Sustainable – Page 3

Meet the new NIMBYs

All good people support renewable energy, right?

It depends.

As the country gets serious about solar, wind and other renewables, and the government steps in with subsidies, parties that traditionally fell in line on eco issues are increasingly squaring off.

The Nature Conservancy, for example, describes how a 7,900-acre wind farm in Kansas brought in 20 miles of roads, 100 towers, transmission lines and a substation, threatening habitats for endangered birds and devouring a big chunk of the country’s disappearing prairie. The organization warns that new energy development will occupy nearly 80,000 square miles of land by 2030 – larger than Minnesota. One state director’s job is seen as mostly “reforming wind power.”

Rural Nevada got a shocker when it learned that two large solar farms, in addition to creating hundreds of jobs, would need 1.3 billion gallons of water per year, or about 20 percent of the desert valley’s supply (via New York Times).

Water plays a huge, underpublicized role in solar and many other forms of energy production, prompting one analyst to introduce an ominous new eco buzzword: “water footprint.”

Water plays a different role in Cape Wind off Massachusetts, potentially the country’s first offshore wind farm, which last week was threatened by a move to place Nantucket Sound on the National Register of Historic Places. “The identity and culture of the indigenous Wampanoag (Native Americans) are inextricably linked to Nantucket Sound,” according to a Massachusetts Historical Commission opinion.

CNET sums it all up perfectly, saying, a “new breed of NIMBY (not in my backyard) is emerging: opponents of wind or solar installations who generally support renewable energy, just as long as they are built somewhere else.”

New Orleans sustainable development must also include survivability

Great things can come from rebuilding after a disaster. Rebuilding downtown Chicago after the 1871 fire started the era of high-rise construction. The great urban spaces of Boston, San Francisco, and even Cleanspeak’s hometown of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, arose from fires and earthquakes. They ushered in innovations like brick construction and firewalls to keep blazes from spreading, new sanitation systems, parks and squares.

Today’s sustainable development advocates view post-Katrina New Orleans as the Chicago or San Francisco of large-scale sustainable development. New Orleans is a unique laboratory for developing technologies, construction methods, business practices and government policies for re-building communities sustainably, goes the green thinking. It’s like what happened in Greenburg, Kansas, which rebuilt itself sustainably after a 2007 tornado destroyed the town, but on a larger scale. A forum in New Orleans, next week, “The Green Rebuilding of New Orleans Conference,” is one of many attempts over the last four years to chart a sustainable course for the city’s future. Organizations like The Holy Cross Project have already begun building sustainable housing in damaged areas.

I want to jump on the advocates’ side because I’m a sustainable building freak, not to mention an architecture nerd. I’m just not sure that New Orleans and sustainable development are synonymous.

Even if every newly constructed building in New Orleans is LEED certified, built from recovered materials and blessed by Pope Al Gore himself, it won’t be sustainable development because of the larger realities about New Orleans. Can it be sustainable to rebuild vast areas of a city that lies mostly below sea level when scientists say the seas are rising and weather patterns are growing more extreme? A city in a bowl bracketed by a large lake and the mouth of the Mississippi River? A city that has flooded disastrously twice in the last 100 years? A city that needs 148 pumps working continuously to keep it from filing up with water?

Let’s face it, if anyone proposed building a city in a spot like New Orleans today, they’d be tasered and put under guardianship for their own safety. The Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico are a levee break or a pump failure from reclaiming the city. How much effort and how many resources are wasted when new construction is wiped out by the next catastrophic storm?

So if sustainability was the only consideration in re-developing the damaged parts of New Orleans, then it would be hard to argue the pro-redevelopment position. There are, however, cultural, moral and social justice issues that weigh in redevelopment decisions. The hardest hit sections of the city were largely low income. Is it morally acceptable for governments to withhold reconstruction aid in those areas because the long-term prospects are uncertain? Flooding destroyed several government low-income housing developments. Is the government morally obligated to rebuild them? Can private lenders be compelled to approve mortgages for new homes in flood-damaged areas when Katrina showed how vulnerable they can be?

