Green Collar Blog

In this interview with Gene Wang, CEO of People Power Co., we discuss how wireless sensor networks are going to play a key role in energy efficiency, the smart grid and electronic product development going forward. People Power has developed an Open Source wireless sensor local area network (OSHAN - stands for Open Source Home Area Network) that anyone can develop for. According the OpenOSHAN wiki:

[OSHAN] will be used as the foundation for many wireless consumer devices, turning those wireless electronics into internet connected electronics. Under a BSD-style license, anybody is welcome to check out, contribute to, and use OSHAN in turning new ideas into devices you can actually feel in your hands. OSHAN is an extension and flavor of TinyOS, kind of how Red Hat and Ubuntu are flavors of Linux. TinyOS already has thousands of users and embedded developers worldwide, which is a lot of brain-hours for you to leverage in your own projects.

1. Lighting upgrades
2. Building Re-commissioning (examining and repairing all building systems so they work optimally, thereby vastly lowering energy consumption and waste)
3. Capitalizing on government financial incentives to improve energy efficiency (Federal, State, even local)
4. Lowering reliance on peak load energy usage (mid-day)
5. Instituting behavioral changes inside a company

Groom Energy is lazer focused on ROI producing energy management initiatives, as well as helping companies lower their carbon footprint. They are providing thought leadership in the new field of enterprise carbon accounting. ECA is the process a company goes through to get a complete and on-going picture of their carbon footprint so that they can improve it and eliminate energy waste and wasted money. In the interview, we discuss the explosion in large companies reporting their carbon emissions (from 5% five years ago to over 75% today) and the benefits they are reaping from having this data at their fingertips. A few months ago, I spoke with the VP of a large company (and one of Groom's clients) that had recently completed the first draft of their carbon footprint, and he said to me that now everywhere he goes in the company he sees $100 bills lying on the floor. The company had no idea how much money they were wasting and are recouping tremendous returns on the project.

Take a listen to the interview. If you are interested in how to get moving in taking your company green, this conversation is going to give you some great ideas....

Peeing is Believing. 

That's what Klaus Reichardt, the founder and owner of Waterless Co, LLC,  told me during our insightful interview about the benefits of waterless urinals.  Klaus has been a producing and deploying waterless, odorless urinals since the 80's and is a true pioneer in this space. 

The interview highlights the business and environmental benefits of this product and makes a compelling case that any CFO would appreciate.  Here are 5 reasons businesses should be seriously consider investing in No Flush Urinals:

1. They save on average 30,000 to 50,000 gallons of drinkable water per year, per urinal.  Imagine a building like the Sears Tower in Chicago...at 110 stories tall, it probably has 1,100 urinals.  That means one building is literally flusing away over 33 million gallons of potable water every year.  And what about the Atlanta airport (you know, the major city that was two weeks away from being out of water a couple of years ago!)?  There is no way they should still be using flush urinals when a waterless option exists.
2. That wasted water translates to Return-on-Investment.  Water costs, on the low end, around $7 per 1000 gallons.  That means a savings of over $210 per year, per urinal (and up to $600 in some water districts).  With these types of urinals costing between $250 and $500, the math is easy.
3. Lowered Vandalism.  No more punk kids pulling on the handles until they overflow all day.  More return-on-investment!
4. Cleaner!  Urine is sterile.  It is by keeping the urinals constantly wet that all the bacteria is created.  The mechanism to keep the restroom odorless relies on a liquid that is lighter than urine...the urine passes through it and no odor can come back up.  As an aside, I've been in many buildings with waterless urinals (of different kinds) and there has never been an odor...they work great.
5. Lowered building and maintenance costs.  Eliminating all of that active plumbing cuts down on the services of tradesmen necessary to install, maintain and repair the urinals (which happen to be one of the most fragile systems in a building....you guys out there know exactly what I'm talking about...think constantly running, won't flush, etc.).  More return-on-investment!

