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Meet the Change Makers: The New Pepsi Challenge | OnEarth


Can a company making sugary drinks and salty snacks for more than a century modernize for an era when health and sustainability matter? Image by Tom Kelley

Bringing sustainability to the soda and snack food aisles

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of OnEarth Q&As with business leaders who are transforming their industries.

Since the days when Pepsi challenged Coke to a long-running public taste-off, the cola wars have receded to a quaint memory. PepsiCo has since grown to nearly twice the size of Coke, selling a more diverse line of products. The company based in Purchase, New York, posted sales of $57.8 billion in 2010, but just half of its revenue comes from beverages: Pepsi Cola, Mountain Dew, and Gatorade are its top-sellers. The rest? Those salty snack foods common at picnics and lunch tables, including Lay’s potato chips, Doritos tortilla chips, and Fritos corn chips.

In recent years, PepsiCo has also worked to distinguish itself from its archrival with a more prominent focus on corporate sustainability. Under CEO Indra K. Nooyi, the company has defined its five-year mission, dubbed Performance with Purpose, as “delivering sustainable growth by investing in a healthier future for people and our planet.” On the ground, this has translated into investments in renewable energypackaging reductions, and company-wide efforts to cut the use of energy, food commodities, and water. Those initiatives have already saved nearly 20 billion liters of water since 2006, according to PepsiCo’s most recent assessment. Pumping and treating less water has helped trim energy use substantially, too, because moving less water means using less electricity and fuel to power factories. While PepsiCo won’t reveal a dollar value on these savings, they run into the hundreds of millions.

The successes haven’t insulated PepsiCo from environmental controversy, however. The trash flow from billions of plastic bottles and the private sale of public water resources ignited public ire a few years ago and continues today. In March, PepsiCo unveiled the first fully recyclable disposable beverage bottle made from plant-based materials that don’t compete with food crops. The news won praise from green groups, including NRDC. It came just a few months after the company’s Aquafina brand was given a “D” for transparency by the Environmental Working Group in its Bottled Water Scorecard.

OnEarth contributor Adam Aston recently spoke to Dan Bena, senior director of sustainable development at PepsiCo. A 27-year veteran of the company, he is active in international water issues, having worked with the United Nations CEO Water Mandate and the World Economic Forum, among others, to chart a course toward worldwide water sustainability and security. He opened up about the environmental challenges the snack food giant faces.

Daniel Bena

You’re trying to curb water use across the company. How is PepsiCo changing the way it operates to meet that goal?

In 2009 PepsiCo became one of the first large companies to publish public guidelines recognizing water as a human right. This was just before the United Nations General Assembly did likewise. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback, even from non-governmental organizations that wouldn’t have had much time for PepsiCo before then, praising that step as an important line in the sand to draw.

 

The challenge we face now is to embed those values in our day-to-day operations, and to push them out to our suppliers and customers. To do so, we set out a few specific goals focused on water. Within our own beverage and food factories, we aim to improve our water-use efficiency by 20 percent by 2015, from a 2006 baseline. In fact, we’re already at 19 percent, so we hope to hit that goal very soon, four years early.

Second, we’re aiming to have positive water balance in water-distressed areas. Last month during World Water Week, an annual global summit of water experts in Stockholm, we published a joint report with The Nature Conservancy assessing the benefits of watershed preservation and restoration in five global communities, to help us and others learn better practices for protecting watersheds.

Lastly, we set a goal to provide three million people in water-distressed areas with access to safe water, also by 2015.

How do you define and improve “water-use efficiency?”

It’s a measure of the total water used to make a single unit of our product. For example, as a rough global average, it takes PepsiCo about 2.5 liters of water to produce a liter of beverage. It’s really variable though. At our best plants, it’s probably half that, and a few facilities use twice that amount. That’s the opportunity we face: to lower water use at our least efficient plants.

We track our internal water use for drinks by liters per liter of beverage, or for snacks as liters per kilogram of food. Using an analytical method we developed in house, called Resource Conservation, or ReCon for short, our plants around the world have gone through and meticulously mapped streams of water use.