The reality is that owing to political and social factors, the damaged Lower Ninth Ward, Lakeview and New Orleans East sections of the city will most likely be at least partly rebuilt through a combination of public and private aid. So it might as well be done sustainably, but under a broader definition of sustainability than has been applied so far. Sustainable construction usually means energy efficiency, non-toxic materials, recovered materials, etc. In the New Orleans context, sustainable also means surviving the next natural disaster. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright created new construction techniques when he designed the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo because earthquakes were a constant threat. It survived a devastating earthquake in 1923 because Wright designed it with: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel

a reflecting pool that provided a source of water for fire-fighting, saving the building from the post-earthquake firestorm;
cantilevered floors and balconies that provided extra support for the floors;
seismic separation joints, located about every 20 meters along the building;
tapered walls, thicker on lower floors, increasing their strength; and
suspended piping and wiring, instead of being encased in concrete, as well as smooth curves, making them more resistant to fracture.

The engineers and architects who rebuild New Orleans have to apply that kind of thinking to the city’s realities. Maybe New Orleanians will ride out the next flood in homes that can float on the floodwaters, then settle back into their foundations when the waters recede. Who knows. The point is that sustainability, in this case, must also include survivability.

There’s no doubt New Orleans offers a unique opportunity to develop sustainable building designs and methods. Attention to surviving the city’s unique, if not hazardous water-bracketed topography will help ensure what rises in New Orleans to replace what Katrina destroyed will be a fitting living monument to the lives lost there, and a testament to American’s talent for wringing progress from disaster.

Geothermal heat gets real

I love renewable energy stories. We know that if we can reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, we can reduce global warming, our utility bills and, one hopes, our military presence in the Middle East.

But renewable energy stories frequently disappoint. What starts out like a success story turns out to be merely a hint at renewable energy’s potential. Too often, the project isn’t quite there yet. It’s merely proposed, or it’s in the demonstration stage, or it’s underwritten by a one-of-a-kind grant, or it’s only a tiny improvement on traditional methods.

That’s why I’m delighted to hear that a local developer has invested in geothermal to heat and cool a four-unit residential condominium now on the market. According to the local paper, the holes have been dug, the pipes have been laid, and the condos are more than 90 percent complete. It looks like a rare marriage of renewable energy and the free market: private money going into a private project (with any tax credits going to the eventual homeowners).

So while the success story isn’t complete, it’s real. Explaining his rationale for the project, developer Steve Kelm said the owners will never have to worry about rate shock of fluctuating heating oil prices: “I’d rather be ahead of the curve.”

The payback on a project like this is about five years, estimates Andy Livingston, chairman and CEO of American Ecothermal Inc., also of Portsmouth, which installed the geothermal “wells.”

How does geothermal heating and cooling work?
Geothermal uses heat from the earth’s core and sun-baked surface to heat homes in the winter and cool them in the summer. You need a geothermal heat pump (GHP), which circulates a carrier fluid through underground pipes. In the winter, the heat pump uses electricity to extract heat from the ground-warmed fluid, sending re-chilled fluid back through the ground to pick up more heat. And the cycle continues. The principle is similar to an air conditioner or refrigerator. This approach is 48 percent more efficient than the best gas furnaces and more than 75 percent more efficient than oil furnaces, according to the EPA.

To cool a home in the summer months, switch the direction of the heat flow, and the same system can extract heat from the air, thereby cooling it.

What are the benefits?
Geothermal heating and cooling offer a potential large reduction in energy use, peak demand and utility bills. Aggressive deployment of GHPs could nearly halve the need for net new electricity capacity needed by 2030, according to a U.S. Department of Energy study. It could reduce electricity bills by as much as $38 billion.

