Corporate Knights

Philly Mayor Michael Nutter puts his city on a greener path | Corporate Knights

Michael Nutter couldn’t have picked a worse time to win the keys to city hall. In late 2007, after 14 years as a city councilman, Nutter was elected as Philadelphia’s 125th mayor. His victory was built in part on a campaign promise to make his town in Pennsylvania “the greenest city in America.”

Yet mere months after he took office, Wall Street imploded, sparking global financial crisis and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Philadelphia’s fiscal outlook plummeted from surplus to billions in deficit, leaving Nutter facing painful choices.

Rather than retreat on his green agenda, however, Nutter looked to sustainability to help right the city’s finances. In 2009, he unveiled Greenworks Philadelphia, an ambitious blueprint to help the city run more efficiently, with less pollution, and become healthier all while using less energy and money to do so. “Cities are incubators of innovation,” said Nutter in an interview with Corporate Knights. “Congress can’t figure out energy or climate policy. Breaking new ground is happening at the city level because this is where it has to.”

Philadelphia’s eco-planners developed the program by auditing a vast array of urban metrics – from the amount residents walked to the availability of fresh, whole food. Then, they cast the data into the future, assessing how the city might look if “business as usual” continued. Finally, they combed through the numbers to set tough but achievable goals touching on dozen of actions. The final report organized the targets under 15 broad categories.

As an integrated vision for urban sustainability, Greenworks won plaudits for its unusually ambitious timeline. When it comes to energy or climate goals, it’s not unusual for governments to set targets a decade or more into the future. But distant goals can erode political will, Nutter notes, so his team agreed to peg the bulk of the plan’s targets to 2015.

Three years in, the results are showing up on Philadelphia’s city streets, and on its bottom line. Some of the programs are helping the city’s day-to-day operating budget. Consider recycling: The city saw rates soar to 18.9 per cent in 2011, more than triple the benchmark rate of 5.4 per cent in 2006.

The city made recycling both easier and more rewarding. Recycling days were shifted to the same day as regular garbage pickup and doubled in frequency. The city also eased the sorting hassle by expanding the types of plastic that could be recycled to numbers 1 through 7. Most U.S. cities accept just a few of those types.

The shift is turning a cost into a revenue source. Each ton of trash diverted to recycling bins not only saves about $68 in landfill costs, it generates more than $50 from the sale of bulk recycling material.

Other efforts promise to deliver huge, long-term capital savings. For example, Philadelphia was facing a $10-billion tab for new sewage facilities to prevent storm water from tainting regional waterways. Instead of a costly infrastructure fix, though, the city is spending $2 billion over 25 years on a multifaceted solution that restores the urban landscape’s ability to absorb rainfall.

Additional trees, parks and urban green space, all of which act as natural sponges, top the city’s to-do list. For buildings, the tricks include rain barrels and green roofs to collect and hold rainfall. The city is building out permeable road surfaces that let drops of rain soak slowly into the ground, rather than race down to storm sewers. “We recognized we could save money, not dig up half the town, and improve our parks and green spaces,” says Nutter.

The mayor’s green team tapped private partners to help multiply public efforts. To help cut citywide energy use, city programs aim to reinsulate homes and recoat black-tar roofs – which become oven-like hotspots in the summer – with cool, reflective white coatings. To spark homeowners’ competitive impulse, the city teamed up with Dow Chemical on the “Coolest Block” contest. Residents competed to win energy-saving cool roofs, insulation and other efficiency upgrades donated by Dow to their entire block. Said the mayor: “We can’t do this alone.”

For Nutter, the city’s green programs are delivering growing rewards, too. Philadelphia closed a multi-billion dollar budget gap as Greenworks took root. In its 2011 self-assessment, the city found that 135 of its initial 151 green goals have been completed or are underway. That quick success, Nutter says, has fired ambitions, spurring the addition of dozens more new eco-goals.

Perhaps the greatest measure of success for Nutter is re-election. He won a second term in November, assuring he’ll be there to push Greenworks through its 2015 deadline, and beyond.

See the original story here: http://www.corporateknights.com/report/2012-greenest-cities-america/philly-mayor-michael-nutter-puts-his-city-greener-path

Global CCS Institute

MIT study refines estimate of CO2 storage capacity of US saline aquifers | GCCSI

Deep, saline aquifers in the US have sufficient capacity to sequester a century’s worth of CO2emissions from the nation’s coal-fired power plants, according to a research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on April 3.

The findings substantially refine estimates of the storage capacity of these reservoirs, which the Global CCS Institute recognizes as having the most promising potential of any geological storage option. Previous measures of their capacity in the US spanned from a few years’ of CO2 emissions, to tens of thousands of years’ worth.

Earlier assessments tended to oversimplify the problem, leading to the wide range. “We felt that there was such a big disparity in numbers out there that CCS deserved a closer look,” team leader Ruben Juanes, MIT’s ARCO Associate Professor in Energy Studies in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, told The New York Times.

MIT researchers improved the accuracy of these estimates by building a more detailed mathematical model. Previous models were “missing some of the nuances of the physics,” said Christopher MacMinn, a doctoral researcher and co-author of the study, via a press release.

Image: MIT

The MIT team modeled micron-scale fluid dynamics to better understand how liquefied CO2 is trapped in deep saline aquifers. Including some 20 parameters, the team designed the mathematical model to be flexible enough to evaluate the potential of saline aquifer formations at the scale of hundreds of miles, and in different regions of the US.

“The key is capturing the essential physics of the problem,” said Michael Szulczewski, a doctoral researcher and co-author of the study, “but simplifying it enough so it could be applied to the entire country.”

Using glass beads to simulate the way liquefied CO2 would percolate through the tiny poor spaces of deep rock formations, the approach helped the MIT team to better understand rates of injection and how the CO2 is sequestered through the dynamics of capillary trapping and solubility trapping. Of key concern was estimating the pressure and rates of CO2 injection necessary to prevent fracturing of the reservoir or its over-capping structures.

The study “demonstrates that the rate of injection of CO2 into a reservoir is a critical parameter in making storage estimates,” said Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer with the MIT Energy Initiative and another co-author of the PNAS paper, in a release.

While this study is focused on the saline aquifers in the US, the method can be extended to similar geologies around the world, MacMinn added.

