From Green Right Now Reports

AT&T said today it will have a tree planted in honor of each customer who opts in to paperless billing – up to 1 million trees in 2010. The program, which will be operated in conjunction with the Arbor Day Foundation, is open to customers of  AT&T residential home phone, AT&T U-verse TV, broadband and wireless customers nationwide.

According to PayItGreen, if a million customers switch to paperless billing, this would help to save 400,000 pounds of paper, avoid 6 million pounds of greenhouse gases, and prevent 4 million gallons of wastewater from discharging into lakes, streams, and rivers in a year. And, according to the EPA, planting 1 million trees can absorb more than 1 million tons of carbon dioxide, can provide oxygen for up to 4 million people to breathe in a day and can forest more than 1,400 acres of land.

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From Green Right Now Reports

Assessments of which nations are the world’s biggest polluters can be deceiving. A study by the Carnegie Institution for Science has determined that over a third of carbon dioxide emissions stemming from the consumption of goods and services in developed countries are actually released outside their borders.

For instance, if Americans buy goods produced in China, they are effectively “outsourcing” the carbon footprint while not technically doing the polluting on home soil.

According to the study, about 2.5 tons of carbon per person are consumed in the U.S. but produced elsewhere. Europeans, on average, top four tons per person.

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From Green Right Now Reports

The U.S. Green Concrete Council has just released the industry’s first-ever comprehensive resource on concrete and sustainability. “The Sustainable Concrete Guide—Strategies and Examples” is a guide to strategies for the best use of concrete in high-performance, long-lasting, green buildings.

The guide includes case studies, technical data and references, and numerous practices that can be implemented immediately, the Council said. In addition to general overview of basic,the drills down to such topics as carbon footprints, thermal transmission, stormwater management, and how to reduce, reuse and recycle.

The last part of the guide profiles 12 projects throughout the U.S., all of which utilize sustainable concrete practices and techniques.  The profiles include three specific types of structures: parking structures and parking lots; single-family and multi-family residential structures; and commercial, institutional, and industrial structures.

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From Green Right Now Reports

Garbage Dreams is the paradoxical title of an upcoming PBS documentary on Egypt’s Zaballeen, or in English, ‘garbage people’. The Zaballeen collect the trash in Cairo. They are born into the job and live on the city’s outskirts, within the large garbage village composed of Cairo’s waste.

Egypt's Zaballeen are born into the garbage business

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By Melissa Segrest
Green Right Now

This is an interesting time to be Ric O’Barry.

On one hand, the marine mammal activist is counting down the hours until Sunday, when he may win an Oscar for his role in the documentary The Cove – a compelling and gruesome expose about the secret slaughter of dolphins in Japan.

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By Harriet Blake
Green Right Now

In Durham, N.C., homes will get an energy retrofit. In Salt Lake City, they’ll develop a plan to reduce auto pollution. In Sacramento, they’ll be improving the landscape around a river to reduce pollution runoff. And in Denver, they’ll be looking at a little bit of all that — energy efficiency for homes and businesses, bike sharing and renewable energy.

It’s all being made possible by $10 million from the EPA’s Climate Showcase Community Grants, set up to help communities develop their plans to reduce greenhouse gases and lighten their carbon footprint.

Durham, N.C.

Retrofiting by insulating pipes in Durham, N.C.

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By Harriet Blake
Green Right Now

Vancouver scored highly as an Olympic venue despite weather concerns. Equally impressive, the Winter Games also scored well in terms of their energy efficiency.

According to Pulse Energy’s Venue Energy Tracker, the software technology that measured the 17 days of athletic contests, the games were the most energy efficient Olympics ever.

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Van Jones founded Green for All, an organization promoting green-collar jobs.

From Green Right Now

One of Barack Obama’s best-regarded appointments by environmentalists, Van Jones, was forced to resign as “green czar” last September amid conservative backlash that labeled him a radical. This Friday he will be celebrated as pioneering hero in environmental and civil rights and honored with an NAACP Image Award.

As author of The Green Collar Economy, published in the fall of 2008, Jones was a leading promoter of the idea that the American economy could be revived with the introduction of more green jobs. Such jobs would help the environment and provide work for many, he argued.

Under President Obama, Jones briefly was head of the Council on Environmental Quality, which helped coordinate different government agencies in an effort to create millions of green jobs. After what many consider a smear campaign to remove him from office — he was tagged a communist and was linked to a Sept. 11 conspiracy group, among other accusations —  Jones said the criticism was unwarranted and based on false information.

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By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Concerned about all those dangerous household chemicals you keep hearing about: BPA, phthalates and pesticides with cryptic names like 2,4-Dioxane?

We’ve found just the book for you.

Slow Death By Rubber Duck:The Secret Danger of Everyday Things (Counterpoint, 2009. U.S. $25) will take you on a chilling, but informative ride through our chemically enhanced consumer product world. Starting with your kid’s Rubber Duck, which contains five chemicals of concern, imagine what the rest of the household contains.

Frankly, I worried that this cleverly titled book about the dangerous additives lurking in our house dust, furniture, hand soaps and Teflon pans would be just that, an inspired title followed by surface information. But I was quickly relieved of that concern. Co-authors Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie are not just scratching the stick-resistant surface here.

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By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Having just read and reviewed Slow Death By Rubber Duck, I had a few questions for co-author Rick Smith, head of Environmental Defence Canada.

And since his book was costing me — some $120 for a new set of stainless steel cookware to replace my stick-free, Teflon-coated set — I thought he owed me some answers.

We chatted earlier this week, while he took advantage of Family Day in Canada, visiting a playground with his young boys, a strong impetus behind his work to educate the public about harmful environmental and household toxic chemicals. The younger generation, he worried, has an even higher ‘body burden’ of chemicals than we adults grew up with.

In the book, he and co-author Bruce Lourie, an environmental consultant, test common toxics to find out how they get from consumer goods and food into our bodies. In fact, they ingest or expose themselves to these chemicals to chart the effects.

The basic idea: Since many of these toxic ingredients have been shown in lab experiments to act as endocrine disruptors and cancer triggers figuring out how to limit or reduce our exposure could have positive health effects, for kids and adults.

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Just another Winter day in Kaufman County, Texas. Photo: Green Right Now

By Bill Sullivan

If the Winter Games don’t work out in Vancouver this year, the International Olympic Committee can always consider a future move to…Dallas?

Blame it on global warming or just bad luck, but the 2010 Games will get off to a queasy start for hosts and athletes alike. While the East Coast is buried in white stuff, and normally mild North Texas enjoyed a day-long snow on Thursday (ending with a record 11.2 inches recorded at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport), folks in British Columbia were scrambling to make at least one Olympic venue look like a winter wonderland – with mixed success.

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By Harriet Blake

Snowboarding, skiing and skating will be front and center when the 2010 Winter Olympics open in Vancouver this week. But not far behind is another S-word: Sustainability. Sustainability has generated a lot of momentum, so much so that the Olympic website devotes numerous links to various aspects of the subject.

There we find out that hydrogen-fueled buses will transport people at some of the venues, several of the buildings are LEED-certified and many of the medals are made from recycled electronics. And, energy provider British Columbia Hydro has teamed with a local software company, Pulse Energy, to monitor energy usage at the games.

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