When The Customer Values Green

  More than just telling a story of turning what was once "trash" into a commodity, this story tells of how a company realized that having a lighter environmental impact was important to their customers!!!! From The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Palermo's finds a way to recycle less-than-perfect pizza crusts

Company supports efforts to make Menomonee Valley 'green'

By Thomas Content of the Journal Sentinel

Oct. 8, 2014

As workers on the rapid-fire pizza line at Palermo Villa Inc. are churning out nearly 1 million frozen pizzas a day, every perfectly round crust makes it onto the line.
But flawed pies — the ones that are cracked, somehow missed a key ingredient, or don't quite make it into the coveted circle shape — won't move down the line to get doused with sauce.
So they end up on the floor. From there, they used to be tossed in the trash.
Instead of that, workers at Palermo's now toss the faulty crusts into a brown bin that ends up keeping something edible out of the landfill.
Every year, Palermo's is sending 900 tons of pizza crusts to a waste processor, where they are ground up and then distributed as animal feed for livestock.
Feeding animals instead of filling a landfill is among the achievements that made Palermo's the Distinguished Performer in the Environment category this year on the Deloitte Wisconsin 75 list of closely held companies.
Palermo's moved its headquarters to the Menomonee Valley in 2006, deciding to open in what had been a brownfield. Since then it has been working in concert with Menomonee Valley Partners in efforts to "green" the valley, said Laurie Fallucca, Palermo's chief creative officer. That includes support for Three Bridges Park and the Urban Ecology Center's valley campus, as well as work by company employees who help as part of Palermo's stewardship crew.
The Palermo's "stew crew" heads out, usually at midday on Fridays, to help keep the Hank Aaron State Trail tidy and to prevent invasive plants from overtaking native plantings. Palermo's is one of about a dozen companies or neighborhood groups with stewardship crews.
"It's neat to be able to get out and walk the trail in the middle of the day," said Jessica Rautmann, a member of the crew. "People riding bikes will stop and thank us for picking up garbage, so it's a really good feeling."
Sometimes Palermo's is paying extra for its green initiatives. The company has been using cardboard from recycled pulp, with the Sustainable Forestry Initiative logo on it, for both its pizza boxes and the "master cases" that deliver a dozen pizzas at a time to the supermarket.
In all, that's more than 15 million pounds of cardboard a year. Going with the greener packaging option costs the company more, Fallucca said, and Palermo's did marketing surveys to gauge whether consumers really cared about whether the Sustainable Forestry logo was on the package.
"A lot of companies are moving to that. All of that is a lot more expensive than the other packaging, but since we've moved in here we've always done that," Fallucca said.
"If we didn't have to do this, it would cost us less," she said. "We've definitely done research. We're always like, 'Do people really care?' The answer is: 'Yes, they do.'"
Other environmental work at the company included the installation of energy-saving occupancy-sensor lighting in the factory and converting to LED lighting, as well as recycling tons of cardboard, plastic and plastic drums.
The company also donates dozens of large plastic food barrels that are reused as rain barrels in neighborhood gardens in Milwaukee.
Though Palermo's has had labor challenges in recent years, the company has carved out a "slice" for stewardship in its pizza-shaped corporate mission statement.
The company employs 645 people and is finding more and more that new hires want their company to be a good citizen, she said.
"We have a large group of millennials working here. They grew up on 'reduce, reuse, recycle,' so for them it's been a big part of how they grew up," she said.

http://www.jsonline.com/business/palermos-finds-a-way-to-recycle-less-than-perfect-pizza-crusts-b99361422z1-277892451.html

Old Dogs Learn New Tricks

Hmmm........ charging for shopping bags changes behavior..... from The Washington Post -

