As long as the world is busy refining crude oil for gasoline and other petroleum products, it may as well try to maximize the benefits from the process.

That’s the aim of “cogeneration” plants, such as the newest one put into action by  ExxonMobil in Antwerp, Belgium. The refinery there will capture heat from the refining process to generate electricity, “cogenerating” or making dual use of the refining process, according to a press release.

ExxonMobil estimates that the practice will generate 125 megawatts of power and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 200,000 tons per year, the equivalent of removing about 90,000 cars from Europe’s roads.

The company also notes that the Antwerp facility will be “significantly more efficient than traditional methods of producing steam and power separately”. The result is lower operation costs for the company, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions for the everyone.

New cogeneration facilities are under construction in Singapore and China, which should increase ExxonMobil’s cogeneration capacity to more than 5,000 megawatts in the next three years, the press release stated.

Marin County dairy farmer Albert Straus started moving toward a “slower” way of doing business back in 1994, when his family-owned farm, Straus Family Creamery, became the only organic dairy west of the Mississippi.

Straus, whose organic ice cream will be scooped out at the Ice Cream Pavilion at Slow Food Nation, has been producing organic milk, yogurt, butter and ice cream under the family name ever since. Straus grew up on his father’s conventional dairy farm in Marshall, California, a town so small it had a one-room schoolhouse, on the shores of Tomales Bay in western Marin County, 60 miles north of San Francisco. He joined the farm as a partner in 1977 and made the risky, but prescient decision to transition the operation from conventional to organic in the early 1990s.

“Someone approached me about doing organic milk for ice cream,” Straus said in an interview in a makeshift conference room above his dairy. “I had no clue what it was. It took me three-and-a-half years to figure out what “organic” meant. No one else was doing it. There was one small co-op in Wisconsin, Organic Valley, but that was it.”

As he transitioned his farm, Straus found out what organic meant – not just by definition, but also in terms of how he had to change his approach to farming. To be a California Certified Organic dairy, Straus said, the land has to be free of herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertizliers for at least three years. The cows have to go through at least a year transition with no hormones, no antibiotics and all-organic feeds.

Translated to day-to-day dairy farming, Straus said it meant, “Learning how to treat the animals without antibiotics and hormones, what homeopathy was, how to make it workable, where to find and produce organic feeds, how to market our products, build a plant, and get financing. We transitioned the whole farm. Organic feeds cost twice as much as conventional feeds, so it was a very expensive and risky time,” he said. “The Small Business Adminstration wouldn’t give me money without taking all my parents’ land and my sister’s house as collateral, so I got going by taking loans from family members and friends, and leasing a lot of equipment.”

But Straus also quickly learned what organic meant for his business. In terms of economics, he said, “We’ve grown double digits every year for last 14 years,” he said.

Straus doesn’t believe growth is the only way to profitability. In fact, he’s the perfect poster boy for the Slow Food mantra that bigger isn’t necessarily better. “This has been my challenge,” he said. “In order to keep a viable farm, you need to have an operation that is profitable and sustainable with the resources you have and not be forced to get bigger and bigger.”

Straus said with about 300 milking cows on 660 acres, his creamery is considered a small, regional processor, and he likes that just fine. “We’d like to keep most of our products local, to keep a quality and a freshness for consumers who know where their milk comes from, how it’s processed, what our philosophy is, and who want to support that. We don’t want to go cross-country unless we have to,” he said.

His operation employs about 70 people in the creamery and six in the dairy. In a walk through the small creamery, we saw the stainless-steel vats where yogurt is made and set, and how it’s piped over to the brand-new yogurt-filling machine, plopped into containers, moved on a conveyor belt to the capper, then boxed by workers and sent to the walk-in or put on delivery trucks.

We got to peer into the 1950s-style butter churn, which makes award-winning butter so yellow it was once disqualified from a national butter contest because the judges were convinced it was artificially colored. (It isn’t.) VP of Sales and Marketing Rich Martin said Straus butter is the only butter Slow Food Nation founder and chef Alice Waters uses in her famous Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, because of its high percentage of butterfat to moisture.

