Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Sustainability
No question, there’s plenty of bad news when it comes to the environment. Get ready for some good.
NIES: I don’t really have a lot of patience for people that -- the first words out of their mouth is that “It’ll be hard” or “We can’t do that.” our fish are dying from too much waste in the water? Here’s an idea.
MAHONEY: We removed 50% of the nitrogen in the waste water with just minor retrofits.
Are you worried about global warming from too much CO2?
HASELBACH: There is potential for us to build sidewalks where -- yes -- these sidewalks will suck CO2 out of the air.
Scientists and engineers are working right now on some of the tools we hope will lift us out of our environmental malaise.
NOCERA: The issue is: can you do those things that we already know how to do with new materials and new ways to do it so it is really cheap, cheap, cheap?
We explore “Sustainability” part of the “Grand Challenges” series from the Purdue University College of Engineering Coming up after this hour’s news.
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This is “Sustainability” part of the “Grand Challenges” series from the Purdue University College of Engineering. I’m Barbara Bogaev If you’re paying attention at all, how can you NOT know. This planet has some huge problems.
MONTAGE OF NEWS STORIES
REPORTER: Try not to take a deep breath. If you breath the air for too long in Ge Xu To, it may make you ill and it may end up killing you
REPORTER: Fish stocks in the Pacific are said to be dropping. Many reasons for this. Everything from over fishing to pollution to global warming.
SCIENTIST: So what’s happening with global warming is, as the sea ice is melting, the polar bear habitat is just plain disappearing
REPORTER: The population of Lagos has grown from 300,000 in 1950 to over 14 million today. An estimated 10,000 people arrive here weekly in search of week.
REPORTER: The country is now home to some of the most polluted cities and waterways on the planet. It’s also the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, after the US
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
Fouled air. Fetid water. Global warming. Things are worse than they’ve ever been. Right? Actually, there are people who’ll say, wrong.
SOUND – TOM LEHRER SINGING
LEHRER: If you visit American city / You will find it very pretty / Just two things of which you must beware / Don’t drink the water and don’t breath the air / Pollution, pollution
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
Baby boomers – and anyone else alive in the 50s and 60s can remember when you could taste the air in Los Angeles. When American lakes were as horrible as anything we read about today in China. And when people driving down the highway would just throw their trash out the window.
SOUND – CRYING INDIAN PSA
(MUSIC) ANNOUNCER: Some people have deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country. And some people don’t. People start pollution. People can stop it.
CROSS FADE TO
SOUND – TOM LEHRER SINGING
LEHRER: Just go out for a breath of air / And you’ll be ready for Medicare
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
And our attention, riveted to the environment? That’s not new either. Forty years ago there were congressional hearings on the environment. There were Presidential speeches.
SOUND – LYNDON JOHNSON’S “GREAT SOCIETY” SPEECH
JOHNSON: The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air that we breathe, are threatened with pollution.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
It was in Broadway musicals.
SOUND – “AIR” FROM THE MUSICAL “HAIR”
WOMAN (singing) Welcome! sulfur dioxide / Hello! carbon monoxide / The air, the air / Is everywhere.
It was in the movies.
SOUND – SOYLENT GREEN
EDWARD G. ROBINSON: Now when I was a kid food was food. Before our scientific magicians poisoned the water. Polluted the soil. Decimated plant and animal life.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
That’s Edward G. Robinson in “Soylent Green” from 1973. Of course the principal environmental evil was different back then. So was the solution. In the 70s they told us the problem was over-population. In “Soylent Green,” Charlton Heston uncovers what the government decided to do about it.
SOUND – SOYLENT GREEN
CHARLTON HESTON: It’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people. Listen to me! You gotta tell ‘em! Soylent Green is people!
FADE UP
SOUND – TOM LEHRER SINGING
LEHRER: So go to the city / See the crazy people there / Like lambs to the slaughter / They’re drinking the water / And breathing, cough, the air
So environmental problems are not new. But that doesn’t mean today’s not different. And plenty of people will tell you, it CERTAINLY doesn’t mean it’s not worse.
SOUND – MAKOWER READING
MAKOWER: These are not your parents’ environmental problems. It’s no longer just about the “landfill crisis,” or smoggy urban air, or the extinction of cute, cuddly critters.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
Joel Makower (muh KOW er) is executive editor of Greenbiz-dot-com and a commentator on Marketplace. He’s reading here from his book “Strategies for the Green Economy.”
MAKOWER: Today’s environmental challenges are far beyond anything we’ve faced before, affecting not just the birds and the trees but also, potentially, the economics, public health, and well-being of all humans, too.
People like Joel Makower will tell you that today’s environmental problems are nothing like what we faced in the 60s.
SOUND - RANDY NEWMAN SINGING “BURN ON BIG RIVER”
NEWMAN: Cleveland, even now I can remember / ‘Cause the Cuyahoga River / Goes smokin’ through my dreams / Burn on, big river, burn on / Burn on, big river, burn on
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
MAKOWER: Think for example about the burning Cuyahoga River in June of 1969 on one hand, and on the other think about “An Inconvenient Truth.” The burning river in 1969, typifies problems that were local, instant cause-and-effect, single cause, things that you could see or smell, fairly easy to resolve -- if you stop the cause, the problem would go away. Today, if you think about global climate change as typical of the current kinds of problems, it is global, it’s from multiple causes, so from thousands or millions maybe even billions of different actions and activities. And were not really sure we can solve it.
SOUND - RANDY NEWMAN SINGING “BURN ON BIG RIVER”
NEWMAN: Burn on, big river, burn on / Burn on, big river, burn on
And a whole lot of other smart person see our problems today and think they’re on a whole different scale from the way things where in the era of Don’t-Be-A-Litterbug. Michael Prather (PRAY ther) is a professor at U-C-Irvine and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which won the Nobel Prize along with Al Gore.
