Moving beyond sustainability: The Interface story

This morning on my way to work I was, as per usual, listening to KUOW. The guest was Ray Anderson, author of Confessions of a Radical Industrialist and retired CEO and founder of Interface, a commercial carpet company.

In 1995, he described his vision to his company: to be both sustainable and profitable. He asserted that the path to sustainability lies in rethinking the entire industrial system. Under a new system, ecological awareness would be a requirement, based on the belief “to take nothing from the Earth that can’t be replaced by the earth.”

In order to do this, Anderson set measurable goals (like cutting greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel consumption, waste, and water use) and led his business by the mission “doing well by doing good.” He has reduced his businesses waste by over a third over the last fifteen years. In fact, since 2003, Interface has “manufactured and sold over 83 million square yards of carpet with no net global-warming effect.” Through the company’s Mission Zero project, they are striving for a zero environmental footprint by 2020.

Many Seattle business owners called in, bemoaning the effects of the tanking economy on their green business efforts, begging the question: are sustainability and capitalism mutually exclusive?

ECOSS thinks not! With our no-closed-door policy, our free and confidential services are available to business owners and individuals who aim to incorporate sustainable practices in their business models or in their homes. We can help you reduce waste and consumption with the bottom line in mind.

-Elise

DOE issues public notice for SeaCon Property in South Seattle

In 1999, SeaCon learned of contamination on their newly acquired property on S. 96th Street and was invited to a Brownfields Presentation given by ECOSS’ brownfields manager, Emery Bayley. ECOSS helped SeaCon get a grant through King County to pay for removal of contaminated material from the creek. Ultimately, SeaCon received the grant but elected to remove the contamination themselves after they learned a Biological Assessment from National Marine Fisheries would be required before they would receive funds.

In March of 2000, SeaCon removed contamination from the creek buffer zone that was capped and used as fill under the building. Construction of building began in Summer 2000. SeaCon’s ten year relationship with ECOSS began at this site, on S. 96th Street. Department of Ecology is now holding a public comment period to remove the site from it’s list of Hazardous Sites.

The following notice was published in the current issue of the Department of Ecology’s Site Register regarding Seattle Construction (SEACON) property on S. 96th Street.

Proposed Removal From Hazardous Site List
Public comment period: 8/21/09-9/21/09

The Markey Property Parcel 4 site is situated north of South 96th street and east of 10th Avenue South in a commercial and industrial district of King County. The north fork of Hamm Creek runs along the north side of the property. The site has two buildings occupied by a Sherwin Williams Paint Company store, Simplex Grinnell Company and NRC Environmental Services. Prior to the 1970s, the site was a truck garden. Between 1977 and 1978, an estimated 50,000 cubic yards of cement kiln dust (CKD), reportedly from Ideal Cement, were placed on the parcel as fill. Subsequent fill included 1,000 cubic yards of soil that designated as dangerous waste due to its lead content. The property owner sued the company responsible for this fill, Bayside Disposal. Bayside Disposal responded by removing and properly disposing of the dangerous waste. Based on available information, Ecology added the property to the Hazardous Site List in 1992. The site was selected for a Site Hazard Assessment (SHA) and subsequent ranking by the Washington Ranking Method (WARM).

Read the rest here.

South Seattle’s Total Reclaim highlighted in NYTimes Article

June 30, 2009
A Green Way to Dump Low-Tech Electronics
By LESLIE KAUFMAN

This month, Edward Reilly, 35, finally let go of the television he had owned since his college days.

Although the Mitsubishi set was technologically outdated, it had sat for years in Mr. Reilly’s home in Portland, Me., because he did not know what else to do with it, given the environmental hazards involved in discarding it.

“It’s pretty well known that if it gets into the landfill, it gets into the groundwater,” he said. “Its chemicals pollute.”

But the day after the nationwide conversion to digital television signals took effect on June 12, Mr. Reilly decided to take advantage of a new wave of laws in Maine and elsewhere that require television and computer manufacturers to recycle their products free of charge. He dropped off his television at an electronic waste collection site near his home and, he said, immediately gained “peace of mind.”

Over the course of that day, 700 other Portland residents did the same.

Since 2004, 18 states and New York City have approved laws that make manufacturers responsible for recycling electronics, and similar statutes were introduced in 13 other states this year. The laws are intended to prevent a torrent of toxic and outdated electronic equipment — television sets, computers, monitors, printers, fax machines — from ending up in landfills where they can leach chemicals into groundwater and potentially pose a danger to public health.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates 99.1 million televisions sit unused in closets and basements across the country. Consumer response to recycling has been enormous in states where the laws have taken effect. Collection points in Washington State, for example, have been swamped by people like Babs Smith, 55, who recently drove to RE-PC, a designated electronics collection and repurposing center on the southern edge of Seattle.

Ms. Smith’s Subaru Outback was stuffed with three aged computer towers that had languished in her basement after being gutted by her teenage sons, who removed choice bits to build their own souped-up computers. “It’s what geeks do,” she said.