We saw the milk-bottle capper and the ice-cream makers. (Had we been there on a Thursday, we could have tasted fresh ice cream right out of the machine, but since it was Monday, we had to settle for taking part in sampling the first-ever Straus frozen yogurt, a product in development for the gourmet frozen yogurt shop market.)

Straus said his creamery is developing a sustainability model around reusable packaging, energy independence, and land stewardship. The dairy products are packaged on site, put on trucks, and sold mainly on the West Coast. Much of Straus Family Creamery’s milk is packaged in bottles made of 40 to 50 percent recycled glass, Straus said. Consumers pay a bottle deposit, which is returned when they bring them back to store. “The same trucks that deliver pick up the empties and bring them back, where we wash them, sanitize them and reuse them. We get six to eight uses out of a bottle,” Straus said.

Cows supply a constant source of methane gas, which comes in handy if you have the equipment to trap it and use it to power your farm. Straus does.

“In our methane digester, we digest and capture the waste from the cows, and produce 90% of electricity and about half of our hot water needs,” Straus said. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration (NOAA), methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more damaging to the atmosphere than C02, so what Straus said is true: “We’re doing our part by keeping it from going into the atmosphere.” Not to mention the fact that less methane means fewer odors, and fewer flies – a win-win-win for humans, cows, and planet.

Keeping the land in farming is a cornerstone of Straus’ sustainability model, and a concept that his mother, Ellen Straus, championed. In the 1970s, when the future of the region was being threatened by developers eyeing the coastal access and million-dollar views, Ellen Straus co-founded the Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT), a unique alliance between Marin ranchers and environmentalists. Through restrictive zoning, land use regulations, active support for ranching by County government, and MALT’s agricultural conservation easement program, MALT has bought the development rights to 47 ranches and dairies covering more than 32,000 acres — about a quarter of privately-owned farmland in the county – which keeps the land in agriculture in perpetuity.

“It’s something that’s been lost around the globe,” Straus said of family farmland. “We’re losing five percent of our family farms every year. This is what Slow Food is trying to promote: global heritage of farming and food that reflects those values.”

Straus said he thinks his business has been successful in showing that organic dairy farming can be profitable and sustainable.

“Organic farming is the wave of the future. For many years I was the only organic dairy in Marin County. In the last couple years we now have about a quarter of dairies in Marin County that are certified organic. I think more and more farms are starting to understand what it takes to do this, and that this is how they can survive.”

(Photo credits: Albert Straus and Equipment/Catherine Girardeau; Cow/Straus Dairy)

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Let’s face it: Solo car commuters increase both traffic congestion and a city’s carbon footprint.

In San Francisco, those gas-hogging lone drivers soon will be get a clear message to switch to greener forms of transportation, such as buses, train transit and van pools. Earlier this month, the city preliminarily approved a commuter measure requiring medium- and large-size city employers to promote — or even pay for — public transit or vanpools for their commuting employees.

It’s likely that many more American cities will follow San Francisco’s lead, particularly those cities that have signed on to the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement (USCPA), and pledged to reduce global warming pollution in their cities by 7 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2012. They will likely be scrambling to usher commuters from their cars and SUV’s and onto mass transit lines, an immediate and proven way of reducing urban smog.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was an early adopter of the USCPA and the city has an ambitious climate action plan, so it’s no surprise that on August 5, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a commuter measure that would require many city employers to promote public transit or vanpools for their commuting employees. The Commuter Benefits ordinance, introduced by Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, would give San Francisco employers with more than 20 workers three options: pay for employees’ transit passes or vanpools; provide door-to-door shuttle or vanpools, or tap into the federal Commuter Checks program, which allows employees to create pretax commuter accounts.