PRATHER: Some people view it as more imminently serious than the others. Others view it as a long-term problem. But all of us take it as a serious problem -- if we don’t do anything about it, the world will be a very unpleasant place for our children’s children to live in.
He’s talking there about scientists. But what about the rest of us? Do we get it? Here’s Larry Nies (rhymes with “size”), Purdue University civil engineering professor.
NIES: I don’t think the vast majority of the public grasps the seriousness of the challenges that are facing us in the future.
Want an example? How’ bout Bob Lutz, Vice Chairman of General Motors, who, as Leslie Stahl reported on “60 Minutes” recently said
STAHL: Manmade global warming is a crock of (beep)
PRATHER: The public -- I think is now catching on that this is an issue.
SOUND – CONFERENCE ON GLOBAL WARMING
SPEAKER: Seventy two percent of American citizens are completely or mostly convinced that global warming is happening. So this is quite an amazing statistic.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
PRATHER: I am not sure that the average person understands of the severity or what it means. Climate change is like a tsunami that you can see coming from a long ways away. We don’t know whether it is going to be 2 feet high or 20 feet high.
He says scientists can’t quantify that severity, so people don’t know whether or not to be concerned. And, he says
PRATHER: The big danger; the loss of ecosystems, the change in the water supply on a large scale, is going to happen in 10, 20, 30 years or more. And I think it is hard to get people excited unless you can be more specific.
One result of this, because we don’t understand how big the problem is, even a lot of us who do “get it” think it’s going to be easy to solve.
MUSIC - Melissa Etheridge - I Need To Wake Up
ETHRIDGE: Now I am throwing off the carelessness of youth / To listen to an inconvenient truth / That I need to move / I need to wake up / need to change
This is the credit sequence from Al Gore’s movie where – along with being told who the producer and the director are – we’re told “The climate crisis can be solved” and we’re given instructions on how to do it. Things like “Buy energy efficient light bulbs. Recycle. Buy a hybrid car. Call radio shows and write newspapers.” As Joel Makower of greenbiz-dot-com says,
MAKOWER: We have been told that they are is a lot of simple things that we can do, and that if we all swap out our light bulbs, if we all buy the right car, maybe switch cleaning products, that we will somehow be able to shop our way to environmental health. And of course that’s not the case.
No, it’s not going to be easy. Purdue University’s Larry Nies says far from it.
NIES: I think we face very difficult times ahead of us. We’re gonna have very, very serious energy problems that we have to deal with that are going to cause people to have to change their lifestyles. It’s going to cause great economic hardship. It’s going to cause an entire transformation of our society, I really believe. And we have very serious water issues facing us as well. I think we would be doing a disservice to the public if we gave anybody the idea that the future and the problems we need to solve are going to be easy.
We’re not telling you all this to depress you. Really, we’re not. Because, as Joel Makower says, when you do that – just piling-on environmental problem after environmental problem – people just shut down.
MAKOWER: Most people get paralyzed. And that is not a place we want to be either.
Purdue’s Larry Nies says, there’s a better solution.
NIES: We need to stop using fear. I think we need to start using encouragement and challenge them to see the future as a great thing and challenge them to see the opportunities in the future and how we can improve the lives of our children and our grandchildren.
So this is not to depress you. It’s to get you charged up. But with a problem this big, we have to figure that you’re asking
MAKOWER: “Well, how can I possibly help?”
We want to show you that you can. Here’s what some people are doing on a large scale and what you can do yourself.
SOUND – LETTIE GOES TO WORK
LETTIE: Mattie!
MATT: What!
LETTIE: It’s 7:05 – we have gotta go. You have to brush your teeth and get your back pack
MATT: OK mom, gee!
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
Lettie’s a working mom with two kids. She lives outside Washington, DC.
LETTIE: OK, let me tell dad that we’re leaving. (yelling) Tim! We’re outta here! We’ll see ya later, OK?
We thought we’d try an experiment. We had Lettie go through her normal day while we looked over her shoulder -- Lettie’s are really good sport. And as if that wasn’t enough, we asked Michael Prather of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to critique her choices. No, it’s not fair. It’s not even nice. But at least it’s instructive.
LETTIE: And this light is The LONGEST! light in – Silver Spring! (laughs) That’s how I feel!
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
According to the World Resources Institute, people in countries like ours put out six time the amount of CO2 as people in the Third World. And right now Americans account for close to 25 percent of all CO2 emissions.
LETTIE: This is five – six lanes of traffic on University Blvd. and it’s all bumper-to-bumper.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
PRATHER: The transportation sector -- which includes people driving to work is probably about 25% of the global warming gases.
Michael Prather.
PRATHER: Sitting still running your engine is probably the least efficient use. You you’re going nowhere and you are putting out CO2. So I think one of the key efficiencies people note is to have the freeways and the street systems designed in ways that minimize the waste of fuel.
LETTIE: My office is kind of on the smaller side, very cozy and compact. Fluorescent lights in the ceilings
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
PRATHER: One of our major power sectors that we all need and live with is electricity. But most of our power in the US is coal.
Burning coal is a major greenhouse gas producer. Even what they call “Clean Coal.” The “Clean” part has nothing to do with CO2 emissions.
LETTIE: We are going to go down to B1 -- the basement level of the building, and I am going to get a Diet Coke out of the machine down there.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
PRATHER: Our electric use is obvious. We know when we turn the switch. But we do keep many things on that we don’t need to. There is a lot of electricity use on the edge that we don’t think about.
We make choices every day. And so many of them can influence the size of our environmental footprint. But the nice thing about choice is: You can take one route OR another. And when it comes to your impact on the planet, that can present opportunities. Let’s be realistic, here. You don’t design your own highways. You don’t lay out your electrical grid. But, Michael Prather says, there are things an individual can do to have an environmental impact on a large scale.
