Tag: Cleantech

Toyota’s new 3rd gen Prius ads are mesmerizing

I’m blown away by the new Prius ads.

David Kiley said this ad from Toyota may have been inspired by Honda’s earlier diesel engine “Hate Something” spot (compare the two yourself), but from my eyes, it’s the freshest creative in a decade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq4nrmnqY9o&feature=player_embedded

But it’s not just creative for creative’s sake. Lots of agencies are living the creed “make it entertaining, engaging and disruptive” so consumers take notice and buy.

The new Prius spot is much more.

They’ve taken a car that was already the # 1 best selling hybrid in the world – the undisputed mainstream brand – and made it a vehicle of the people, for the people, by the people. Literally.

Using 200 extras, they created a layered – but somehow unified – sea of 1 million people parts. Everything (except the Prius, road and sky) was constructed from human beings who become “landscape texture.”  Grass. Water. Trees. Clouds. Stones. Leaves. Sun. Flowers. Butterflies. The Bellamy Brothers’ # 1 hit from 1976 – “Let Your Love Flow” – is the audio glue.

The piece de resistance (besides the people, colors and music) is the movement. As the Prius drives by, clouds shift, grass sways, butterflies fly, flowers open, water flows, the sun glows.

It’s a visual trip, blending nature, technology and the human race.

They’ve raised the branding bar yet again with the newest Prius ad, spotlighting solar.

Hopefully for Toyota, the new campaign will move more than grass. The Prius has been struggling in the U.S. of late (mirroring the rest of the auto industry). U.S. sales of the Prius were down from 15,011 in May 2008 to 10,091 for the same month this year. Year to date, U.S. Prius sales are 42,753 compared to 79,675 in 2008 – 45 per cent less than last year.

I feel better every time I see these ads. I actually want to see them.

I can’t remember the last time this happened.

Strategies for effective green retailing

Plus lessons from Coca-Cola, Dell and Timberland

Retailers go green for two reasons. One, consumers favor products they believe are green. Two, it’s the right thing to do.

One in three American consumers are more likely to choose environmentally responsible products, and 70 percent of Americans are paying attention to what companies are doing about the environment, according to an Opinion Research poll. Across the water, two out of three UK adults say environmental concerns influence their purchasing decisions.

Does the time and expense of green retailing to these consumers pay off? The jury is still out on that one, so the smart retailer at least considers going green. Fortunately, good green retail marketing is by definition good for the planet. It’s not greenwashing. To be effective, green retailing actions must be able to withstand reasonable scrutiny. They’re changes that matter, in ways however small, to the planet and your business.

Step one: the inventory
If you want to go green, the first thing to do is conduct a thoughtful inventory of how your business affects the environment. Consider both the obvious and less obvious impacts. Let’s say you sell cars. Obvious impacts include the gas they burn, the emissions they spew and the pile of tangled metal that eventually goes to the landfill. The less obvious effects include the production of electricity to illuminate your lot; the trees that die for your paperwork; and the impact of trucking new cars to your showroom. Less obvious still are the natural resources that go into the vehicles’ parts, the energy produced in refining those materials, and all the subsequent consequences of manufacturing.

With this inventory, you learn pretty quickly the infinite breadth of your environmental footprint. The good news is you don’t have to fix everything at once. The inventory simply introduces you to accountability and defines the scope of areas where you can become more sustainable. (This step also tells you how critics might attack you should you be so foolish as to make overly aggressive green claims.)

With your environmental impact inventory complete, here are some options for going green and some examples of companies that employ them:

Green your product
Any product can be greened up. Downsize the vehicles you sell, for example, and make room for some hybrids. Or use greener materials. Payless Shoes now offers a full line of eco-friendly footwear, purses and accessories that use natural fibers like organic cotton, hemp, jute (plant), recycled rubber and plastic, water-based glue and (for packaging) 100-percent recycled boxes printed by soy-based ink. No metal or pesticides in the sourcing chain and no excess raw material extraction. (Sorry, ladies, no pumps either, but you can still get some elevation, see right.) The marketing benefits are immediately clear: Why else would this post mention Payless? How else would Payless have caught our eye on Reuters?

Green your most visible operations
Whole Foods Market banned the use of plastic grocery bags at its 280-plus stores starting on Earth Day 2008. In the ensuing year, it says it has kept an estimated 150 million plastic bags out of landfills. The campaign helped energize customers to triple their use of reusable bags – themselves made of recycled materials. The company also sells a special reusable bag for $29.99, each sale of which feeds 100 kids in Rwanda. That’s good marketing, and it’s hard to be cynical about feeding the hungry.