The surprising reason why those 5 cent charges for plastic bags actually work

By Chris Mooney November 13, 2014

If you live in Washington, you know the drill: After bagging your groceries, the checkout machine asks you how many bags you used. And if you used plastic or disposable bags (rather than bags you brought on your own), you have to pay 5 cents per bag. The District passed a law requiring as much in 2009 -- a policy that states like New Jersey and New York are also considering, and that has been adopted around the world from Ireland and Scotland to South Africa.
Some localities have gone farther still -- California and Hawaii have effectively banned plastic bags outright -- but recent research suggests that charges or fees can also be effective (and have the added benefit of being less coercive). Moreover, it suggests that they work, at least in part, through a surprising mechanism. It's not just the relatively minor added cost, on its own, that impels people to stop using plastic bags and to instead bring their own bags with them to the store. Rather, it's the way this small change disrupts habitual behaviors and helps people draw a tighter linkage between the environmental awareness that they already possess, and actions in the world that actually advance that consciousness and their values.
Such is the upshot of a new study on plastic bag charges published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology by a team of Argentinian researchers, led by psychologist Adriana Jakovcevic of Buenos Aires University. Charging a relatively small amount for bags "produces changes in behavior," says Jakovcevic, "and these changes are not only because of the economic value of the incentive -- there are also some other processes at play that involve environmental concerns."
As the researchers note, Buenos Aires provides a perfect opportunity to study the effects of plastic bag charges because in 2012, the vast city's Environmental Protection Agency put in place bag restrictions that in turn led the leading supermarket chain association to institute a bag charge (the equivalent of 2.5 U.S. cents for bags of medium size and 4 cents for large bags) Oct. 9, 2012. For smaller supermarket associations, meanwhile, the same charge went into effect roughly two months later on Dec. 10, 2012. But for Gran Buenos Aires, the larger area that surrounds the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA), there was no change instituted at all.
This is, the researchers note, a "natural experiment": You have three groups of supermarket shoppers, two of which experienced new bag charges at different times, and one of which did not experience plastic bag charges at all. So the researchers conducted several field studies, observing shoppers leaving supermarkets in low-to-middle income areas in the three different regions at different times -- before any policies went into place, after the first change, and after the second change.
The result was that sure enough, the policies greatly increased the percentage of shoppers who were observed to be carrying their own bag. Here's a figure from their study, showing the effects for the first set of supermarkets to institute the charge (CABA1), the second set (CABA2), and for supermarkets in Gran Buenos Aires that never saw a bag charge instituted (GBA). Consumers were observed at four times: before any policies took place (Time 1), just after the first policy affected CABA1 (Time 2), four weeks after the policy change (Time 3), and then shortly after the second policy affected CABA2 (Time 4):

From Adriana Jakovcevic et al, "Charges for plastic bags: Motivational and behavioral effects," Journal of Environmental Psychology, 40 (2014), 372-380.

Clearly, the bag fees worked to dramatically increase the habit of people carrying their own bags. But importantly, in a second study that involved directly interviewing consumers who were observed to leave supermarkets carrying either plastic bags or their own bags, the researchers tried to get at why they had begun to adopt this new behavior, rather than paying the relatively small bag charges that had been instituted.
First, it turned out that a surprising number of people didn't like the bag charge policy, but started carrying their own bags anyway. According to Jakovcevic, it is likely that the small economic cost is the best way of explaining the behavior of these individuals. Past research, however, has called into question whether a purely economic effect like this is a lasting one, with sustained influence on behavior.
But there was another group of Argentinian shoppers -- those who supported the charge and carried their own bags for reasons of environmental concern. They cared much less about economics and much more about green motives. "The people who supported the policy most, they also say they do it for environmental reasons," says Jakovcevic, "and this is a stronger finding because it was an open question, the people could say anything that comes into their mind, and most of them say it was to protect the environment." For these shoppers, says Jakovcevic, the policy provided an opportunity to "rethink why they are using plastic bags or their own bags, and if they care about the environment, this will push them to change their behavior and change it longer over time."
Thus, the paper concludes that the bag charge might have worked "both by the activation of pre-existent pro-environmental attitudes and by a direct effect of the charge on behavior." In addition, it suggests that the new policy worked in another way as well -- by being disruptive of the status quo and changing people's default options and choices. "After the introduction of the plastic bag charge, customers had to explicitly approve or request to obtain a bag and pay for it," notes the study. They couldn't just get one without thinking about it.
So just maybe, a little 5 cent charge can indeed help the environment. You don't have to confiscate all the plastic bags in the world to save the environment (enraging anyone from industry to the Tea Party in the process). You can just give people the slightest push, and let them fix the problem themselves.

Chris Mooney reports on science and the environment.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/11/13/the-surprising-reason-why-those-5-cent-charges-for-plastic-bags-actually-work/?tid=hpModule_79c38dfc-8691-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394&hpid=z17

School Cafeteria Sustainability

    Step by step.......

