Kudzu to Ethanol

Personally, I am very against the use of ethanol to fuel cars. Mainly because as it is the main source of ethanol is corn, which is delicious... so it just doesn't make sense to me use something to run a machine that I could just as soon eat. Anyway, for those of you that live in the southeast, you know of the plaque that is Kudzu... I have found a couple good posts in the last couple weeks about the possibility of using it to create ethanol. Now that's more like it. Check out the article on ecogeek here. And this one on chemically green. This is the kind of thinking we need to encourage and pursue. The answer is out there, just not in my stomach.

Spin Dryer

I got an e-mail about this great product today, so I am passing it along to all of you. It is called a spin dryer. Basically it gives your clothes a nice fast spin after the washing machine to wring the water out of them, making it so that your drying time can be cut in half or more. Pretty cool product. Could for sure make a big difference in the electric bill.

Waste Management in Korea

A while back I stumbled upon a blog talking about living in Seoul for a period of time. Nothing too out of the ordinary about it at all except for a post about how they handled the trash there. It was really just a genius system to me. In order to encourage more recycling, they put together a system where you have to buy government issued bags for your garbage. In other words you can only use these certain bags that they sell for something like $1 a bag for your garbage. You can use any bag for recycling. So in effect instead of paying the flat rate for garbage like most of us currently do as part of our water bill, you would pay for the bags, and the more you use the more you pay. So the people that never recycle and fill their bin to the brim every week would actually pay more for their garbage pickup than someone like Anna and myself that get by most weeks with one bag of garbage.. wouldn't that be nice. Anyway, they also are using this system for compost, so you can limit your garbage even further by sending organic materials to the community compost heap. I would love something like that here, but who knows how or when anything like that would ever happen. They basically were having serious problems with landfills becoming too full too fast, so they came up with a new idea that is turning out to be a HUGE success. If you want to read more check out some of the links about it I've found. Anyone that has some ideas for how we could make this happen here, feel free to share.

Link1, Link2, Link3, Link4

two good articles today

Well, good is not necessarily the correct word, but interesting, infuriating or important may actually be better for this one. The Union of Concerned Scientists ran a little bit of a survey with the EPA. Just to see really how much current policy is dictating what data they are putting out, how the finding may have been edited by current administration, etc. It turns out to be quite a bit. Coming from someone in a scientific field, I am completely unsurprised by these findings, but at the same time can tell you that nothing is as frustrating to a scientist than someone coming in and manipulating your data to say what they want it to, or to challenge your assessments with no scientific evidence on the contrary. We currently have political officials with no scientific background coming in and changing scientific findings to match what they want, and this is not the first time I have heard of this sort of censorship going on under the current administration. This stuff is bad and really needs to stop.. Anyway, the article says it all better than I can, definitely a good read.

The second article is a study performed by the Environmental Defense Fund. The basic rundown is that they wanted to find out what it would actually cost our economy to put a cap on carbon emissions with a cap and trade program. What they came up with was approximately 1% of the GDP... hardly the crippling cost that we have been led to believe. The other important tidbit is that it will become more and more expensive to perform the longer we wait. So lets get it done already.

Get rid of your Nalgene bottles

If you haven't already, get rid of all your Nalgene Bottles. You know the popular clear hard plastic bottles that seemingly EVERYONE has and carries around with them. These plastics contain what is being described as a very harmful ingredient called Bisphenol A (BPA). I read an article about this several months ago in the Green Guide, and at the time it was becoming a hot issue, with cities like San Francisco banning it. Also, at the time, the people at Nalgene were defending their product and playing the there is not enough evidence to say our products are unsafe card. I recall going to their webpage at the time that I read this and they even had a special link to their own information on BPA, claiming their products were safe and all studies to that point where inconclusive.

Well, now that Canada is planning a ban, and the National Institute of Health is saying it is toxic, they are phasing it out over the next few months and offering many non-BPA alternatives. It would seem to me that they saw these bans coming a while ago.. They did offer some alternatives before, but they were not marketed nearly as much as the Polycarbonate bottles that everyone knows so well. That may just be the cynic in me, but if they DID see this coming and planned accordingly, how on earth do they explain the continued sale of a product that they knew would be classified as unsafe in the near future?

