By John DeFore

Everyone knows by now that habitually buying bottled water introduces a staggering amount of wasted plastic into the world. Even if you conscientiously recycle every bottle, that recycling process uses energy and would be unnecessary if you used a non-disposable drinking vessel instead.

For those who have ditched the bottled water habit but don’t trust what comes from their tap, water filters are an appealing solution. Filter-makers have seized upon environmental concerns, and Brita even teamed with Nalgene for an ad campaign disguised as a green awareness effort that asks readers to “take the pledge” to buy filters and reusable bottles.

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By Barbara Kessler

The news on bisphenol A or BPA just doesn’t get better. The chemical, used to make plastic baby bottles and food can liners, could deliver a double-whammy to women, paving the way for breast cancer, and then boomeranging back to interfere with the treatment for cancer recovery.

A study by University of Cincinnati scientists released this week found that BPA exposure may reduce the effectiveness of chemotherapy treatments for breast cancer patients.

Researchers found that this man-made chemical - already implicated as a potential trigger in breast cancer because it is structurally similar to the estrogenic DES - induced a group of proteins in the body to protect breast cancer cells from the chemotherapy.

Resistance to chemotherapy is already a “major problem for cancer patients, especially those with advanced metastatic disease,” said UC’s Nira Ben-Jonathan, a professor of cell biology who’s been studying BPA for more than a decade.

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By Catherine Colbert

Aging wind turbines - some installed more than 20 years ago - are getting a second wind. Towering gracefully among California wind farms, an estimated 10,000 machines are slated to be replaced by more modern and much larger wind turbines.

Instead of laying these wind soldiers to rest, a Massachusetts company is focused on breathing new life into them through what it has coined “The Ultimate Recycling Project.”

Aeronautica Windpower, as part of its business as a wind turbine and tower manufacturer, harvests the better machines from the field and refurbishes them to give them a second life. The firm likens the modern windmills to aircraft, as they’re stripped down to their frames and rebuilt with newer technologies and reporting capabilities to fly for another 20 years.

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By John DeFore

While automakers and garage-based inventors work on replacing the car as we know it, a scientist at Temple University claims to have found a way of squeezing more out of the ones we already own with a process tongue-twistingly dubbed electrorheology.

A team led by professor Rongjia Tao implemented the principle for a small device that creates a strong electric field to make auto fuel less viscous; that allows much smaller fuel droplets to be injected into the engine for combustion. As the authors explain in the introduction to their paper: “Because combustion starts at the interface between fuel and air and most harmful emissions are coming from incomplete burning, reducing the size of fuel droplets would increase the total surface area to start burning, leading to a cleaner and more efficient engine.”

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By Barbara Kessler

Time to dust off that tax-free commuter benefit. It’s been getting musty under the pile of better-known HR benefits — those health care and childcare programs — for the last two decades.

Only about half of employers — and likely a lower percentage of employees — even know that the benefit exists, according to a survey released Tuesday by the TransitCenter, Inc., a nonprofit that promotes mass transit. And yet, the commuter benefit could be provide a big boost to workers struggling with high gas prices and employers who report that commuting costs are beginning to affect worker retention.

The benefit works just like those other payroll set-asides, allowing employees to pull money out of their pre-tax pay for commuting expenses. Under the IRS rules, employees offered the benefit can set aside up to $115 per month to pay for transit and vanpool commuting costs, and up to $220 for commuter parking.

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By John DeFore

Barring a mass return to quill-and-ink pot technology, one way to green the world’s desk drawers is to pump up the percentage of recycled materials in office supplies. Pentel is working that angle aggressively with a Recycology line that touches on most of the popular ways to manually put words and pictures on paper: Its pencils, gel and fiber-tipped pens, and permanent markers are all made with a high percentage of recycled plastic.

None of the items contains less than 50% recycled material in its body (ink and lead, of course, don’t count in that percentage); some are well over that threshold, like a “Cool Lines” pencil that is 75% recycled and 67% post-consumer waste.

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By Barbara Kessler

Polar bears, penguins, pandas have become symbols of the fight to save wild places around the world and push back global warming.

According to conservationists meeting in Barcelona this week, they have a host of company. A broad assessment of the world’s mammals reveals an “extinction crisis” with nearly one-quarter of known mammal species at risk of disappearing forever due to habitat loss, pollution, global warming, over-hunting and food chain erosion.

The study, unveiled at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congress, shows that 1,141 (and possibly nearly 2,000) of the world’s 5,487 mammals are known to be threatened with extinction.

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By Shermakaye Bass

Those who’ve tried The Blade say it works - though, so far, we’ve not met any of them. The proported fuel-conserving, emissions cleansing attachment for autos hit the market late last year amid kudos and celebrity endorsements (Sheryl Crow, Laura Dern and Ben Harper say it’s da bomb).

The simple tail-pipe attachment/filter is said to cut auto emissions by 57 percent, and greenhouse gases by six to 34 percent, depending on the model of your car. That makes the $200 price tag reasonable enough for the carbon-conscious.