Montgomery schools ending the era of the foam lunch tray

By Donna St. George, Published: May 18, 2014

Luis Pozo’s lunch tray was the size of a notebook, a thin cardboard rectangle he used to carry his noon meal through the cafeteria of Francis Scott Key Middle School in Silver Spring.
The eighth-grader loaded it with chocolate milk, potato rounds, a burger and a fruit cup. When he was done, he stacked the tray onto a growing pile.
“They can be recycled,” Luis said. “If we don’t recycle, we’re going to destroy our planet.”
It was a sign of times to come in Montgomery County, as Maryland’s largest school system leaves behind the long era of the polystyrene lunch tray for a more environmentally friendly replacement that will be used to serve up nearly 15 million school meals a year.
Starting in the fall, Montgomery expects to stock lunch lines from Clarksburg to Silver Spring with trays that are recyclable.
The change comes as schools across the region and nationwide aim to go greener and yet not overspend. Arlington replaced its foam trays with cardboard four years ago, and six urban school systems, including New York and Chicago, joined forces to leverage their buying power to get better prices on more environmentally friendly trays and healthier foods.
“We’re now seeing a revolution in cafeterias around the country ditching polystyrene and moving toward compostable trays,” said Mark Izeman, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. For Montgomery, he said, “this is a great move from an environmental and public health standpoint.”
For many districts, one of the biggest obstacles to scrapping polystyrene (which many refer to by the trademark “Styrofoam”) has been price.
“The conventional wisdom was they were too cheap to change,” says Eric Goldstein, chief executive officer for school support services in the New York City Department of Education. New York alone has 1.1 million students, many of them using foam trays “that go right into the landfill,” he said.
During the 2014-15 school year, Goldstein said New York and its five partner districts — the Urban School Food Alliance — will move from polystyrene to a compostable round plate with compartments.
“We’re very excited about this,” he said. “We’re already hearing from other districts that want to copy us.”
In Montgomery, Marla Caplon, director of food and nutrition services, said polystyrene goes back to the 1970s and that she’d received quotes as high as 28 cents each for cardboard trays, nearly 10 times more. But the gap began closing in recent years, she said, and the district has worked with a manufacturer to create a new product.
The new trays at Key Middle cost 4.3 cents each, which would mean a hike of about $140,000 a year. “It’s close enough to where we can stretch,” she said. The bid process for next year is underway.
At Key Middle, cardboard trays have been tried out since late April and have been welcomed. Key was a 2012 national green ribbon school, and it has a strong environmental focus.
In the din of a recent lunch hour, students filled trays with French bread pizza, baked cheese dippers, yogurt, burgers and chicken patty sandwiches.
A few students said the cardboard can be wobbly, so sometimes an apple or a milk jug will roll off the tray. Some spoke of environmental advantages.
“Even though it’s kind of a small step, I think maybe it can spread out to other schools and do something for our environment,” said Yemi Djayeola, 13.
The foam trays have been a passionate focus for students with the Young Activist Club at Piney Branch Elementary, who had campaigned and raised $10,000 to bring reusable plastic trays and a dishwasher to their school. Margot Bloch, 13, now in middle school and still a member of the club, called cardboard trays a major improvement.
“It’s a really good step to move from polystyrene to paper trays, but we would still like to see our dishwasher pilot happen,” Margot said.
Caplon said Montgomery’s polystyrene trays were not tossed into a landfill and did not go entirely to waste. They were incinerated, she said, in a process that produces energy. The cardboard trays will be recycled unless they are splattered with food; they are also compostable.
In the Washington region’s school systems, not everyone takes the same approach. In D.C. public schools, all disposable items must be reusable, recyclable, made of recycled materials or easily compostable. In Fairfax County, polystyrene lunch trays are taken to a plant in Lorton, where they are processed into electricity, said schools spokesman John Torre.
By contrast, Prince William County washes its reusable plastic trays, and Loudoun County relies on a foam tray that officials say is environmentally friendly. Prince George’s County’s lunch trays are not recyclable but are biodegradable, so they break down in a landfill, officials said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/montgomery-schools-ending-the-era-of-the-foam-lunch-tray/2014/05/18/3f083244-d537-11e3-8a78-8fe50322a72c_story.html?hpid=z4

US Army Leading Trash To Gas Efforts

From The New York Times -

August 17, 2013

Trash Into Gas, Efficiently? An Army Test May Tell

By PAUL TULLIS

THERE is an indisputable elegance to the idea of transforming garbage into fuel, of turning icky, smelly detritus into something valuable.

But big drawbacks have prevented the wholesale adoption of trash-to-gas technology in the United States: incineration is polluting, and the capital costs of new plants are enormous. Gasification systems can expend a tremendous amount of energy to produce a tiny amount of electricity. Up to this point, it hasn’t seemed worth the trouble.

Mike Hart thinks that he has solved those problems. In a former Air Force hangar outside Sacramento, his company, Sierra Energy, has spent the last several years testing a waste-to-energy system called the FastOx Pathfinder. The centerpiece, a waste gasifier that’s about the size of a shower stall, is essentially a modified blast furnace. A chemical reaction inside the gasifier heats any kind of trash — whether banana peels, used syringes, old iPods, even raw sewage — to extreme temperatures without combustion. The output includes hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which together are known as syngas, for synthetic gas, and  can be burned to generate electricity or made into ethanol or diesel fuel. The FastOx is now being prepared for delivery to Sierra Energy’s first customer: the United States Army.

Ethanol has long been promoted as an alternative fuel that increases energy independence, and federal law requires the use of greater amounts of it. But most ethanol in this country is produced from corn, and many people worry that the mandate is pushing up food prices. Ethanol produced from trash — or agricultural waste, as others are trying — would allay such concerns.

