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Source: Environmental Expert.com

ASTM International Committee D20 on Plastics is currently developing a new standard, WK35342, Specification for Home Composting of Biodegradable Plastics. The proposed standard is under the jurisdiction of Subcommittee D20.96 on Environmentally Degradable Plastics and Biobased Products.

According to Robert Whitehouse, Ph.D., senior customer applications development manager, Metabolix Inc., and a D20.96 member, developing a standard on home composting makes sense on both economic and educational levels.

“Home composting reduces the amount of volume of trash for curbside collection and associated landfill fees,” says Whitehouse. “Municipalities have the same interest since their served costs are reduced from less trash collection and landfill options.

“Education is equally important, because the home consumer may have very little knowledge regarding plastic materials that can be biodegraded through the home composting process, hence they need to have the packaging marked by the brand owners so that items can be distinguished from non-biodegradable materials.”

Whitehouse says that the proposed standard will have several types of potential users, including resin producers, packaging converters, retailers/brand owners and consumers. Whitehouse notes that state and municipal governments, as well as food packaging producers and homeowners, are also among the wide variety of possible users for WK35342.

The subcommittee encourages packaging converters, retailers, brand owners, home composters and other interested parties to become involved in the development of WK35242.

Source: Environmental Expert.com
WEST CHICAGO, Ill.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Sims Recycling Solutions, Americas, (Sims) the global leader in electronics reuse and recycling, is pleased to announce that the company will pursue e-Stewards certification at its 14 North American electronics processing facilities. The company’s facilities currently have ISO 14001, OHSAS 18001, and R2 certifications and EPSC RVQP in Canada. With the addition of the e-Stewards certification, Sims will maintain the highest level of certification in the electronics recycling industry. Sims supports the most responsible global recycling practices and is the industry leader in creating safe workplaces for our employees and supporting responsible recycling legislation.

Beginning with the Common Sense Initiative and progressing through the National Electronics Product Stewardship Initiative (NEPSI), R2, and e-Stewards discussions, Sims Recycling Solutions has been, and continues to be, an active participant in all electronic scrap recycling industry collaborations. In addition, Sims Recycling Solutions is also a member of the Coalition for American Electronics Recycling (CAER) steering committee, an industry group supporting the passage of the Responsible Electronics Recycling Act.
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Source: Environmental Leader.com

Floor care — specifically stripping and refinishing floors — poses many challenges for building administrators. First, it’s costly. This is due to the fact that it is typically both time- and labor-intensive. It is estimated that as much as 90 percent of the cost of floor care is attributable to labor costs, and as such it can be one of the most costly of cleaning tasks.

For sustainable facilities, stripping and refinishing floors can also cause the kinds of significant environmental impacts that administrators try to avoid. One of the biggest concerns is the actual chemical stripper that is used to remove old finish and soils from floors. Traditional floor stripping chemicals are among the most powerful — and potentially harmful — cleaning agents in existence.

According to the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries, conventional floor finish typically contains butoxyethanol, sodium hydroxide (also known as lye), and ethanolamine in varying degrees. All of these chemicals can be corrosive to eyes and skin and harmful if inhaled. Risks increase if they are used improperly or an accident occurs.
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Source Environmental Expert.com

Event Goers Encouraged to Help Make Comic-Con 2012 the Greenest Ever

SAN DIEGO, CA — (Marketwire) — 07/12/12 — Waste Management has joined forces with leaders of the San Diego Convention Center for this year’s Comic-Con in a quest to save more recyclables than ever from the clutches of local landfills.

The duo’s mission is to increase recycling at the Convention Center over last year from set-up to tear down of the sold out event that begins July 12. Waste Management recycled more than 98 tons of materials during last year’s event.

Waste Management representatives will be at the Convention Center to call on Comic-Con attendees and vendors to appropriately dispose of trash and recyclables. Comic-Con goers and exhibitors are encouraged to keep the following earth-friendly tips in mind:

• With the high volume of traffic during Comic-Con, attendees are encouraged to utilize public transportation to and from the Convention Center;
• Look for the marked recycling bins throughout the Convention Center and downtown to keep recyclables out of the trash;
• Comic-Con exhibitors can donate usable materials left over from the event. These materials, which would otherwise take up space in a landfill, will go to local non-profit organizations: http://www.visitsandiego.com/resources/DonationsFlyer.pdf

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July 16, 2012

Source: DOE Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy

As part of the Energy Department’s Open Energy Information platform (Open EI) and its continued commitment to open and transparent energy data, the Department released today a new public database featuring cost and performance estimates for electric generation, advanced vehicle, and renewable fuel technologies. The Transparent Cost Database (TCDB) provides technology cost estimates for companies, utilities, policy makers, consumers, and academics, and can be used to benchmark company costs, model energy scenarios, and inform research and development decisions. The database makes it much easier to view the range of estimates for what energy technologies, such as a utility-scale wind farm, rooftop solar installation, biofuel production plant, or an electric vehicle, might cost today or in the future.