Since January, Washington State residents and small businesses have been allowed to drop off their televisions, computers and computer monitors free of charge to one of 200 collection points around the state. They have responded by dumping more than 15 million pounds of electronic waste, according to state collection data. If disposal continues at this rate, it will amount to more than five pounds for every man, woman and child per year.

Use of the drop-off points was so overwhelming at first that the Washington Materials Management and Financing Authority, which oversees the program, urged consumers to consider holding off until spring.

“We were getting 18 semi loads a day when the program first started,” said Craig Lorch, owner of Total Reclaim, a warehouse on the south edge of Seattle that is among the collection points.

Still, states that pioneered the electronic recycling laws report that consumer participation remains strong over time. Maine, which was one of the first to approve such a law, in 2004, says it collected nearly four pounds of waste per person last year.

Read the rest at the source.

Seattle City Council member Bruce Harell – composting, co-op’ing, collaborating

I’m a little behind on my news, apparently, but I caught this article from last week describing Seattle City Council member Bruce Harrell’s proposal to help small businesses offset the cost of changing to compostable take-out ware. His plan: start a buyers’ co-op to leverage the collective buying power of all the affected businesses.

WHY I LOVE THIS: Not only is it environmentally friendly AND business friendly, it increases cooperation and collaboration in the process. Way to go, Bruce.

-Audrey

ECOSSolutions launches April 30th

ECOSSolutions is a new Information Series we’re launching to help local businesses and communities with sustainability issues. We’ll have sessions about once a quarter to talk about ways businesses can save money and improve their sustainability efforts. Our first session is scheduled for the end of this month at the South Park Neighborhood Center, and the topic is Hazardous Waste Management. We’ve got a great lineup of experts from King County, the Industrial Materials Exchange program, and Total Reclaim/EcoLights Northwest. They’ll give us a little background on their programs, talk about how to deal with various types of hazardous waste, and explain ways to save a lot of money on proper disposal through existing programs. It should be a relaxed atmosphere where people can ask direct questions about any hazardous waste challenges they’re facing.

We’re excited to kick off this new program and we’re hoping for a good turnout from local business owners and staff. Please join us if you are interested in the topic: April 30th, 7 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. It’s early, but we’ll have coffee and pastries to help get your day going.

-Aldan

Ahead of the game

ECOSS has been advocating for a green economy in South Park and beyond since 1994. Our organization positioned itself a neighborhood that is charming, lively. The folks in our neighborhood are not necessarily representative of the faces you traditionally see in the environmental movement – and that was the point. Our mission and values are defined by the needs of our diverse constiuency, not by the trends of the movement or the mad rush to the dollar. We realized early on that to make “green” work in this neighborhood and in the industrial sector, we would have to make it timely, relevant, and culturally appropriate. When we say we are pioneers of the green economy, we mean it. The need for diversity in the environmental movement was discussed in today’s New York Times.

National environmental organizations have traditionally drawn their membership from the white and affluent, and have faced criticism for focusing more on protecting resources than protecting people.

But with a black president committed to environmental issues in the White House and a need to achieve broader public support for initiatives like federal legislation to address global warming, many environmentalists say they feel pressure to diversify the movement further, both in membership and at higher levels of leadership.

“Our groups are not as diverse as we’d like, but every one of the major groups has diversity as a top priority,” said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “There’s great commitment to making the environmental movement representative of what the country is.”

Are we seeing a second wave of environmentalism coming to the table?

If you’re going to be impacted by an issue, you bring the impacted people to the table,” said Mr. Moore, who is now executive director of the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, a coalition of 60 groups.

Cara Pike, the author of a 2007 study commissioned by the environmental law group Earthjustice, said the research found that the “greenest Americans,” many of them members of environmental groups, were overwhelmingly white, over 45 and college-educated. “The focus of green groups has been to target the greenest Americans,” Ms. Pike said, “and as a result, we’ve left other people out of the equation.”

National polls show high environmental concern among minorities. A post-election poll for the National Wildlife Federation in November, for example, found increasing support among blacks and Latinos for candidates keen on addressing global warming. And surveys by the Public Policy Institute of California have found that minorities are sometimes even more concerned than white respondents about environmental issues like air pollution.

But until recently, social concerns did not appear to be “on the radar” of many large environmental organizations, said Julian Agyeman, chairman of the department of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University and author of the 2005 book “Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice.”

Even organizations like the Sierra Club, which has incorporated social justice work since the 1990s, concede that their diversity efforts have failed to gain traction. The organization’s executive director, Carl Pope, points at “cultural barriers” that in effect shut the door to nonwhites regardless of good intentions.

“If you go to a Sierra Club meeting, the people are mostly white, largely over 40, almost all college-educated, whose style is to argue with each other,” Mr. Pope said. “That may not be a welcoming environment.”

As a student of the environment, I learned that there are many different types of environmentalists, all focused on different, and often intersecting, factions of the larger “environment.” Several diverse strains of environmental activity are coming together and the community impacted by different environmental problems or issues are emerging as important, vital players in this new wave of environmentalism.

Van Jones…said that while environmental justice groups were focused on “equal protection from bad stuff,” groups like his wanted “equal access to good stuff” and to use green jobs to lift urban youths and others out of poverty.

“The more the green movement transforms into a movement for economic opportunity,” Mr. Jones said, “the more it will look like America.”