The abstract for the paper, Lifetime of carbon capture and storage as a climate-change mitigation technology is published at PNAS.

Also, below is a video where Juanes and his team members explain their work. The first half-minute or so is a basic overview of carbon storage. Stick with it; starting around 0:45 Szulczewski goes into greater detail of the model’s approach to the subsurface dynamics of CO2 injection.

Global CCS Institute

Project update: In Canada, partners pull the plug on CA$1.4billion TransAlta CCS project | GCCSI

A group of energy companies abandoned a project to capture, use and store 1 million tons of CO2 per year from the flues of an Alberta coal-fired power plant.

Pointing to weak project economics, TransAlta, Canada’s largest investor-owned electricity generator announced on 26 April that its partners Capital Power and Enbridge would halt the CA$1.4billion project after completing initial engineering and design studies. Construction was due to start this year.

According to TransAlta’s first quarter results, the partners “determined that although the technology works and capital costs are in line with expectations, the revenue from carbon sales and the price of emissions reductions are insufficient…”. The Pioneer plant aimed to sell CO2 for enhanced oil recovery, but found no firm buyers.

“What’s really needed, of course, is a regulatory framework on CO2 that puts a value on that CO2 – a significant value,” Don Wharton, vice-president of policy and sustainability at TransAlta, told The Globe and Mail. Wharton added that: “If [a price on carbon is] done properly, then CCS projects, as well as other emissions-reducing projects, would be more encouraged to go ahead.”

The province of Alberta currently charges certain industrial emitters CA$15 per ton of CO2 beyond a pre-determined level. That price doesn’t support the cost of the project, and there’s “little certainty on future revenue”, Cheryl Wilson, carbon capture and storage analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance told Bloomberg News. “Pioneer had too many factors working against it.”

Located about 70 kilometers west of Edmonton, the project was slated to capture 1 million tons of CO2 from the exhaust of TransAlta’s Keephills 3 facility, a 450-megawatt coal-fired power plant that went on line in September 2011 at a cost of roughly CA$2 billion.

A portion of the captured CO2 was to be sold to oil and gas drillers operating in the nearby Pembina oil fields, to enhance the recovery of oil from mature wells. Another share of CO2 was to be permanently sequestered in deep saline formations nearby, as well.

The Pioneer project was granted public funding in October 2009. The lion’s share, CA$436 million, was committed by the province of Alberta, and another CA$343 million was pledged by the Canadian Government. The Global CCS Institute also put up AU$5 million.

According to TransAlta, the company and its partners had spent just CA$30 million on the project to date, with CA$20million of that coming from government.

Speaking to Thomson Reuters News, Chris Severson-Baker, managing director of the Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based environmental think tank, said: “Within Alberta, this was the one coal-plant application of CCS and it was the most important application. There are significant emissions from coal operations… and there are few other options to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from those types of operations without CCS.”

Meanwhile, the province has funded three other CCUS projects which will reach critical decision points in the next year or so. These are:

Global CCS Institute

Mapping a continent’s potential: North American Carbon Storage Atlas released | GCCSI

If a picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes, then perhaps the new atlas of North American Carbon Storage, might be worth a gigaton or two?

In a first-of-its-kind assessment of continent-wide storage potential, the North American Carbon Storage Atlas was released on 1 May 2011 at the 11th Annual Conference on Carbon Capture Utilization and Sequestration (CCUS) in Pittsburgh.

NACSA synthesizes data from Mexico, the United States and Canada to map out known geological storage reserves as well as the location of some 2,250 large stationary CO2 sources.

Tallying up all of the reserves, the report estimates the continent has at least 500 years worth of CO2 storage capacity, and as much as 5,000 years, based on current emission rates. The 500-year case estimates potential capacity of 136 billion metric tons for oil and gas fields, 65 billion metric tons for coal fields, and 1,738 billion metric tons for saline reservoirs.

“This new atlas provides the kind of fundamental information that, combined with technology innovation, can help fossil-fuelled facilities continue their essential energy role while reducing carbon pollution,” said Steven Chu, United States Secretary of Energy, in a statement.

“This initiative can also help identify opportunities for enhanced oil recovery projects that can further increase domestic oil production, enhance American energy security and support economic growth in states across the country,” Chu added.

Also being launched alongside the printed-copy of the atlas were the NACSA website and online viewer. In addition to maps of CO2 stationary sources and storage resources, the website also presents methodologies for estimating storage resources along with links to additional information.

Intended for a broad range of users, the online viewer also provides interactive access to the map layers and data used to construct the atlas.

The carbon storage atlas project has been produced under the auspices of the bilateral Canada-US Clean Energy Dialogue as well as a trilateral program under the North American Leaders’ Summit.

GreenBiz

Recyclebank’s iPhone app aims to ease London traffic congestion | GreenBiz

Recyclebank's iPhone app aims to ease London traffic congestion

In an era of rising congestion and shrinking budgets, big cities face a major challenge making the most out of aging transportation networks. Some, such as London and Singapore, have opted to use a stick: congestion fees to nudge commuters out of their cars, onto subways, buses, bikes or even their feet. Yet congestion fees can be politically unpopular. Similar efforts in New York City have failed.

But what if city planners could use a carrot, instead, to induce different commuting behaviors? That’s the vision behind re:route, a new program being rolled out by Transport for London (TfL) and developed by New York-based Recyclebank, a pioneer in the field of using incentives to spur greener behaviors.

Announced this week, re:route is an iPhone-based app that encourages Londoners to walk and cycle more by awarding points for each trip they re-route away from conventional alternatives. The credits can be redeemed for valuable rewards, from food perks to products, at participating retailers.

For London, the goal is to reward switches that improve public health, reduce pollution and ease congestion. “By virtue of human nature, people tend to respond more immediately to a positive signal than they do to a negative one based on penalties,” said Ian Yolles, chief sustainability officer at Recyclebank, in a phone interview last week.

Part of a broader effort by TfL known as Get Ahead of the Games, the launch of re:route is timed in advance of the summer Olympics. (Read more about the greening of the Games here.) With 350,000 visitors inbound, TfL hopes to lure Londoners out of the city’s overtaxed subways and taxis and onto bicycles and footpaths. Last week, the city’s taxi organization announced that 40 percent of drivers would quit the streets during the Olympics in anticipation of potentially paralyzing gridlock. Many city streets will be closed for official use only.