Green the building
Timberland opened a “carbon neutral” store in New York City last week with reclaimed wood, salvaged brick, efficient lighting and non-VOC paint. These green features hit the consumer between the eyes. Although less visceral, Timberland’s LEED certifications for its mall stores are also important for green credibility.

Green your energy consumption
Dell, for example, announced last week it gets 26 percent of its global electricity needs from renewable energy sources, up from 20 percent in 2008, and powers nine of its facilities with 100 percent renewable energy. Twenty-six percent doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but the company wisely uses credible third parties to compare itself favorably with competitors in technology and in big business. Dell also uses another tactic…

Buy renewable energy certificates
Renewable energy certificates, or RECs, are commodities that an organization can purchase from a renewable energy producer (solar, wind, biofuels) to conceptually offset the harm the first company’s power sources are causing. Purchasing a REC subsidizes renewable energy production and effectively increases the cost of emitting carbon. It’s of limited green retailing value except in bolstering a claim of progress toward carbon neutrality.

All of these measures can be effective, but they have the potential of doing more harm than good. Few media stories are more withering than a point-by-point analysis (of how a company took its green claims a little too far. So just be careful what you say and how you say it:

  • Modesty is always nice, lest you provoke observers to note all the ways you are not yet green.
  • Align green retail actions with your product. The auto industry needed greening, so Toyota greened an auto, the Prius. Coca-Cola, a beverage company, is vowing to replenish the supply of the world’s most popular beverage: water. Alignment resonates. If your building is LEEDS certified but your product pollutes, your overall message is weak.
  • Try to be correct. The Treehugger blog skewered an Italian architect for a stunning creation billed as the “first zero CO2 office building in Milan.” Among other things, the building is elevated on 13-meter pyramid-like “stilts,” effectively driving occupants onto elevators just to get inside. On a roll, the blog even complained about the carbon footprint of manufacturing photovoltaic panels for the roof.
  • Prepare for surprises. As BusinessWeek.com reported, Coca-Cola until recently assumed that most of its emissions came from manufacturing or its trucks. It discovered the lion’s share came from cold drink equipment – the coolers, vending machines and fountain dispensers. This gear includes potentially damaging refrigerants and insulation and consumes a lot of electricity. This unexpected source accounted for about 15 million metric tons of emission every year – almost twice that of the trucks and manufacturing combined.

These examples should give you some direction in planning your next step in green retailing. Remember, if it’s good for the planet, it’s good for business. Because it’s hard to profit without a planet.

Of plastic bottles, grassroots and reducing consumption

A word about plastics, the bete noire of the environmental movement, and a lesson in fuzzy math, environmental style.

Plastics, as we’ve been taught since the mid 1970s, are evil. Lucifer, sitting on his throne in hell, handed the formula directly to inventor Alexander Parkes in 1862, and life hasn’t been right since. Made from petroleum and breaking down into hazardous chemicals – when they break down at all – plastics are symbolic for everything that’s wrong with the world economy. There is no better example of plastic’s malignant effect than the spread of bottled water. Plastic water bottles increase petroleum use, clog landfills and foul the oceans, according to environmental groups. Every time I buy water in a plastic bottle, I feel like I’ve personally flown up to Prince William Sound and rolled a sea otter in Alaskan sweet crude. Plastic bottles have gotten such a bad rap lately that you might as well be carrying a mustard gas canister out of the MobileMart as 16 ounces of Poland Springs, in many environmentalists’ estimation. You can’t care about the environment and drink bottled water, goes the new orthodoxy.

So let’s stop buying water in plastic bottles! When demand slumps, the bottled water companies will have to use a more environmentally friendly material, like glass. Glass isn’t made from oil, it recycles easily and it doesn’t degrade in landfills. That’s all true, but glass breaks more easily than plastic. Breakage increases waste and spoilage. More waste means producing more to meet demands – which takes energy. Also, because it doesn’t degrade, glass permanently takes up landfill space. It’s heavier than plastic, so it requires more energy to ship.

Okay, so maybe glass isn’t the answer. How about boxes, like the kind kids drink juice from?  They’re light and durable. They’re also difficult to recycle unless the thin layers of plastic and metal insulation are stripped from the paper, according to the New York Times. Metal cans? Very recyclable, but it takes a ton of energy to produce and recycle metal – especially aluminum.