When you do this, you see how water costs add up. Incoming fresh water is expensive to bring into a factory. On top of that, every liter that enters a factory must be treated, processed, and discharged. Each of these steps carries costs. So by reducing the amount of water entering a plant, you reduce those extra steps, too, and the savings compound. Factory managers used to the idea that “water is cheap” suddenly start paying attention. There’s no better way to get their attention than saying: “This can save you money.”

Since its launch in 2009, ReCon water has prevented the use of 2.2 billion liters of water, with a corresponding cost savings of nearly $2.7 million. We’ve also begun extending ReCon water-saving practices to our key suppliers. So far, those partners have scored a collective 22 percent improvement in water-use efficiency, compared with a 2007 baseline.

What else is water used for in the factories other than the actual beverages and food?

Believe it or not, in a beverage plant, one of the largest users of water is the room where the water is filtered. There, frequent backwashing of filters and advanced membranes consume really high volumes of water. Another of the biggest users is what we call “clean in place” or “sanitize in place,” where water is used to douse conveyers, equipment, floors, and rooms, ensuring they’re sanitary before producing beverage. Sometimes, it’s even used as a lubricant to keep conveyor belts flowing.

Are similar water-saving steps underway at PepsiCo’s food plants?

Yes. Few people realize this but producing food is also highly water-intensive. Making potato chips uses as much water as making beverages. There’s a lot of rinsing as potatoes are processed: to remove dirt when they’re peeled; to take off an outer layer of starch so they fry better. Companies talk about taking factories or buildings off the electric grid, but no one talks about taking plants off the water grid. That’s something we’re exploring at our Walkers potato chip plants in the United Kingdom.

As they arrive from the farm, potatoes are 80 percent water. Frying drives out most of that moisture as steam. The Walkers team is developing a process to capture that steam before it goes out a stack and bring it back into the process. It’s enough water, we think, that the plant could operate without taking fresh water from public supplies.

These efficiencies improve PepsiCo’s internal water usage. But what steps are you taking to help the communities you operate in where water is scarce?

I mentioned before that we’re aiming to achieve a “positive water balance” in water-stressed regions. An example can help explain our approach. One of the easiest areas in which to achieve big water savings is agriculture. Globally, farming accounts for about three-quarters of water use. In India, it’s more — about 85 percent. We make a variety of beverages there, and water supplies are widely at risk. To help lower farms’ water use, PepsiCo developed and patented a relatively simple piece of equipment that automates the direct seeding of rice.

Conventionally, rice is planted in a flooded field, where young shoots sit in three or four inches of water for up to six months. Direct seeding shortens this period and cuts water use by about one-third. We estimate that developing and promoting direct seeding lets us give back 5.5 billion liters of fresh water each year that would have otherwise been drawn from wells or surface streams and lakes.

Critics have cried foul over the idea of selling bottled water in low-income countries. You’ve argued that they’re missing the point — that water is sold anyhow, often at unfair rates in those markets.

There’s a misconception that poor people cannot and should not pay for water. The reality is that in many cases they do pay for water: the trouble is they often pay high prices for poor-quality water. Delivering safe, clean water at a fair price is something that can help close the health and poverty gap between consumers at the “base of the pyramid” — the poorest half of the world’s population — and the developed world.

This relates to PepsiCo’s third goal I mentioned: improving access to fresh water for three million people by 2015. To hit this goal, we’re working with Columbia University’s Earth Institute and Water.org — which is the merger of Water Partners International and Matt Damon’s H2OAfrica.

The PepsiCo Foundation provides funding to assist a variety of Water.org projects. Under the WaterCredit Program, the money is distributed in microloans, on the order of $120 per loan, and used to build household sanitary facilities or to improve access to fresh water. The loans go almost entirely to women, and repayment has been close to 100 percent. Any global bank would be envious of those kinds of returns.