But the fact that it can increase fuel economy up to five miles per gallon makes it attractive to just about every Joe and Jane Sixpack in the country.

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By Tom Kessler

The battlefield cry “charge” is taking on new meanings. Portable fuel cell systems from SFC Smart Fuel Cell AG won first and third prizes in the U.S. Defense Department’s inaugural Wearable Power Competition, the DOD announced.

Nearly 170 designs competed in the event, which was established by Department of Defense Research and Engineering to “encourage innovation in energy systems carried by personnel during field missions.” The systems, attached to a military vest, were required to provide 20 watts of average electric power, have peak-power capability up to 200 watts and weigh no more than 8.8 pounds.

The M-25 Portable Fuel Cell from DuPont and SFC, won the $1 million first prize. The AMI team from Ann Arbor, MI, won the $500,000 second place prize. SFC and partner Capitol Connections LLC of Middleburg, Va., took third place and $250,000 for their JENNY fuel cell.

These portable devices are used to power a range of field equipment that includes GPS navigation systems, communications equipment, computers and robots. The devices weigh up to 80 percent less than conventional power sources.

The winners were announced Oct. 4 at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, Calif.

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By John DeFore

Honda is shifting gears in its strategy for hybrid cars. Judging from announcements at last week’s Paris Motor Show, the automaker has decided that the hybrids most likely to succeed in the marketplace are models with a standalone hybrid identity — like Toyota’s Prius, which is not available with a conventional gas engine — rather than those, like Honda’s Civic, that are already familiar in all-gasoline incarnations.

So while Chrysler’s new plan will speed up electric vehicle roll-out by building on existing cars, Honda will now focus on “dedicated” hybrid models like the new Insight Hybrid, which it expects to have in showrooms early next year. (Perhaps confusingly, this new car recycles the name of a previous Honda vehicle, a gas/electric hybrid that was discontinued a couple of years ago due to poor sales.)

The five-passenger car will be followed by two other dedicated hybrids — within the next four years, Honda intends to introduce both a compact similar to its Fit and a sports car resembling the CR-Z. The Insight’s fuel efficiency figures are not yet public, pending full EPA review, but company spokespeople have said its performance should be comparable to the existing Civic Hybrid, which gets a combined 42 mpg.

Though no price has yet been mentioned, in a press release the company boasts it will offer the Insight at “a price significantly below hybrids available today” and therefore expects to sell 200,000 cars a year, with half that in North America.

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By Harriet Blake

Catalog mailings are nearing full swing now, with mailboxes being deluged by hefty full-color enticements to get that Christmas shopping done by phone.

Obviously, online shopping is more prudent, ecologically speaking. However, at the recent Business of Green Media Conference in Boston, the printing industry showed signs of taking green issues seriously.

Consumers can “take solace” in the fact that many catalogs are recycled and others are certified as coming from sustainable forests, said Beth Reardon, a corporate accounts manager with Appleton Coated, one of more than 30 companies represented at the conference’s Expo.

Appleton Coated, a paper company that sells under the Utopia brand, uses virgin fiber but does not use any fiber bleaching, said Reardon. None of their pulp comes from old-growth timber or rainforests. It’s all 100 percent certified by one or all of the following: the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) or the Canadian Standards Association (CSA).

These certification groups were created as a result of concern for the planet’s forests. They review companies’ practices to assure that they do not use old growth or rainforest timber, or engage in disreputable forestry practices that can lead to habitat loss or the displacement of human residents.

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By John DeFore

The first-ever RGGI auction, which we reported on last week, has concluded, and now begins the long process of seeing how it works.

Critics are skeptical, saying the emissions caps were set too high and therefore led to allowance prices that were too low. GOOD Blog contributor Ben Jervey calls it a “doomed-to-failure program (or, at least, doomed-to-very modest success)” while allowing that it “will prove invaluable, mostly for the lessons learned from what goes wrong.”

But RGGI members, who never claimed they’d fix the world immediately, are taking a brighter view: The six states involved in the first round raised $38.5 million from the auction, money RGGI says they’ll invest in “energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies, and programs to benefit energy consumers.” That’s something by itself, even if it takes time for the cap-and-trade plan to have much impact on emissions.

The going rate for a single allowance, once the gavel fell, came to $3.07 per ton of emissions. All twelve million-plus of the allowances put up for sale were sold, not just to power-plant operators but also to financial and environmental organizations.

Fifty-nine buyers took part in the auction, presenting a demand (close to 52 million allowances) that was four times as much as the available supply. Maryland, putting the most allowances up for sale, took home a hefty $16.4 million. According to Deputy Director of Communications Dawn Stolzfus, the state passed a law this year to determine exactly how that money will be spent (even if the categories are broad) — allocating, for instance, 10.5% to “clean energy & climate change programs, outreach & education.”

The next RGGI auction is December 17, and they’ll be held on a quarterly basis for the next three years.

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