tikoff, manager of the Green Lights program for the California EPA. This in turn reduces the amount of pollution produced at power plants.

“One of the misunderstandings we need to overcome is that energy efficiency means a sacrifice of some sort,” Tikoff said. “When it comes to lighting, that’s just not the case. In most instances, the quality of lighting is improved.”

Since the voluntary Green Lights program started last January, more than 125 corporations and five state governments have joined the effort. This means more than one billion square feet of building space has already been dedicated to energy efficient lighting, she said.

Under the program, participants sign an agreement committing their organization to survey all of its facilities and install new lighting systems that maximize energy savings and do not compromise lighting quality.

To simplify the process, the EPA has a computer program to help participants quickly survey their lighting systems. The program assesses various options and can even make final recommendations. The EPA also offers product information and can help organizations find grants or low-interest loans for the new lighting.

California was the first state government to join the Green Lights program. The state estimates that by installing “green lighting” in its buildings, taxpayers eventually will save $255 million in annual energy costs, Tikoff said.

Along with the monetary savings, the new lights also will keep more than two billion pounds of carbon dioxide, two million pounds of sulfur dioxide and six million pounds of nitrogen oxide out of California’s air.

Not a bad gain for changing a few light bulbs.

Tip/Stat — One compact fluorescent light bulb can last as long as 13 incandescent bulbs, while saving about $57 in energy costs over the life of the bulb.

Technorati Tags: saving the environment, environmental protection, pollution prevention, energy efficiency, green lighting, green lighting systems

Because the city’s urban gardening program is coupled with a leaf composting project, it helps reduce landfill costs while beautifying plots of land that were once eyesores, said Frank Sudol, manager of the city’s Division of Engineering.

“We had an ongoing problem with maintaining these vacant lots because of illegal dumping,” he said. “Through the program, we’ve stopped the dumping, cut maintenance costs and put the lots to productive use.”

Nearly 4,000 once-vacant lots are now being used. Resident adopt the lots, Sudol said, then plant gardens and maintain them as a community project.

The leaf composting project is essential to the success of the community gardens because New Jersey’s rocky soil makes growing gardens difficult. Each fall, the city asks residents to rake their leaves to the curb. Bagging the leaves is discouraged to save residents money and the city disposal costs of the plastic, he said.

Once the leaves arrive at Newark’s composting site, they are screened, watered and composted in long windrows. Eventually, the finished product is hauled back into the urban area where it helps gardens bloom on the vacant lots.

“Rather than just hauling all that material to the landfill, we use it internally to enrich the soil and improve the value of our neighborhoods,” Sudol said.

As an added benefit, more and more residents are now composting on their own and hauling the material to their community gardens, he said.

An annual dinner is held each fall as part of the urban gardening program to honor the efforts of Newark’s community gardeners. A bus tour is conducted to visit the now-prosperous vacant lots before the event, and a panel of judges chooses winners in various categories.

Slides of the winning gardens are shown at the dinner as schools and neighborhoods celebrate their efforts, while making plans for another growing season.

“We’re talking about a significant amount of acreage being gardened that would otherwise sit unused,” Sudol said. “The program has helped raise community spirit and involvement.”

Tip/Stat — An estimated $750,000 worth of produce is grown on Newark’s vacant lots each year, through its urban gardening project.

Technorati Tags: composting, gardening, landfills, community gardeners, leaf composting project, urban gardening

Just one phone call can save plenty of time, energy and pollution when the alternative is jumping in the car. And with little effort, the telephone can be used to mobilize and inform people. But these options have been at our fingertips for years.

However, the environmental power of the telephone is starting to emerge in some new and different ways. Cellular One, a Seattle-based mobile phone company, has created several new regional programs aimed at helping the environment.

In southern Florida, Cellular One customers can use their car phones to access an Environmental Destruction Hotline. All calls are toll-free and are routed directly to the Florida Department of Environmental Regulations.

“We started this program in September 1990, in an effort to get the community more involved with environmental protection,” said Cellular One’s Jacqueline Stewart. “Our callers can either report hazardous situations or get advice on topics such as oil disposal.”

In November 1990, Cellular One started a different program in Colorado, called Air Line. Under this program, the company’s customers are encouraged to use their car phones to report vehicles that are emitting excessive amounts of smoke.

The toll-free telephone calls are routed directly to a local pollution prevention agency, Clean Air for Colorado, where the offending vehicle’s license plate and car model are recorded. The office also makes note of the date and location of the incident.