The point here isn’t to stick up for unfettered use of plastic bottles. The debate around plastic bottles and their potential replacements is symbolic of a larger issue – the complexity of “environmental math,” or trying to figure out when doing something with environmental motives has unintended consequences. The way our economy is geared right now, if we’re going to cut down on something like plastic bottles, we expect another disposable alternative. That’s the key word – disposable.

Anyone wise to environmental issues knew right away that the plastic bottle scenario above is a red herring. The best alternative to a disposable plastic water bottle isn’t making a disposable bottle out of another material; the best alternative is a reusable water bottle. It can be made of metal or plastic, as long as it isn’t thrown away. Because what we use is the smaller part of our environmental conundrum. Every product and commodity has an environmental price tag. The bigger problem is that we use too much of everything, and our appetite is growing. As far back as 1995, United Nations writer John Young reported in “Towards a New Culture of Consumption” that “materials use has grown far faster than population: in the US, total consumption of virgin raw materials was 17 times greater in 1989 than it was in 1900, compared with a threefold increase in population.” Metal, glass and plastic consumption is also increasing. Reducing use of one commodity usually means using more of another one, unless our disposable society changes. We have to stop making stuff to throw away.

The problem is that reducing consumption is the maiden aunt of the environmental movement. It bakes pies and babysits the kids so its sexier siblings – solar energy, wind power, biofuels and recycling – can go out on the town with media and investors. There is no industry backing conservation. In fact, considering that our economy is based on consumption, the business community is probably uneasy about the reduction message. Government, heavily influenced by industry, won’t push the reduction agenda. (If you have any doubts, consider what happened to the nutrition pyramid by the time the food industries weighed in.)

If this most important part of the oft-repeated “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra is to catch on, then, it’s going to have to be a grassroots movement. Ten years ago, it would have been unrealistic to expect a national campaign of “turn it down, turn it off, don’t use it, don’t buy it” to take off on its own without some big patron saint at the national level. But we live in the viral marketing age fueled by the Internet. A growing crop of Web sites like carbonfootprint.com and the World Wildlife Fund site advise consumers on simple measures that make a big difference. A small example: washing clothes in cold instead of warm water – which is reducing electrical usage – saves the average consumer $167 per year, according to the blog Saving Electricity. The Rocky Mountain Institute estimates a lower dollar savings – $61 – but a higher percentage – 85 – and 1,281 fewer pounds of CO2 released into the environment.

Since you’re reading an environmental blog, chances are you knew that already. So here’s an extra credit assignment: find a good energy or material conservation tip on a Web site that you like, and e-mail it to people you know who are least likely to be environmentally aware. Tell them how much they can save washing clothes in cold water, or turning the air conditioner down two degrees. You could be planting the seed of a reduction revolution. And what the heck, put a reusable water bottle in their Christmas stocking. It just might catch on.

Social cause & sustainability lessons from Stonyfield Farms’ Hirshberg

Affable and inspiring Gary Hirshberg, chairman, president and CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farms was the featured speaker at Saturday’s University of New Hampshire graduation. The company makes the number-one selling brand of organic yogurt and is the number-three overall yogurt brand in the US according to Fortune magazine. Through its Profits for the Planet program, Stonyfield gives 10% of profits to environmental causes.

Here are memorable takeaways from his talk:

  • “We allowed ourselves to believe in a sort of modern day mythology about the infinite resilience of our finance system, and to allow greedy, short-term thinking to get the upper hand. In a nutshell, we borrowed money we didn’t have, to buy stuff we didn’t need.”
  • “We are seeing signs of failure in every single aspect of our relationship to the planet … if we stopped all fossil fuel burning this afternoon, the Earth’s fever would continue to mount for 40 more years before it began to break.”
  • “How far an item travels, is actually a very minute percentage of the footprint of an apple, yogurt or bottle of beer. The far larger footprint is in how the product is grown, that is the type of agriculture accounts for more like 50-60% of the carbon footprint. In other words, buying organic from a long distance may be far more carbon-friendly than buying non-organic locally. The point is, we need to be sure our brains are as engaged as our hearts when making big decisions.”
  • “I have learned that, whatever you choose to do, there is no point in producing the same quality as anyone else. In fact, that is likely a strategy for failure, for you are almost certain to be out-competed by someone who is better capitalized.”
  • “At a societal scale, those of you who question conventional thinking will be in the best positions to seize the next wave of jobs and economic opportunities. Consider for instance, that with the amount of sunlight that strikes the US each day, we would need only 10 million acres of land – or only 0.4% of the area of the United States – to supply all of our nation’s electricity using solar photovoltaics.
  • “When you consider that the US Government pays to idle approximately 30 million acres of farmland per year, you can see how confused our priorities have become.”
  • “Success will be when you finish eating the yogurt, you will eat the cup.”
  • “Solar isn’t just for Arizona anymore, either; right now in New Hampshire there are homes powered completely off the grid – built at competitive costs. For less than half the normal garage roof space, you can power your house with no fuel, no pollution, and no ice storm outages. Soon it’ll be down to one-quarter of that garage roof. And we haven’t even talked about solar hot water, which is even cheaper than solar cells, or wind power, which is cheaper too. Best yet, these power sources are built, installed, and maintained locally, right here in America, unlike the billion dollars per day we ‘export’ out-of-country for oil, for example.”
  • “Renewable technology isn’t just a energy issue, it’s a global competition. We don’t have a natural monopoly on sunlight or wind, and the Danes, Germans, and increasingly, the Chinese ‘get it.’ They aim to be the energy technology vendors to the world, and—having paid more attention to it than we have—they’re as good or better than we are.”
  • “Questioning conventional authority is a powerful way to succeed in business and in life. A couple of guys from UPS once asked ‘why not try to avoid left-hand turns,’ with their 95,000 big brown trucks.”
  • “What we discovered from doing good is a new business formula that is now being mimicked by the largest companies on earth…. when you make a better, higher quality product, you leap all the way to loyalty without having to spend as much on advertising…. When you make it better, you get loyalty. And with loyalty comes the most powerful purchase incentive in commerce—word of mouth.”
  • “I can assure you that there will be more jobs in renewable energy, energy efficiency, preventative health care, organic/non-toxic agriculture, textiles and cleansers (I have yet to meet the consumer who prefers to eat the yogurt with more pesticides or synthetic hormones than in the traditional fields.).”
  • “The whole notion of service is very attractive to smart employers. From a practical perspective, those of you who volunteer and give your time and energy to work on positive change are exactly who we CEO’s want to hire.”
  • “Don’t forget that as consumers, we wield enormous power to choose the polluting, consumptive and failed ways of the past or the renewable and sustainable ways of the future too. When we purchase anything, we are voting for the kind of communities, society and planet we want. And I have learned that corporations spend billions of dollars to tally those votes.”
  • “We stand at the edge of the next wave, the sustainability revolution in which we use green chemistry which leaves behind no toxic residue, cradle to cradle technology which generates no waste, renewable energy with no carbon footprint, industrial ecology with waste from one process being the food for another, will be the norm.
  • “Personally, I feel there is no greater societal priority than to embrace the conversion to renewable energy and organic food production with all of the climate, ecological and health benefits. When people tell me that organics is not proven, I respond that it is the chemicals that are not proven, but the early results are poor as we face an epidemic of cancers and preventable disease. The same is true of our energy policy, which has been driven by generations who have grown up in the oil and coal business and believe that mining the earth’s crust is the only way to fuel our needs.”

 

Idea for solving an eco-calamity: garbage in, electricity out

The word’s largest garbage dump is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a toxic swarm of plastic trash twice the size of Texas that’s wreaking havoc on sea birds and marine life. It’s an obscene environmental problem for which we’re all responsible, but no one has a solution nor wants to deal with it. So yesterday, a group of scientists and conservationists set out to map the calamity and try to figure out a plan.

The US has nearly 90 waste-to-energy plants that turn garbage into electricity and hot water. They burn nearly as clean as natural gas plants, displace 7.8 million tons of coal-produced energy, and every ton of garbage consumed by the plants eliminates one ton LESS of CO2 emissions due to landfills and fossil fuel generation.

I’m just saying….

Green business may need a little white-collar entrepreneurship

Do you ever have a flash of inspiration, then shrug it off thinking it probably couldn’t pan out?

Shai Agassi never does. His back-of-the-napkin conversation with an engineer has quickly become perhaps the most viable plan for making all-electric cars feasible (hybrids still depend on fossil fuel). Agassi has a clever solution to “range anxiety,” the pervasive consumer worry that electric cars are prone to stranding their owners on deserted roads. His solution? If you run low on juice, don’t plug in for half a day; just switch the battery out. In the time it takes to pump a tank of gas, a robot would whiz out to your car, reach underneath, pluck out the battery and pop in a new one. If anyone can make that fanciful notion real, suggests the New York Times Magazine, it’s Agassi.