Ineos Bio, a Florida company, announced last month that it had produced ethanol from gasified wood waste, using a method that it expects to be commercially viable, and KiOR Inc. will make one million to two million gallons of diesel and gasoline this year from wood waste at its plant in Columbus, Miss., according to Michael McAdams, president of the Advanced Biofuels Association. Mr. Hart said Sierra Energy’s technology should be complementary with the Florida company’s; the FastOx turns all municipal waste, not just wood scraps, into a gas that Ineos Bio could then transform into ethanol.

The FastOx gasifier is the brainchild of two former engineers at Kaiser Steel, patented by the grandson of one of them and commercialized by Mr. Hart. “It’s a modular system that can be dropped into any area,” Mr. Hart said, “using waste where it’s produced to make electricity where it’s used.” Once it’s off the ground, he said, “garbage will be a commodity.”  

From concept to construction, the story of the FastOx is of one fortuitous accident after another. And while Sierra Energy has not yet proved to be a successful company — it will be a long while before your garbage is shoveled into a FastOx — its system has become the first waste-to-energy technology acquired by the Defense Department, which paid $3 million for it through an environmental technology program. (The California Energy Commission, which supports renewable energy development in the state, also gave Sierra $5 million, to cover the portion of Sierra’s costs that the Pentagon couldn’t.)

The military is looking for ways to reduce its oil consumption, and to make it easier to supply the front lines with the fuel it uses in all its vehicles and generators. “These days, the supply lines are in the battlefield,” said Sharon E. Burke, the assistant secretary of defense for operational efficiency plans and programs. “And we consume a lot of fuel, which makes us a big target.”

MIKE HART got into the energy business by way of a train. In 1993, he bought the Sierra Railroad, a small freight and tourism line in Northern California. During the California blackouts of 2001, he had an idea: “As the lights were going out, I realized every one of my locomotives creates 2.1 megawatts of electricity,” he said — enough to power many hundred homes. “It’s a rolling generator, and inexpensive.”

The train-as-power-generator idea never really left the station, but it got Mr. Hart thinking about alternative energy. Then, as part of a settlement after a fuel spill from one of his trains, he promised to convert his trains to nonpolluting biodiesel.

Biodiesel, however, proved hard to find, and Mr. Hart started looking for new ways to source it. In 2002, he was asked to judge an annual business plan competition called the Big Bang, at the University of California, Davis. That’s where he met Chris Kasten.

Mr. Kasten came to the competition with an idea to use a modified blast furnace to turn waste into fuel. His grandfather, Bruce Claflin, a retired chief industrial engineer at Kaiser Steel in Fontana, Calif., had given him the idea.

Kaiser used blast furnaces to make steel, and Mr. Claflin and a colleague, John Jasbinsek, were tasked with finding “a way to make the blast furnace more efficient and less polluting,” said Mr. Jasbinsek, who is now 86.

Like all blast furnaces, Kaiser’s emitted a flue gas out of the top. It occurred to Mr. Clafin and Mr. Jasbinsek that this gas might have value. The two came up with the idea of injecting oxygen, instead of the atmospheric air that steel makers had always used, to create the chemical reaction that heats the inside of the furnace. This would cut pollution while raising the energy content of the flue gas — in essence, giving the steel maker a second product. But pure oxygen made the system too hot, so they added steam. This gave the furnace a third product: hydrogen, which can be used to produce electricity in fuel cells.

After Kaiser decided to close the Fontana plant in 1983, workers were told to toss all demolition debris into the blast furnace. It was then that Mr. Jasbinsek and Mr. Claflin realized that the furnace could take garbage, too. “No matter what they put in, the furnace melted and gasified it,” Mr. Kasten said. This meant a potential fourth revenue stream — from taking municipal waste that would otherwise go to landfills.

When Kaiser wasn’t interested, Mr. Jasbinsek recalled, “we took the idea to other steel companies, too.” But “nobody gave a damn!” he said. “Now there are hardly any steel companies left in the U.S.”

Kaiser Steel went bankrupt in 1987, so the idea belonged to Mr. Jasbinsek and Mr. Claflin. They were nearing retirement, though, so Mr. Claflin told his grandson about it. (Mr. Claflin died before the idea could be commercialized.)

Mr. Kasten’s first fruitful step in developing his grandfather’s idea was meeting with Chris Soderquist, founder of Venture Lab. “When you run a technology incubator, you see a lot of crazy and half-baked ideas,” Mr. Soderquist said. But Mr. Kasten’s was different; Mr. Soderquist could see right away the value of multiple revenue streams.