San Francisco Chamber of Commerce senior vice president Jim Lazarus said the chamber is not always in favor of city-imposed mandates on businesses, but said it backs the latest commuter proposal. “The good thing about the mandate is that it has a net no-cost alternative for employers,” he said. Employers would save on their payroll taxes by implementing option three of the proposal, pre-tax employee commuter accounts. “There’s flexibility and that’s a positive thing,” Lazarus said.

The Commuter Benefits plan aims to extend the same mass transit benefit that most municipal employees receive through programs like the federal Commuter Checks to the private sector, Mirkarimi said. Municipal employees can already avail themselves of employer-subsidized transit discounts, and the Commerce’s Lazarus said many do.

A city-mandated downtown plan for 55 new high rise buildings requiring employers to educate employees about non-car transit options resulted in 92% worker participation in Commuter Checks: 3,000 employees traveling to work in some way other than a single-occupancy vehicle.

But the federal pretax benefits program is “not well utilized in the private sector,” Mirkarimi said. “Our city’s workforce use of this benefit pales in comparison to how many could be using it.”

With gas averaging well over $4 in San Francisco, the potential numbers of transit benefits users could be big. Jared Blumenfeld, who heads the city’s Department of Environment, estimates another 50,000 to 75,000 transit riders may enroll for commuter benefits.

The federal program works like this: The employer buys Commuter Checks – vouchers used to pay for public transit or vanpooling – and either gives them to employees free of charge as an employee benefit, or allows employees to purchase them using a pre-tax payroll deduction. Because the amount employees spend on transit or vanpooling, up to $115 a month, can be deducted from their paychecks before taxes, their yearly taxable income is reduced by the value of vouchers purchased. That can translate to a savings of up to 40% on transit costs.

Mass transit commuters save even more than that, however, through the direct and immediate savings on gasoline and car maintenance. The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) estimates that with a gallon of gasoline at $3.90, a person can save about $8,000 a year by switching to mass transit, according to a July report by the APTA.

And that’s not even accounting for greenhouse gas savings.

”It really goes beyond saving a few dollars for employers and employees; it’s a city response to an energy crisis and also to the global environmental crisis,” San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi said. The measure was approved by a final vote of the board yesterday but must be signed by the mayor to take effect.

Employers don’t have to wait for a mandate to offer commuter benefits to their workers. Businesses nationwide are taking initiative to offer sometimes-innovative commuting options. Siegel and Strain, an Emeryville, California architecture firm, reimburses its employees at the current federal automobile rate of 58.5 cents per mile for bicycling to off-site meetings.

Compare that to the state of California rate of 4 cents per mile for state workers who bike on government business, or even The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition’s suggested 10 cents per mile reimbursement rate, and you have a nice incentive, and even “a scone at the bakery on the way back to recharge,” said Siegel and Strain associate Marjorie Smith.

Smith said that while it’s nice to be reimbursed for wear and tear on the bike and calories expended, what she really likes about the program is that it institutionalizes bicycling as transportation. “Having the support of the organization behind it acknowledges that bicycling is a valid way to get around,” she said.

This type of program is a win-win for both employers and employees looking to reduce their environmental impact and improve their health. “We’ve been looking at ways to further green our business,” said Nancy Malone, a principal at the firm. “One of things we’ve been looking at is transportation. The idea came from someone relatively new who asked if we reimbursed for bicycle riding to the job site.” The firm decided to go with the auto reimbursement rate because the distances ridden “won’t be huge”, and if employees drove, the firm would have had to pay the same amount.

“Most of the people that ride their bikes really are dedicated to it and really enjoy it. If people are happier doing that it’s certainly a plus for everybody,” Malone said.

Siegel and Strain, with 18 employees, will make a relatively small impact on the planet by supporting carbon-free travel. But the trend includes much bigger companies too. The League of American Bicyclists, which recognizes municipalities for actively supporting bicycling, has a new plan to give awards to bicycle-friendly businesses. The applications are still being reviewed, but director Bill Nesper mentioned a couple of companies in the running:

• Calvert -- The Washington, D.C. investment company reimburses up to $500 for the (one time) purchase of a bicycle and reimburses up to $120 annually for the purchase of shoes for those employees who walk to work.