The 41-year-old Israeli-American has already created a software company, sold it for $400 million, started a SAP division that went from zero to $2 billion annually, and turned down the SAP CEO job. He has Israeli President Shimon Peres and Renault-Nissan behind his new venture, Better Place, and $400 million in investor backing. He is described as fearless, brilliant and charismatic, and a rhetorical steamroller in the face of objections.

Agassi is an exemplar of innovation (versus mere inspiration), a distinction about which we blogged a few weeks ago. He demonstrates the underappreciated need for clean, green and sustainable businesses to be as fiercely entrepreneurial as any other.

Unfortunately, the world often sees green concerns as starkly at odds with those of business, and every SUV or Superfund site in America reinforces the canard. Agassi, however, makes an eloquent case that classic entrepreneurship will be essential to green business success. He also trusts in the free market to drive demand for electric cars. In fact, he says, cheap electricity will subsidize those cars the same way that cheap minutes let carriers subsidize wireless handsets. (Agassi is, however, counting on government subsidies – to automakers, consumers and infrastructure builders – to kick start the market.)

Keep your eye on Better Place. This one promises to be a wild ride. If Agassi has his way, it won’t burn a drop of petroleum.

6 simple ways to help Mother Earth @ the office

In trolling the Web for simple ways to give back to Mother Earth on Earth Day, I came across an interesting article on ITWorld focusing on how tech companies are recognizing the day. The article describes Earth Day activities ranging from carbon offsets to planting trees to even giving away free products. There’s even an invite to share what your company is doing.

Being a Facebook user, one of my favorite programs from this article is GenGreen LLC’s Every Day is Earth Day application. The application provides daily green tips and the company will offset 5lbs of carbon emissions for every Facebook user that installs this application.

Wondering what you can do? Here are some simple ideas:

  • Got a fancy screen saver? Don’t use it. Use the power-saver mode to turn off the screen instead.
  • Want to burn some calories? Take the stairs instead of the elevator.
  • Done toasting your bagel? Unplug office kitchen appliances not in use.
  • File cabinets overflowing? Think twice before printing that e-mail or document.
  • Heading to a meeting or lunch? Turn office lights off.
  • Your iPhone or BlackBerry all charged up? Unplug the charger or turn off the power strip.

These may not be super original, but they are something everyone can do. And while alone they won’t solve the climate crisis, every little bit helps and Earth Day is a great day to take action for our planet.

How Marc Gunther found a sustainable voice

Marc Gunther is one of the most respected thinkers, writers and speakers on business, the environment and corporate social responsibility.

Last year, Ethisphere ranked him # 39 out of 100 “influentials” in business ethics, ahead of Jim Koch, T. Boone Pickens, James Goodnight and Paul Newman. It’s a well-earned reputation.

In a wide-brush conversation, I asked him about his early influences, career highlights and how he became enamored with business ethics and sustainability.

Gunther grew up in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. “I was a child of the Sixties. My parents weren’t that politically involved, but our Rabbi was part of the civil rights movement; he had marched with Martin Luther King. That inspired me.

“I was an idealist, growing up during one of the most interesting times in history with JFK, Martin Luther King, RFK. Incredible social progress was being made, from the civil rights movement to the women’s movement. Vietnam and Watergate were happening. This had a big impact on me.”

Gunther graduated from Yale in 1973 with an English degree, but couldn’t find a job in journalism. His first gig was with a clean air activist group funded by Ralph Nader. “I inspected boilers in New York City, making sure pollution controls were being met, working with City enforcement groups. It was literally a dirty job.”

Then he cracked journalism.

Over the next two decades, he climbed the newspaper ladder, starting with the Paterson (N.J.) News, then The Hartford Courant, The Detroit News, Detroit Free Press and Washington Bureau of Knight Ridder. He covered many topics, but wrote most often about TV, media, politics and business. Gunther also interpreted the Internet in the nineties, writing stories like “What is cyberspace?” and “What is e-mail?”

When Fortune magazine hired him in 1996, he wrote even more about business. “I was beginning to wonder what had happened to my idealistic values. I had gotten off track.”

