January 5, 2009

How Did We Get All These New Followers on Twitter?

Posted by francinehardaway under From Inside Earth911 | Tags: , , , , |
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I was really jazzed over the holidays about the number of new followers we are getting on the Earth911 Twitter account. I am carefully following everybody back, especially if the have a handle that indicates their interest in recycling, being green, or the environment.

Then I find out accidentally (in one of those coincidences of life that you can’t explain the ins and outs of) that Earth911 is one of the Twitter accounts listed in something called Autopack. According to my friend Rafe Needleman, who posted to CNet about it, Autopack is

an offshoot of wiki-based Twitter directory called Twitter Pack. AutoPack is a long list of Twitter user accounts broken into categories (such as Quotations, Lawyers, and Green Building). The directory itself is incomplete, but what’s cool is that you can sign up for everyone in a category at once. This is the way signing up to follow Twitter users should be: find a flock, and sign up to all the cool people in it. Otherwise you’ll just end up following a piece of the general conversation. I’d like to see this concept developed further, and as I said, the directory content itself needs work.

It definitely needs work. We are listed under Green Building. But there are about five green and sustainable categories, and I’d bet that’s how people are finding us.

The article was dated yesterday, and that’s why I’ve been wildly following people back all morning! Rafe, you have a big audience.

This is wonderful, because it solves two problems simultaneously: the first is how to find the people who really want to follow Earth911 because they are interested in product stewardship and recycling and second, how to eliminate the extraneous conversations in the Twitter stream so that we and our followers are sharing valuable content.

 

December 26, 2008

10 Predictions (Wishes?) for 2009

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I am not a simple predicter, but I am a person who wishes certain things would happen and hopes that by putting my energy into the universe, I can help them happen. So I’m not so much predicting what will happen in the recycling world as defining what I think might happen, and indeed, HOPE might happen.

1) American car manufacturers will bring out some of their upcoming hybrid cars, which will be accepted by an American public that suddenly understands low gas prices are only temporary. The Ford Fusion is already coming in the spring, and I believe GM will have 9 hybrid models by the beginning of 2010.

2)The idea of clean coal will go slowly away.  While we can’t just give up our old forms of energy, we have to quit thinking that we can use sleight of hand to keep doing the same things and pretending we’ve changed. A carbon tax might help.

3) Solar energy tax credits will provide a bridge to make the installation and retrofit of both commercial and residential buildings possible and affordable for large numbers of people, taking enough families and businesses off the grid to start a “buzz” about how alternative energy really works.

4)More people will grow gardens and eat their own crops, teaching their children where food comes from.

5)Curbside recycling programs will not go away, but will expand, and new markets for recycled materials will be found.

6)Corporate Sustainability Reports will become more substantial, measuring and monitoring the effect of manufacturing processes on our global climate issues.

7)Climate change will stop being a political issue, and become a fact of life that we have to take into account.

8) The government will provide a real leadership example by retrofitting its own buidings and military bases and transforming them into sustainable places for people to live and work.

9)Companies the size of WalMart , who really can make a difference, will continue to lead by becoming zero-waste and zero-impact businesses.

10) As the real estate market re-adjusts, sustainability will be seen as a key selling point in residential and commercial buildings.

Here at Earth911, 2009 will be like every other year since we were founded: another year to help our friends reduce, re-use and recycle.

 

December 23, 2008

Recycling’s Having its Own Downturn

Posted by francinehardaway under From Inside Earth911, product stewardship, recycling
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By now you probably know that I have set Google alerts for “product stewardship” and “recycling,” and that I sometimes use what they bring back to populate my Twitter feed when there’s nothing I need to tell people about from our own site. But I’m about to cancel them, and here’s why.

Lately our own site has more content, and changes on an almost daily basis, so I’ve usually got something of ours to tweet. I try never to post to Twitter unless I’m offering some good information (I confine the tweets about what my dogs eat to my personal account), and now that Raquel and Jenn are editing the site and we have a real editorial calendar I always have something to say.

But even more important than that is what Google Alerts offers me lately: a constant stream of negative  news about falling prices for recycled goods, cities having trouble keeping their recycling programs during bad times, and alarms about the green backlash.

People, don’t you understand? Recycling, reusing and reducing are what got America through the Great Depression.  Now’s the time to do MORE of it, not less. It’s not all about business — a lot of it is about coming to the realization that resources are scarce, just like money and credit. Once I have used or bought something and don’t want it anymore, perhaps someone else does.

I used to toss my discarded clothes in the trash. But for the past fifteen years, I’ve had the good fortune to know Olivia Morales, a Mexican immigrant who now lives in Arizona. Her family is divided between the U.S. and Mexico. Olivia has been my housekeeper once a week for all that time, and she taught me to recycle my clothes.  I give them to her and she takes them back to her family in Mexico.  She tells me they have gotten to know all about me through my sense of style. We have a relationship that makes all of us feel good.

Olivia has taught me a lot. Every year at Christmas, I take down the same box of ornaments, replacing ony one or two (casualties of whatever puppy we happen to have). Then I take down a large shopping bag of wrapping paper and smaller bags. The only new stuff I buy to wrap gifts in are tags (yes, I change the tags every year:-)).  And every year after Christmas, she carefully takes it off the tree with me and we pack it away.

