5 Jun 08 |
Photo courtesy of ♥Lauren♥ at Flickr.com.
Is your company looking for energetic, talented, motivated, hip, and intelligent workers? If so, that’s another reason to develop green policies and brag about them. Companies with green cred spend less on recruiting and have better retention rates. Perhaps this is because we’re seeing a cultural shift, where workers are becoming increasingly proud of working for companies that help the environment and ashamed of working for faceless corporations that plunder the natural world.
Which camp does your company belong to? If you want to reap the benefits of a green workplace, here are 10 starting points to green your office environment. And don’t forget - reduced turnover is only the tip of the iceberg:
Finally, if you’re looking for a green career, here are some job search tools that may come in handy:
GreenJobs.com
&
SustainableBusiness.com
Photo courtesy of temp13rec. at Flickr.com.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Minas Basin Pulp and Power Company Limited is a Canadian company started in 1937 to produce ground wood pulp, adding paperboard in 1946. Today they make 100 percent recycled paperboard products with power generated from their own hydro power plant. It’s estimated that their plant saves over 10 million cubic feet of landfill space a year. So what better recipient of a government program to produce diesel from recycled plastics?
On April 2, 2008 Premier Rodney MacDonald announced that the Canadian province would be investing up to 20 million in Minas Basin’s new green programs.
“We are committed to investing in innovative and resourceful companies that contribute to job growth, a green environment, and a strong economy for Nova Scotia,” said Premier MacDonald. “Minas Basin is taking a leadership role by helping to ensure environmental sustainability for this province.”
With this investment by the Government the company will be able to invest $27 million in capital investments.
“This assistance from the province allows us to enter the next phase of sustainable restructuring for Minas Basin,” said Scott Travers, Minas Basin president and chief operating officer. “It will create significant operational savings and increase the supply of renewable energy for Nova Scotia.
Details on the process that will be used at the Minas Basin facility were not readily available.
China began converting waste plastic into diesel in 1999, and since then have been importing large amounts of plastic waste that would otherwise go into landfills.
Popularity: 9% [?]
Previously we talked about Jatropha as a new biodiesel source here, here, and here. Now The Naples Daily News reports that My Dream Fuel LLC is has been cultivating a Jatropha SW Florida. Jatropha produces four times the fuel per acre than soy and ten times more than corn. Paul Dalton, a former attorney owns the company and says demand is great:
“There are about 100 buyers for every gallon you produce,” he said.
Dalton already has close to a million plants in the ground and hopes to plant another million before June and is in the process of opening a 15,000 square foot seed crushing and plant cloning center in Ft Myers. The seeds of the of the plant are crushed in order to make biodiesel.
My Dream Fuel is one of the first companies to bring large scale planting to the US of Jatropha, a plant native to Mexico and South America. The company expects to be able to turn out plants at the rate of one million per month
“We studied our mother trees that we use to clone for over six years, and we have over 500 of them. So we have the largest bank of mother trees in the world, of any company,”
“We know of a couple of groups from New York and from Spain that want to plant in Texas and Brazil. So in the next couple of weeks, we may exhaust our current supply,” Dalton said.
Dave Wolfley, the owner of Sunshine Biofuels is working towards establishing a fuel plant. He has been campaigning to convince local farmers to take a chance on the new fuel crop and has a few ready to try it.
Jatropha evangelist are targeting citrus groves in Florida with diseased trees and cattle ranchers looking to branch out. With the reported ability of this plant to grow in nearly any environment that is a lot of land in a lot of the country that these plants could be grown on.
Popularity: 11% [?]
As many of you already know, the amount of consumer electronics being purchased is growing astronomically these days, and one writer has written a blog about a few “tech habits” that get him riled up — and we love it!
From Good Clean Tech, Erik Rhey made a list of several things people do that annoy him, and it’s titled “Everyday Ecotech: Wasteful Tech Habits that Chap My Hide”.
He seems to mean business, too:
My goal here is not just to wax cantankerous, but to tell you straight out: Don’t do any of these things.
What makes his list of annoying habits? Printing everything, throwing out iPods and cell phones as soon as the new generations hit the market, leaving the computer on 24/7, tossing out perfectly usable things instead of donating them and buying your kids “cheap electronic crap.”
He’s got a point, and hey, sometimes you have to get fired up about things like this! And don’t worry, Erik, it’s doubtful your eyebrows could ever get as bushy as Andy Rooney’s. (I mean really, that just doesn’t seem physically possible!)
Popularity: 8% [?]
Photo courtesy of laure_et_carlos at Flickr.com.
Green wine sounds about as appealing as green eggs and ham (which, coincidentally, IHOP is currently offering), but a group of wine producers in the Languedoc region of France has come up with an unusual and environmentally friendly way to ship their product.