Earlier this year, we became the first private sector donor to the Inter-American Development Bank’s Aquafund. With our $5 million donation, the plan is to “lift and shift” the WaterCredit model from India to Latin America, and to deliver safe water to 500,000 people there by 2015.

Our third partner is the Safe Water Network, a not-for-profit that PepsiCo founded with Paul Newman’s charity and others who saw the need to bring people safe water. This work is focused on Ghana, India, and Kenya.

Some argue that the nature of the water crisis — its very scale and stubbornness — make it a poor match for corporate efforts. How do you reconcile PepsiCo’s reach with the scope of the challenge?

It’s true that water crises are enormous — so much so that no single entity can solve them alone. That’s why all the key players — governments, NGOs, academia, individuals and, yes, industry — must collaborate on the solutions. Recognition is the start of a long journey to help improve the situation. Commitments are the next step.

At PepsiCo our challenge now is to formalize those efforts, test their success and nurture the best of those practices across our business units around the world. It is a daunting process. But our efforts together with those of others — I think of it as a divide-and-conquer approach — can help achieve steady, small steps.

So, do companies have a role in protecting water? Not just a role, but an absolute obligation.


Sidebar: TRUTH SQUAD

Checking industry claims with NRDC’s sustainability experts

PepsiCo has been in the middle of more environmental and health controversies over the past decade than at any time in the century since it patented the recipe for Pepsi-Cola. In recent years, its Aquafina brand of bottled water came under fire. Today, the waste caused by the beverage industry, as well as questions about the commoditization of a public resource, persist as lighting-rod issues. Health is another knotty challenge. Concerns continue to mount over the role of sugary drinks as childhood obesity and diabetes rates skyrocket.

While some companies have shied away from acknowledging such problems, PepsiCo has responded with a range of industry-leading efforts. “Does one praise a company making an unsustainable product such as bottled water? I don’t know,” says Jonathan Kaplan, an NRDC senior policy specialist in San Francisco. “But there’s no question that they’re forward thinking on these issues relative to their competitors.”

For example, in 2009, the company conducted a life-cycle assessment  to gauge the environmental impact of its Tropicana orange juice line and published the results in the New York Times. “Many companies spend time doing LCAs, but they rarely make the findings public,” says Kaplan. Likewise, its public focus on developing plant-based plastic bottles, recycling, and greener operations boost the pressure on its competitors to follow suit, Kaplan adds.

Water use is another area where PepsiCo is leading its peers, Kaplan says. “Food manufacturers, in general, are closer to recognizing that we’re headed toward a future with finite resources, where water, grain, and other inputs are less available and more expensive.” By this measure, the company’s efforts to curb water use at its plants gives it an edge — and just might drive competitors to do likewise. “Companies that figure out how to become part of the solution will have an advantage.” — Adam Aston


URL for the original story: http://www.onearth.org/article/change-makers-new-pepsi-challenge

Green Pinstripes: Wharton School of Business Dean Thomas Robertson Talks About Sustainability | OnEarth

Stroll through practically any business school in the country — or any of the fast-multiplying U.S.-style B-schools overseas — and there can be little doubt that an MBA remains a hot commodity. With the start of classes now upon us, business schools are prepping for another near-record year. During this recession, as in past downturns, applications have surged, with candidates looking to use the slowdown to upgrade their credentials.

Just a couple of years ago, this bumper crop might have seemed unlikely. In 2009 the financial meltdown exposed the outsize role played by financial MBAs and math-whiz PhDs in crafting the house-of-cards investment vehicles that all but crashed Wall Street.

Critics pointed to another, deeper cause: a culture of profit at all cost that had been incubated in business schools. “The really grim news for the MBA…is about more than short-term trends,” wrote Matthew Stewart in Slate back in March 2009. “The economic crisis has exposed long-standing flaws…in the very idea of business education.”

If the recession hasn’t dimmed the prospects of B-schools, the crisis of confidence has spurred a flurry of curriculum makeovers at top institutions. Ethics, of course, have come into greater focus. In parallel, there’s been a rising appetite on the part of students and faculty alike to study more sustainable approaches to business. The number of programs emphasizing social, environmental, and ethical issues has been rising steadily in recent years, according to Beyond Grey Pinstripes, an independent, biennial survey of business schools managed by the Aspen Institute.