TfL’s goals with re:route reach past the Olympics though. As part of a multidecadal, city-wide effort to lower greenhouse gas emissions and improve public health, TfL has set out a long-term goal of boosting cycling by 400 percent by 2025, compared with 2000. TfL also wants to boost the share of trips done on foot above its 24 percent share.

For Recyclebank, re:route is a first step into the urban transportation market, a bid to help cities devise new solutions to help ease the large and growing problem of congestion, spur the use of public transport and enhance public health.

Recyclebank iPhone appBy marrying available technology — mobile phones, apps, GPS, transport schedules and online maps — “we can create greater efficiencies in cities, catalyze citizen engagement and drive behavior change for public benefit,” Yolles said. “We’re launching this in London, but it would be easy to reskin the front end to use in New York, Chicago, Washington or San Francisco.”

Here’s how re:route works: After downloading the free iPhone app and signing up for a free Recyclebank account, a user enters a starting point and destination. The app will show different options, including walking, cycling (using either one’s own bike or a bike share) and public transportation. Upon arrival, re:route uses GPS to sense the end of the commute and rewards the user with five Recyclebank points. Users also see the calories they’ve burned, and CO2 they’ve saved compared to other transport modes.

One of the appealing features of the program is that it encourages small-scale incremental shifts. Rather than substitute an entire subway commute with a bike ride, for instance, re:route is built to exploit “switchpoints”: spots along a regular commute where a user could exit and switch modes. “So perhaps you exit the tube a stop or two early and walk or bike the remainder,” Yolles said. This increases exercise, reduces congestion and can shake up force-of-habit commuting behaviors.

Recyclebank worked hard to simplify what the user sees. Recyclebank teamed up with R/GA, a digital advertising agency with deep experience in building mobile interactive media. R/GA helped Nike develop their Nike+ GPS running app, which tracks, shares and rewards runners’ efforts. “We thought that was interesting because it’s also focused on behavior change,” Yolles said.

Behind the scenes, the complexity is much greater. The app relies on information provided by TfL’s journey planner, which serves up relevant data about location, travel distance and trip time, and helps calculate travel options. “TfL’s choice to develop and open that data to developers has made all of this possible,” explained Yolles. TfL hopes to use the data to guide future plans. As users and trips multiply, the resulting database can help TfL refine or augment existing transportation infrastructure.

Back on the London’s streets, users will find the program is geared to generate meaningful rewards quickly. By joining, participants earn 75 points. For each trip that is rerouted to a greener option, five points are added. A back of the envelope calculation shows that if a participant modifies each commute, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, the annual tally will hit 2,500 points, though it would be easy to boost that figure significantly with addition trips during the day.

At this rate, the rewards initially offered under the program are easily achievable, and include both useful and mildly indulgent offers. A quick sampling: For 75 points, participants can get £5 off a £25 tab for food, wine or booze at Marks & Spencer. For 100 points, they can score half off a Champneys Town & City Spas treatment, or get a free bar of soap at LushFree. Recyclebank predicts participants will be able to earn up to £250 worth of credits per year using re:route.

To tap users’ competitive impulses, the app awards achievement badges for accumulated savings, and makes it easy to share results through Facebook and email.

It remains to be seen just how much re:route can influence the tide of London’s commuting crowds. With a population of 7.6 million, plus another million commuting to and from the city each day, Recyclebank hopes to attract more than 100,000 users near term, with the ultimate goal of “motivating and tracking” half a million journeys per week.

Bikeworldtravel / Shutterstock.com

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Visit the original article here at  Recyclebank’s iPhone app aims to ease London traffic congestion | GreenBiz.com.

GreenBiz

Seven lessons learned from driving 24 million EV miles | GreenBiz

In the world of electric vehicles, nothing attracts as much speculation or disagreement as the debate over exactly how EV drivers behave. Do they need 100 miles of range or will 30 miles do? How many public recharge stations do they need? Do energy prices influence charging? And so on.

The answers to these questions could have huge implications for the success of EVs. If drivers are satisfied with lower-range cars, fewer recharge points and overnight recharging, then the overall challenge of electrifying the nation’s fleet could be resolved at lower costs and more quickly — with greater economic and environmental benefits.

The best way to answer these questions, of course, is to watch EV drivers and to learn what they’re actually doing.  To assist in that process, the Department of Energy commissioned an industry collaboration — involving a wide range of carmakers, utilities, retailers, government entities and technology providers — to help identify current and potential barriers to EV adoption.

Dubbed the EV Project, the program began in late 2010; gathering data from EV drivers willing to share that information. And last week, the EV Project announced it had amassed an unprecedented volume of behavioral data drawn from more than 24 million miles of EV driving.

The DOE awarded management of the project to ECOtality, which manufactures EV charging units and related software. Chevrolet Volt and the Nissan LEAF are project partners, too. Qualifying Volt and LEAF drivers also receive a residential charger and installation at little or no cost to themselves.

“We’re beginning to really see how people are using chargers,” said Colin Read, vice president of corporate development for ECOtality. I spoke with Read while he was in New York City.

So far, the EV Project is tracking some 4,600 vehicles. And including public sites the EV Project is also monitoring 6,200 charging stations, made up mostly of the Type II chargers that operate at 240 volts.

Geographically, the project is tracking EV behavior in 18 markets, including the “Birkenstock Belt”— those eco-conscious parts of West Coast: Washington, Oregon and California — plus sites in Arizona, Texas, as well as Tennessee, where Nissan builds the LEAF. “We picked regions with very little in common on purpose. We’re seeking a diversity of driver experience,” Read said.

The EV Project is also buying EVs from dealer lots, much like regular consumers do, to understand the overall buying experience. “We call it the ‘Noah’s Ark of EV programs,’ because we buy a pair of every EV on the market,” Read joked. The project does make some exceptions, however, with the most costly models, where just one car is enough.

So, what are some of the project’s early lessons?