PRATHER: There is going to be no person who comes in on a white horse to solve the problem. And every little bit counts. We need to get people thinking that every bit counts.
So here’s a look at some things that an individual can do.
MAZZA: We are looking between two of the houses. They are probably 50 feet apart, and we are looking at the foothills of the Alleghenies.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
Lenny Mazza is standing at the edge of a housing development called Hundredfold Farms. He and his wife moved here about a year ago. The houses sit in the middle of a Christmas tree farm in Orrtanna, Pennsylvania, about 8 miles from Gettysburg. This looks like your typical new cul de sac development, but it’s no ordinary community. And a look up at any of the houses here will tell you why.
MAZZA: You can see solar panels on all of the roofs. You will also see a bank of windows which are facing due south. And these windows are designed to soak up solar energy.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
Hundredfold Fall Farms is designed to be a 100 percent environmentally sustainable community.
MAZZA: We are walking up to my house. We are coming up to my porch right now.
The people at Hundredfold Farms have taken a radical step. They’ve made an investment that allows them to live lives that leave a footprint that’s remarkably smaller than most Americans.
MAZZA: When the sun comes in, in the winter it actually heats up this tile under our feet. So you have tile and you also have cement backer board underneath it. And it acts as a heat sink.
That helps heat the houses in the winter. And for summer, every house has an overhang that keep the sun from making it too hot inside. Plus, on every house, ¾ of the first floor is surrounded by dirt
MAZZA: So you have the natural heating and cooling aspects of the Earth working to your advantage.
The houses at Hundredfold Farms are on the electric grid, but they only use it for emergencies. Lenny’s solar panels generate twice as much power as he needs. And he doesn’t need the grid to heat his water. So he ends up selling the surplus electricity back to the power company at the end of every month. Lenny uses 300 kilowatt/hours of electricity-a-month in this house. In his old house it was around 16-hundred.
(Walking on gravel)
Lenny walks next door to talk with one of the founders of the community.
(Doorbell rings) (dogs bark)
HARTZEL: Hi, Bill Hartzel.
Bill and Lenny walk up a slight hill from the houses so Bill can show off the most astounding thing about this already-remarkable community. Remember this is a sustainable community. So energy’s not the only thing they’re saving. In Hundredfold Farms, they flush their toilets knowing full well that what goes around comes around. And believe it or not, they actually LIKE it! We’ll explain when we come back. Plus, what if you could stop global warming by just sucking the CO2 right out of the air? We look at ways to do it. That’s when we come back. This is “Sustainability” part of the “Grand Challenges” series from the Purdue University College of Engineering. I’m Barbara Bogaev and we’ll be back after a break.”
END OF SEGMENT A
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This is “Sustainability” part of the “Grand Challenges” series from the Purdue University College of Engineering. I’m Barbara Bogaev. We’re in rural Pennsylvania, close to Gettysburg. And we’re paying a visit to Hundredfold Farms, an environmentally sustainable suburb set in the middle of an old Christmas tree farm.
(sound of walking on gravel)
We’re with Bill Hurtzel, one of the founders of the community. As we’ve heard, the houses here are designed to slash electricity use. But it’s here at the top of this hill …. What they do with their waste water, that’s the real jaw-dropper.
HARTZEL: It’s a greenhouse, but it’s actually our wastewater treatment facility.
In half of a 30-by-100 foot greenhouse …
HARTZEL: Let’s walk back in the back here. As I said, this is a divided greenhouse. And the back 70 feet of it is actually where the work is done.
They’ve re-created marshes, wetlands, and ponds.
HARTZEL: We pump all of our wastewater from our homes up here.
Everything from the toilets, everything that goes down the kitchen drain.
HARTZEL: And it’s processed through this facility and we actually recycle it. This water is pumped back to the homes, reused as flush water.
Bill says this is basically a giant swimming pool, filled with gravel.
HARTZEL: So what you see here is our employees -- 15 different varieties of wetland plants. And you see all of these plants have rooted in these gravel beds. So the plants are pulling the nutrients out of the waste stream. And also the bacteria that is symbiotic with the roots in the gravel are starting to do their magic as well.
The wastewater slowly works its way through the root zones of the plants. It’s pumped from there to some open-topped tanks with floating plants. And from there it goes to a second artificial marsh, and then into storage.
HARTZEL: There is no chemicals, there is no chemical processing, it is all natural -- basically, it’s just bacteria
They actually make a lot more clean water than they need. They use the rest of it to water the Christmas tree farm. The people here are walking the walk about living sustainably. An average American uses 75 gallons of water-a-day. Here they use 15. And remember, 300 kilowatt/hours of electricity-a-month instead of 16-hundred. And they doing it in comfort. What if we all lived that way? It could be that Hundredfold Farms as a step into all-of-our future.
BED MUSIC UP AND OUT
LETTIE: I turn to my computer first thing and I turn it on. It’s a Dell computer and I probably got this new maybe nine months ago.
Where would we be these days without our computers? Some of us even love our computers … Get insane about them. These people are called Mac owners. But let’s not start that argument. Instead, we want to check the environmental footprint of your love-interest. Let’s look at your computer. Or Lettie’s computer if that will make you feel less guilty. Because you WILL feel guilty after you hear this.
WILLIAMS: Owning a computer uses more energy over the lifecycle than a refrigerator.
That’s Eric Williams, an environmental engineering professor at Arizona State University. He just got a 236-thousand dollar grant from the National Science Foundation to examine the lifecycle of your computer.
WILLIAMS: If you are looking at the total energy that you need to make a computer, it turns out to be around four times the energy the computer uses when it’s plugged into the wall. It is 206 kg of fossil fuels needed to make a 20 kg desktop computer.