Gasification is more efficient than incineration and eliminates toxic byproducts that come from burning trash. But it was especially appealing from a business point of view because it relied on a proven technology and used materials in wide abundance: blast furnaces being abandoned as the American steel industry was collapsing.

“What was compelling from the start,” Mr. Soderquist said, “was repurposing existing infrastructure into a generator of clean energy, with a second revenue stream from people paying you to take their waste.”

Mr. Soderquist helped Mr. Kasten prepare for the Big Bang competition. “For a grad school business plan competition, it was quite a plan he presented,” Mr. Soderquist said, and the judges agreed: Mr. Kasten, now 43, won a $2,000 prize.

Mr. Hart, 51, as a competition judge and a serial entrepreneur, was intrigued. He had started his first business at 12, operating a string of candy machines in high schools throughout what would become known as Silicon Valley. Next, while still living at home, he opened a sort of temp agency for teenagers doing odd jobs. There were a lot of other businesses from the late 1970s to 1993, and stints as a developer for Steve Jobs’s company Next, and for Apple. Mr. Hart also did some consulting until he realized that he would make more money buying whatever devalued company he had been hired to help, and turning it around himself. That was when he bought the Sierra Railroad.

Mr. Hart checked out Mr. Kasten’s gasifier and decided to buy the patents. Then he applied to a Pentagon program established to shepherd proven concepts to the production stage. Results at the Defense Department’s testing facility near Sacramento have been promising; after about four hours, one ton of waste creates enough gas to produce 1,580 kilowatt-hours of electricity, which would power an average home in the United States for about a month and a half — at one-third the emissions of coal — and 42 gallons of renewably sourced fuel. And that’s with a 12-ton-a-day gasifier; existing blast furnaces can handle as much as 2,000 tons a day.

Now that the Pentagon is convinced that the FastOx will work as advertised, the system should be providing electricity later this year at Fort Hunter Liggett, a  training base in Monterey County, Calif., and fuel for vehicles and generators in early 2014.

“California produces 30 million tons of garbage a year,” Mr. Hart said. “If it decided to turn its waste into clean fuels, at that rate it could meet all its oil consumption needs and still export more fuel than some OPEC members.” That is, if the FastOx can do what no other waste-to-energy gasification technology has done before: take any kind of trash, in any succession, without additional separation or preparation.

Sierra plans to license its technology and to sell systems to make electricity or ethanol from the syngas produced by the FastOx. The first will be small and cost about $3 million. But Mr. Hart said he expects to sell larger systems to municipalities and biofuel makers that will go for much more.

Any waste-to-energy plan, however, must overcome a major hurdle: the wild inconsistency of the waste stream. “Until you’ve demonstrated that you can handle it all, nobody’s interested,” Mr. Hart said. “I can understand it; they’ve heard similar promises before. We’ve got 150 cities, communities and businesses lined up to be Serial No. 2. Nobody wants to be No. 1.”

NOBODY, that is, except the Pentagon. The Defense Department is the country’s largest single consumer of energy, spending $15 billion a year just on fuel.

“The mission drives this,” said Ms. Burke, the assistant defense secretary, “and the mission is inherently energy-intensive.”

The FastOx could reduce the military’s reliance on oil overseas and the grid at home. “I have a $24 million-a-year electric bill at Camp Pendleton” in Southern California, said that Marine base’s commander, Brig. Gen. Vincent A. Coglianese. “If I can reduce that cost, that’s more money I can put into training Marines and sailors.”

Ms. Burke added, “Something for military operations has to be really rugged, deployable, simple to use — all of those things.”

Consultants and municipal sanitation officials who’ve looked at the FastOx say it meets those criteria. John Conger, the acting deputy under secretary of defense for installations and the environment, who oversees management of military bases in the United States, says Sierra Energy’s technology should provide energy security for the military in the event of a blackout and provide budget savings as well.

The military’s cost of petroleum, when the costs of transporting and guarding it are factored in, can run as high as $50 a gallon. Moreover, about half of United States casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2003 and 2007 were of servicemen and servicewomen moving and protecting fuel convoys, according to an Army report.

The appeal of Mr. Hart’s Pathfinder system is that it would produce fuel on site, eliminating the need to truck in fuel to dangerous military outposts. It would also reduce the need for trash-burning on bases, which creates pollution and noxious odors that have contributed to locals’ distaste for the American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.  As a result, United States forces in Afghanistan are working to close burn pits.