  1. The current EV driving distance is modest. According to a pool of EV drivers, made up most of LEAF drivers, average daily mileage is running at 27.7 miles. That distance is very much in line with the overall, rule-of-thumb estimates that most Americans drive less than 40 miles per day.
  2. There’s range anxiety, but not the sort most expected. Project data is showing a curious quirk. There’s been a collective worry that ‘range anxiety’ stifles demand for EV. But data from a small but growing pool of Volt drivers reveals that its drivers work hard to stay in all-battery mode — rather than routinely taking advantage of the extended range provided by the Volt’s gas engine. To stay within the Volt’s 40-mile battery range and not use any gasoline, “[Volt drivers] are being very disciplined,” Read said. “They want to drive all-electric, so we’re seeing them plug in more frequently than LEAF drivers.”
  3. Recharge times are fairly short. Given these relatively low daily-driving distances, the amount of time EVs are actively drawing power to recharge is averaging about 1.5 hours. The average amount of time the car is plugged in (although not necessarily drawing power) is 8.5 hours. And the bulk of cars are reportedly plugged in during a window that spans 8pm to 8am. The upshot? “Drivers don’t need to recharge continuously overnight,” Read said. This data suggests the transmission grid may be better prepared to handle large volumes of EVs than originally thought.
  4. Price signals work. The EV Project looked at San Diego, where utility San Diego Gas & Electric runs one of the nation’s most sophisticated time-of-day consumer pricing programs. And according to the Project, there’s a strong demand there for low-cost, late-night power. SDG&E sells power at four tiers: full price, half price, one-quarter price and, from midnight till early morning, one-sixth of the full price. “We see almost no charging until midnight, when prices fall to their lowest,” Read said. This has implications for grid use: “The knock that the grid will need more capacity to handle a lot of EVs isn’t true; if we can shift charging to night, it will actually balance out the grid.”
  5. Topping off is habitual, but maybe not necessary. The EV Project data shows that daytime charging rises from 9am to 4pm. “People plug in when they’re at work, regardless of whether they need the charge,” Read said. At the moment, because the daytime chargers are free, this behavior may not be reflecting real-world conditions. “People recharge more out of convenience than out of fear,” Read notes. “If the charger is available and free, they’ll plug in.” But higher prices for daytime pricing are inevitable, he adds, and that change will likely drive down demand for daytime plug time.
  6. Installation costs must fall. ECOtality is also tracking installation costs and procedures in its test markets. The costs to permit and install a home charger vary widely and must come down, Read said. Installation costs can run as high as $1,400, and “this has made us rethink the design of the installation process and charging device,” he said. Earlier chargers had to be hard-wired into the wall — but now they can be plugged into a heavy-duty 240V wall plug, like those used for clothes dryers or ovens.
  7. It’s too early to judge true demand. Read’s final point: criticism of EVs in some industry and political circles is premature and unjustified. Critics have been pointing out that the LEAF and Volt fell short of sales targets in 2011, with a total volume of just over 17,000 vehicles. But Read points out that Toyota’s Prius sold just 5,000 units in 2000 – the year when first-generation hybrid cars such as the Prius and the Honda Insight were first sold. “We’re about to see a more real-world test of demand,” he said, with the arrival of Toyota’s plug-in Prius hybrid and the debut of Ford’s battery-powered Focus EV.

Keep an eye on the EV Project’s progress at http://www.theevproject.com/documents.php.

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Image of concept alternative electric vehicle by AlexRoz via Shutterstock. 

Check out the original article here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/04/30/how-evs-are-changing-driver-behavior-7-lessons-24-million-miles

The Daily

How free recycling helps Best Buy stand out from its competition | The Daily (NewsCorp)

Practically everyone has them. They’re those household items that shouldn’t go in the trash and can be really tough to recycle.

It could be a cumbersome tube TV in the basement. Or maybe it’s a drawer full of out-of-date cellphones, or even that long dormant fridge in the garage.

Retailing giant Best Buy will recycle them all — for free.

Though battered by a CEO scandal, store closings and withering online competition, Best Buy has turned recycling into an unlikely success story. Begun three years ago, the chain’s nationwide program earns a small profit by selling mountains of broken gizmos and defunct appliances to partners who dismantle the gear and harvest valuable commodities.

“It’s profitable,” says Leo Raudys, senior director of environmental sustainability at Best Buy. “But just barely.”

What’s more, in many regions, it’s one of the only options available to consumers to dispose of hazardous e-waste. When they launched the program nationwide in 2009, Best Buy executives were uncertain if the program could ever break even. First year costs were projected to run $5 million to $10 million.

“We didn’t know what we were getting into,” says Raudys. If costs stayed that high, he added, the program might have been scrapped. Though Best Buy declined to share more recent cost figures, the fact that it covers its costs — and then some — has helped extend its reach, Raudys says.

At its launch, the chain required consumers to buy a $10 store card to drop off recycling. But last November, Best Buy dropped the fee.

As the program has matured, a few streams of revenue have grown to offset Best Buy’s costs.

First, a small percentage of the waste is recovered and resold. Operational cellphones, for instance, are often reconditioned as replacements.

A larger stream of revenue comes from the recycling companies with which Best Buy partners. They return a share of the value of the recycled plastic, gold, lead and other materials to the retailer. Prices for such commodities have been volatile in recent years, but have been climbing over the long term.

Big, well-known electronics brands also contribute materials to Best Buy’s recycling operations. Twenty-five states have issued rules requiring manufacturers to recover a minimum percentage of what they sell, Raudys said: “Our network can deliver efficiencies that [the electronics makers] can’t match, so they buy access to it.”

As its recycling operations have grown, Best Buy has steadily driven down key labor and transportation costs to collect and haul the waste. Best Buy has also been able to negotiate higher rates from its recycling partners as the volume of waste has grown.

In the cutthroat business of electronics retailing, Best Buy’s take-back program distinguishes it from competitors such as Amazon.com that can’t match the service.

Whether recycling actually lures additional customers to Best Buy’s storefronts remains unclear, though. It’s difficult to identify incremental sales that happen because of the recycling policy, says Raudys. “We see this as a service.”

To avoid the export of hazardous materials, Best Buy pays third parties to audit the practices of its recycling partners. The aim is to enforce a corporate recycling policy designed to match or exceed state and federal guidelines.