For a look at how sustainability and post-crash ethics are evolving at an elite business school, there’s no better laboratory than the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, one of the nation’s oldest and largest B-schools and an important nursery for Wall Street talent.

Thomas Robertson took over as dean of the school in August 2007. As the dust from the financial crisis has settled, he has worked to boost the profile of sustainability in Wharton’s curriculum and among its staff. To be sure, Wharton remains strongly focused on finance, even as highly ranked competitors such as Michigan’s Ross School or Berkeley’s Haas School have made sustainability a core commitment. Notably, none of the nation’s top three B-schools — Chicago’s Booth, Harvard Business School, and Wharton, according to Bloomberg Businessweek’s latest rankings — appear in Beyond Grey Pinstripes.

Robertson says Wharton is hoping to change this. Adam Aston, a freelance writer and former energy and environment editor for BusinessWeek, spoke recently with him about sustainability and the greening of Wharton at his office on the school’s leafy campus near downtown Philadelphia.

Sustainability as a business strategy is still the exception, and there haven’t been many successful, mass-market “green” brands. Why do you think that is?

Green business is still quite young. Yet even in that fairly short time, there are some serious questions about whether you can brand green any longer, because the public is so suspicious. To some extent it has reason to be. It’s easier to recall fallen green champions who have failed terribly than it is to come up with green success stories. BP is a poster child for this. The company emphasized for years how green it was, even as the environmental concerns about its operations were mounting, and then the problem spiraled out of control with the Gulf oil spill. Companies have to be careful. They should first ask, do green claims really differentiate our product, and should we be emphasizing that? If so, are those claims credible? Will consumers believe us? There’s a lot that can go wrong, so it’s no surprise that companies remain shy.

Are you hesitant to brand Wharton as a greener business school? You don’t appear in the Beyond Grey Pinstripes rankings, for example.

Wharton has had a funny love/hate relationship with rankings in general. A predecessor of mine, along with the deans at Harvard and a few other institutions, decided some years ago to stop participating. But the ranking services rate us regardless, using information from outside sources. Beyond Grey Pinstripes is among the most demanding, because it requires that we survey the content of individual courses to identify which ones have green content. However now we’re cooperating again for the first time in a long while, and we have full-time people substantially dedicated to answering these requests. The Aspen Institute is probably the most reputable place out there ranking green initiatives in schools. It’s a good place for us to be, whether someday we come in first or thirtieth.

Did you pick up any shift toward greener goals since the financial crisis?

The aftermath of the crisis has reinforced one of the longest-standing strategic pillars of the curriculum at Wharton: social impact. From environment to labor and other social dimensions of business, there’s very much a belief here that business schools must be a force for good in the world. Even so, this is the biggest school in the country. We have 4,900 graduate students plus a few hundred undergrads. And some of our alumni do still go astray.

Do you have any star faculty members working on green issues?

One is our vice dean of social impact, Len Lodish, who also leads Wharton’s Global Consulting Practicum. Among other things, this sends groups of MBAs overseas to apply business skills to solving social and environmental problems. One team recently went to Botswana, for example, to help develop a sustainable funding model for a health partnership. I’d also mention Eric Orts, the director of Wharton’s Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership. Eric is a lawyer and tends to come at these issues from that perspective. He argues that business as usual is quite likely to lead to major environmental catastrophes, and he’s pushing for Wharton to get ahead of the curve on these issues. It’s clear that sustainability is here to stay. I think it has come into its own as a business priority. We all realize that we’re going to destroy the planet if we don’t get on board.

In many business schools, the interest in sustainability is coming from the bottom up, from the students.