Sometimes it takes an amiga like Olivia to remind us of what is the right thing to do.

Feliz Navidad, Olivia.

 

December 11, 2008

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http://ping.fm/mqMaF
Following the Poznan coverage gives me little hope for alternative energy in reaching carbon reduction goals by 2050.

 

December 11, 2008

What Will Poznan Produce?

Posted by francinehardaway under climate change | Tags: , , , , , , , , |
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We’re almost at the end of the Poznan climate change conference and there is no agreement in sight about how to achieve significant carbon reductions by 2050.  Worse yet, the Parties to the conference are losing faith in solar, wind, and other forms of renewable energy as a way to get to their goals.

Instead, they are drifting toward what I consider a form of sleight-of-hand: carbon trading. In this system, the people who emit greenhouse gasses pay the people who don’t to carry on projects that plant trees and insure less developed countries against the risk of climate change. In the current news cycle, “pay for play” has suddenly become a key phrase as the Governor of Illinois tries to sell the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Obama.  Pay-for-play seems to be an appropriate term here, too, in the world of carbon trades and carbon offsets.

According to the Guardian, whose representatives are attending the Poznan Conference,  support for renewable energy technology to fight global warming is weakening in the face of worldwide economic problems and the true scale of the carbon reductions required.

A survey financed by the World Bank, the United Nations Environment Programme and the Pew Centre for Global Climate Change, questioned 1,000 senior figures across governments, pressure groups and companies in 115 countries over the last few weeks.

Results presented at the talks show that climate experts have less faith in alternative energy than they did 12 months ago. The respondents also warned that a deep recession would make a new global deal on climate harder to achieve. Some 44% agreed that the current economic crisis will significantly delay or compromise the “achievement of effective climate change agreements”.

The survey shows less support for wind energy, solar power, biofuels, biomass and hydrogen energy as technologies with “high potential” to reduce carbon levels in the atmosphere over the next 25 years.

There was also less support for carbon capture and storage, new nuclear build, small-scale hydropower and natural gas stations as viable ways to hit targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Almost three-quarters of the experts agreed in the survey that “equitable economic growth and development and significant progress in combating climate change can be achieved at the same time.”

But asked to rate the likely success of low-carbon technologies in the mid-term, they showed less confidence than a similar survey 12 months ago. Support for offshore wind farms, the bedrock for ambitious UK renewable energy plans, was down to 61%, from 65% last year. Solar electricity generation was rated as having high-potential by 66% of respondents, down from 74%. Support for hydrogen power was 32%, down from 36% in 2007.

Bottom line:  the Poznan talks are unlikely to agree a long-term goal for overall carbon reductions by 2050.

Bummer.

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December 3, 2008

Green isn’t Going Away

Posted by francinehardaway under product stewardship, recycling | Tags: , , , |
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The GreenTech startups at the AlwaysOn Conference are really cool.  They all seem to be founded by startup veterans who attack this space with the same tools they have use to start other successful companies.

Cool Planet Biofuels is actually developing negative carbon fuels, and is going to promote the idea of negative carbon fuels throughout the industry in a kind of open source architecture way. A negative carbon fuel is one that not only doesn’t produce carbon, but takes it out of the atmosphere at the same time. A coal-fired plant could

The technology is out of the incubator lab and in its own free-standing lab. Looking for an A round. Team is very experienced. No web site yet.

BioFuelBox founded by a team of startup veterans also. There’s a huge opportunity in the petroleum diesel fuel area for alternatives. Most biofuel producers are now mothballed because they use feedstocks for their biodiesel and it’s no longer economically feasible to produce.

THis company extracts fats, oils, and resources from the wastewater stream. Their raw materials are practically free: low cost waste, distributed production network, advanced proprietary tehnology. They own the plans, co-located with the waste stream provider. Self-funded to produce the prototype,then got $9m and used it to do a field trial with Tyson. Now doing another plant with potato processors. They lock up the waste stream with a ten-year contact.

Production of biofuels involves a full systems approach. Their plants are self-contained.
They are trying to build a company without the necessity for tax advantages.

Renewable Fuel Products addresses the problem of runaway feedstock costs. Renewable diesel is a second generation product, without hydrogen or methanol needed and thus without the manufacturing complexity..Renewable Fuel Products is commercializing renewable fuels from both low-cost, high Free Fatty Acid (FFA) commodities available today as well as next-generation organic feedstock’s such as algae.( The founder started BioWillie.)They are in test phase to meet the specifications of real diesel.

Ausra is a potentially large provider of solar equipment that is cost effective in comparison to photovoltaics and solar thermal. Their costs come down as their power goes up. They store energy much more effectively and emulate the characteristics of a gas-fired plant, producing 200 megawatts per square mile. They have built a plant in Bakersfield and have a contract with PG&E to sell electricity and a plant in Australia that feeds steam into a coal plant.

Transmission is still an issue. The existing transmission system was built for coal-fired plants. For renewables to make the national impact that they should, significant changes to the transmission system have to be made.  But that could be part of Obama’s green jobs initiative:-)

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December 2, 2008

Clean Energy? How?