Scrutiny of how e-waste is handled rose sharply following revelations in recent years of companies exporting e-waste to poor countries.

The majority of waste collected in the U.S. for recycling is sent to Asia and Africa, says Jim Puckett, executive director of Basel Action Network, an e-waste watchdog group. “It is often smashed, burned, dumped or processed in conditions that endanger the health of workers,” he adds.

Best Buy works with three e-waste recyclers: E Structors in Baltimore; Regency Technologies in Cleveland; and Electronic Recyclers International, or ERI, in Fresno, Calif. Appliances are processed by Regency Technologies and Jaco Environmental in Snohomish, Wash.

Currently all three of Best Buy’s recyclers meet an industry-backed code of conduct for e-waste known as R2. Just ERI is currently certified under the more stringent e-Stewards code, created by the Basel Action Network and other environmental groups.

“Only e-Stewards is consistent with international agreements barring export of hazardous e-waste to developing countries and forbids using municipal landfills or incineration for hazardous e-waste,” says Puckett.

Only about half of states have e-waste rules, although Best Buy accepts recycling nationwide. For the rest, Best Buy’s take-back program is one of only a small number of options available.

There’s a big need for more such programs, if the growth of Best Buy’s program is any indicator. It is expanding by 10 to 15 percent per year. In 2011, roughly 4 million customers dropped off 86 million pounds of electronics and 73 million pounds of appliances.

Since its debut, Best Buy has collected more than a half billion pounds of recycling, divided roughly evenly between appliances and e-waste.

That puts the retailer on track to hit a target of 1 billion pounds of consumer goods in just a few years.

Gizmos continue to multiply as they fall in price. And as they are replaced ever more quickly, the need for an easy recycling option is only growing. Best Buy is well positioned to mine this growing mountain of digital detritus for cash, and divert more waste from landfills in the process.

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Originally published 2012-04-30 by The Daily, an iPad-only venture created by NewsCorp. Original publication URL: http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/04/30/043012-biz-best-buy-recycle-aston-1-4/

GreenBiz

How Best Buy makes money recycling America’s electronics | GreenBiz

Retailing giant Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) has seen its recycling take-back program grow from a costly gamble into a fast-growing business that’s making a little bit of money. “It’s profitable. But just barely,” said Leo Raudys, senior director of environmental sustainability at Best Buy. “People still don’t believe it.”

The skepticism comes from the fact that the program is not only free to consumers, but they can also drop off just about any kind of junk that runs or ran on electricity. A dead tube TV? Check. The cell phone you dunked? Of course. That leaky washing machine? Yep. Best Buy takes appliances, too.

So how does the company cover its costs and a bit more? I had the chance to catch up with Raudys last week during the Sustainability Operations Summit in New York City, where he spoke on a panel titled “Successfully Tackling Waste.” Afterward, Raudys talked about how Best Buy turned the potentially thorny problem of collecting recycling into a self-subsidizing operation.

At its launch in 2009, the chain required consumers to buy a $10 store card to drop off recycling. But last November, Best Buy dropped that fee.

Today, the program generates two streams of revenue. First, Best Buy takes a cut from its recycling partners. When truckloads of old TVs, PCs and dryers go to its processing partners, the plastic, gold, lead, nickel and other materials recovered from the dismantled waste is sold to be remade into new materials. And while volatile, the prices for all of these commodities have generally been heading up over the past few years, raising the share that comes back to Best Buy. A very small percentage of the waste, Raudys estimates, ends up recovered and refurbished.

Secondly, Best Buy collects revenues from its partners: big, well-known electronics brands. “25 states have rules requiring that manufacturers recycle some share of what they sell every year,” Raudys said. “Our network can deliver efficiencies that [the electronics makers] can’t match, so they buy access to it.”

Best Buy has also been able improve its margins by steadily lowering the costs of collecting and transporting the consumer waste by improving workflows and boosting volumes, he said. Higher volumes of waste let Best Buy win more competitive rates from its recycling partners as well.

But does Best Buy see any extra sales from customers lured in by the recycling service? After all, when faced with roughly similar prices for a flat panel TV from a number of retailers, many customers would opt for the vendor who can take away the old set. The benefit of the program remains unclear, however. Raudys explained it’s difficult to identify sales that happened because of the recycling policy. “We see this as a service to our customers,” he said.

It could have been a costly, unsustainable service, though. “The program was projected to cost $5 million to $10 million in the first year,” Raudys said. “We didn’t know what we were getting into.” If costs stayed that high, he said, the program might’ve been scrapped.

The program’s most tangible overhead costs are labor and storage space, to process the waste at its stores. There’s also the cost to truck pallets to recycling sites. Less visible costs for Best Buy include auditing the processes of its recycling partners. Raudys said the company hires third-party inspectors to enforce a corporate recycling policy that aims to match or exceed state and federal guidelines. To avoid the export of hazardous materials to low-income countries, Best Buy’s program includes physical inspection of shipping containers and paper auditing.

E-waste handling practices remain a controversial challenge. Scrutiny of e-waste practices increased in the wake of embarrassing revelations — most famously a 2008 investigation by CBS’ 60 Minutes program — that exposed recyclers who were sending e-waste to be dumped or processed in primitive, dangerous methods.

Experts say the problem has improved but still persists. “At least half of the e-waste collected in the U.S. for so-called recycling is exported to Asia and Africa where it is often smashed, burned, dumped or processed in conditions that endanger the health of workers,” said Jim Puckett, executive director of Basel Action Network, an e-waste watchdog group.

Three partners handle Best Buy’s e-waste. In the western U.S. materials go to Electronic Recyclers International (ERI) in Fresno, California. In the Midwest, old gear flows to Regency Technologiesin Cleveland, Ohio — and in the East, E Structors in Baltimore, Maryland handles the e-waste. Appliance recycling is done by Regency and Jaco Environmental in Snohomish, Washington.

Puckett would like to see all of Best Buy’s e-waste handlers meet the e-Stewards certification, a program co-developed by BAN and other environmental groups. “Only e-Stewards is consistent with international agreements barring export of hazardous e-waste to developing countries and forbids using municipal landfills or incineration for hazardous e-waste,” he said.

Of Best Buy’s three e-waste handlers, only ERI is currently e-Steward certified. But all three meet the R2 code, an industry-backed standard.