So before the thing even hits your desk, it’s already an energy hog. And, as if that’s not bad enough, once you’re done wasting energy because you (loudly, in a scolding tone) NEVER REMEMBER TO UNPLUG YOUR COMPUTER WHEN YOU’RE NOT USING IT, after you’re done with the machine it goes on to damage the earth in other ways.
LETTIE: I did ask whether the computer gets recycled because I live in Montgomery County, Maryland and when you get rid of a computer there is a recycling location that you can drop your computer off and the county recycles it.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
Recycling. We hear the word and we just naturally assume: Green. But not necessarily so when it comes to computers. As Eric Williams says, most of our computers are recycled in the Third World using very primitive processes.
WILLIAMS: For example, the wires in a computer containing copper, which – copper has a good price – and in order to get at that copper: Pull out the wires, pile them up. Set that on fire.
SOUND – BUZZ SAW CUTTING IN THE WILSON GALLERIES LIMA PERU
This is the Wilson Galleries in Lima, Peru. One of the places your recycled computer ends up.
WILLIAMS: Circuit boards contain copper, they contain gold and in order to get at these metals, these are recycled using a process where you are using cyanide or acid. You know, you have a pot (chuckles), you put the circuit board and the acid in there, and it’s often done next to water sources. The water sources, there have been contaminated by the circuit board recycling and the other processes that are going on.
SOUND – OUTDOORS AT COMPU-PLAZA LIMA PERU
WILLIAMS: The use of informal recycling impacts abroad seem to be really the most serious and pressing environmental issue associated with computers, and we need to have explicit engineering and explicit policy aims to address these issues.
Eric Williams got his grant so that he could create recommendations for managing what’s called “the global reverse supply chain” of computers. The forward supply chain is all the things that happen to get the computer to your desk.
WILLIAMS: Reverse supply chain here is all of the things that happen after the computer leaves of the first user. And to think about that reverse supply chain from a global perspective.
Eric is traveling all over the world trying to figure out what, exactly happens to junk computers – and junk cell phones and PDAs – all the small electronics that run our lives. It turns out that Lettie isn’t the only one who just assumes that it’s a good thing, per se to recycle computers. Most policymakers also default to doing what feels like it SHOULD be right.
WILLIAMS: We decide that “recycling is good.” Or “landfilling is bad.” And so we make a policy based on this sort of very generic concept, but we don’t really ask the question: What benefit did we really get from this recycling?
Eric says the other options are better.
SOUND – COMPUTER AUCTION
AUCTIONEER: On Lot 40 here. Nice little Dell. 3.0 I believe. It’s loaded. XP. Ah, let’s to 25 dollar on the computer. A 25 bid, now 25.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
This is a computer auction, where junk computers are re-sold to a new user. Eric Williams’ research suggests that once you’re sure you’re not going to be using your old computer anymore, don’t recycle it. Sell it. Or give it away to someone who’ll give it to poor kids. Eric’s working on ideas to make that easier. One is to put radio-frequency ID tags on every piece inside a computer. That way you could track it. And prosecute people who are recycling it in ways that damage the environment.
LETTIE: The office has one of the radiator which is as far as I understand is set through a main computer and the temperature is set
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
Sure, at the office, there’s someone who decides how hot or cold it’ll be. And there are some people who’ve installed thermostats at home that change the temperature depending on what time of day it is. But what if -- based on what’s best for the power grid, or for the planet -- the electric company could tell you to turn stuff down?
KEOGH: We are going to go out front door
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
In parts of California they’re doing this.
KEOGH: To the west side of the house (up inflection) and look at the SmartMeter that PG&E installed.
Liz Keogh lives in Bakersfield. She’s part of an experiment being run by Pacific Gas & Electric to test out what they call SmartMeters. At some point in the future, the SmartMeter will automatically do things like turn your washing machines from hot water to warm. Right now though it’s all still fairly low-tech.
KEOGH: When they have a Smart Day, they will phone you and e-mail you.
PG&E will call a “Smart Day” when they think the power grid is going to be over-taxed. People in the SmartMeter program get rewarded for cutting back their energy use
KEOGH: So the first thing is, we are not going to use the air conditioner on this Smart Day. What I am going to do is take my fan, put it on the counter, and I am going to turn it on kind of high (the fan noise).
The less power you use, the more money you make.
KEOGH: Unplug the refrigerator, so I just unplug it, (refrigerator noise stops) you don’t hear any refrigerator noise anymore.
She’ll also unplug the computer and run it on battery power. And unplug the power strip for the TV and VCR.
KEOGH: You do dishes after lunch, then what you want to do is wait, until maybe after dinner and then turn the dishwasher on.
It all pays off for Liz at the end of the month when the bill shows up.
KEOGH: (reading) Then it says “Smart Rate credits. $14.04,” so I made out like a bandit.
She lives alone. If a family did this, they would save 35 or 40 dollars a month.
KEOGH: Which these days isn’t chump change for people.
At this point you might being saying “Yeah, yeah. One person turns off her lights. So what? How do we get EVERYONE to turn off their lights?”
PIETTE: If everybody does a little bit, it is better than a few people doing a lot.
That’s Mary Ann Piette (pee ET), an energy scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley national laboratory. This question is constantly on her mind. What if we could find a way to take all the buildings in a big downtown – every supermarket and department store, every office building, every high school and hospital – and get them to turn off THEIR lights, or turn down THEIR thermostats? THEN we’d be getting somewhere.
SOUND – GUY RUNNING A DEMAND RESPONSE COMPUTER PROGRAM
AKUACOM GUY: I think you can probably hear the fans, which is the main sound made by automation nowadays.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
As of right now, Mary Ann thinks she’s found the answer. This is the server facility of a company call Akuacom (uh KOO uh com) on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Mary Ann’s been working with Akuacom and the big California electric companies for the past few years and what they now have a is working system. They send out signals to buildings all over the Bay Area. When the signals come in, the buildings automatically turn down their thermostats and their lights.