Around the time Gunther turned 50, he wrote a cover story for Fortune called “God and Business.”

“I interviewed people at the intersection of religion and corporate America. People like Jim Collins of “Built to Last” talked about business and values. I spoke with a Notre Dame priest who also taught MBAs. These people got me thinking about business in a fresh way. They were treating people well and believed business can – and should be – a force for good, for positive social change.”

The story became a turning point for him professionally and personally.

“Until then, I had a cliché view of business. The tension that existed between business and values got me thinking in a fresh way. Suddenly, I was no longer interested in writing about media companies, the entertainment industry, American Idol.”

Gunther began writing with “a sense of purpose.”

He wrote a cover story about the greening of Walmart and one about Jeff Immelt’s efforts to reshape the values of General Electric. “Those were two very interesting reputational turnarounds.”

He wrote a cover piece about Hank Paulson, as well as spirituality in the workplace. He authored stories about the business of carbon finance, the rise of corporate social responsibility, the zero-waste movement, genetically-modified rice, environmental activism, corporate governance, AIDS and gay rights in corporate America.

Last December, Gunther (and about 100 others) was let go by Fortune. He calls this experience “a hugely valuable event,” because it connected him with even greater numbers of interesting people and opportunities. Gunther likens it to an economic model called creative disruption “where things are destroyed and then new things spring up.”

The social media revolution is serving him well. His popular blog is proliferating. Gunther is on Facebook, YouTube and he’s started Tweeting (@MarcGunther).

His blog is being syndicated by two of the most influential online environmental voices, GreenBiz.com and The Energy Collective.

Proving “creative disruption” brings good karma to good people, Gunther not only still writes for Fortune, he authored the current cover story “Warren Buffett takes charge” about the Chinese company BYD.

Gunther smiles and in his self-effacing style says, “This could be a first – a laid off reporter writing a cover story for the publication that let him go, four months after it happened.”

A plug for plugging in

About eight years ago, one of my best friends scoffed at my newly purchased electric lawnmower and even louder at the reason I bought it. I had decided against a new gas-powered mower because I had read how much junk their two-stroke engines release into the atmosphere. My friend said that my electric lawnmower was no more environmentally friendly than his two-stroke mower because they both burned fuel, just in different places. His lawnmower did it in his own yard, while mine did it at coal-fired power plants here on the New Hampshire Seacoast, the source of my mower’s electricity.

Full disclosure: My buddy is not exactly objective when it comes to green issues. He’s about as environmental as a barrel of dioxin. He sells building materials and one of his favorite jokes is “I love spotted owls. They’re all we ate on the baby seal hunt.” You get the idea. So maybe he was dissing my lawnmower to get even with me for the year I gave his daughter a copy of “The Lorax” for Christmas, but he had a point. It’s a point society has to address as products like plug-in hybrid cars hit the market making claims at green cred. For example, General Motors is staking a lot on its soon-to-be released Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid. If, however, buyers don’t see economic and environmental upside in the Volt and its ilk, these products are going nowhere. It’s a given that plug-in hybrids burn less gasoline than their internal combustion-only cousins, but they don’t necessarily consume less energy.So they can’t be much better for the environment, right?

There is an answer to that knock against plug-ins, but government has to supply a critical missing piece before the answer stands up to scrutiny. The answer is based on the difference between point and non-point sources of pollutants. Power plants are “point” sources of air pollutants. Cars, lawnmowers etc. are “non-point” sources. It’s a distinction lost on most people, including my owl-munching friend. (I’m pretty sure he was just kidding about the owls, but I couldn’t swear to it.) This distinction gives plug-in hybrids the potential to change our transportation energy consumption habits for the better.

Point-source pollution is easier to manage than non-point source pollution because it’s easier to equip one power plant with effective pollution control technology than to equip 100,000 cars. Today’s emission control technology can remove up to 80 percent of the toxins, greenhouse gases and particles from smokestack exhaust. That could make plug-in hybrids an environmental improvement over conventional cars and their tailpipe emissions. “Could” is the key word, however. Most American power plants aren’t equipped with advanced environmental controls, especially carbon dioxide capture technology. Coal-fired power plant owners have consistently resisted retrofitting their plants with the highest levels of pollution control technology because they say it would drive up the cost of power. In some cases, the government has backed them up. The Department of Energy reported in 2008 that existing carbon dioxide capture technology isn’t cost effective on large power plants. Not surprisingly, there have been no government mandates for cleaner coal-fired power.

