3p Contributor: Mary Catherine O'Connor
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Bill Nye’s Climate Scouts: Our Great Green Hope
photo: Chabot Science Center
First off, the scary and bad news: During a speaking engagement at the University of Southern California last week, Bill Nye collapsed. He was reportedly mid-sentence when he collapsed, and though he tried to continue his talk, his speech became strained and he eventually left the stage. We’re sending him good vibes and hoping he’s on the mend.
You know Nye, most likely, from his science-is-fun TV show called Bill Nye The Science Guy. But Nye is now turning his energy in a new, science-is-fun-but-also-proves-that-we’re-in-trouble theme. In other words, he’s now Bill Nye The Climate Guy. And he’s bringing his message to Bay Area kids (and grown-ups) through Bill Nye’s Climate Lab, a new exhibit at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland.
I visited the exhibit on November 20, its opening day, and came away from it with a renewed sense that our future generations might just save us–assuming we bribe them.
Weekend Photo Essay: Clif Bar’s Sweet New Digs
Kit Crawford and Gary Erickson, hanging out at Clif Bar HQ
From its smart employee stock ownership plan to its tasty, organic products, Clif Bar offers plenty of employee benefits. But until recently, daylight and elbow room didn’t rate very highly on that list. That’s because its original Berkeley, Calif., location became snugger and snugger with each new hire, and the industrial setting didn’t allow much sun to shine in. That all changed last month, when Clif Bar’s new headquarters opened in Emeryville, Calif. Triple Pundit recently stopped by for a little tour. And we’re more than a little jealous…
Curbside Recycling & Energy Management: The Gov’s Latest Tools of Oppression
Fountain Hills, a master planned community of roughly 25,000 in the mountains northwest of Scottsdale, Arizona, has well-appointed (if homogenous) homes and public art and beautiful mountain vistas. With lots of park space and golf courses, it seems like a lovely place to live…except that the town government is launching a plot to start etching away at the resident’s freedoms, starting with their freedom to choose a garbage collector and their freedom to not recycle! That’s right, it’s Obamatrash!
OK, here’s what really happened: The town voted to award Allied Waste Services (part of Republic, the second largest waste management company in the country, after Waste Management) a five-year contract to become the single waste and recycling collector in Fountain Hills, which currently works with five different waste-collection services. None of these current services offer curbside recycling (or if, they do offer these services, they are not used in Fountain Hills, but Allied will collect recyclables, as well as yard waste, from residents’ homes.
Coca Cola’s PlantBottle: Digging Up the Roots
Packaging, because it’s ubiquitous and because it is tied irrevocably to our purchasing decisions, is very personal. Branding has made packaging more than just the housing for the products we buy—in many cases, a product and its package are forever married. (The square Fiji Water bottle, for example, is much more than a vessel. To some, it’s a status symbol. To others, it’s a symbol of inefficiency.)
And so major consumer packaged goods manufacturers, including Coca Cola, are putting a great deal of effort into lightening the environmental footprints that their packaging leaves in its wake. I recently spoke with Scott Vitters, sustainable packaging director for Coca Cola, about the steps it has taken to improve its packaging.
As I’d explained in a post about the Odwalla bottle, I’ve heard some dubious information about what PlantBottle is and what its lifecycle looks like. Vitters tried to set the record straight.
Greenhome.com Acquisition Highlights Growth in Social Commerce
Lawrence Axil Comras
Back in 1998, way before the word “green” was widely bandied around as a verb, Lawrence Axil Comras set off on a new venture to develop a rating and certification system for eco-friendly home products. It kind of flopped. “It was a small, difficult market and the suppliers wouldn’t deal with me,” he says. “But then it occurred to me that I could use my website to sell the stuff I wanted to certify. So I started a hybrid site that had a rating system and also sold goods.”
With that, Greenhome.com was born. Over the years, Comras developed his product approval policy, using a combination of his own criteria as well as certification labels from agencies such as Green Seal, while also growing the e-commerce aspect of the business. And as “green” became part of the consumer lexicon, Comras started speaking at many conferences and became a go-to expert whenever the news media needed an affable spokesperson for green products (as these CBS, Fox News and Today Show clips reveal).
Starting early in the 2000s, sales at Greenhome.com, which is based in San Francisco, doubled each year, before flattening, in lock step with the recession. And earlier this month, Greenhome.com was purchased for an undisclosed sum by Jane Capital Partners, LLC, a merchant bank based in San Francisco and Houston. Jane Capital has funded or founded multiple cleantech spin-offs, including CarbonFlow, and it operates the clean tech community site cleantech.org. It’s also behind the blog CleanTechBlog.com.
I asked Neal Dikeman, a principal at Jane Capital, why the company decided to move into consumer products.
Odwalla Squeezes Out the Oil—Much More Oil Than Coke Squeezed
Juice maker Odwalla has announced that, starting in March of 2011, it will move to a new type of plastic for its single-serve juice packaging. That bottle of C Monster or Mango Tango you pick up on your lunch break will no longer be derived from a completely petroleum-based plastic. The new “PlantBottle” will be comprised of 96 percent (or more) of a bio-based plastic derived from molasses or sugarcane juice.
This news comes on the heels of announcements from Stonyfield Farm, which is moving to corn-based polylactic acid (PLA) for its multi-pack yogurt packaging, and the debut of the Replenish cleaning product, which basically reinvents cleaning product packaging in a very clever way.