PIETTE: There is a big cooling plant in the basement. And there’s thermostats throughout the building. And we programmed the control system to be able to receive a signal coming in over the Internet that would change the cooling loads throughout the building.
SOUND – GUY RUNNING A DEMAND RESPONSE COMPUTER PROGRAM
AKUACOM GUY: When I get a signal from the utility that indicates that the utility would like to have a demand response shed occur, it will appear on the program tab. And I can see the time that the event has come in and when it’s supposed to start
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
For their initial tests they line up some heavy hitters.
PIETTE: Wal-Mart, Target, Cisco, Sybase, Oracle.
SOUND – GUY RUNNING A DEMAND RESPONSE COMPUTER PROGRAM
AKUACOM GUY: So what you see on the screen here is a list of the large commercial buildings in California that are part of current commercialized efforts for automated demand response
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
PIETTE: We shed about a quarter of the total building electric load without getting complaints from people.
All those stores; all those office buildings turned down their electricity at the same time. That means few power plants are running, which means fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Right now they use the system to cut power on hot days. But it could have other benefits. In California, there are times of day when more power is generated by windmills than by coal. You could have more people use power then. However they use it, the thinking here is: I turn off my lights, at my house, that’s fine. But if Wal-Mart turns off their lights, THEN we’re getting somewhere. According to Joel Makower of greenbiz-dot-com, there are more and more business that are getting on-board. And not just when it comes to lights.
MAKOWER: McDonald’s eliminated the embossed golden arches on their napkins. In doing that, they made their napkins 24% thinner. Which meant that they could fit 24% more napkins in a box, more boxes in a truck, and they reduced the amount of transportation by the equivalent of about a hundred tractor-trailers a year simply from that one simple act.
And they’re not the only ones.
COOGAN: Here, we make in the Outback, The Legacy, the Tribeca and just recently the Toyota Camry.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
MAKOWER: One of the ironies of the world of green business is that contrary to what most people think, this is an area where companies are walking more than they are talking. They are doing more than they are saying.
COOGAN: We actually do recycle just about everything -- well 99.8% of everything that we generate is recycled.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
This is the Lafayette plant of Subaru of Indiana Automotive. In 2000, this plant was generating 459 pounds of waste for every car they produced. Denise Coogan is the plant’s manager of environmental compliance.
COOGAN: Styrofoam and cardboard, and pallets. Then we have our cafeteria waste. Brown paper towels from the restrooms. So our problem was: we had all of this waste that we were generating and a lot of it was going to the landfill.
For environmental and cost-saving reasons, the company decided this couldn’t go on. Their engineers went through a rigorous, section-by-section look at every process inside the plant. And today,
COOGAN: We send nothing to a landfill.
Admit it, you don’t believe that’s true. According to Joel Makower of the website greenbiz-dot-com, your reaction is not surprising.
MAKOWER: We don’t trust companies that say, “We’re on the case.” That is the big problem, and we have to figure out how to have a more honest and open conversation with companies. Companies specifically need to figure out how to be credible on these things in a way is that they are not. Even when they have amazing stories to tell.
Denise Coogan says that’s certainly her experience.
COOGAN: We have had people come in and just outright said, “I don’t believe you are actually doing this.” And we show them around and show them how we’re doing it and then they -- they always end up saying, “Wow, we just couldn’t believe it could be done.”
She says, when you think about it, it’s no great surprise that they’re doing this.
COOGAN: I always like to say that waste is money. No matter how you cut it, waste is money.
SOUND – STEEL BEING STAMPED
Let’s take steel. Subaru was wasting tons of it. They turned the problem over to Mike Patterson, an engineer in the stamping section. Normally, they take a blank piece of steel, bolt it down and pound out a part in a press that works something like a cookie cutter. Mike found that the waste was coming from the steel that was outside the bolts.
PATTERSON: We analyzed these parts, one by one, determined the amount of material that was outside of that line. And then tried to estimate how much we thought we could reduce that number.
It was a painstaking process, cutting and re-cutting the blank sheets, then stamping and re-stamping them, to figure out exactly how small they could be and still fit under the bolts.
PATTERSON: We actually hand-sheered several hundred blanks and ran them in succession and then checked the parts to make sure that they were good before we went with that change.
They had to do this with 67 different car parts. It took 6 months. They went through a similar process with Styrofoam.
(Industrial Noise)
Pretty much every major part that goes into a Subaru in Indiana is shipped in Styrofoam from Japan. Instead of continuing to throw it all in the trash, they asked engineer Greg Tyson to figure out an alternative. One of the things Greg did was walk around the shop floor and examine the condition of every piece of Styrofoam lying around the floor.
TYSON: I felt that the material that they were sending us was still in good enough shape to use back in Japan.
Greg did an extensive analysis of precisely how everyone in the plant does their job and then redesigned the work spaces to find room for a bin to stack Styrofoam in. Now
TYSON: They take the camshaft out of the form, they place it into the engine, assemble their engine, and then, when they’re done with the form, they actually discard it into a container and stack it basically exactly the way they would receive it.
Those containers are gathered, put on trucks and sent back to Japan where new parts are put in them and they’re sent back to the US. Some of the Styrofoam forms have been back and forth across the Pacific seven times. And none of them are ending up in the landfill.
(Industrial Noise)
What they’ve done at Subaru is impressive. But. Joel Makower of greenbiz-dot-com says
MAKOWER: One of the things I’m asked a lot is, “Is this a fad, is this a bubble, is it going to go away at some point?” And the answer is no. This is a fundamental change in the way that business is done. Once companies squeeze out the waste and inefficiency and the toxicity and the carbon intensity of what they are doing and replace it with much more efficient or cleaner practices, they are not going to go back to the old way should oil come down to only $75 a barrel. This is a permanent change.