In the absence of federal or state regulations for e-waste, Best Buy’s take-back program is one of only a small number of options available. Just 25 states have e-waste rules, although Best Buy accepts recycling nationwide. “There are many places in the country where there are no alternatives,” according to Puckett.

The program’s growth, meanwhile, suggests there’s a big need. Since the program began, Raudys said, Best Buy has collected half-a-billion pounds of recycling, including both appliances and e-waste. And given that the volume of recycling is growing by 10-15 percent per year, Best Buy is likely to hit its goal of 1 billion pounds of consumer goods soon. Last year, some four million customers dropped off nearly 86-million pounds of electronics and 73-million pounds of appliances for recycling (see table, below).

Best Buy’s global recycling operations

Best Buy’s efforts come against a backdrop of intensifying efforts to improve e-waste recycling nationwide. Last week,Staples announced a deal with HP to take back all sizes of computers, monitors, desktop printer/scanner/copier devices, handheld electronics and various other retired gizmos.

The number of recycling drop-off locations for consumers nationwide grew to nearly 7,500 from just over 5,000 in 2011, according to the First Annual Report  of the eCycling Leadership Initiative (ELI), a program created by theConsumer Electronics Association, a consortium of major electronics manufacturers and retailers.

ELI participants arranged for the recycling of 460 million pounds of consumer electronics last year, a 53 percent increase over the 300 million pounds recycled in 2010. And the group is aiming to drive that figure to annual rate of 1 billion pounds by 2016.

Photo of Best Buy store sign by Lynn Watson via Shutterstock.

GreenBiz

Cheap natural gas drives manufacturers, energy companies to shift gears | GreenBiz

Last week, Joe Nocera reminded me of how disconnected and angry the debate over fracking — the process of injecting fluids into deep, dense rock formations to fracture them and release natural gas — has grown. At The New York Times Energy for Tomorrow conference, Nocera moderated a series of panels that were focused on a broad variety of energy issues, but repeatedly returned to the hot button issue of fracking.

In a rhetorical question, he asked if the tradeoff in environmental harm and public health one we just have to accept. The answer is no, of course. But, as Nocera added, the fact is that fracking is already happening in a very big way. For those not following this issue, he’s an op-ed columnist for the Times who supports fracking as an innovation that, done responsibly, can lead to game-changing new supplies of energy, job growth and economic expansion.

Nocera’s position crystalizes much of the debate around this energy technology. His writing has drawn ire, especially in greater New York City and its hinterlands, where proposals to drill for natural gas in the city’s upstate watershed have sparked enough protest to turn the Hudson Valley into the epicenter of national anti-fracking efforts.

There’s good reason for alarm. ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative journalism entity has — in my opinion — amassed the best work documenting the environmental harm done by fracking. Here are just a few of the key environmental harms associated with the practice:

These issues make a strong case against the practice, and explain why Nocera’s “develop responsibly” position is controversial. The mixed reactions to his endorsement of the practice highlight the schisms dividing interest groups, coming between neighbors who are fighting over whether to frack or not and between national environmental groups who disagree about the environmental pluses and minuses of the practice.

For example, Nocera draws some of his analysis from work done by the Environmental Defense Fund, which is also pushing for tightly regulated fracking. Nocera’s approach has drawn heavy fire from climate activists such as Bill McKibben, a writer and scholar who backs a moratorium, arguing the risks of fracking are simply too high, as well as from Joseph Romm, a former Clinton-era energy official and now an influential climate commentator at Climate Progress.

Putting aside the fight over whether fracking should extend into new areas, Nocera’s talk drew my attention to a facet of fracking that gets less attention. Away from the main boxing ring where the issue is being fought out, large-scale industrial investment is rapidly reorganizing based on the long-term promise of low-cost gas. In short, industry is betting that fracking is here to say. Here’s where fracking already is impacting industry:

Power generation

The fracking binge has already altered the outlook for the U.S. power and manufacturing sectors. More than the rise of renewables, cheap natural gas has paved the way for the retirement of more than 100 coal-fired powered plants, too aged to meet federal clean air rules.

Efforts to build new coal plants are constrained too. Because natural gas power plants are cheaper to build and fuel, the natural gas boom has radically lowered the count of new coal-fired plants being proposed. According to data tracked by the National Energy Technology Lab and Sierra Club, plans for more than 160 coal plants have been shelved in recent years, partly due to natural gas’ cost advantage, as well as soft growth of demand for power.

“Natural gas has done more than other legislative initiative to push coal out of the equation,” said panelist Michael Levi, a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the center for foreign aaffairs, and by my reckoning, one the smartest observers out there on this issue.

Manufacturing

Cheap natural gas is rewriting the rules for other manufacturers too. Less than a decade ago, natural-gas-reliant manufacturers were decamping from the U.S., transplanting operations to the Arabian Gulf, Latin America and other gas-rich regions.

Now many are returning. Makers of chemicals, fertilizer and pharmaceuticals, all of which use natural gas as both an energy source and a raw material are returning stateside, lured by natural gas for under $2.50 per thousand cubic feet, less than fifth of the price in Europe or East Asia.

As Jim Motavalli reports in The New York Times, Nucor, which uses natural gas to make steel, is building a $750-million facility in Louisiana, just eight years after shutting down a similar plant in the same state and shipping it to Trinidad, to tap the island’s recently-developed natural gas supplies.

The cost advantage provided by cheap natural gas is even sharper for companies that use methane as a raw material — to make plastics, for example. Kevin Swift, chief economist at the American Chemistry Council, tells the Times that because European chemicals companies use oil-based raw materials derived to make plastics, the U.S. has a 50-to-1 advantage. “‘Shale gas’ is really driving this,” he says. “A million [British thermal units] of natural gas that might cost $11 in Europe and $14 in South Korea is $2.25 in the U.S. Partly because of that, chemical producers have plans to expand ethylene capacity in the U.S. by more than 25 percent between now and 2017.”

Add up the impact of investments like these and high rates of shale gas recovery could result in a million new manufacturing jobs by 2025, according to a 2011 PricewaterhouseCoopers study cited by Motavalli.