More stats from the Geothermal Heat Pump Consortium, the non-profit trade association for the GHP industry:

Operating 100,000 geothermal heat pump units over 20 years would be the greenhouse gas/carbon reduction equivalent of taking 58,700 cars off the road or planting 120,000 acres of trees.
Owners can expect savings of 30 to 70 percent in heating mode and 20 to 50 percent in cooling mode compared with conventional systems.
GHPs reduce energy consumption and corresponding emissions by 40 to 70 percent over traditional heating methods (e.g., furnaces).

And there are concrete tax incentives. The IRS is offering tax credits for 30 percent of the spending on geothermal heat pump equipment, including labor. Installing a $12,000 geothermal heat pump system would give you a $3,600 credit.

Geothermal in the works
We’re just getting started with geothermal heating and cooling. The United states has more than 600,000 GHP units, the largest installed base in the world, but many European companies are ahead on a per capita basis, according to the DOE.

A Reno casino, the Peppermill Resort Spa, has tapped an underground aquifer holding 170-degree water to heat a 17-story hotel tower, including restaurants, 1,600 rooms, and the water for the sinks and showers. Owners are predicting $1 million in a year in savings with an eight-year payback.

An Iowa town is using part of a $1 million community development grant to create a shared geothermal heating and cooling system for the downtown.

Some homeowners are designing homes that combine geothermal with passive solar and knock $1,000 off their utility bills. This geothermal/solar design involves solid wood walls, an airflow envelope just inside the walls, and lots of windows on the southern exposure.

Meanwhile, there’s an entire separate industry using geothermal to produce electricity. That’s for another post, but one exciting possibility is in oil production. Oil extraction is accompanied by non-petroleum hot fluids that can help power field equipment. “With an estimated 10 barrels of hot water produced along with each barrel of oil in the United states, there is significant resource potential for this technology,” says the US DOE.

Bring it on. It’s time for more success stories.

Wind energy’s huge opportunity … and its challenges

I see so many windmill blades I feel like Don Quixote. There are at least five windmills – turbines we call them now, since they’re only milling electrons – within a 20-minute bike ride of my doorstep. These devices hint at the appeal, promise and challenges of wind power as a major energy source for the country and the world.

A trio of turbine towers spikes the farmland just up the road in Eliot, Maine. Although the proud owners expect an eventual payback, are receiving tax credits, and are putting a few kilowatts back into the grid, their motives are largely ecological: In the first month, John Sullivan’s 2.4-kilowatt[1] turbine “saved 120.4 pounds of CO2 from going in the air.” That’s the amount he figures a coal-powered plant would have pumped out making that electricity.

Unfortunately, the next town over, Kittery, is dismantling the 50-kilowatt turbine it erected in 2008 and returning it to the manufacturer for a refund, citing “underperformance” of the project. Trees and buildings created turbulence no one had accounted for, and the tower was producing only 15 percent of its projected power.

But there’s more hope back in Eliot. East of the farms, on the banks of the Piscataqua River, deep sea engineer Ben Brickett has been developing a turbine that turns in a breeze as gentle as 2 mph. That’s big, because low-wind days are the bane of traditional turbines. Called a variable force generator, Brickett’s invention converts wind directly into electricity, bypassing the conventional gearbox. Unlike other turbines, he says, it also manages to produce power in proportion to the wind speed, up to 60 mph. His company, Blue Water Concepts, is deep into prototype testing and is attracting interest from academia and manufacturing partners.

These are just a few small examples of how the Unites States has come to be the world leader in wind power with the fastest-growing capacity.

A mighty wind
The U.S. wind energy industry installed a record-breaking 8,500 megawatts of new wind-generation capacity last year, enough to serve more than 2 million homes, according to the American Wind Energy Association. That brought the country’s total capacity up to 23,500 megawatts and pumped $17 billion into the economy. The new projects accounted for roughly 42 percent of the entire new power-producing capacity added in 2008. It was like taking more than 7 million cars off the road.

The country has more than enough wind resources to reach a 20-percent wind energy contribution to the US elecrtricity supply by 2030, according to a DOE report. We’re currently at 4 percent for wind, biomass, geothermal, solar, and miscellaneous sources combined.