After the vehicle is reported, the Colorado Department of Health sends a letter to the vehicle’s owner, warning that a citation may be issued if the problem is not corrected.

“The Air Line handled more than 500 calls between November and March last winter,” said Dick Abels, with Cellular One in Colorado. “And these are Colorado’s worst air pollution months because of cold-air inversions.”

Cellular telephones do have great potential in terms of environmental protection. They’re adding eyes and ears to the movement, and they’re saving precious response time.

(Tip/Stat) Use your telephone to find out more about possible radon contamination in your home. Call the Radon Hotline at 1 (800) SOS-RADON.

Technorati Tags: environmental protection, environmental tools, helping the environment, energy, pollution, waste reduction, cell phones, pollution prevention

Dr. Roy Hann, Jr. has been leading the fight against these disasters for more than twenty years. Applying his hands-on experience with tanker, pipeline and facility spills, Hann started the world’s first oil spill cleanup school at Texas A&M University in 1974. He also has directed oil spill courses for the United Nations, Brazil, Chile and India.

“The job market for our graduates is booming,” he said. “Since the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, our enrollment has doubled. We’ve even got a backlog of students trying to get into the program.”

Like most problems, it’s easier to prevent a spill than clean one up, Hann said. Prevention saves both time and money in the long run, as well as the environment.

“Most companies know what ought to be done,” he said, “but don’t actually do it.”

That’s why he stresses a system called the “prevention cycle” — a thought process that starts with ship and facility design and considers all aspects of the business, including construction, maintenance and training.

Since Texas A&M’s campus at College Station is landlocked, only research work is done at that site. The actual school is conducted through an extension program on the Texas coast at Galveston.

Many of the school’s graduates find jobs in the oil industry or government, working on both prevention and cleanup issues. Hann’s graduates earn either a Master’s or Doctor’s degree in civil engineering, with an emphasis on environmental engineering.

“In many cases, they’re going to companies we never would have expected,” Hann said. “McDonald’s, banks…..it’s almost unlimited.”

Currently the school is limited to 40 or 50 new students each year. Expanding the program is being considered, Hann said, but will depend on funding and grants.

Still, Texas A&M’s popular program remains one of the few oil spill clean-up schools in the world.

(Tip/Stat) The world’s worst oil spill occurred off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago on July 1, 1979, and was nearly ten times worse than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.

Technorati Tags: oil spill, oil spills, oil spill cleanup business, chemical spills, oil industry, environmental issues, environmental schools

Chicago’s 563 parks are now being covered in garbage. But it is in the form benches, playground barriers and other items composed completely of plastic donated by residents in the city’s Plastic On Parks (POP) program.

At the start of the two-year-old project, 400 pounds of plastic was being collected each week, said Fred White, director of recycling for the park district. Now, more than 40,000 pounds of plastic are brought to the city’s 260 recreation centers every week.

“When you contribute to a project and can see what your efforts are creating, it’s a lot easier to get excited about it,” White said. “They know their plastic bottles are becoming useful items.”

Under the program, residents bring their empty plastic milk, water and pop containers to their local city recreation center. Because of the volume, the park district has dedicated a truck solely to collecting the bottles, and must stop at some of the centers every day.

The bottles are then sorted and bailed before being shipped to Hammers Plastic Recycling in Iowa Falls, Iowa. This company creates plastic lumber out of the plastic and returns it to Chicago.

“Our contract says the company must return the plastic we give them,” White said. “This is why people do it — they can see what is being done with the plastic.”

A majority of the plastic wood received so far has been used to refurbish some of the city’s 630 playgrounds. A 12-inch-high perimeter wall is built around each playground using the lumber, and the inner area then filled with a soft material like wood chips or sand, he said. The unique lumber also has been used to build park benches and floating docks.

“Our carpenters have no problem with the plastic,” he said. “It cuts like wood, saws like wood and nails like wood.”

But the plastic lumber doesn’t deteriorate like wood, and children don’t have to worry about splinters. Also, the plastic is graffiti resistant because it is non-porous and can easily be cleaned, White added.

“We’ve collected more than 2 million pounds of plastic since we started,” he said. “If we’ve diverted that much material from landfills, then we’ve helped lengthen the lives of those landfills and benefited everyone here.”

The park district has received many inquiries from other cities regarding the POP program, White said, and has offered lend whatever assistance it can to help establish similar recycling programs in other communities.