DRILLING NOISE
LETTIE: (Talking on the phone) and I will give you a call back. Okay? Great.
We’re back with our friend Lettie in her office.
LETTIE: (talking on the phone) I’ll call you then. Bye-bye. (Hangs up the phone), excuse me, but I am going to have to go and visit the ladies room. I’ll be right back.
We humans tread pretty heavily on this earth. Mostly because there are so many of us. Someone goes to the bathroom. (flush noise). And someone else does. (flush noise) and another (flush), and another (flush), and another (flushing noises overlap). Over time, it adds up
DUNWELL: The increase of dead zones in the ocean really corresponds to two things. The increasing use of nitrogen in fertilizers, and also the increase of human population, particularly in coastal areas.
That’s Fran Dunwell, Hudson River Estuary Coordinator For The New York State Department Of Environmental Conservation. She’s talking about a phenomenon that’s becoming more and more serious around the world. something called “hypoxic dead zones.”
DUNWELL: A hypoxic dead zone is an area where you have low oxygen to the point that living creatures can’t survive.
They’re caused primarily by nitrogen that gets in the water from fertilizer and from human waste. They kill everything along the bottom of a water body. And they’re growing. According to an August 2008 article in Science Magazine, “Dead zones have now been reported from more than 400 rivers lakes and oceans and they affect a total area of more than 152,000 square miles.” But the Science article had a piece of good news. There are a small handful of places where the dead zones have vanished. One of them is in one of the last places you’d imagine.
BUCHANAN: We are northbound on the East River. And we are about to cross under the Manhattan Bridge.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
Rob Buchanan runs the community boathouse on pier 40 on Hudson River Park in Manhattan.
BUCHANAN: I am looking at the skyline of Williamsburg Brooklyn. And that is a subway going overhead. The Manhattan Ridge has subway traffic.
He’s canoeing on a body of water that has one of the worst reputations in America.
BUCHANAN: A lot of what we do is address stereotypes, frankly -- go and say to people who say, “I wouldn’t get into that water you paid me a million bucks” and say “well, we won’t pay you. But come out with us someday and see if you don’t like it.”
It turns out the East River is one of the world’s success stories. Of the 400 bodies of water that researchers looked at in the Science Magazine article, three had seen their dead zones disappear. New York’s East River was one of them.
BUCHANAN: (Yelling) Hey Malcolm, can you take a couple of strokes up there? Just to bring us head down, and then we can all fall in together with ‘Lissa on this one. Ready? Row.
The way they cleaned it up holds lessons for us an for the rest of the world’s water and we’ll tell you about it when we come back. Plus, we’ll take a look at concrete that sucks CO2 right out of the air. This is “Sustainability” part of the “Grand Challenges” series from the Purdue University College of Engineering. I’m Barbara Bogaev and we’ll be back after a break.”
END OF SEGMENT B
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This is “Sustainability” part of the “Grand Challenges” series from the Purdue University College of Engineering. I’m Barbara Bogaev.
BUCHANAN: (Yelling) Let’s just row up into this flat and then we will take a break, okay?
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
We’re canoeing on the East River, between Manhattan and Brooklyn. And yes, we’ve heard all the old jokes. Canoeing on the East River? How do you keep your oar from snagging on all the dead mob informants. Yuck, yuck, yuck. It has to be said; the East River’s lousy reputation is earned.
MUSIC – FLOATING DOWN THE RIVER, The Premier Quartet (1913)
Lyrics: Floating down the river / Floating down the river / In the evening by the bright moonlight.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
About the time this song was written, New York’s Metropolitan Sewage Commission made its first report about the condition of the city’s waterways. Fran Dunwell is with the New York State Department Of Environmental Conservation.
DUNWELL: You had 10 feet of sludge in the river bottom. You had gas bubbles the size of a football bubbling up on a regular basis from the bottom of the river.
New Yorkers were dying of typhoid and getting sick from eating oysters.
DUNWELL: It was really a horrible situation.
It would be another 30 years before the city finally built its first sewage treatment plants. And while they took care of the typhoid, they didn’t address the dead zones. By the 1980s, the situation was bleak. Giant algae blooms were spreading; choking off oxygen and killing nearly all the fin fish and shell fish. Something had to be done.
MAHONEY: We’re currently standing outside aeration plant #4 which is currently being upgraded.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
The city turned to Keith Mahoney, an engineer with the Department of Environmental Protection. Remember that episode of the Odd Couple where they meet a guy who knows absolutely everything about New York parking?
JOHN BYNER: Seventh Avenue, Broadway no parking between 7 AM / 7 PM. 75th Street, you got your school zone, no parking, you got your church on the corner.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
Well Keith’s like that about New York’s Sewers. He’s the kind of guy who’ll say something like this
MAHONEY: We were able to nitrify the centrate stream outside of the typical Step Feed BNR Process
And when he does, you nod. Because you know that HE knows what he’s talking about.
MAHONEY: Right now we’re in North Queens at the Tallman Island treatment plant. It has a dry weather capacity of 80 MGD and a wet weather capacity of 160 MGD.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
Tallman Island is where the city developed, tested and implemented their plan to fight the Dead Zones.
MAHONEY: Which we traced to there being excess nitrogen in the water system.
Algae feeds off nitrogen. When they look at where the nitrogen was coming from; it was like that old Pogo cartoon. “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
MAHONEY: When they looked at the cause, it seemed to be excess nitrogen from point discharges such as treatment plants
Up to this point, they’d been doing waste water treatment the same way in New York city for decades. If you’re eating right now, forgive me. The old process was basically like sifting sand. They’d use screens to take out the big pieces. Then they’d blow some air into it to break it up, disinfect it and dump it into the East River. Keith and his team had been experimenting with a new idea. An unconventional kind of nitrogen removal system. Because they’re engineers they had to give it an incomprehensible name. In this case, “Step Feed BNR.”