It’s true. A lot of student efforts are bubbling up here. Emily Schiller graduated with an MBA from Wharton in 2009 and chose to stay here to become the school’s first associate director of sustainability and environmental leadership.That role grew out of her involvement, when she was a student, as co-chair of Net Impact’s North America Conference, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit events focused on sustainability. She also works with our Student Sustainability Advisory Board, which takes student suggestions and so far has turned them into real savings of more than $100,000. One of their ideas now is to switch to natural cooling of our data center in winter, rather than using air-conditioning. If it’s cold outside, why not take advantage of that?

Sidebar: NRDC FOCUS — Peter Malik, Director of NRDC’s Center for Market Innovation

If business schools could choose one thing to enhance their focus on sustainability, what would it be?
Mortgages. The housing market has to be one of the drivers of economic recovery, but it’s still under severe pressure. Unsound lending practices were partly responsible for the mess, and we need to scale down the role of government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in underwriting private-borrower risk. Banks should also incorporate sustainability criteria into mortgage scoring and pricing. Live in a mansion and drive a Hummer, and you’ll pay more. Live in an energy-efficient apartment and walk to work, and you’ll pay less.

Learn more about Location Efficient Mortgages.

Review: Revenge of the Electric Car | OnEarth

Chris Paine’s 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? arrived with perfect timing, capturing the country’s collective frustration with sky-high energy prices as well as our growing disenchantment with the automotive alternatives on offer. Let’s hope his sequel, Revenge of the Electric Car, previewed last week in New York and set for wide release this October, proves equally as prescient. The film, which captures what may turn out to be the first stages of the auto industry’s evolution away from oil, cruises smoothly over the finish line where its predecessor ultimately stalled short.

For Revenge, Paine scored fly-on-the-wall access to three of the most charismatic leaders in the auto industry. And he did so at a key moment — just as each was in the midst of executing a high-risk, multi-billion-dollar bet on battery-powered cars. Add in the fact that Paine’s crew was filming during the 2008 economic crisis and implosion of GM, and the result is more than just a snapshot of the gamesmanship behind the creation of mass-market vehicles. Revenge offers a look inside the minds of business leaders struggling through one of the most troubled periods of recent economic history.

As the documentary opens, U.S. automakers face an environment that’s radically different from the cheap-oil days that ruled when GM developed its first electric vehicle, EV1. Now oil prices are running at historic highs, and governments around the world have begun to put some real muscle behind the idea of the electric car.

Here’s Bob Lutz, GM’s American-born vice chairman and a veteran of the Big Three (Chrysler, Ford, and GM), becoming the unlikely champion of the Chevy Volt, and opening a door to GM’s salvation after the company’s downfall. Known in Detroit as “Mr. Horsepower,” Lutz personifies the about-face that the industry as a whole went through in the time that passed between the making of the two films. Once a deep skeptic of EVs, he now artfully tilts GM’s monolithic culture toward his goal of developing the Volt.

Facing off against GM is the enigmatic Carlos Gohn, the Brazilian-Lebanese CEO of Nissan/Renault, which is building the all-electric Leaf. Gohn’s orderly execution of the Leaf offers a welcome perspective on EVs from beyond American borders. After all, battery-powered cars are likely to flourish on the roads of Paris, Shanghai, and Tokyo before they do here, for the same reasons that small cars did.

Playing counterpoint to the corporate titans is Paypal-founder Elon Musk, a charismatic South African-Canadian struggling to steer the scrappy Tesla from startup mode to full-scale manufacturing. With confidence bordering on hubris, the then 38-year-old is at once inspiring and pain-inducing, as he underestimates the complexity of manufacturing and struggles to produce a stream of fault-free $100,000-plus electric sportsters. (This while also navigating his way through a painful divorce and playing doting dad to his five sons.) There’s real drama in watching Musk’s brave face flicker as he inspects an armada of faulty cars and in watching him awkwardly deliver the news to early depositors that the price of their vehicles will have to rise yet again.

One of the film’s delightful subplots involves the struggles of Greg “Gadget” Abbott, a goateed indie tinkerer who made a brief appearance in Who Killed and who excels at retrofitting classic cars with batteries and electric motors. With an infectious, mischievous air, Gadget offers a reminder of the gear-head roots of EVs’ most devoted fans.