Transportation

Compared to current petroleum prices, natural gas costs $1.50 per gallon equivalent, nearly two-thirds less than current pump prices for gasoline or diesel. Large fleets of heavy-duty vehicles — from buses to garbage trucks to delivery vehicles — have been among the earliest converts. One-quarter to a half of Navistar’s new vehicle sales in these markets opt for natural gas.

Long-distance highway trucking may be the next to switch. Speaking with the Times, Navistar chief executive Dan Ustian, predicts that natural gas could capture up to a fifth of sales of highway tractor-trailers within a year.

The need for on-road refueling infrastructure remains a constraint. There simply aren’t many publicly accessible natural gas refueling sites. The count is under 1,000, less than 1 percent the number of gas stations. Last month, GE and natural gas producer Chesapeake Energy inked a joint venture to build 250 natural gas refueling points around the country.

Policy

Industry is clearly digging in even as environmental opposition gains momentum. Complicating the politics of this debate is that fracking is an intensely regional issue. State-level cultural perceptions of energy vary, for instance. Some families in Texas welcome gas rigs in their backyards, while some landowners in New York are suing to prevent nearby drilling.

Geology is different everywhere too, of course. So what was done safely in Oklahoma may not be replicable in Pennsylvania. “Local conditions matter significantly,” said Mark Brownstein, a panelist at the Times event and chief counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund’s energy program.

These polarizations have driven the debate to unproductive levels of ire, the panelists at the NYT event argued. “This is the perfectly dysfunctional fight,” said Levi, from the Council on Foreign Affairs. “There are environmentalists who believe this cannot be done safely. And there are those in the industry who say regulations will destroy their business.” The loudest voices amount to an all-or-nothing proposition, Levi added, which makes the process of brokering a solution to the fracking question very difficult.

There is a web of substantial existing regulation covering fracking, Brownstein explained, including the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act. “The fundamental question is whether they are sufficient,” he said, and how to improve them if not. Another weak link he pointed to is variations in state level rules and enforcement of well construction, where one poorly built well, after all, can do enormous environmental damage.

Indeed, pointing to these weakest links, Levi made a case for the role of federal regulation. If one state underinvests or underenforces, a single disaster could stir up a far-reaching political backlash that could ultimately slow or halt development.

Some state-level policies, such as Texas’ tough disclosure rules on what frackers inject into the ground, can be cut and pasted to other state or national rules. New York State’s rules are also shaping up to be a benchmark in this respect. And some rules, such as the “Halliburton exception,” which excluded fracking from Clean Water Act standards for what is injected into wells, can only be fixed by an act of Congress.

With the scale of fracking rising, the stakes to get regulation right are growing — and making the fight harder to resolve. Some in the industry are beginning to welcome tougher regulation, recognizing that it could help level the playing field. If tougher regulations could ensure fracking can be done safely, but added 10 or 20 percent to unit cost of gas, the fuel remains cheap, Levi pointed out. “If I were a fracker, I’d rather have 20 cents extra charge” than the environmental and political risks facing the energy today, he said.

Check out Nocera, Levi, Brownstein and others here at The New York Times Energy for Tomorrow conference.

NRDC OnEarth

Meet the Change Makers: Starbucks’s Quest for a Better Cup | OnEarth

Starbucks didn’t invent the disposable coffee cup, but few other brands are as tightly married to their container. From Brooklyn to Bangkok, the Seattle-based roaster’s white cups are instantly identifiable. More than four billion containers crossed the company’s counters last year, and only a small percentage were recycled.

The person charged with finding a way to increase that share is Jim Hanna, Starbucks’s director of environmental impact. He joined the company in 2006 and has tackled a host of issues, from improving coffee farming, harvesting, and processing techniques to greening the chain’s 17,000-plus stores. He has a lot of success to show for those efforts: Starbucks hit its goal of buying half of all the energy for its North American stores from renewable sources in 2010, years ahead of schedule, for example. But cups, especially the amount of virgin paper they consume, are proving to be one of his greatest challenges.

The company is tackling the problem with its own version of the three R’s: recycling, reuse, and reinvention. Starbucks has piloted recycling efforts city-by-city, working out kinks with trash haulers and paper mills. It has run a nationwide contest to design better reusable mugs. And it has worked to share its findings with the industry, bringing together McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts, for example, at a series of Cup Summits. But the heat is on. Starbucks has pledged to have cup recycling available in all of its North American outlets by 2015. Modest as this target may sound, it requires that Starbucks more or less remake the paper recycling business.

Hanna, 43, holds a degree in environmental science and has worked in environmental consulting. He says the long-term costs of corporate inaction on pressing environmental issues can be enormous, which is why Starbucks’s hunt for the perfect cup is a voluntary, but critical, initiative. By moving aggressively, the company hopes to win and retain customers, boost employee morale, and maybe even outflank competitors. On March 21, Starbucks released its2011 Global Responsibility Report, documenting both its progress and ongoing challenges. Recycling efforts made gains: the share of North American stores that can recycle hot cups has more than tripled since 2010 to 18 percent. Yet the push to avoid paper use, by spurring more consumers to use tumblers or in-store ceramic mugs, saw almost no improvement.

Hannah spoke with OnEarth’s Adam Aston about Starbucks’s successes and its struggles to solve the coffee cup problem.

What steps has Starbucks taken to lower paper use? It wasn’t so long ago that Styrofoam was the standard.

Our effort goes back to the company’s earliest days, in the 1980s. There was a period, for instance, during which customers would always get two cups to prevent them from burning their fingers. In late 1990s, we introduced the sleeve, which is made of Kraft paper. It is made from recycled content, plus it uses far less material than a whole cup. And because it doesn’t touch the beverage, it can be more easily recycled.

Why not make the whole cup out of that material?

This is where you see how the business side of the paper industry, as well as food safety rules, really complicate this challenge. It is possible to make cups out of unbleached Kraft paper, but there are a couple of limitations. First, most Kraft paper is made from recycled content and, to maintain consumer safety, the Food and Drug Administration regulates the use of post-consumer recycled paper in packaging that comes into contact with food.

Second, whatever sort of paper you use, it has to be made waterproof by lining it with another material. Wax is used in some food applications. Along with most of our competitors, we use a thin lining of food-grade polyethylene plastic.