Posted by francinehardaway under product stewardship | Tags: , |
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Paul Deninger,  the vice Chairman of Jefferies & Co., scared the pants off me this morning on the subject of complex issues involved in clean energy. And remember, this is also the week of the Poznan Conference, which we are covering over on Earth911.com.

Deninger points out that an energy tsunami is coming.  All around the world, the demand is for more energy rather than less.  There is a tenuous alliance forming now between environmentalists and business.  The US is outspending Europe in  clean energy spending, but Europe is ahead in regulation.The developing countries are, well, developing. They are not thinking about saving energy, only about getting it.

$4 billion of venture capital, about 10-12%, is now invested in clean technology. This will increase to 6 billion, because consumers are pushing for it, and government regulation is spurring it on. But this will create issues if we do it wrong.

Clean tech is a mosaic of  alternative energy generation, applying technology to brown energy generation, energy transmission, energy storage, carbon monetization and water purification.

Cars are not the biggest consumers of energy or emitters of GHGs. The biggest emitters are buildings, followed by industries, and cars are third. Tesla is an interesting story, but not a big one.

Here are the more important issues: Over 30 billion bottles of water are consumed in the US. The amount of oil consumed to make those bottles would keep 1 million cars on the road. The water used to manufacture a water bottle is 3x the amount the bottle contains.  Not only that, but we don’t know where our energy consumption really is. 55% of all energy generated is lost in transmission somewhere to where it is used.

Our addiction to incandescent light bulbs and bottled water consumes much of our energy.

Gas at $4.00 a gallon is cheap. Toothpaste is $7500 a barrel. Bacardi rum is 10x more expensive.

We expect energy to be free. Our economic growth was based on the presumption of widely available, cheap energy. Our assumptions of how we live our lives are based on $20 a barrel oil.

Wind is free, but so is oil; it’s a natural resource. It’s the rent to get it out and the extraction that’s expensive. We are shipping money one way for oil and another way for cheap consumer products.  There is a $10 trillion wealth transfer going on as we ship all our money to the Middle East for oil and  to China for consumer goods.

If this continues, sovereign wealth funds will be bigger than mutual funds.

We are more energy efficient now than we were 25 years ago. We have increased our GDP 25% with little energy consumption increase. We are one of the only countries to do that.  Developing economies consume more energy than we do without anything we can do about it.

Developed countries are moralizing on global warming, but developing countries are focused on industrial development.  They can’t become prosperous without it.

Is a price on carbon good policy? It raises the cost of fossil fuels, lowers the bar on the price-competitiveness of alternatives. But if China and India don’t participate, is the US then non-competitive? We have outsourced our pollution to China as we outsourced our manufacturing.

Worldwide, there’s a huge tug of war between priorities: pulling people out of poverty vs. lowering carbon emissions. The developing world is not focused on polar bears and icecaps.

Be careful what you optimize for.  The green world is optimized now for eliminating carbon. Should it be? It should be optimized for alternative energy. Social costs really matter. The developed world is focused on jobs and GDP. The next big thing is low cost clean energy. In Deninger’s opinion, that’s not accomplished by a carbon tax.

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November 28, 2008

Shopping Sustainably

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Here I am on Black Friday, laying in bed propped up on pillows, carbon footprint nearly nil, shopping for sustainable gifts out of the Earth 911 gift guide. No lie: this gift guide is incredible.  Raquel and Jenny and the team have put together something truly original.

I have already bought 5 SIGG re-usable water bottles for all the teen-agers I buy for. And two chickens made of recycled plastic bags from a South African crafts shop. I’m still cruising through the guide, especially since our family has established price limits on our shopping this year and I see I am able to stay within the limit ($20), and finding ways to make our Christmas green and fun.

I actually began using re-usable gift bags many years ago and well before they caught on. I’m looking for recycled tissue paper for this year to accompany the bags. If you know where it is sold or can be ordered, will you let me know in the comments?

UPDATE: Jenny Martinez reminds me that another green gift is her Budcozy, a cute and useful fabric device that keeps your earbuds from tangling.

 

November 24, 2008

The Return of the LunchBox

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silokitwhite8629When was it that we gave up sending our kids and spouses off to work with a lunch box and left everyone to the fast food or the school lunch?

That was a mistake, both nutritionally and econologically. I’m not usually a product-pusher, but every morning I walk my dogs in a park that is routinely traversed by kids on the way to a nearby high school. And there are always bazillions of fast food cups, wrappers, and leftover French fries laying around on the grass (the dogs, of course, do not complain).

So this morning when I saw this company, based in Marin, that has launched a line of recyclable lunch kits for kids, I thought about how this is such a good time, for so many reasons, to bring back the lunch box and — in its modernized Sigg-designed format — the thermos bottle. If you are my age, you will remember the first incarnation of these. Healthy food carried from home: it’s good for you, it’s inexpensive, and it’s environmentally sound.

 

November 21, 2008

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Our partnership with Keep America Beautiful is now live. Our brand new search engine is available on the KAB homepage (http://kab.org)

 

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