Unlike with his first film, where Paine came to the topic too late to build a “how-it-happened” tale and leaned instead on activists and half-baked acolytes, Revenge captures rich natural tension as it unfolds. Who Killed, for example, featured a parade of Hollywood A-listers (Tom Hanks) and B-listers (Phyillis Diller), many of them sore about having lost their exotic cars and whining about GM’s decision to kill the EV1. Revenge gives us mercilessly few Hollywood prima dons — though Danny Devito does get downright giddy test-driving the Volt.

It won’t be giving anything away to tell you that the end of Revenge is a happy one. Of course, it’s far from the end of the story. Should Paine opt to complete what seems like a natural triptych, the final installment will no doubt prove more global in scope. Beijing has set national EV goals that dwarf those of Washington, for example, and the Chinese have much deeper capital resources. They also have a strong knack for building things like smart grids, which will be necessary for the wide-scale adaptation of EVs. And the race to build a better battery is heating up elsewhere overseas, with labs in dozens of countries working to build batteries capable of matching the range of your average gas tank.

With the gee-whiz stage of EV creation now complete, GM, Nissan, and Tesla also face the tougher slog of turning these enormous bets into reliable, mass-market machines that can actually make some money. Sales of EVs and hybrids are so far running far below the ambitious targets set by national governments, including our own.

Lurking farther out is the persistent threat of volatile oil prices. Many, myself among them, would argue that the real killer of the electric car was cheap oil. In the late 1990s, prices hit a post-’60s low, in inflation-adjusted terms, at the very moment that GM’s EV1 was being rolled out. That wouldn’t make it easy for any $1.25-million prototype to get off the ground, I don’t care how many starlets tell you it’s a great idea. Sub-$2-a-gallon gasoline may seem unimaginable to us today, but a double-dip recession — a real possibility given the anemic economic growth and sovereign debt woes on both sides of the Atlantic — could send energy demand crashing, rendering the EV once again an intolerably uneconomic prospect.

Revenge closes with a scene featuring the Los Angeles Times reporter Dan Neil. The sole automotive writer ever to win a Pulitzer, Neil is cynical about the industry’s abysmal record on eco-cars. At the same time, reflecting on a lifelong affair with gas-guzzlers, he admits that in recent years even he has begun to “let go” of the idea of the traditional car, and to acknowledge that it may finally be rolling toward the sunset.

Original URL: http://www.onearth.org/article/revenge-of-the-electric-car

Business Loves Lighting Efficiency, So Why Try to Dim Efforts to Make a Better Bulb? | OnEarth

Efficiency is a generally considered a good thing. Good politics. Good business. That’s why efforts from national mileage standards for cars to rules requiring your refrigerator to use less energy have proven popular and effective, quietly spurring the gradual replacement of outdated technology with better-performing alternatives.

And that’s why, back in 2007, barely anyone raised an eyebrow when Congress applied efficiency standards to an energy guzzler that hadn’t changed much in more than a century: the light bulb.

A requirement that would make bulbs at least a third more efficient starting next year passed Congress as part of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 in a 3-to-1bipartisan vote. Half of House Republicans supported the bill; Rep. Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican who now chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, called the legislation a “common sense, bipartisan approach … to save energy as well as help foster the creation of new domestic manufacturing jobs”; and President George W. Bush duly signed it into law.

The lighting industry welcomed the bill, which gave it time to work on meeting the new standards and set out a schedule gradually phasing them in, starting New Year’s Day 2012. First to be replaced will be the bulbs we’ve long know as “100-watt” incandescents. Over the next two years, today’s 75-, 60-, and 40-watt bulbs will have to likewise cut there energy use by about a third.

And guess what? The new rules have worked just as intended, accelerating the development of a variety of new lighting offerings, all of which save consumers money in the long run. In addition to improved CFLs, the new options include low-energy halogens that look like today’s incandescents, as well as LED bulbs that last for years. They’re already on sale at your local hardware store or Home Depot. You’re probably using some of them in your house, perhaps without even realizing there’s a difference.