• Google – Provides on-site bike repair, a fleet of company bicycles for on-campus and off-site meeting commuting on its Mountain View, CA campus, and, free, company-branded bikes for some employees in its Europe, Middle East, and Africa offices. The company also makes a donation to charity for every day that an employee gets to work under his or her own power (biking, skateboarding etc.) A Google spokesperson says that more than 2,500 employees participate in the Self-Powered Commuters (SPC) program worldwide.
  

Many other programs and resources support city-backed climate plans, and public transit and bicycle commuting, including:

• Cool Cities — In this Sierra Club-Sponsored program, Cool Cities are cities that have made a commitment to stopping global warming by signing the U.S. Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement. Begun in 2005, the Cool Cities campaign empowers city residents and local leaders to join and encourage their cities to start smart energy solutions to save money and build a cleaner, safer future.

• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Best Workplaces for Commuters — As it says, this is a list of employers with commuter-friendly policies.

• Seattle Climate Action Plan — Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels initiated the U.S. Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement, and Seattle’s Climate plan is the model for cities nationwide. The campaign provides online tools and tips for getting started on climate action.

• The City of Seattle website provides a good explanation of commuter benefit programs and also offers a page of links to transportation resources for those who want to find carpool programs or find out more about city bus and train options across the country.

• American Public Transportation Association’s Public Transportation Savings Calculator lets you see for yourself how taking transport saves you money.

• San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Employers Commuting Guide helps employers decide which commuting options they could offer, based on location, number of employees and other factors.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

From degree options to the availability of financial aid and extracurricular activities, college applicants consider a variety of factors when choosing a school.

A college’s sustainability practices are becoming another key factor, and The Princeton Review is trying to help students and parents by including a new category of “green ratings” in its college guides to be released this month.

Who topped the list? There are some surprises, from a school in the desert (hint: they are devilishly green) to that old Princeton rival….Well, we don’t want to ruin all the fun. But read on.

The Princeton Review rated 534 colleges that will be featured in its Best 366 Colleges and Complete College Handbook. Each school was rated on a scale of 66 to 99 based upon:

• Whether students have a campus that is both healthy and sustainable

• Whether a school’s policies are environmentally responsible

• How students are being prepared not only for future employment, but also for dealing with environmental challenges

The decision to implement a “green ratings” system came from The Princeton Review’s annual “College Hopes and Worries” survey. Over 10,300 students and parents completed the survey, which revealed that 63 percent would consider attending a college that showed a commitment to the environment.

A non-profit environmental research organization, ecoAmerica, developed the survey that included 28 questions pertaining to recycling, transportation alternatives, food sources and other sustainability methods.

“Forward-looking colleges and universities know that policies are good for the environment and are also good for students,” said Lee Bodner, executive director ecoAmerica, in a statement. “The Princeton Review’s Green Ratings help students and parents find these schools which offer a great quality of life and prepare students for successful and fulfilling careers in the 21st Century green economy.”

The Review listed 11 schools on its green honor roll. Among them:

Arizona State University at Tempe — cited because it sustainability considerations underlie its educational goals and business and research practice. ASU also created a School of Sustainability with dozens of cross-disciplinary study options.

College of the Atlantic — because it was created to teach harmonious existence with nature and can now boast that it is carbon neutral with emissions reduced or offset to “net zero”.

Harvard College — because it has the largest green campus organization anywhere with 24 full time staff and 32 part time students working to green all areas of the campus. It also offers a loan program to anyone with a green concept with a payback within 10 years, an initiative that has resulted in improved lighting, heating, cooling and ventilation systems.

For more information on green ratings, and to see the rest of the honor roll visit The Princeton Review’s website.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media