Recycling

electric car/shutterstock

Even if there is enough lithium to displace the 1 billion internal combustion engine cars that now pollute the earth with electric cars, it is the electronic waste problem that should dominate the question.[read more]

combined heat and power

Combined heat and power (CHP) is an underutilized tool that could have a huge impact on industrial energy efficiency. But how do the benefits of CHP stack up against building new wind, solar, or natural gas facilities?[read more]

keystone xl pipeline

A huge blow to the anti-Keystone XL pipeline crusade occurred earlier this month when the State Department released a “Draft Supplementary Environmental Impact Statement.”[read more]

Black Friday via Shutterstock

As we approach one of the biggest shopping days of the year, take a minute to think about the things you can do to make searching for the perfect gift a little friendlier on the planet (and your wallet).Here are nine ideas for making Black Friday -- and the rest of the holiday season -- a little greener and less stressful. Try one. And...[read more]

Rich Carey/Shutterstock

Polyester polyurethane is unappetizing to most living things – including the sea creatures who encounter it in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where recent news shows insects are starting to lay their eggs on pieces of plastic.What will we do with all the plastic we make – and the oil that we use to make it? Luckily, there are...[read more]

Producing energy from waste is hardly a new idea, as illustrated by efforts such as the landfill methane-to-LNG project I mentioned in November and by numerous demonstration projects to turn various forms of solid waste into liquid fuels. However, I don't normally think of wastewater as having any noteworthy energy potential to extract....[read more]

When trying to save the planet, every litter bit helps. But let’s not lose sight of the forest when we’re saving a tree–or when General Motors is recycling “plastic boom material used to soak up oil in the Gulf of Mexico” into auto parts in the Chevrolet Volt. Recycling is laudable–indeed, it points the way to a sustainable, zero-waste...[read more]

Big companies aren’t good at breakthrough innovation.  Disruptive innovation usually comes from start-ups or entrepreneurs. (See Big Business’s big innovation problem.) Big companies are even worse at innovation when it threaten to cannibalize their existing business. Think about why newspapers failed to create a Craigslist or why...[read more]

I joined RecycleBank for many reasons, one due to an observation regarding the application of rewards in the green space.  Quite simply, rewards have the potential to change consumer behavior without necessarily changing attitudes first. I first wrote about this in a 2007 blog post. Today, it remains a powerful way to...[read more]

I have often been asked by members of the public what happens to wind turbines at the end of their lives. For many of the components, that’s easy. Steel, copper and aluminum have well established scrap markets – the vast majority of the turbine is worth money. But what about the blades, usually made of a fiberglass composite material...[read more]

My favorite conference is Net Impact’s annual gathering, mostly because of the crowd—this weekend, about 2,500 people, most of them MBA students, undergrads and young professionals, gathered at University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business in Ann Arbor. These fare the smart, passionate and committed business leaders of tomorrow. I’m...[read more]

While my focus is primarily on energy, I am also interested in other sustainability issues. Some of those include food production, water issues (e.g. water desalination to increase availability of fresh water), and waste management. I have discussed waste management here before in My Composting Experiment. (My experiment has gone quite...[read more]

“People just want a cell phone,” Dan Hesse, the CEO of Sprint, told me. “They don’t care how green it is.” “But we think they will over time.” Is that sufficient reason to try to sell “green” phones, aggressively promote recycling and buy renewable energy? “People want to do business with good companies,” Hesse says. “I want us to be...[read more]

There was so much progress over the summer that I needed two posts to capture all of the neat projects being undertaken on college campuses. Berkshire CC Kicks Off Energy Monitoring and Management Program Berkshire Community College (MA) is part of a $55 million pilot project to monitor and better manage energy use in state buildings....[read more]

Grab your sunglasses and your sun tan lotion because we are headed to the Hawaiian islands..oh don't forget your calculator.Energy production in HI sparks the imagination.  Think of all the natural resources available: Wind, Solar, Geothermal (big island), Hydro, biomass, ocean thermal, and tidal.  So where then does all the...[read more]