“Efficiency is a desirable thing, and this type of standard has been a part of our body politic for a long time,” said Randall Moorhead, vice president of government affairs at Philips, as quoted at ThinkProgress.org. “The reality is, consumers will see no difference at all. The only difference they’ll see is lower energy bills because we’re creating more efficient incandescent bulbs.” The National Electrical Manufacturers Association and General Electric have also voiced support for the new rules.

So who’s got a problem with lighting efficiency standards now? Not business, certainly. And not the consumers reaping the benefits (which are estimated to reach $6 billion a year). It’s some of the same House Republicans (including Upton, whose statement crowing about the 2007 law as a “common sense, bipartisan approach” that will create jobs has disappeared from his website) who think they can score cheap political points with fans of Rush Limbaugh — who decries efficiency standards as “nanny state-ism” — and Glenn Beck, who apparently thinks anything that saves consumers money is “all socialist.”

On Tuesday night those House Republicans failed to pass a law known as the “Better Use of Light Bulbs Act,” or BULB Act, that would have repealed state and municipal rights to set efficiency standards for light bulbs. Business and consumers can hope this signals the end of a misguided effort to roll back progress. That’s never been a very bright option.

UPDATE 7/14/2011: Not the end! On Thursday, House Republicans launched yet another misguided attack on light bulb efficiency. Sigh.

Original URLhttp://www.onearth.org/blog/business-loves-lighting-efficiency-so-why-try-to-dim-efforts-to-make-a-better-bulb

Plastic: A Toxic Love Story (in Pictures) | OnEarth

 Writer Susan Freinkel began wondering how much plastic passed through her life. So she conducted a one-day experiment, recording each plastic-containing item she came in contact with. The tally: 196.
 
They ranged from the obvious to the unnoticed, from the dashboard in her car to the dime-sized stickers she had to peel off her apples. The next day, she reversed the experiment, tracking everything she touched that wasn’t made of plastic. Total: 102.
 
Freinkel’s world, she realized, was more plastic than not. Yours probably is, too.The experiment started Freinkel on a plastic odyssey, learning all she could about its imprint on our economy, lives and health.
 
The resulting book, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, appears at a time of rising anxiety over plastic’s impact. In mid-April, Congress renewed efforts to modernize a 35-year old law addressing chemical safety that’s widely regarded as toothless and ineffective.
 
Freinkel traces the reversal of plastic’s reputation from “better than nature” to a chronic health concern. She reminds us of plastic’s very real achievements while exploring our options to reduce the health and environmental toll of living in a plasticized world. These images help tell that story…
 
Originally published as a slideshow at onearth.org.
 

PODCAST What Can We Do With All That CO2? | OnEarth

You can’t see it, smell it, or taste it, but there’s carbon dioxide in the air all around us. And each day, we’re producing more of it.

For the past 60 years, scientists have been measuring the increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Burning fossil fuels (along with rapid deforestation around the planet) sends billions of tons of CO2 into the air each year, and the extra greenhouse gas is causing average global temperatures to climb. To slow down rising temperatures, or stabilize them, scientists say carbon emissions need to be dramatically reduced and eventually brought to zero.

Of course, using carbon-free sources of energy, such as wind and solar, is an obvious way to cut emissions. But the world’s growing energy demands can’t yet be met with renewables and other carbon-free energy, and it will probably be decades before that technology is affordable and widespread. In the meantime, what can we do with all that extra CO2?

In this episode of the Climopedia podcast, Climate Central and OnEarth look at ideas for reducing CO2 concentrations. Columbia University’s Klaus Lackner shares his thoughts on why carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is needed. OnEarth contributor Adam Aston describes new technology that can help scoop CO2 right out of the air (see his story on carbon trees). Finally, Princeton University’s Andrew Bocarsly explains how we might put some of that captured CO2 to good use.