Take a listen to the entire interview.  You'll thank yourself  the next time you are at a cocktail party...you'll be a wealth of information on a topic everyone is oddly interested in!

Haven't you always wondered how they put one of these things up?   Here's the answer in fast forward.  Due to my short attention span, and overactive inbox, I wish this video was 4 minutes  - it would be just as effective, but I've always wondered how it is done.  Thanks to @OnSiteStudios from Twitter for letting me know about their video - http://www.onsitestudios.com.

I have been a big proponent of white roofs and lighter colored pavement for quite some time for 3 primary reason.  1.  Reduced Energy Costs.  A building with a white roof saves 10-15% on average.  2.  Reduced Heat Island Effect - less absorption of energy from the sun means less heat in cities and therefore reduced Global Warming, and; 3.  Jobs....this is a no brainer and someone has to deal with the millions of black roofs in America and help us reap the benefits.  A new research study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory confirms the benefits of this concept in a big way.  According to their report:

In the latest study, the Berkeley Lab researchers and their collaborators used a detailed global land surface model from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, which contained regional information on surface variables, such as topography, evaporation, radiation and temperature, as well as on cloud cover. For the northern hemisphere summer, they found that increasing the reflectivity of roof and pavement materials in cities with a population greater than 1 million would achieve a one-time offset of 57 gigatons (1gigaton equals 1 billion metric tons) of CO₂ emissions (31 Gt from roofs and 26 Gt from pavements). That's double the worldwide CO₂ emissions in 2006 of 28 gigatons. Their results were published online in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

It goes on to claim that doing this in the northern hemisphere would produce the equivalent benefits of taking 300 Million cars off the road.

"If all eligible urban flat roofs in the tropics and temperate regions were gradually converted to white (and sloped roofs to cool colors), they would offset the heating effect of the emission of roughly 24 Gt of CO₂, but one-time only," says Rosenfeld, who returned to Berkeley Lab this year. "However, if we assume that roofs have a service life of 20 years, we can think of an equivalent annual rate of 1.2 Gt per year. That offsets the emissions of roughly 300 million cars (about the cars in the world) for 20 years!"

In both studies, the researchers used a conservative assumption of increasing the average albedo (solar reflectance) of all roofs by 0.25 and of pavements by 0.15. That means a black roof (which has an albedo of 0) would not have to be replaced by a pure white roof (which has an albedo of 1), but just a roof of a cooler color, a scenario that is more plausible to implement.

 And it's not just me that is excited about this concept.  Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu is touting this research as one of the most effective things we can do as a society to address global warming and reduce energy costs.   He is working to have all governmental buildings converted to white roofs to take advantage of the energy savings and make a statement about the benefits to climate change.  Now, let's take this concept and roll it out in a big way in a jobs bill to jump start the 'green collar' economy!

Interestingly, LEED does not take fire into consideration even though one fire incident can undo all the benefits from even a LEED Platinum structure. The fact is that the environmental and carbon impact of fire is dramatic and includes not simply the carbon released during the fire incident itself, but the embedded carbon necessary to manufacture materials and rebuild a fire damaged structure.  Additional carbon is released during the response by fire departments to fire incidents, as well as during the monitoring and maintenance of fire supression systems like fire extinguishers and sprinklers.

Produced by Green Collar Research, this new White Paper  - The Environmental Benefits of Electronically Monitored Fire Extinguishers - highlights the fact that fighting fires in their early stages with fire extinguishers is the most environmentally beneficial way to fight fire.  Futhermore, electronic monitoring of fire extinguishers significantly increases the likelihood that this vital equipment will be available, accessible and functioning properly when needed and therefore reduce the environmental risk of fire.  Additionally, by electronically monitoring extinguisher there is a substantial reduction in carbon emissions due to the transportation needs associated with the manual inspection of extinguishers.

With all of the on-going release of carbon into the atmosphere, it is in all of our interests to eliminate the unnecessary carbon emissions related to fires that don't need to get out of control.