-Elise

Stormwater Solutions?

On March 3rd, ECOSS’s Executive Director Kevin joined Alex and me in Tacoma to be part of the Northwest Environmental Business Council’s (NEBC) conference on Managing Stormwater in Washington.

Held at the Hotel Murano, the conference was well attended and designed to address the current issues in construction and industrial stormwater management.

The opening panel in the morning was a controversial one, but an interesting way to kick start the conference. The panel was comprised of Ken Johnson from Weyerhaeuser, Josh Baldi from the Washington State Department of Ecology, Van Collins from the Associated General Contractors, and Sue Joerger from the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance. These stakeholders addressed the potential impacts of upcoming changes in stormwater regulation, representing a diverse spectrum of differing opinions on how to manage stormwater. Understanding the relationship between these parties made the tension in the room quite palpable.

The rest of the day was divided along two tracks, one for those interested in industrial stormwater and the other for people involved with the management of stormwater from construction sites.

There were several big take away points that I thought were important to address in this blog. Firstly, the copper and zinc benchmarks are going to be lowered drastically. Some of the numbers being thrown around were 14 ug/L and 63 ug/L respectively. This is a considerable change, which leads me to the second take away point addressed in the afternoon by Calvin Noling from StormwateRx . StomwateRx designs and installs industrial stormwater treatment and filtration systems, but during his presentation on pollution removal efficiency he declared that filtration systems alone will most likely not be sufficient to achieve the newly proposed copper and zinc benchmarks.

Finally, I wanted to address the overall content of the conference. Every single solution presented to manage stormwater was focused on dealing with water that had already been polluted. There was no discussion about prevention. All of the exhibitors were presenting highly engineered treatment devices, but there was no one there talking about how to keep stormwater from being polluted in the first place.

Americans have a habit of relying heavily on technological solutions to our problems. This alone is not the problem. However, what I am concerned about is we are talking exclusively about engineered technology as the solution to stormwater management. With drastically changing benchmarks, we are finding that technology alone cannot save us. We need to start thinking about stormwater in a more systemic way, relying less on technology to clean up our pollution and more on not polluting in the first place. Stormwater is as much an issue of source control and responsible purchasing as that of engineering and technological solutions.

-Todd Hunsdorfer

ECOSS attends Carbon Footprint Workshop, enjoys free breakfast

On Wednesday, I attended a carbon footprint workshop at the Rainier Square Conference Center in downtown Seattle. The event was hosted by the Seattle Climate Partnership (SCP), Sustainable Business Consulting and Cascadia Consulting Group (CCG), and featured a case study of Homestreet Bank. You know what’s great about morning workshops and seminars? Pastries. When I arrived, Charlie was just starting his talk about SCP, so I grabbed a Starbucks cinnamon roll and took a seat.

I looked around and found that the audience consisted primarily of staff from local businesses, but members from government and environmental groups were also present. After Charlie finished speaking, he introduced CCG’s Anisha Shankar, who gave a presentation on the SCP Carbon Calculator. The calculator is designed to help businesses determine their carbon footprint, which Anisha defined as the “impact, in carbon emissions, of business activities.” She went on to say that the common sources of carbon emissions for most businesses include building energy, employee travel (operational and commute mileage), materials usage and solid waste practices. I’ve looked at the Carbon Calculator before and have been impressed with its user-friendliness and versatility: the tool can be applied to businesses of many sizes across a variety of industries.

When Anisha finished, she introduced the Marketing Director from Homestreet Bank, who gave a great presentation on their carbon reduction efforts as a member of the SCP. I think his presentation did a good job of showing the challenges and opportunities of carbon footprint reduction, and I liked that he talked about the specific, concrete changes Homestreet has made in their efforts, such as turning their computers off at night and getting Zip Car service for their employees. By the end of the presentation, I was done with my cinnamon roll and had several new ideas for implementing carbon reduction strategies at ECOSS.

Last year, ECOSS signed the SCP pledge to reduce our own carbon footprint. Currently, we’re in the process of gathering data on our building’s energy use and our employee travel, and we’re assessing the way we select and use our office materials, like printer paper. The idea is to collect a year’s worth of data (which can be done either by evaluating a backlog of records, or by multiplying a single month’s data by 12) to serve as the baseline year for our carbon footprint. This takes a little digging through utility records and the like, and in areas where we don’t have hard figures, we’ll have to make smart estimates. From there we can set reduction targets and devise strategies for meeting those goals. It’s likely that our efforts will include a combination of staff education, modified day-to-day practices in the office, workplace sponsored incentives, and, perhaps most important, a reliable tracking system. Hopefully, we’ll reduce our carbon footprint and serve as an example for the many businesses and organizations we serve, while doing our part to be a little easier on the environment.

Learn more about Seattle’s Climate Protection Initiative and how the city is reducing it’s carbon footprint:

If you have questions about joining the Seattle Climate Partnership or about carbon footprinting in general, feel free to email Charlie Cunniff (ECOSS’ founding Executive Director!) or call 206-386-9748 at the Seattle’s Office of Sustainability & Environment.

-Aldan Shank