Check out my mellifluous stylings in the middle third of this short podcast: http://www.onearth.org/media/listen-what-to-do-with-co2

The New Electric Vehicles: Coming to a Plug Near You | OnEarth

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The e-cars are coming. You know about hybrids such as the gas-electric Prius, but they were just the first step in a long evolution toward virtually emissions-free, high-mileage vehicles. The next frontier is gas-free, 100 percent-battery powered cars: this year and next, more than a dozen electric vehicles (or EVs) will start to appear in showrooms and rental fleets. To show you what’s coming, we’ve rounded up a baker’s dozen. Our focus is fossil fuel-free vehicles (so no hybrids) from manufacturers with a proven track record. 2011-01-21

A Smart Ride — Testing driving Smart’s electric runabout | OnEarth

Our correspondent hits the New York streets in the electric Smart ForTwo  ED.
Americans are likely to have their first taste of an all-electric vehicle as a rental car. Our correspondent climbs behind the wheel for a test drive.

The future is here. It’s cheaper than I expected, and it’s so small that you could fit two in a single parking space. I find it plugged into a wall charger in the subterranean garage of a midtown Manhattan office tower. It’s called the Smart ForTwo Electric Drive, or ED, and it’s one of the first mainstream, all battery-powered cars to hit U.S. roads.

New Yorkers, of course, have seen Smart cars before. The gas-powered version grabbed headlines two years ago for its ultra-parkability, but it handled poorly and wasn’t much on gas mileage. Electrification fixes both of those problems. The ED’s cost per mile — the electric equivalent of mileage — is among the best available. And the added weight from the batteries improves the car’s handling, while electric motors zip it up to speed more confidently. Continue reading A Smart Ride — Testing driving Smart’s electric runabout | OnEarth

She’s a Genius for Honey Bees | OnEarth

Human practices have brought about a sharp decline in bee health and populations. University of Minnesota entomologist Marla Spivak wants to reverse the trend.

>> Q&A with MacArthur “genius grant” recipient Marla Spivak

Last week, University of Minnesota entomologist Marla Spivak was awarded a $500,000 “genius grant” by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for her work with honey bees. (David Simon, creator of TV’s “The Wire” and “Treme,” was among the other 2010 recipients.) Spivak started studying bees at the age of 18; she’s now 55, and over the course of her career, bees have grown in economic importance as growing numbers have been trucked around the country to pollinate crops, including apples, blueberries, almonds, and countless other fruits and vegetables. Yet over the same period, the health of bees has seen a steady decline, culminating in the phenomenon known as “colony collapse disorder,” in which most bees within a colony simply disappear. (OnEarth first reported on this phenomenon in “The Vanishing” from our Summer 2006 issue.) Continue reading She’s a Genius for Honey Bees | OnEarth

Once on the Fast Track, Tar Sands Pipeline Faces Tougher Scrutiny | OnEarth

Will a pipeline like this one in Alaska soon run tar sands oil all the way to refineries on the Gulf Coast?
>> Concern mounts that a Canadian company’s plan to transport more tar sands oil across the continent will cause environmental harm and fail to make a dent in U.S. energy prices.

For TransCanada, the timing couldn’t have been worse.

First, there was BP’s runaway well in the Gulf. Then, on the night of July 25, the steel skin of a 30-inch-wide oil pipeline split open in a wooded stretch of southern Michigan. By the time the flow had stopped, upwards of 1 million gallons of toxic crude had disgorged into a nearby creek and polluted the Kalamazoo River.

TransCanada doesn’t own the ruptured pipeline — it belongs to the company’s top rival, Enbridge. But the spill in Michigan and the disaster in the Gulf have led both the public and regulators to cast a more skeptical eye on what once looked like a sure thing: TransCanada’s plan to build a $12 billion network of pipeline that would roughly double the capacity connecting Canada’s vast­­ — and highly controversial — tar sands oil reserves to U.S. refineries. Continue reading Once on the Fast Track, Tar Sands Pipeline Faces Tougher Scrutiny | OnEarth