There is also a huge buzz going about where they are using these plastics in baby bottles. The green guide has also hit on this as well (in 1999!!), but it is back in the news because of these most recent studies. How is this for a response from a plastic company representative, "There is nothing new in this report," said Steven Hentges, executive director of the American Plastics Council's Polycarbonate Business Unit. "The data that is presented has been known for years and, most importantly, data of that type has been reviewed by government agencies around the world in their comprehensive reviews on BPA and, in every case, they reach a conclusion even after considering this kind of data that polycarbonate baby bottles are safe for use."

Basically there is no ban yet, but many producers admit they are BPA is unsafe, but they downgrade the amounts that are leached and they plan to keep selling them anyway. I personally really wish we would remove the phrase "safe level" from our vocabulary. If we know something is unsafe... why have ANY of it?

top 20 bills in NC Assembly - Part 4 (#1-5)

Part 4 (#1-5) of the top 20 bills in the NC general assembly

This is it.. the final part. Check out part 1, part 2 and part 3 if you haven't yet.

And on we go.

5. Senate Bill 1493/House Bill 1232 - Fund State Water Infrastructure Commission
The State Water Infrastructure Commission would of course identify the state's water needs and develop plans to meet them. Then monitor the implementation of the plans.

4. House Bill 1179 - Clean Cars Program/Funds
This would establish a low emissions vehicle program in North Carolina. This would basically adopt the low-emissions vehicle program that they have in California for the state of North Carolina, effective for cars sold after 2009 model year. There is a lot of info included in this bill, so if you are interested I recommend reading up. Needless to say, any bill that will require the phase out of vehicle emissions is a good thing.

3. Senate Bill 927/House Bill 1073 - Green School Construction Loan Fund/Program
This basically allows for schools to get no interest loans for the purpose of green constructions or renovations. With the number of schools going up in the state every year (especially Wake County) there is no reason why they shouldn't be building as green as they can, and this would help them cover a lot of those costs.

2. Senate Bill 1522/House Bill 990 - Land and Water Conservation Bond Act of 2007
This one looks to have been sat on a bit, but there is no reason to think we couldn't get it moved back up and pushed through. It would authorize the issuance of bonds, provided passing of vote to address the statewide needs of land conservation, Water Quality protection and Historic preservation. We are talking about a lot of money here (up to $1 Billion), that is needed in a bad way for conservation around the state. I can only hope that this one gets revisited.

1. Senate Bill 634/House Bill 557 - North Carolina GREEEN Act
This act is to grow a renewable and energy-efficient economy in North Carolina by establishing a Green Business Fund to be administered by the state energy office to provide seed grants to develop North Carolina's green economy. This version of the bill allows for $15 Million a year to be divided between Bio-fuels, Green Building and general Green Entrepreneurship. This one is important to me for clear reasons, but not only because I am trying to start a green business. I think becoming a leader in this industry can pay huge dividends for this state in the future.

With elections coming up, etc. it is on all of us to make sure the folks running know what we think is important and the type of things we want them to work on for us. All of these bills may not work out in these particular iterations, but we can at least draw some attention to them. Check out the state board of elections for info on all the candidates. E-mail them, call them, whatever. but let them know what you want. Maybe something can eventually get done.

Top 20 Bills in NC Asembly - Part 3 #6-10

So here we are for yet another installment. Check out part 1 and part 2 if you haven't yet.

And on we go.

10. Senate Bill 1149 - Use of Biodiesel on School Buses
This bill would allow $5,000,000 for grants to NC public schools for production of biofuels to be used to run school buses.

9. House Bill 1052 - Hog Farms/Methane Gas
This bill would require power suppliers to purchase electricity from farms/facilities that use hog waste to produce it.

Just found out that my #8 was ratified as well. It was a bill that prohibited any sort of control over the use of solar collectors by things such as homeowners associations, etc.

7. Senate Bill 215 - Litter Reduction Act
This bill would be an attempt to curb litter and promote recycling by instituting a deposit program for things like bottles and cans. Other states do this with a lot of success, so no reason to think it wouldn't work here.

6. Senate Bill 967/House Bill 1600 - NC Organic Economic Opportunities Study
Self explanatory, but it would be a market research study to determine what sort of opportunities there would be for organic farming in the state. I can give them the quick answer, PLENTY. But government needs an actual study with actual results, so the sooner they get it over with the better.

That 5 flew by. check back soon for the top 5.

Top 20 Bills in NC Asembly - Part 2 #11-15

Part 2 (#11-15) of the top 20 bills in the NC general assembly

So here we are for another installment. See part 1 if you have no idea what this is.