As this DOE map shows, the best wind is on the coasts and in the plains states. Texas leads the country with the most installed wind-based capacity by a wide margin, followed by Iowa, California, Minnesota and Washington.

Without losing sight of our tremendous progress, to follow is a list of obstacles impeding even more robust wind development. Anyone promoting wind, whether a new turbine design or 500-megawatt wind farm, needs to consider these obstacles as they set out on their crusade.

Infrastructure
The country needs transmission systems that can shuttle power from rural wind farms to urban centers as well as load balancing installations that enable regions to consume a mix of generation sources.

Aesthetics
Green, in addition to being good, is fashionable. So your neighbor may never be more welcoming of the sight of a windmill, or fleet of them, on your roof or farm. That said, there’s plenty of resistance. The $900 million Cape Wind project slated for Nantucket, Mass., has dragged on in permitting, politics and litigation since 2001. Viewshed impact is high on opponents’ list of concerns. So why not site wind farms on sparsely populated land? That’s not so simple either, as a Wyoming farmer is finding out.

Ecology
Ten thousand birds, including 80 golden eagles, die every year at a California wind farm near San Francisco, according to a study by the local community development agency. Wind proponents blame that carnage an unlikely convergence of factors, including bad siting and older turbine technology. On average, they say, wind power’s avian toll is extremely low.

Noise
No doubt about it, windmills make noise. But the key questions include: How loud? Is the sound of whooshing blades a bad noise? How far away are you? How fast is the wind blowing? Wind proponents put windmill noise in the decibel range of household background noise or the sound of trees and leaves rustling on a blustery day.

Taxes
The government (i.e., taxpayers) has begun issuing $500 million in grants to spur wind energy development as part of the economic recovery package. They’re a double-edged sword for people worrying about personal and national debt.

Foreign Investments
One company with Spanish DNA has received more than half of that $500 million grant money, says the Environmental News Service. Too many reports like this won’t sit well with the public.

The communications strategy
So what does this all mean for the inventor or company promoting wind? The good news is there’s abundant popular support and a persuasive case for wind and other renewable energy sources. Yet, as with any complex technology that needs to go in someone’s backyard, there is bound to be wariness, if not opposition, to siting proposals.

Consequently, any development effort requires a solid communications plan born out of this strategy:

Identify all the potential benefits of a project, not just those in your market segment or locale. Include the benefits of wind to the planet.
Talking points promoting your project are just a start. You need data, and there is plenty of it out there. As you can see by the links in this blog, the American Wind Energy Association is a great place to start.
Develop content up front that documents all of the benefits. Main audiences include the public, planners and regulators.
Connect with advocacy organizations, politicians, utilities, business groups, landowners, conservationists and educators who are likely to favor your project.
Anticipate all potential concerns and prepare to address them squarely. Avoid defensiveness or reactivity. Listen and talk rather than argue. Some skeptics just need to be informed.
Depending on what you’re proposing, you could end up with a lot of energized opposition. Make sure you have the arms, legs and content to swiftly and effectively address the concerns.
If you believe in your project, stay the course.

…

Some helpful resources from the American Wind Energy Association:

Handbook for permitting small wind turbines:

Talking points on the benefits of wind energy.

Handbook for commercial scale siting.

Wind power outlook for 2009

[1] A 5kW turbine is sufficient on average to power a home. Variables include wind speed, turbine height, terrain and home energy usage, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

Trees – hug them or burn them?

For a symbol of environmental mojo, you can’t do any better than trees. After all, have you ever heard an environmentalist called a seal hugger? A snail darter hugger? Nope, it’s tree hugger. Among environmental icons, bark and leaves trump fur and scales every time.

