Green Right Now

California this week honored 21 companies and organizations with the Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Awards, the state’s highest prize for contributions to environmental issues.

The Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Awards program was established in 1993. Recipients are selected by a large panel of evaluators and the Secretaries of Cal/EPA, the Resources Agency, Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, the Department of Food and Agriculture, the State and Consumer Services Agency, and the Governor’s Office. It honors projects in nine categories.

Here are the 2008 award winners in each category with comments from the California EPA:

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By John DeFore

East of Las Vegas, Times Square is surely the king of flashy, attention-grabbing and power-hungry signage. Soon, though, one of the intersection’s most novel advertisements will be one that doesn’t draw a single watt from the grid.

Construction is set to begin this month on a massive billboard for copying giant Ricoh, to be mounted at the corner of 7th Avenue and 42nd Street, that will run solely on wind and solar power generated at the site.

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By Harriet Blake

The benefits of a rooftop garden are not only environmental, but extend to the human spirit. At the Ulfelder Healing Garden atop Massachusetts General Hospital’s Yawkey Cancer Center, those benefits are realized.

The 6,300-square-foot foliage-filled healing garden gives cancer patients and their families a much-needed retreat and helps the hospital conserve energy at the same time. It is just one of the many Boston sites included on tours during this week’s GreenBuild International Conference, a large annual gathering of builders and remodellers sponsored by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).

Bringing green design into health care and hospital building is a growing trend across the U.S.. At Dell Children’s Medical Center, which opened in Austin, Texas in 2007, green has been the focus from the ground up. In fact, says spokesperson Matilda Sanchez, the hospital is waiting to hear if they have achieved “platinum status” in the Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) program sponsored by the USGBC. Among the many green elements at Dell is a four-story interior healing garden with a waterfall that starts on the top floor, as well as a three-acre healing garden with a labyrinth that can be seen from many of the hospital rooms.

“Dell is setting the bar for hospital buildings,” says Sanchez. “While we were still under construction, many other hospitals looked at what we were doing. There was even a delegation from Australia who came to get ideas.”

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By Barbara Kessler

Wildlife habitats might not have the same impact on global warming as electric cars, but they help hold down corners of nature that are threatened by climate change, human development and the contamination of outdoor spaces.

So raise a toast to Anheuser-Busch, which has been supporting wildlife conservation for many years and can now boast of hosting ten wildlife habitats certified by the Wildlife at Work, a program of the Wildlife Habitat Council.

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From Green Right Now
Brooklyn-based Green Depot,  which supplies the New York area with eco-friendly building and living solutions,  announced it will open a retail space on the Bowery in Manhattan. The store will carry practical “green” do-it-yourself, lifestyle and design products in five categories to help customers choose products that address the aspects of green [...]

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By John DeFore

As disheartening as it is to hear, you may not be doing anybody any good by taking broken electronics to a firm promising to recycle it. In fact, your good-faith act could be leading to disease and hellish pollution in some of the world’s most impoverished villages.

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By John DeFore

Now that bringing your own shopping bag to buy groceries is no longer seen as aberrant behavior, and is inching in some places toward the norm, foes of throwaway plastic bags can open new fronts in their war: the dry-cleaner bag, for one, which reportedly accounts for three hundred million pounds of landfill-clogging waste each year.

Last month, dry cleaning and laundry professionals at an Atlantic City convention were introduced to a new product designed to do away with those single-use bags: The Green Garmento, a more durable polypropylene bag that shifts forms as needed for continual reuse. At home, it’s a duffel bag for collecting dirty clothes and taking them to the cleaner; at the cleaner, it can be reconfigured as a zippered garment bag, keeping items fresh until customers pick them up.

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By Shermakaye Bass

If skiing or snowboarding is your brood’s idea of the perfect family vacation, then ask yourself: What could make it even “more” perfect?

Powdery white slopes and alpine valleys? Maybe a white Christmas? Chances are when you think of skiing, you think of things white, not green. But the green-ski movement, prompted by U.S. groups like the Ski Area Citizens Coalition (SACC), an outgrowth of nonprofit Colorado Wild, and National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) “Sustainable Slopes” program, is changing that – little by little.

A fairly young endeavor (SACC started in 1999; Sustainable Slopes in 2000), the movement’s emergence reminds us that as healthy and nature-loving as this sport might be, it hasn’t been known for its environmental sensitivity.

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By Tom Kessler

The Philadelphia Phillies are still trying to close out the World Series, but the team has already been declared winners off the field. The National League Chanmipions were among the winners cited in the Environmenal Protection Agency’s 2008 Green Power Leadership Awards. The announcement was made at the the National Renewable Energy Marketing Conference in Denver, Colo.

EPA’s Green Power Partnership is a voluntary program helping to increase the use of green power among leading U.S. organizations. The program encourages organizations to purchase green power as a way to reduce the environmental impacts associated with conventional electricity use. The EPA says the program has hundreds of partner organizations buying billions of kilowatt-hours of green power annually.

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From the Environmental Protection Agency

The 2008 Green Power Leadership Awards were presented in conjunction with the National Renewable Energy Marketing Conference, held October 26-29 in Denver, Colorado.

Green Power Pilot Award — Honorable Mention

After conducting primary research in both the Rio Grande Valley and Houston, Texas markets, Green Mountain Energy Company found that the Hispanic population in these areas was highly interested in clean electricity and Green Mountain’s product offering. In early April 2008, Green Mountain launched its first integrated advertising and PR campaign targeting the Hispanic market in Texas. A media plan that included a combination of both English and Spanish language advertising, and a comprehensive media mix of TV, radio, print and outdoor, was designed for maximum effectiveness.

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From the Environmental Protection Agency

The 2008 Green Power Leadership Awards were presented in conjunction with the National Renewable Energy Marketing Conference, held October 26-29 in Denver, Colorado.

Green Power Beacon Award – Honorable Mention

To help promote enrollments in its fledgling renewable energy program, GreenCurrents, Detroit Edison entered into a partnership with a landmark music venue in Ann Arbor, Michigan known as The Ark. The Ark attracts up-and-coming music acts and well-known artists from around the country who enjoy playing to audiences in its intimate atmosphere.

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From the Environmental Protection Agency

The 2008 Green Power Leadership Awards were presented in conjunction with the National Renewable Energy Marketing Conference, held October 26-29 in Denver, Colorado.

Green Power Beacon Award

In an innovative effort to bring business and residential renewable power customers together, Portland General Electric (PGE) created an online “green community” through the launch of their GreenPowerOregon.com web site.

The site is available to all PGE customers, with special content available only to renewable power customers. Several hundred customers are registered on the site, with more than 10,000 unique visitors to the site in the first couple of months after launch.

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