Can plug-in hybrids or my electric lawnmower make sense while coal generates 49 percent of America’s electricity? Yes, there are two reasons why plug-in hybrids are still a good idea. The first is that emissions control technology will get cheaper and more efficient if the federal government mandates it, which is the only way to create a market for it. The second is that plug-ins change how we think about our cars, and for the better. With wind, solar and biomass power gaining momentum, the grid will get greener. As it does, plugging in will make more and more sense than filling up. It will probably take a long time before conservation and renewable energy take a significant bite out of coal’s generating capacity, but it’s going to happen.

In the meantime, I think I’ll just let my grass grow longer and avoid the mower question altogether.

Kindle 2.0 a new wave in reading, but an old story in recycling

Books, magazines and newspapers on one hand, Amazon’s Kindle 2.0 reading tablet on the other. A classic matchup of the old and the new, of a better way of doing something that’s been done for centuries. A tale of trees saved, of landfills spared the bulk of unwanted paper and the detritus of broken and obsolete Kindles, because Amazon has set up a recycling program to recover batteries and other potentially harmful components after Kindle loses its final spark.

However, it’s open to debate how effective recycling programs like Amazon’s are. High tech products account for about two percent of the American solid waste stream, according to the EPA, but that percentage is growing rapidly. If the waste stream is growing as manufacturers like Amazon, Dell, Apple, HP and IBM are enacting recycling programs to gain green cred, then something isn’t working. But before throwing cold water on the Kindle, let’s dwell for a minute on its potential appeal to consumers and its considerable environmental upsides.

Should Kindle 2.0 take off with the predicted gusto, it could be the turning point in paperless reading. Kindle, and less-heralded cousin produced by Sony, have what previous generations of electronic reading tablets have lacked; enough convenience, portability and content in one compact package to wean readers away from hard copy books and periodicals. Kindle is thin, light, and can run for four days on a single charge. Its screen uses a technology called “E-Ink” that employs physical ink arranged and re-arranged electronically as the reader flips along. E-Ink is easier on the eyes than conventional screens and doesn’t fade in bright light, so Kindle works everywhere books do. Except that Kindle is a whole library, because its wireless access capabilities provide almost ubiquitous access to a quarter million publications, with more on the way every day. Writing in Slate and Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg makes an excellent case that Kindle can revolutionize the reading and publishing worlds as the dominant reading media of the future. Kindle 2.0, in other words, could be the iPod of reading.

If Kindle becomes the dominant mass reading media, it will have vast environmental benefits. Removing paper from the reading equation saves billions in natural resources and environmental impact. Hard copy publications consume trees and cotton fiber for paper, soybeans for ink, fuel for shipping to retailers, and more fuel for taking back overstock. Pulping and recycling unwanted hard copies means using lots of electricity and, often, chlorine bleach. Books, magazines and newspapers that aren’t recycled take up landfill space. If the landfills are uncapped, they’re probably leaching old petroleum-based inks into water tables, and even soy inks in enough volume can probably damage ground water.

Those benefits are on the front end. The back end is another story. Manufacturers’ recycling programs are not stemming the tide of discarded electronics, and that’s not exclusive to Kindle and Amazon. It applies to Apple iPods, Dell laptops, HP printers, Sony Playstations, and just about anything else that beeps when you turn it on. Most of the current programs place too much onus on the consumer to contact the manufacturer, package the unwanted item, and ship it someplace for recycling. It’s still easier for the average consumer to just bury the dead laptop in his/her trash can and let the garbage crew deal with it.

Yet those same consumers will fill a bucket with used plastic bottles and metal cans and set it out right next to their trash can for curbside recycling. The key is convenience. The industry needs a new recycling model that includes incentives, penalties and convenience. Many municipalities charge homeowners by the bag to haul away trash, but allow unlimited free recycling. In a twist of that model, why not tack on a mandatory refundable recycling fee onto the price of every high-tech product sold? The fee goes into interest-bearing accounts to offset the program’s costs. At the end of an electronic product’s life, the owner brings it to a local site, like a retailer, where it’s accepted for recycling and they get their fee refunded. Such programs might not make any money, but they can be structured not to cost anyone, and they will serve the higher purpose of keeping high tech materials out of landfills and incinerators.

Tech products like Kindle can reduce the overall environmental impact of industries like publishing. But until they can be recycled as easily as an aluminum can, they will not be a solution, just a smaller problem.