MAHONEY: We wanted to advance the Step Feed Biological Nutrient Removal and see if it really worked
So in 1990, they retrofitted one of the tanks here at Tallman Island to test their new process and see if they could get rid of the nitrogen. The results were impressive.
MAHONEY: We removed 50% of the nitrogen in the waste water with just minor retrofits.
But they didn’t stop there. In addition to loving nitrogen, algae demands lots and lots of oxygen. Keith and his team struck on a novel idea. Make the algae bloom before it hits the river .
MAHONEY: We’re actually growing it in the aeration tanks under controlled conditions where we supply the oxygen
What Keith figured out was … you have to satisfy the algae – give it all the oxygen it wants – before it goes into the river.
MAHONEY (YELLING OVER THE BLOWERS) Right now we’re standing right outside of the Process Air blower Building. This is the facility that supplies all the air to the Aeration tanks needed for the biological oxygen demand process.
They have these massive air blowers that pump oxygen into the algae while it’s still inside the tank. They take the algae all the way through it’s lifecycle right there in the tank. It blooms, and then it dies.
MAHONEY: So basically we’re taking a natural process that occurs in the receiving waters, doing it under a much more concentrated, controlled footprint and eliminating all the oxygen demand right up front.
Then they send it off for what’s called “digestion” where they cook it for 15 days. That burns off a lot of the solid waste that’s still in it and kills any pathogens. It also produces methane gas that could be used to operate engines and boilers. And, it turns out there’s another place – besides the bottom of the East River where they could put it.
ZHAO: First, the very bottom part of the (banging noise) gasifier is a small container (banging noise)
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
Inside a drab institutional yellow concrete block building, Purdue University mechanical engineering professor Fu Zhao is walking around the guts of what will soon become his new gasifier. That’s a machine that makes ethanol. Making ethanol is no big deal these days, but Dr. Zhao’s machine is. His partner on the project, Dr. Suresh Rao is a Purdue environmental engineer. He explains that making ethanol
Rao: It's based on converting corn grain, which is obviously competing resource as food. So we are looking at a noncompetitive system which does not involve a food as opposed to actually using waste biomass to convert to transportation fuel.
And they’ve done it. This machine that they’re building will take common, everyday garbage
Zhao: From agriculture, from forestry or even municipal solid waste.
Feed it into the gasifier and turn it into fuel.
Rao: The gas can be re-synthesized into liquid fuel so beyond ethanol, you can produce diesel as an example. In addition, of course, you can also have the option of producing electricity as a byproduct is well.
To put this in it’s most basic form: we’re talking here about making gas out of garbage. It sounds like science fiction, but Dr. Rao says it’s not.
RAO: There is in fact a contract in northern Indiana just signed last week to convert garbage to ethanol through Thermo gasification process. So maybe the reality of full commercialization is not that far away.
MUSIC THEN TRANSITION
SOUND – DAN NOCERA IN HIS LAB
NOCERA: We have a cell and it has two cylinders. And then the two cylinders are connected by a glass frit right here in the middle.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
Another way to address our environmental problems is to curb global warming by finding a way to use more electricity that DOESN’T come from coal-fired power plants. Like maybe electricity from the sun. For years, we’ve been this close to doing that. (aside) And when I say “this close,” I’m holding my fingers this far apart. Anyway, we’ve been this close using photovoltaic cells that turn solar power into electricity. But the problem with solar cells is: What do you do at night? And what do you when it’s raining?
SOUND – DAN NOCERA IN HIS LAB
NOCERA: And then we fill it with water, and then in one side of the cell -- on the left side of the H., we have a platinum electrode
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
We’re in the lab of someone who may have figured that out -- Dan Nocera, a chemistry professor at MIT. There’s something that every tree and every piece of grass can do that machines can’t do. As Dan Nocera explains, plants convert sunlight to electricity, just like a photovoltaic does, but
NOCERA: Then when the sun goes down, what do they do? And it turns out they store solar light. Then they convert that sunlight into a fuel, which they can store inside the plant and keep on living when the sun goes down.
In cracking that process, Dan Nocera thinks he’s found a way to make solar cells that work 24-7. Here’s how it works.
OLD TIME-Y, SCRATCHY SCIENCE MOVIE MUSIC PLAYS
(Reading like an old-time announcer) Our Friend Photosynthesis.
OLD TIME-Y, SCRATCHY SCIENCE MOVIE MUSIC UP FULL
(Reading like an old-time announcer) The leaves of the common household tree are buzzing with electricity. The tree makes electricity in its leaves. (stops) Do I have to do the rest of the show like this? Good. (continues in her real voice) The electricity is fed to two catalysts.
NOCERA: One catalyst takes water to oxygen.
Then, in another part of the leaf, the tree makes hydrogen at another catalyst.
NOCERA: So we have tried to do the same thing.
Scientists have known this process for 100 years.
NOCERA: The issue is: can you do those things that we already know how to do with new materials and new ways to do it so it is really cheap, cheap, cheap?
Right now they use platinum as the oxygen catalyst, which is 11-hundred dollars an ounce. So much for cheap. But Dan Nocera’s beaten that too.
NOCERA: It is the oxygen catalyst that is special here and we made a very simple compound that forms when you put electricity on an electrode.
He’s doing it with cobalt and phosphate.
NOCERA: So now what I am doing is I am turning on some current. So I am putting a positive charge on the glass and as I do it, you start to see this black, thin film forming on the electrode.
The special catalyst splits the water.