Together, these are important parts of a larger trend toward reducing the environmental impact of consumer packaged goods. It’s an encouraging trend, and also a difficult task for producers, who need to find ways to maintain the attractiveness of their goods while also making them more eco-friendly and keeping the same price points, since consumers might pay more for organic tomatoes but not for the same old yogurt they’ve been buying for years.
Stonyfield Plants Seed for Better Packaging
Each year, Stonyfield Farm sells 200 million of its “YoBaby” and “YoKids” individual, 4-ounce yogurt cups (they’re sold in multipacks of four). This makes up 27 percent, by weight, of all its products sold each year. But these little containers had become a big problem for this forward-thinking company, from both waste and health perspectives. The company started using polystyrene for the YoBaby packaging in 2003, and since then, consumer complaints, based on the material’s links to human health problems, were piling up. Plus, it wasn’t getting any easier to find recycling facilities that would accept the material. So last month, Stonyfield began transitioning to a material composed mostly of polylactic acid (PLA), which is corn-based.
This is a major transition for a company of Stonyfield’s size, especially given its cache among sustainability-focused firms. But it’s also not a perfect solution. For one thing, the PLA is produced by NatureWorks, a subsidiary of the agri-giant Cargill, and a company one might be surprised to find linked to the yogurt-maker, which prides itself on using organic ingredients and supporting sustainable agricultural practices. Also, the PLA cups are no more recyclable than the polystyrene they are replacing—in fact, there are only two facilities that recycle the PLA, and only one in the U.S.
Will Whitman’s Opposition to Prop 23 Help Get Her Elected?
Sure, seeing former Secretary of State George Shultz come out against Proposition 23, the November ballot measure that would stop California’s landmark emissions-reduction law (AB32) in its tracks, might have raised some eyebrows. But Shultz has been actively pushing for energy independence and the increased use of renewable energy, so really, his support of AB32 is no surprise. But Meg Whitman? Yes, the Republican nominee for Governor, has also come out in opposition of Prop 23.
Why? Because the ballot measure is “too simple.”
Come again?
Whitman had been mum on Prop 23, but her Democratic opponent Jerry Brown has been pushing her to take a stand. She did just that today, listing her opposition to the ballot measure. She has long called AB32 a “job killer” and mentioned her plans on enacting at least a year-long moratorium on the law’s implementation, if she is elected. In a statement to expand on her opposition to the measure, she said:
While Proposition 23 does address the job killing aspects of AB 32, it does not offer a sensible balance between our vital need for good jobs and the desire of all Californians to protect our precious environment. It is too simple of a solution for a complex problem. I believe that my plan to fix AB 32 strikes the right balance for California. I will vote ‘no’ on Proposition 23.
EPA to Retailers: Watch For ‘Pesticidal’ Claims
Cleaning and pest control products sold at 99¢ Only Stores will kill germs and bugs…and who knows what else. In a significant ruling, an EPA administrative law judge has ordered 99¢ Only Stores, a chain with 273 stores across the country, to pay $409,490 in penalties for the sale of illegal unregistered and misbranded pesticides contained in household products.
At the root of the fines are three cleaning and pest control products sold at the chain stores, which were being sold in violation of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). A cleaning agent from Mexico called “Bref Limpieza y Disinfección Total con Densicloro” (Bref Complete Cleaning and Disinfection with Densicloro), was not registered with EPA, despite what the agency called “pesticidal claims” on the product’s label. The other products that violated the Act are the innocuous-sounding “Farmer’s Secret Berry & Produce Cleaner,” which contains an unregistered pesticide (guess that was the farmer’s secret) and “PiC BORIC ACID Roach Killer III,” which did have EPC labels but they were upside-down or inside out, making them hard to read.
The fine is the largest contested penalty ever ordered by an EPA administrative law judge against a product retailer under FIFRA, according to the EPA’s report, released Wednesday.
Fight to Derail AB32 Could Spill Into Courts – Outside California
Thanks to a ballot initiative waged by a group called the California Jobs Initiative, California voters will decide in November whether to move forward with implementation of the state’s landmark emissions reduction law, the Global Warming Solutions Act (AB32), even though it was signed into law in 2006. But if the initiative, Proposition 23, fails, the battle may just be getting started. California Watch reported on Thursday that four states, Alabama, Nebraska, Texas and North Dakota, are all ruminating legal actions against California because they see the Golden State’s decision to limit greenhouse gas emissions as an affront to other states’ right to conduct interstate commerce.
If that sounds like a hard legal argument, consider a suit between Minnesota and North Dakota over a similar law. Says California Watch:
North Dakota supplies 60 percent of Minnesota’s energy, much of it from a massive lignite coal mine. Shortly after Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty signed a law mandating a 30 percent reduction in CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants by 2012 and an 80 percent reduction by 2050, tensions erupted with the electricity supplier next door: The North Dakota legislature appropriated $500,000 to finance preparation of a legal challenge by [North Dakota attorney general Wayne] Stenehjem.
This emerging threat being launched from across the Rockies (funding for Prop 23 is flowing from Texas and Kansas, via Koch Industries) will only embolden efforts to fight Prop 23, which are getting organized all across the state.
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