I’m guessing that the plastic lining complicates the recycling process?

To recycle beverage cups, the cups have to be ground up. From that pulp, the plastic lining is separated using a combination of mechanical force and heat. All of this adds complexity, and cost, to the recycling process. If a paper mill has a cheaper source of fiber — one that demands less processing — it is not going to want beverage cups. And paper mills vary wildly in their abilities. Some are six months old and can handle a wide variety of materials; others are a century old and are easily gummed up by impurities like plastic. So if Seattle, say, has a modern paper mill, you may be able to recycle cups, but if New York has an older mill, or no mill, you can’t.

Working with GlobalGreen [a sustainability focused non-profit established by Mikhail Gorbachev], we ran a trial in Manhattan in 2010, sending poly-coated paper cups from a number of stores to a paper mill on Staten Island. We had mixed results: When we introduced the cups, they generated more unusable byproduct and really slowed down the mill’s processes. When we ended the trial, we had learned a lot. But we’re still looking for paper mills near New York. In other cities, we’re seeing more promising results, and in time we hope to copy and adapt those success stories elsewhere.

This suggests there are a lot of economic factors driving what can be recycled.

Yeah, the New York City pilot illustrates this point. Quite often, it’s not strictly a question of whether the process is possible, but whether there’s enough economic incentive for various parties to take on the challenge. That’s why our challenge is not only to come up with a better recipe to make the cups more easily recyclable, but also to help develop viable markets for the resulting paper.

Where are you having success with these trials?

In Chicago, we’re doing a test where we’re sending all of our paper cups to a mill in Wisconsin that makes our napkins. So the cups come back as another Starbucks product. We’d like to scale that up and test it out elsewhere. We’ve also got an industry group, the Food Services Packaging Institute, to take on this effort. By doing that, it evolves from being a Starbucks-centric project to an industry-led initiative with a much bigger potential for change.

And recycled paper can’t be used to make new cups again, right?

The FDA has rules strictly controlling the use of recycled materials in food-grade containers. The idea is to prevent impurities or disease that could sicken the public. But it dates back to a period when waste handling and paper processing technology was less advanced. Starbucks started working with the FDA about 10 years ago. We were able to make a case to use recycled paper in our coffee cups by showing that the mills we were working with could consistently make sanitary recycled containers. In 2006, we got the FDA to OK a cup with 10 percent recycled content, and that’s been our standard ever since. Ten percent may not sound like a lot, but it was a big step. Given the billions of cups we use, it saves a lot of trees from the mill.

That leads to another solution you’ve tried: getting customers to use fewer cups in the first place, especially since so many of them carry their cups out the door, rather than drinking and discarding them in stores where your recycling receptacles would be located. Yet the share of beverages you sell in reusable containers, such as tumblers that customers bring in, is surprisingly small: just 1.9 percent in 2011. That amounts to a savings of about 34 million cups, but the rate has been growing very slowly. What makes this such a challenge?

It’s harder to shift customer preferences than you might expect. We’ve always sold reusable mugs. And we offer customers a 10 cent discount if they use a tumbler. That’s more than the unit cost of a paper cup. Yet, in practice, we see that people value the convenience of having a cup when they want it and may not always want the hassle of handling and cleaning a tumbler.

Consumers are famously fickle. Attachment to plastic bags and plastic water bottles lingered for years before efforts to get rid of them caught fire. How are you trying to spark these changes?

We’re exploring many approaches to help consumers opt for alternatives to paper cups. In 2010, for instance, we ran a contest. Called the Betacup Challenge, entrants included everything from better designs for collapsible cups [such as the Cupup] to fully biodegradable designs [such as the Betacup]. The finalists stood out by including social networking and reward features that help shift behaviors. The Karma Cup, which was the overall winner, encourages customers to bring in reusable mugs by offering rewards and public recognition of the benefits of doing do. But when we tried some of these techniques out at a Seattle test store, we found there was less enthusiasm than we had seen in the online community.

We’ve increased our focus on shaping behaviors as a way to lower cup use. For example, this year we’re working to redesign stores to make ceramic wear more visible to customers, by positioning it in sight, right behind the baristas. Customers who want to enjoy their drink in the store will be reminded that they can do so in a ceramic mug that we wash and re-use. This is something that’s widely available today, but opted for less often than we’d like.

Are others in the industry collaborating with you on this challenge?

Yes. Big as we are, Starbucks still accounts for a tiny share of the 500 billion or so cups used industry-wide every year. So we’ve convened three “Cup Summits,” the first in Seattle, and the others at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to bring together manufacturers, government officials and retailers — including our competitors — to devise solutions that have the potential to shift the industry.

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TRUTH SQUAD — Checking industry claims with NRDC’s sustainability experts

Starbucks got America hooked on Venti lattes. The problem, as NRDC’s Darby Hoovers sees it, is that we’re also hooked on the paper cups they come in. To lower its paper consumption, the coffee chain’s most effective option is to steer customers toward reusable cups, saysHoover, a senior resource specialist in NRDC’s San Francisco office.

Easier said than done, though, she acknowledges. “The reality is that Starbucks is working in a disposable culture,” says Hoover, in which consumers’ habits are tough to change. Accordingly, the coffee chain is focusing its efforts on recycling. By 2015, it has pledged to make front-of-store recycling available in all of its company-owned stores in North America.

But it’s not as simple as putting out more recycling bins. Although, technically, a growing share of recyclers can handle the challenge of processing the plastic-lined cups, a small amount of plastic can downgrade a batch of recycled paper, making it harder to process and less valuable, Hoover explains. So Starbucks has been working with select mills to improve the economics of the venture. In its Chicago stores, for example, it buys back napkins made from the paper that is recycled from used cups. The efforts are bearing fruit. During 2011, Starbucks extended the availability of in-store recycling for cups to more than 1,000 stores, largely in Canada, Chicago, and southern California, more than tripling the count from the prior year.

Starbucks’ most important role could be as an industry leader, Hoover says. If the company hits its 2015 cup recycling goal, it may trigger wider change throughout the restaurant industry. — Adam Aston

Writer, editor, content advisor, creative leader – energy, climate | Chief storyteller at RMI | Co-founder of T Brand at The New York Times