“Waste is a problem,” Ms. Burke said. “So if we could dispose of waste and create energy at the same time, that would be a silver bullet.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 25, 2013
An article last Sunday about a Sierra Energy gasifier system that the Army will use to turn trash into energy referred incorrectly to a product of the system. It is hydrogen and carbon monoxide, together known as “syngas,” for synthetic gas; the system does not produce “synthetic natural gas.” The article also referred imprecisely to Fort Hunter Liggett, a training base in Monterey County, Calif. At more than 165,000 acres, it is not a “small” base.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 1, 2013



http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/business/trash-into-gas-efficiently-an-army-test-may-tell.html

Home Bio-Digesters For Cooking Gas Production

   Among my primary interests is local energy production and local reuse of organic "waste" - the leftover by-products of our lives - food preparation and landscaping and gardening to name two large contributors to what we call our "garbage".
   Large centralized trash-to-energy plants are built on a model that imitates the status quo - central plant, collection system for raw material that is reliant on truck pick-up/delivery and a distribution method by wire, pipe, truck or rail. As a management system for both "trash" pick-up and energy production, centralized systems require a large amount of energy use, with resulting pollution, for moving things around.
    Centralized energy production also is an incredibly efficient system for the redistribution of wealth. Basically, the purchase of energy never stops - we all need it.Yet it is a product that vanishes at the moment we acquire it - yes we get something, lets say cooked food, that is essential to our well being, but in a few hours, or the next morning we will need more. 
    Imagine instead a system that does not require the purchase of energy because the energy is now locally produced by the user themselves utilizing what they have previously thrown away - things that previously they had to pay to have taken away! A variety of savings appear - both to the individual user and to the larger society. Most immediately for the user is a reduction or elimination of  paying for energy. Further, if energy production is brought to the house or building level, the means of energy production - solar collector or bio-gas generator for example - increase the value of the building they are attached to. Now instead of paying out for energy, money is saved and the value of most people's biggest asset - their house - increases.
    Following is a story from The Banaglore Mirror (India) about one family and their bio-digester -

SELF HELP IS BEST HELP

Nine gas cylinders a year rule does not apply to him

By Niranjan Kaggere

Posted On Monday, July 29, 2013

It’s a problem that has generated more than a whiff of unpleasantness. While most of us ranted and suffered as the garbage kept piling up right outside our doorstep, with contractors refusing to carry out door-to-door collection, a Banashankari resident did what a true civic-minded citizen would have done.

To begin with, he complained to the BBMP commissioner. But after three complaints went unheeded, Satish Bakshi decided not to waste any more time and do it himself. And he came up trumps! Bakshi’s efforts have paid off and today, he and his family savour the sweet smell of success as their indigenously made bio-gas plant lights the kitchen fire thrice a week, and also keeps their vegetable and fruit garden verdant and bountiful.

Bakshi says he watched the garbage assume menacing proportions with every passing day, and it finally struck him that he could extract gas out of it. With the internet as his teaching aid, and a plastic water tank, a useless tyre and other ordinary devices to fuel his dream, he embarked on the project.

SURFING FOR IDEAS

An independent tax consultant, Bakshi tapped the internet for ideas. “I read that the concept of converting garbage into gas had caught on in Pune and Kochi. Since I was setting up my bio-gas plant in a residential area, I needed to avoid foul smell and ensure disposal of residue (slurry) within minimum space and with limited funds. The methods suggested on  line were for a full-fledged bio-gas plant which I couldn’t have set up. But taking a leaf out of those ideas, I thought of experimenting with a plastic water drum installed on my roof,” Bakshi told Bangalore Mirror.

Bakshi’s next step was to put the ubiquitous black water drum to ingenious use. He converted it into a digester tank to generate pure methane and installed a pipeline leading to his kitchen.

Bakshi says he had a plastic tank on the terrace of his house with a capacity of 1,000 litres. “I bought another similar tank of 750-litre capacity. After making a small partition inside the bigger tank to hold the garbage, I inverted the smaller tank upon it, covering the partition. To facilitate the insertion of garbage, a medium-sized opening was made at the centre of the inverted tank. A small hole was drilled on the periphery of the same tank and was fitted with a valve and pipeline to supply the methane gas produced,” he explained.

NEIGHBOURS GOT NO WHIFF

With a gas digester in place, Bakshi poured the garbage into it in the first week of April. Though their experiment had been flagged off, the entire family was on tenterhooks, plagued by fears of the foul smell causing a nuisance to neighbours, especially because it would be nearly 45-50 days before the gas could be produced since the garbage needs time to completely decompose before it can produce methane. “However, no one in the neighbourhood will believe it if I tell them that I have set up a gas digester atop my house. You will not be able to smell any stench unless you peep into the tank.”

He says once the gas is collected inside the inverted tank, it begins to rise — an indicator that it’s ready to be tapped. To tap gas, you need to apply pressure on top of the tank so that it pushes the gas through the pipeline. Once again, Bakshi’s innovations came into play. “To exert pressure, I used a waste tyre of my car and a small boulder. It worked, and I managed to easily pump the gas through the pipe,” he explained.