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Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, June 6, 2012

Technical Fact Sheets – FFRRO Contaminants of Concern

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Federal Facilities Restoration and Reuse Office (FFRRO) published the following technical fact sheets, which provide brief summaries of contaminants of concern that present unique issues and challenges to the environmental community in general and to FFRRO in particular. Each fact sheet provides a brief summary of the contaminant, including physical and chemical properties, environmental and health impacts, existing federal and state guidelines, and detection and treatment methods. Sources of additional information about each contaminant are also included in the fact sheets. These fact sheets are intended for use by project managers and field personnel in addressing specific contaminants at cleanup sites and are updated annually to ensure they include timely information.

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Source: Earth Policy Institute
In their book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, American architect William McDonough and German chemist Michael Braungart conclude that waste and pollution are to be avoided entirely. “Pollution,” says McDonough, “is a symbol of design failure.”

The challenge is to re-evaluate the materials we consume and the way we manufacture products so as to cut down on waste. Restructuring the transportation system has a huge potential for reducing materials use as light rail and buses replace cars. For example, 60 cars, weighing a total of 110 tons, can be replaced by one 12-ton bus, reducing material use 89 percent.

Savings from replacing a car with a bike are even more impressive. Urban planner Richard Register recounts meeting a bicycle-activist friend wearing a T-shirt that said, “I just lost 3,500 pounds. Ask me how.” When queried, he said he had sold his car. Replacing a 3,500-pound car with a 22-pound bicycle obviously reduces fuel use dramatically, but it also reduces materials use by 99 percent, indirectly saving still more energy.

Cutting the use of virgin raw materials begins with recycling steel, the use of which dwarfs that of all other metals combined. In the United States, virtually all cars are recycled. They are simply too valuable to be left to rust in out-of-the-way junkyards. With the number of cars scrapped now exceeding new cars sold, the U.S. automobile sector actually has a steel surplus that can be used elsewhere in the economy.

The U.S. recycling rate for household appliances is estimated at 90 percent. For steel cans it is 65 percent. For construction steel, the figures are 98 percent for steel beams and girders but only 65 percent for reinforcement steel.

Beyond reducing materials use, the energy savings from recycling are huge. Making steel from recycled scrap takes only 26 percent as much energy as that from iron ore. For aluminum, the figure is just 4 percent. Recycled plastic uses only 20 percent as much energy. Recycled paper uses 64 percent as much—and with far fewer chemicals during processing. If the world recycling rates of these basic materials were raised to those already attained in the most efficient economies, world carbon emissions would drop precipitously.

The rates of paper recycling in the top 10 paper-producing countries range widely—from China and Finland on the low end, recycling less than 40 percent of the paper they use, to Japan and Germany on the higher end, each between 70 and 80 percent, and South Korea, which recycles an impressive 91 percent. The United States, the world’s largest paper consumer, is far behind the leaders, but it has raised the share of paper recycled from roughly 20 percent in 1980 to 59 percent in 2009. If every country recycled as much of its paper as South Korea does, the amount of wood pulp used to produce paper worldwide would drop by more than one third.

In the United States, only 33 percent of garbage is recycled. Some 13 percent is burned and 54 percent goes to landfills, indicating a huge potential for reducing materials use, energy use, and pollution. Among the larger U.S. cities, recycling rates vary from 25 percent in New York to 45 percent in Chicago, 65 percent in Los Angeles, and 77 percent in San Francisco, the highest of all.

One way to encourage recycling is simply to adopt a landfill tax. For example, when the small town of Lyme, New Hampshire, adopted a pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) program that encourages municipalities to charge residents for each bag of garbage, it dramatically reduced the flow of materials to landfills, raising the share of garbage recycled from 13 to 52 percent in only one year, simultaneously reducing the town’s landfill fees, and generating a cash flow from the sale of recycled material. Nationwide, more than 7,000 U.S. communities now have PAYT programs.

In addition to measures that encourage recycling, there are those that encourage or mandate the reuse of products such as refillable beverage containers. Finland, for example, has banned the use of one-way soft drink containers. A refillable glass bottle used over and over requires only 10 percent as much energy per use as recycling an aluminum can. Banning nonrefillables is a quintuple win option—cutting material use, carbon emissions, air pollution, water pollution, and landfill costs simultaneously.

Bottled water is even more wasteful. In a world trying to stabilize climate, it is difficult to justify bottling water (often tap water to begin with), hauling it long distances, and then selling it for 1,000 times the price of water from the kitchen faucet. Although clever marketing has convinced many consumers that bottled water is safer and healthier than tap water, a detailed study by WWF found that in the United States and Europe there are more standards regulating the quality of tap water than there are for bottled water. In developing countries where water is unsafe, it is far cheaper to boil or filter water than to buy it in bottles.

Manufacturing the nearly 28 billion plastic bottles used each year to package water in the United States alone requires the equivalent of 17 million barrels of oil. This—combined with the energy used to refrigerate and haul the bottled water in trucks, sometimes over hundreds of miles—means the U.S. bottled water industry consumes roughly 50 million barrels of oil per year, equal to 13 percent of U.S. oil imports from Saudi Arabia.

The production, processing, and disposal of materials in our modern throwaway economy wastes not only materials but the energy embodied in the material as well. The throwaway economy that has evolved over the last half-century is an aberration that is now itself headed for the junk heap of history.