NOCERA: It splits water to hydrogen and oxygen. Which we can store downstairs. And then, at night, you take the hydrogen and oxygen, we combine them over a fuel-cell; then you get the electricity back.
The process can’t be mass produced yet. But he’s working with engineers from battery companies, gas compression companies and photovoltaic companies. And he says it won’t be long before this is on the market and generating electricity from the sun day or night. Rain or shine.
BED MUSIC UP AND OUT
There are some obvious, big-time emitters of greenhouse gas that you can probably name off the top of your head, but here’s one you probably DIDN’T know of. It’s estimated that concrete accounts for close to 5% of the world’s CO2 emissions. Michael Prather from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change explains why.
PRATHER: Concrete manufacturer basically involves taking calcium carbonate rock and driving the CO2 off it.
In the cement manufacturing process, about a ton of carbon dioxide gets put off into the atmosphere for every ton of cement that’s made. But now engineers are looking at ways to change that. Liv Haselbach (Leev HOSS el bock) is an Environmental Engineering professor at Washington State University. She’s an expert on concrete. You can tell she is, because she likes telling jokes like this
HASELBACH: Concrete isn’t really concrete in that sense, it’s a funny thing to say.
Well, no it’s not. But anyways, Liv was given about 35-thousand dollars by the National Science Foundation to find ways of making the concrete manufacturing process more carbon-neutral. She’s seized on an idea that’s basic to the chemistry of concrete.
HASELBACH: Concrete itself can reabsorb the CO2 fairly rapidly.
And not only can it absorb it, but when carbon dioxide gets inside concrete,
HASELBACH: It actually turns back into limestone.
Liv Haselbach’s grant, among other things, is designed to look into ways of using that natural process to reduce global warming.
HASELBACH: There is potential for us to build sidewalks where -- yes -- these sidewalks will suck CO2 out of the air.
And while that’s exciting enough – and who ever thought they’d hear the words “Concrete” and “Exciting” in the same sentence – that’s only part of it.
CONSTANTZ: Well what we are going to do is -- we are putting on our hard hats right now and a we are going to head out and hop in the Land Rover.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER
Brent Constantz is one of those people you read about in business magazines. He makes things that make life better and that make him very, very rich. Brent invented a type of concrete for orthopedic surgeons. Doctors loved it. Brent cashed in and sold the company. Then he got involved with the Woods Institute Of The Environment at Stanford, where, he came to the conclusion that
CONSTANTZ: The only way to address climate change is to do carbon capture and sequestration.
That means grabbing CO2 out of the air and putting it someplace where it can’t do any harm. Brent started a new company called Calera (suh LAIR uh), that does just that. They’ve invented a process whose impact is stunning. Potentially a total game-changer when it come to global warming. Basically, what they do is set up a cement plant next to an emitter of CO2.
CONSTANTZ: The main ones are power plants -- principally coal-fired power plants, gas-fired power plants, oil plants etc.
They grab the CO2 out of the plant, before it gets into the atmosphere and then
CONSTANTZ: Our green cements actually takes the carbon dioxide from the emissions from the power plant and converts that carbon dioxide into carbonate mineral. Maybe a simpler way to say it is: it turns the carbon dioxide into a solid, by converting the carbon dioxide to carbonate, which then becomes essentially limestone.
The carbon dioxide never reaches the atmosphere. They turn it back into rock before it ever hits the air. Right now Calera has one plant, which they set up next to a major greenhouse gas polluter.
CONSTANTZ: The power plant here at Moss Landing produces about 3.42 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. And that is equivalent to about 700,000 cars.
The work Liv Haselbach is doing would take the concrete industry and move it from being a greenhouse gas polluter to being, basically neutral. The Calera process takes it that one step farther.
CONSTANTZ: This gives the material itself a negative carbon footprint. So it is not just less bad, it is actually taking us into the negative zone.
America used 2.35 billion tons of cement in 2007. China made 1.4 billion tons. Remember; a ton of carbon dioxide gets put into the air for every ton of cement. If the Calera process was in wide use, that’s 4 billion tons of CO2 that would never reach the air. Think what that could do for global warming.
BED MUSIC UP AND OUT
So that’s a look at some of the tools – the green tools that we have a hand to help us tackle some of the world’s worst environmental problems. They’re right there for us to use. The question is: will we take up the challenge? Will we make the sacrifices to do it? Purdue’s Larry Nies says there’s no time like the present.
NIES: I don’t really have a lot of patience for people that -- the first words out of their mouth is that “It’ll be hard” or “We can’t do that.”
MAKOWER: I think we have come to a proverbial fork in the road.
Joel Makower of Greenbiz-dot-com.
MAKOWER: On one hand, we can go down this business as usual road and see what happens with the potential that we have these cataclysmic problems that are simply unimaginable. And the other road is to pursue another road that we are frankly just starting to imagine -- the potential of having clean, renewable energy; of having zero waste of factories; of having cleaner and greener products and services but also better lives as a result. There is a lot that technology can do, but it is not technology’s problem to solve. It’s people’s problem to solve. Which means that we have to be ready to make the commitments, to make the changes and that unless we are willing to do that, all the clean technology in the world isn’t going to be able to save us.
BED MUSIC UP AND OUT
“Sustainability” was written and produced by Richard Paul. It was edited by Richard Miles. Our remote engineers were P.W. Fenton, Walter Dixon, Rebecca McInroy, Ben Taylor, Mark Howell, Krista Almanzan, Cyrus Farivar ("suh-ROOS FAR-ih-var"), Jennifer Ball, Julie Caine, Kerry Swanson and Greg Bray. Special thanks to Betty Carson Mogridge at Purdue Radio, WBAA. This program is part of the “Grand Challenges” series from the Purdue University College of Engineering. On the web at Discovery-Park-dot-Purdue-dot.edu. I’m Barbara Bogaev.
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