Their moment of glory could not have been better timed. On June 5, World Environment Day, Bakshi says they could smell methane in the tank. “On that day, I just turned on the valve and held a lighted matchstick to test if it would work. The first sight of the dark blue flame sparked off celebrations in our home,” says Bakshi, adding that very evening they prepared their coffee with the gas from their plant. Though the quantity was very low at first, it improved with every passing day. “Now, we get about two to three hours of constant supply thrice a week, depending on the amount of garbage,” he says.

EVEN THE RESIDUE COUNTS

The solid garbage put into the tank turns into a slurry residue after the extraction of gas. Bakshi has found good use of the residue too. An outlet flushes out the liquid that finds its way into his terrace garden. “I have been growing pineapple, mango, some vegetables, spinach and banana on the rooftop,” he says.

Though they don’t have enough garbage to generate gas on a daily basis, Bakshi says homes that produce 5-6 kg garbage every day can cook using bio-gas and cut down on LPG usage. However, since the gas doesn’t come at great pressure, the burners need to have bigger holes.

Sharing their experiences, Bakshi and his wife, K Aravindavalli, caution against putting seeds of fruits like jackfruit or mango and chicken bones. “If the substance is hard, it will take several months to decompose. Anything that does not decompose will remain at the bottom and eat up space. So, irrespective of the waste, cut it into small pieces, give it a rinse with water and pour into the tank,” Aravindavalli says.

The entire set-up has cost the Bakshis less than Rs 20,000. “It could have been lesser, but since I was doing it on a trial-and-error method, I incurred some extra expenditure,” he says, adding that if BBMP or state government helps with subsidy, a bio-gas plant would be a viable alternative for every household.

A SECRET RECIPE

Thanks to his constant innovation and experimentation, Bakshi reveals he has concocted a mixture of certain organic products which he adds into the garbage tank for speedy fermentation. While he is keeping the recipe a closely guarded secret, he is willing to supply the powder at a nominal rate.

Meanwhile, garbage collection has resumed since last month, but the Bakshi household is no longer dependent on the system. Before starting the project in April, he had approached the BBMP, assuming he needed permission for the bio-gas plant. But he was told there was no such provision, and he could go ahead with it if it did not harm neighbours.

Copyright 2009 Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd. . All rights reserved.

http://www.bangaloremirror.com/index.aspx?page=article&sectid=1&contentid=20130729201307290117459819d2ec7b6#ftr2 

Recycling Is Worth Something

From San Francisco, ABC 7:

Scavengers cash in on illegal recycling around SF

Wednesday, February 09, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- San Francisco lawmakers opened the debate on Wednesday over who should get the city's lucrative recycling contract. Trash is big business, but it's also a source of income for some and it's not always legal.

It's the night before trash pickup in SoMa and the recycling bins are being raided. Rikki Ercoli sent us uReport video he filmed earlier this month, and it infuriates him to see people taking recyclables from his bin.

"Here in San Francisco, we love recycling. I know I do, but 100 percent of my efforts are going directly into the hands of people I'm not doing the work for. If it was going to the city, great, but it's not," he said.

In fact, fewer bottles and cans for the Recology Company to pickup and sell is said to ultimately cost consumers about $5 million a year. Much of that theft comes from organized rings, and Ercoli said trucks pick up the ripped off recyclables on his block.

"So it affects increases in your garbage bill in future years. If that material is stolen, the money is stolen with it," Robert Reed from Recology said.

Stealing recyclables is illegal and state and local penalties are as much as $2,000. The District Attorney's Office recently put out a newsletter calling it, "The issue of the month." For many neighborhoods, it's a quality of life issue with noise and litter. One strategy being discussed is reducing the cash incentive and Supervisor Scott Wiener is considering pushing for a change in state law to require recycling centers to offer vouchers for food and other products instead of money.

"We've seen in the areas around some recycling centers some issues around alcohol abuse and drug dealing," he said.

Ed Dunn runs a recycling center and is critical of the proposal to swap cash for food.

"The vast majority are very middle class people who might want to use the money for rent or to fill up their tank again," he said.

The voucher program would be a change in state law, so Wiener wants to make sure he has enough support before he moves forward with that.

uReport:
Take part in the news. Upload videos and photos to uReport.abc7news.com, or e-mail them to uReport@kgo-tv.com.

Recycled Granite Curbs?

I am curious about the comment at the end of response that the granite used for curbs is recycled. I will have to find out more about that.



A concrete suggestion for speeding up the installation of curbs

ROBERT THOMSON
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 27, 2011; T18

Dear Dr. Gridlock:

Having just watched the District install curbs on Massachusetts Avenue, I was wondering whether you know how much more it costs to install granite curbs rather than simply pour concrete ones.