And on with the list.

15. Senate Bill 1451 - Biodiesel Incentive Fund
It may seem awfully familiar, as in #16, but this Biodiesel incentive is slightly different. This one provides for a fund to pay out to biodiesel producers to encourage development of Biodiesel in the state. The only downside to this one for me is that if emphasizes the use of feedstock for biodiesel production. The perfect bill would be to really push biodiesel from recycled veggie oil or cellulosic ethanol, but we will take what we can get I suppose.

14. My #14 I just noticed has been ratified since I first checked it, so we’ll skip that one. FYI it was for an increase in the penalty for Air Polluters.

13. House Bill 1832 - No Mining Sand from Tidal Inlet/Delta
This one is self explanatory, but it would basically end all mining of sand and damage to the ecosystem, unless it is necessary to maintain navigation channels.

12. House Bill 1846 - Tax Credit for Recycling Vegetable Oil
This bill would provide for a tax credit equal to 25% of the cost of equipment for the conversion of used vegetable oil to fuel.

11. Senate Bill 141/House Bill 1117 - Topsail Beach/Beach Renourishment funds
This would provide $2,000,000 to the town of Topsail Beach for use in beach renourishment.

Thats if for this one, check back for the rest later

Top 20 Bills in NC Asembly - Part 1 #16-20

I was doing some digging this weekend on the NC general assembly webpage to see what the state government in North Carolina was doing as far as environmental policy, I looked through every bill introduced and still in committee, etc. for the 2007-2008 session. What I have put together is what I feel are the top 20 most important bills in that category. They are in somewhat of order of importance, and I hopefully caught all the good ones, but it was a VERY long list, so I apologize if I may have missed any (and if I have please let me know and I can post them up as well). The basic goal of this was to show what our representatives are looking at, and what we can bring to their attention to help push through. I personally feel like much much more can be done, but I will save that for later, right now I just want to look at what IS there so we can all start bugging our representatives on a regular basis to keep tabs on how these things are progressing. It is actually somewhat hard to tell what the current status of some of these are, but I am sure it won’t hurt to bring them up to the folks in power. I will break this up into a few parts to kind of shorten these posts a bit, so check back over the next few days to get them all.

OK so here goes #’s 16-20;

20. Senate Bill 843 - Establish the Biofuels Center of North Carolina
The bill says the Biofuel center would be created as a non-profit organization with an annual budget of $5,000,000 for both and would be responsible for the implementation of “North Carolina’s Strategic Plan for Biofuels Leadership.”

19. Senate Bill 1222 - Funds for NC Solar Center
Appropriation of funds for North Carolina Solar Center at NCState University.

18. Senate Bill 948 - Small Dairy Sustainability
This bill would allow for consumers to contract with local farmers to become partial or complete owners of dairy animals. The original edition of this one was just to allow for people to contract with local farmers to buy fresh milk, but it turned into the current bill that would allow consumers to buy into a local farm to get fresh milk, it now would also require a health warning of the dangers of raw milk, but the nature remains the same. It would allow for small dairy farmers to stay afloat, and for people to support and take part in local agriculture and give themselves a local food source.

17. House Bill 618/Senate Bill 671 - Eat Smart...Move More Initiative
This would provide a budget of $3,000,000 for the next two years for to promote community environments that would support physical activity, healthy lifestyles and personal well-being.

16. House Bill 2003 - Biofuel Incentives
This would supply incentives for distributors of Biofuel in the form of a tax discount.

Business Update

I just want to really quickly try and give everyone an update on how things are going for GHH. I have been asked several times in the last couple weeks about when we might open. The best answer that I have right now is, we don't know. I wish I had something more definite, but right now that is the best I can do. We are currently in the status of looking for funds. Truthfully, right now we haven't yet even been able to find any positive leads. What I can for sure tell you is that we have completed our business plan, after long hours of research, editing, writing, rewriting, etc. If any of you readers out there might know someone/something that would be a good place to look for funding, we would MUCH appreciate it. Until we can find some way to get us off the ground we are somewhat on hold. Rest assured though that we are VERY committed to this movement. We will not allow this idea/dream die. Again, if any of you readers may have some ideas, or even just encouragement, please don't hesitate. Hopefully soon I will have some more definite and happy news. Thanks for reading and please come back often.