Soon, a fleet of ships will be at work carrying French wine to Dublin and crushed glass back for recycling. For each bottle, 4.9 ounces of carbon emissions will be prevented (at 60,000 bottles per trip, that’s more than 18,000 pounds or more than 9 short tons). To put it another way, each of these 4 day sailing trips will reduce emissions of CO2 equivalent to what an average car produces in a year. Now that’s something worth toasting to with a tall glass of wine!
Photo courtesy of RR de Facto at Flickr.com.
Popularity: 7% [?]
2 Apr 08 |
It’s that time of year again - HGTV is giving away a custom built home with amazing features. This year, the dream home embraces a number of green technologies.
These features include:
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On the HGTV website, there’s an interactive map of the green home, video tours, and links to more information about energy and water saving innovations. Oh, and you can also enter to win the home. Good luck!
Popularity: 9% [?]
In Oakland, California there exists a non-profit organization with an emphasis on collaboration between art, industry and community. The Crucible serves as a studio for sculpture and a foundry and metal fabrication shop teaching classes in art…both the gallery and industrial kind. It’s a very special educational facility that, for the first time in my life, makes me wish that I lived in Oakland.
Since May 2006, the 56,000 square foot studio has been getting a huge part of it’s electricity from a 34-kw photovoltaic system. Energy not used by the Crucible is sold back to the grid through net metering.
“As a community organization, a cornerstone of our mission is to be environmentally sustainable in supporting the arts. As a nonprofit organization, our high energy needs also motivated us to look into ways to alleviate that cost. Undertaking a solar energy project fit right in with both of these goals.”
Michael Sturtz,
Executive Director of The Crucible
The system puts out roughly 63,000 kwhr per year, saving $27,700 from May of 2006 through October 2007…roughly $2,000 dollars a month during the summer.
The total solar project cost of approximately $260,000 was covered by individual donations from The Crucible’s supporters, financing of $106,000 by SafeBidco, and a one-time $119,525 rebate through PG-E’s Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP).
But The Crucibles environmental interest doesn’t end with photovoltaic. They’ve been working on a subject near and dear to my heart…a biodiesel motorcycle.
I’ve been wanting a diesel, and by extension, a biodiesel motorcycle for years now. Royal Enfield in India actually had a production diesel motorcycles that sometimes make it across the pond, and if I can ever get my hands on one, you can bet I’ll jump at the chance.
But we’re not talking about a little around town bike with an industrial water pump motor shoved into the frame. The Crucible’s Die Moto set the diesel motorcycle land speed record of 130MPH running on B100 biodiesel.
The motorcycle was built using a BMW motorcycle frame and a BMW V6 diesel car motor, not normally available in the US.
The team is hoping to break their own record with another run at Bonneville in the future, expecting to get it up to 160 mph. Although Die Moto is designed to break records, the real story is that environmental responsibility and alternative technology can result in a high performance motor vehicle.
Popularity: 7% [?]
31 Mar 08 |
Growing up in the rodeo buckle of the Bible belt, beer manufacturers were often viewed as cartoon villains rather than responsible members of the business community. But it’s been a few weeks since we had a post about Hawaii making all the rest of the US look like cavemen when it comes to alternative energy, so we go back over to paradise where Hoku Scientific has just signed a deal with Paradise Beverages to install 350kw worth of photovoltaic panels at three of the company’s facilities, which are expected to produce more than 525,000 kilowatt-hours per year.
“The benefits of our PV power system installations on our Kailua-Kona and Lihue facilities were immediate. This made our decision for an installation on our Oahu facility with Hoku Solar an easy one,” said Gordon Usui, Chief Financial Officer for Paradise Beverages.
More and more business seem to be figuring out that all that unused roof space can be making power, which means making money rather than it just going to waste. Unfortunately, it seems that the smart companies seem to be mostly in Hawaii. Wish I could afford to live there.
Mahalo
Popularity: 5% [?]
22 Mar 08 |
If you have a video camera, an exhibitionist streak, and a desire the change the world, Whole Foods wants you! The natural and organic food superstore is hunting for 6 members of the “Earth Generation” (anyone born between 1991 and 1995) to voice their opinions about where the future lies for sustainable consumption.
Good luck!
Popularity: 7% [?]
Photo courtesy of Major-General Clanger at Flickr.com.
(Editor’s note: I didn’t even know what the hell at CRO was! And then I find out that they even have their very own trade magazine.)
The 2008 list of the 100 Best Corporate Citizens was just published by CRO Magazine (a magazine for Corporate Responsibility Officers). The list includes a wide variety of companies, from Intel to SPX Corporation, that have recognized the importance of environmental concerns in their day-to-day operations. According to CRO Magazine, the categories measured include:
Climate Change, Employee Relations, Environment, Financial, Governance, Human Rights, Lobbying and Philanthropy. In so doing, we added, renamed, combined or dropped other categories, and gave Climate Change and other issues related to Environment the greatest weight because of their acute importance.
It’s great to see Climate Change and Environmentalism recognized for their importance!
Popularity: 7% [?]