My anecdotal observation is that granite curbs take longer to install than concrete, thus prolonging the traffic disruption. They have to cost more than concrete. (Have you priced kitchen countertops?) And after a few seasons, they are indistinguishable from concrete.

Carlos Bonilla, the District

DG: When you see streetscaping projects underway across the Washington region, you're often going to see granite curbing being used. Traffic engineers say granite curbing is likely to be much more expensive to buy and install than concrete. The granite must be brought in from a quarry and cut into the proper segments for the curb. Concrete can be delivered faster and is easier to work with. A road crew will probably move faster using it. But granite looks better, to the point of looking like a frill to some passersby. Many communities see it as a neighborhood enhancement. And it will last a lot longer than the concrete, which might have to be repaired after a few years as it suffers the effects of weather and starts to deteriorate. Granite is likely to retain its appearance and require less care until the time comes to replace it. Granite also can be recycled, transportation planners say. Concrete will be broken up and disposed of.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/25/AR2011012504442.html

In defense of Starbucks

By: Jacob Grier
Special to The Examiner
08/24/10 5:27 PM EDT

Starbucks takes a lot of heat from environmentalists for all the trash generated by the estimated 3 billion paper cups it goes through each year. Some of these are recycled, but most of them end up in landfills. What’s often unappreciated is that recycling paper cups is not easy. Separating them from other trash is just the beginning; the next step is finding paper mills willing to take them. An article in the Seattle Timesilluminates how challenging this can be:

The challenge is to convince mills that coffee cups are decent fodder for boxes and other products they make. So far, mill executives remain skeptical, saying coffee cups take longer, and therefore cost more, to process than do other recycled items like cardboard boxes.

"Any time you're asking an industry to change the way it does things — and they have multimillion-dollar pieces of machinery in their mills — they need it to be proved," said Jim Hanna, Starbucks' director of environmental impact. "Once we prove there's a value to our cups, it will create market pull."

"Any time you're asking an industry to change the way it does things — and they have multimillion-dollar pieces of machinery in their mills — they need it to be proved," said Jim Hanna, Starbucks' director of environmental impact. "Once we prove there's a value to our cups, it will create market pull."

The article notes that coffee cups end up in the mixed paper fiber stream, which most US mills can use at only about 10% of a fiber blend. Some Chinese mills can go higher, but they don’t like coffee cups either: The poly coating that prevents the cups from absorbing liquid also makes them harder to process. Starbucks faces an uphill battle trying to turn their garbage into a resource.

Regulations are an obstacle too. In 2006 Starbucks launched cups made with 10% recycled paper. It may not seem like much, but getting these to market required years of research and strict testing to meet FDA standards. From NPR:

George Matthews is executive VP at Mississippi River Corporation, one of Starbucks' suppliers. His pulp company had to prove to the FDA it was safe to drink from a recycled-content cup. That meant eliminating any potentially harmful substances from the high-grade office paper in recycled pulp.

MATTHEWS: The new regulations that the FDA had come out with required testing to be done to really infinitesimal limits. So we not only had to test to those limits but in many cases had to develop the test protocol itself, because it hadn't been done before.

So Starbucks deserves more credit for their work on recycling than many people realize. But is all this effort really worthwhile? Should we start carefully rinsing and sorting our latte cups each morning? While recycling feels good, it’s not always worth the effort and expense. Economist Michael Munger suggests we take price signals seriously:

There is a simple test for determining whether something is a resource (something valuable) or just garbage (something you want to dispose of at the lowest possible cost, including costs to the environment). If someone will pay you for the item, it's a resource. Or, if you can use the item to make something else people want, and do it at lower price or higher quality than you could without that item, then the item is also a resource. But if you have to pay someone to take the item away, or if other things made with that item cost more or have lower quality, then the item is garbage. [...]

"Recycle, regardless of cost!" doesn't solve a problem; it creates one. Laws requiring recycling harm me, the environment, and everyone else. We have to take prices into account, because prices are telling us that we can't save resources by wasting resources.

Obviously environmental externalities may complicate the picture, but he’s right that recycling without considering all the trade-offs is senselessly burdensome.

Fortunately we aren’t yet required by law to recycle our coffee cups, but it’s easy to imagine that happening. My co-blogger Jason Kuznicki notes at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen that Cleveland is installing RFID chips into residents recycling bins to track how often they’re taken to the curb; people who don’t recycle enough will be fined $100.

The costs that go into cleaning, sorting, processing, and finding markets for recycled coffee cups are real. Starbucks deserves credit for trying to overcome them, but if they fail that might be a sign that we shouldn’t waste resources recycling coffee cups. And if consumers want to be green they can take Munger’s advice and follow the price signals: Starbucks offers a 10 cent discount to customers who bring in their own reusable mug.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/Examiner-Opinion-Zone/In-defense-of-Starbucks-101418549.html