(Tip/Stat) Approximately 350,000 plastic bottles are used to refurbish one playground
under Chicago’s POP program.

Technorati Tags: recycling programs, recycling, landfills, plastic, green stories, environmental heroes, green communities

Earth News Media is a pioneer in the field of environmental news and information. The company was founded in 1991 as an international news service. Its efforts have led to a syndicated environmental news column being published around the world.

Julie Lewis, founder of DejaShoes, says the shoe meets all the technical qualifications of a good walking shoe, including a beveled heel, arch support and padding in the tongue and collar for comfort.

While researching an article for a local recycling group, Lewis learned of a woman who wove plastic bags into braided throw rugs. That concept got her thinking about using a similar weave as the upper portion of a revolutionary new shoe — a recycled shoe.

However, Lewis said when she contacted several textile mills in the South about using recycled plastic, they told her to forget it. Undaunted, she looked up one of the founders of Nike athletic shoes in the Portland phone book and called him at home.

Nike’s Bill Bowerman agreed to meet and discuss the idea with her, she said. Soon, help was on the way. He had Lewis call one of the Nike’s fabric distributors, who then contacted the textile mills. This time, the mills got excited about the idea.

Lewis proceeded to research which recycled materials could be used for each component of her shoe. DejaShoe’s fabric uses trim waste from the manufacture of hospital gowns and disposable diapers — material that would eventually end up filling landfills. The inner soles are made from recycled coffee filters and paper bags.

Cushioning in the shoe’s arch, collar and tongue consists of recycled foam rubber. The soles, which don’t mark up floors, come from reclaimed tire rubber and last much longer than other types of soling material, she said. The eyelets, as well, are made from scrap metals.

Even the box the shoes are packaged in follows the theme. Made from recycled material, the box reverses — revealing pictures of endangered animals — so it can be reused as a gift box or storage container.

“I’m helping to set an example for industry by showing them that with a little creativity, they can reuse some of their waste materials and lessen their impact on the environment,” Lewis said. “And I’m also proving that consumers want them to do this and are interested in these kinds of products.”

The first run of DejaShoes has come off the production line, and a second run is being prepared. Lewis has enlisted the help of several ex-executives of the Avia shoe company as her business continues to grow. Nordstroms, a retail store chain based in the Northwest, wants to start a men’s line of DejaShoes, she added.

For more information or to order a pair of DejaShoes, write to P.O. Box 830, Lake Oswego, OR 97034. Or call (503) 636-1887.

(Tip/Stat) The Natchez Trace National Scenic Trail, running through Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee, attracts more than 10 million hikers each year.

Technorati Tags: recycling, recycled shoe, green business, green ideas, save planet earth

Earth News Media is a nationally syndicated environmental news service profiling the positive environmental efforts of individuals, organizations and corporations around the world.

Harper & Row in San Francisco developed the clause at the request of Mickey Hart, drummer for the Grateful Dead music group, for his book, Drumming at the Edge of Magic. To research the book — a history of ancient musical and rhythmic customs — Hart traveled extensively and became concerned about the environment — rain forests in particular.

Hart approached Harper’s, asking if the publisher would be willing to plant as many trees as were felled to produce the paper for his book. Harper’s not only agreed, but also offered to double the number of trees.

The first printing of 50,000 copies of the book represented 45 tons of paper. Quick calculations revealed that 765 trees would meet their demise. With additional printings of the book, the number of trees planted is now well over 2,000.

Harper’s does not actually plant the trees, but donates the funds to the Rainforest Action Network, which has tree-planting programs in place in the rain forests of Central and South America.

“Although the paper used for book production obviously does not come from rain forest trees, we see this action as a powerful symbol of the responsibility we all share for replenishing resources for the sake of future generations,” said Clayton Carlson, senior vice president and publisher at Harper’s in San Francisco.

Since the publishing of Hart’s book last year, Harper’s has made an optional “tree clause” available to all authors entering into book contracts. The provision states the company will plant one tree in the rain forest for every tree the author agrees to fund, based on the number of trees used in the production of the book.

More than a dozen authors already have taken the publisher up on the offer. Hart’s next book, Planet Drum, due out this fall, also will take advantage of the new clause.

Carlson, calling the effort more of an earnest attempt to make a statement than an economic investment, said he hopes this author/publisher concept will catch on in the industry.

