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Del Birmingham

In Season of Returning, a Start-Up Tries to Find Homes for the Rejects - The New York T... - 0 views

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    The Christmas gifts have been delivered, and Secret Santa is done. Now, the work begins for Optoro, a start-up company that aims to reduce the financial and environmental costs of another great holiday tradition: returns. Little known to shoppers, however, is that a majority of returned items never make it back to retailers' shelves. Instead, the items wind their way through liquidators, wholesalers and resellers, many of the purchases ending up in landfills. According to some estimates, as much as two million tons of returned items - most of it undamaged merchandise - are thrown away each year, enough to fill over 200,000 garbage trucks.
Adriana Trujillo

Bloomberg Plan Aims to Require Food Composting - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • requiring New Yorkers to separate their food scraps for composting
  • it is hiring a composting plant to handle 100,000 tons of food scraps a year
  • Sanitation officials said 150,000 single-family homes
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  • New Yorkers who do not separate their food scraps could be subject to fines, just as they are currently if they do not recycle plastic, paper or metal.
  • 100 high-rise buildings
  • 600 schools
  • on the curb for pickup by sanitation trucks
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    Mayor Bloomber is starting a program to make food composting a requirement. Residents will sort trash in their homes and place food sraps in a brown trash can for curbside pick up. Going to start trial phase soon with actual residents and school
Adriana Trujillo

The cheap oil in your Nutella, Oreos, and Girl Scout Cookies is getting more expensive ... - 0 views

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    The world's most popular cheap cooking oil is becoming less affordable. Palm oil prices are up 10% since the start of the year, and closer to 16% since the end of January, when they dropped to $765 per tonne ($843 per ton). The stuff hasn't been this expensive since September of 2012.
Adriana Trujillo

Don't waste CO2, turn it into bottles and glue - tech - 06 March 2014 - New Scientist#.... - 1 views

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    IF HUMANITY is to avoid dangerous climate change, we need to capture hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide. But what to do with it all? There is no shortage of places to bury it (see "Trailblazing power plant is first to bury its carbon"), but we can at least put some of it to good use. A few start-up companies view CO2 as a resource rather than a waste product. They are using CO2 as the raw material for making products including superglue and fertiliser.
Brett Rohring

6 ways Apple's new mothership will be ultra green | GreenBiz.com - 1 views

  • 6 ways Apple's new mothership will be ultra green
  • 1. Fruit trees
  • The new plan will transform an existing site almost entirely covered with buildings and asphalt into a landscape featuring almost 7,000 trees – including the apple, apricot, cherry and plum fruit trees that made San Jose's orchards thrive long before silicon was invented.
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  • When Apple Campus 2 is finished, 80 percent of the site will be green space
  • 2. Renewables
  • the campus will run entirely on renewable energy. The plan calls for about 8 megawatts of solar panels to be installed on the roof of the main, spaceship-shaped building as well as the parking structures. An unspecified number of fuel cells also will be installed, with the rest of the electricity needed for operations sourced through grid-purchased renewable energy.
  • Primary opposition to the site has centered on its transportation plan. To combat those criticisms, Apple has expanded its Transportation Demand Management program, emphasizing the use of bicycles, shuttles and buses that will link employees with regional public transit networks.
  • 3. Net-zero building design
  • the structure itself is being designed to create as much energy as it uses. There is a strong emphasis on energy-efficiency: the passive heating and cooling systems will use 30 percent less than a comparable campus. A central site will contain fuel cells, back-up generators, chillers, condenser water storage, hot water storage, an electrical substation and water and fire pumps.
  • 4. Attention to water conservation
  • Attention has been paid to reducing the number of impermeable surfaces on the site. (Up to 9,240 of the parking spots, for example, will be underground so that Apple can invest in landscaping that absorbs water. A recycled water main is under consideration, and other steps have been taken to minimize water consumption by about 30 percent below a typical Silicon Valley development. Those measures include low-flow fixtures, the use of native plans and roof rainwater capture.
  • 5. An expanded waste management program
  • Apple already diverts about 78 percent of the waste associated with its existing headquarters from landfills. The proposal calls for the company to recycle or reuse any construction waste; from an operations perspective, it will step up recycling from solid waste sources as well as the use of composting.
  • 6. A sharpened focus on commuting alternatives
  • As part of its transportation program, the plan calls for buffered bike lanes on streets adjacent to the campus that are segregated from vehicular lanes and that also allow for bikes to pass each other. The focus will be on encouraging all employees that live within 15 minutes of the campus to use sustainable or public transportation alternatives. The site will start with 300 electric vehicle charging stations, with the built-in capacity to expand.
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    The iPhone maker's master plan features extensive green space, aggressive water conservation and one of the largest corporate solar arrays in the world.
Del Birmingham

Oil giants are waking up to carbon bubble risks | GreenBiz - 0 views

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    With grand speeches, new climate strategies, the offloading of carbon intensive assets and even changes in executive pay structures, the last few weeks have provided some intriguing evidence that oil firms  finally may be starting to take the climate threat seriously.
Brett Rohring

How Hasbro, Lego and Mattel stack up as green toy makers | GreenBiz.com - 0 views

  • Millions upon millions of games, dolls, trinkets and other baubles are churned out for the entertainment of children around the world.
  • As the titans that make them start considering their complete environmental footprints, they are making big strides in protecting the planet's natural resources, albeit by disparate approaches.
  • by 2020 Hasbro plans to reduce waste to landfill by 50 percent, energy consumption by 25 percent, GHG emissions by 20 percent and water consumption by 15 percent.
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  • Between 2008 and 2012, the company says, it reduced non-hazardous waste by 40 percent, energy consumption by 19 percent, GHG emissions by 32 percent and water consumption by 31 percent.
  • Hasbro is also working to reduce its packaging material, eliminate polyvinyl chloride (PVC) from packaging, increase recycled content and source paper responsibly.
  • This year the company eliminated PVC from new product packaging and says it's on track to nix it from all packaging by the end of this year.
  • It also exceeded its 2011 goal to derive at least 75 percent of paper and board packaging from recycled material or from sources that practice sustainable forest management. By 2015, Hasbro plans to increase that number to 90 percent.
  • it also did away with the plastic bags in which game instructions were wrapped, removing 800,000 pounds of material worldwide from its waste stream.
  • Lego has worked for decades to eliminate PVC as well as phthalates from its toys, all of which no longer contain these substances.
  • Next year the cardboard used in the new boxes will carry FSC certification
  • Over the next few years Lego's parent company, Kirkbi, is investing $547 million to build a wind farm off the coast of Germany.
  • By 2020, the company will contribute to the world at least the same amount of sustainable energy as the company consumes.
  • "Today we recycle about 90 percent of our waste, and with zero waste as our long-term ambition we will continue to make progress on this agenda,
  • in 2010, Mattel's Hot Wheels factory in Malaysia began using local sources and 100 percent compostable residual sugar cane fiber as an alternative packaging material for the plastic insert tray of the Hot Wheels 9- and 10-pack car assortments.
  • Mattel established a sustainability target to improve our packaging material efficiency by 5 percent by 2015.
  • the company has reduced its energy consumption by 33 percent, CO2 emissions by 38 percent, water consumption by 54 percent, volatile organic compound emissions by nearly 70 percent, non-hazardous waste generation by 30 percent and hazardous waste generation by 16 percent.
  • Mattel canceled its contracts with Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), who were complicit in rainforest destruction, and instructed its suppliers to avoid wood fiber from controversial sources, including companies 'that are known to be involved in deforestation
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