(Tip/Stat) Approximately one acre of healthy, fast-growing forest can absorb 1.4 tons of carbon dioxide each year.

Technorati Tags: book production, rainforest action, tree-planting programs, save the trees, eco-friendly business, green business, green writing

Created in Seattle, Wash., the original program quickly grew from 270 participating students to more than 1,500 students from 43 different schools. Earth Corps programs are now under way in Ohio, New York, Colorado and Oregon.

“It’s a leadership program based on environmental education and action,” said Nan Little, director of Earth Corps and founder of the first group in Seattle. “It’s fascinating to see young people take leadership roles in tackling environmental issues.”

The program operates on two levels — major community projects are coordinated through local YMCAs while other efforts are conducted in individual schools by smaller groups of Earth Corps students.

On Earth Day, the Seattle Earth Corps planted 15,000 trees, Little said. The group also has undertaken a stenciling project to warn people against dumping fish-killing wastes down storm drains. Messages stating, “Dump no waste; drains to stream,” have been spray painted near more than 1,000 storm drain grates.

The program has been officially adopted by YMCA U.S.A. and is being publicized through its network, Little said. Earth Corps groups also have been started in Hong Kong and Singapore, and still more are being considered in other Asian and South American countries.

Earth Corps involves groups of teachers and students working together, coordinated by the YMCA, and supported by businesses, government, colleges and universities. The program can be molded to the students’ own desires and goals. It is geared to develop leadership skills, encourage students to examine all sides of environmental issues and advance education through action.

“Earth Corps has done many things for our YMCA,” said Jennifer Parker, executive director of the Metrocenter YMCA in Seattle. “It has revitalized our outreach to high school youths and has brought us into new partnerships with community leaders, corporations and government agencies.”

International studies and exchanges also are encouraged in Earth Corps. A Seattle group hosted a weekend conference and retreat with students from Thailand, Japan, India and Canada. Another group of 16 students recently took a trip to Asia to meet with foreign students, Little said, where they were instrumental in establishing the Singapore and Hong Kong groups.

“We have moved quickly from a concept on paper to a vital, exciting program,” she said. “We’re expecting big things in the future.”

For more information write: Earth Corps, Program Information,
909 4th Ave., Seattle, WA 98104. Or call (206) 382-5013.

(Tip/Stat) Planting trees along a south wall provides shade for cooling in the summer and admits sun in the winter when solar heat gain may help.

Technorati Tags: environmental issues, environmental actions, Earth Day, YMCA, Earth Corps, eco-education, environmental education, green communities

The Food Marketing Institute (FMI) recently tracked several environmental issues on behalf of the supermarket industry and found that consumers are changing their purchasing habits to help the environment. These findings should help change the way the industry does business.

The institute, a nonprofit research and education association based in Washington, D.C., has conducted similar surveys for the past 20 years. Its member companies operate nearly 20,000 retail food stores in the United States — from large multi-store chains to smaller independent supermarkets.

According to the survey:

– 30 percent of the surveyed shoppers said they already have refused to buy a product because of environmental concerns. And about one in seven shoppers has gone as far as joining an organized boycott against a particular product or store.

– Roughly 60 percent of the shoppers said they would be more likely to buy a product if the label said that the package was made from recycled materials.

– More than half of the shoppers probably or definitely would change supermarkets if a new store opened nearby that promoted environmentally safe products and practices.

The institute has distributed the results of this survey to retailers and manufacturers across the country in a report called, Trends — Consumer Attitudes and the Supermarket, 1991. Although FMI does not recommend changes based on the report, the industry does take notice.

“Supermarkets rely heavily on this information,” said Karen Brown, FMI’s vice president of communications. “It helps them understand their market, which is, of course, very customer-driven.”

This insight into the environmental concerns of customers will help supermarkets develop new programs and promotions, Brown said. In some cases, retailers will even develop new “house” brands based on these emerging shopping trends, she added.

The survey also revealed that nearly 50 percent of those surveyed have refused to buy products manufactured by companies whose policies they disagree with. Additionally, 74 percent said they recycle aluminum and 64 percent recycle newspapers. Just under half said they recycle glass and plastic.

As this study demonstrates, individuals can make a difference in the marketplace. If you haven’t been an environmental shopper, keep these statistics in mind the next time you head to the grocery store.

(Tip/Stat) Whenever possible, buy products wrapped in little or no excessive packaging.

[tags]earth news, packaging, environmental issues, green business, environmental concerns, shopping,