So to say that burning a tree equals the environmental benefits of hugging one strikes the average observer as fairly absurd. Until recently, you could have counted me among those average observers. When I started reading about wood biomass as a power and heating source, my first thoughts were that we’d strip the country of forest even faster than we are now, and that burning anything for energy is a bad idea. How one book can change your outlook …

In my case, the book is by New Hampshire writer, world-class skeptic and varsity wiseass Jack McEnany. To appreciate what I’m about to say, you have to know that McEnany is about as far from an apologist for American industry as you can get and still qualify as American. His cred as a contrarian includes writing for The Nation and founding the Web site NewHampshirePrimary.com to counterbalance the conservative Manchester newspaper and television station. So when Jack says burning a tree for energy does no net harm to the environment,I pay attention, and you might want to also.

To write his book Brush Cat,On Trees, The Wood Economy, And The Most Dangerous Job In America, McEnany spent months traipsing around with the independent loggers who harvest timber lots in New Hampshire’s stretch of the Great Northern Forest. Along the way, he learned the environmental and economic wisdom in selectively harvesting trees, which often amounts to culling out trees that hinder the forest’s growth. That’s a radically different approach than mass clear-cutting, which takes all of the timber from an area no matter how low or high quality it is.

The most important point McEnany makes comes in a chapter titled “Climate Change and The Forest,” where he lays out the environmental math around wood as a biomass fuel. Basically, McEnany says, nature is self-regulating. When a tree burns, the environment re-absorbs the resulting carbon dioxide and turns it into plants, trees, and, eventually, us. There is no pollution other than wood ash, because at the end of the process, the burned tree creates no surplus carbon dioxide. Burning doesn’t turn into a problem until it adds extra carbon into the environment. Oil and coal, which provide most of our heat and electricity, are extra carbon.

Oil and coal are carbon plant matter that nature has retired by burying it under several million years worth of earth and rock. It’s out of circulation and, as long as it stays in the ground, no environmental threat. But when we bring it to the surface and burn it, we’re adding more carbon dioxide to the environment than it can recycle. So burning isn’t the problem per se. Nature burns every time a lightning bolt hits a dry forest. It’s that we’re burning carbon that has been out of circulation eons longer than even the street directory for Atlantis.

The other issue with using wood as a fuel source is the potential to depilate the landscape. McEnany makes a strong case that a well-managed forest as large as the Great Northern Forest can thrive as a fuel source without decimating the old-growth forest that environmentalists treasure. Forests need to be thinned out for their health. If brush cats don’t do it with chain saws, nature will do it with lightning bolts. The policy of “sequestering” specific tracts of forest promotes good management. Sequestering preserves forest lots from extensive cutting, which gives them time to sustain themselves over the long term.

At the same time that he makes a case for wood as a fuel source, however, McEnany offers this caution:

“How will we ensure that the growing demand for wood chips won’t result in unsustainable forestry practices? A truckload of chips is the same whether it comes from a wide swath of saplings (pecker poles) or a dense thicket of balsams ready to be harvested.

The forest needs a seat at the table when public policy decisions affecting climate change are made. With the right mix of official policies and personal choices, we can fix the environment and save the forest.”

A wisp of hope for American renewable energy wafts in on the climate & energy bill as China emerges

Cap-and-trade, clean energy standards, cash for clunkers and smart grids are the headline grabbers and fight-starters in the climate and energy bill. These stars of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 aren’t, however, going to save the U.S. from also-ran status in the renewable energy economy. Nothing in those provisions – or at least nothing obvious – confronts the very real possibility of China emerging as the superpower of renewable energy in the short term. Out of the limelight, in the bill’s back roads and side streets, lie the gems of hope for America’s future as a player in renewable energy, providing the U.S. can weather the Chinese onslaught. And it’s going to be a hummer of an onslaught.

The Chinese government is going after the top spot in renewable energy with a vengeance, and by employing their unique brew of free market talk and authoritarian action, they’re probably going to get it. If that makes you queasy, it should. The U.S., already a secondary player in renewable energy behind China and the European Union, is staring at yet another possibility of its energy future being tied to a foreign nation. Specifically, a foreign nation that’s also holding much of America’s debt.

There’s plenty afoot to bear out that pessimistic view. China has targeted wind and solar, the two most promising renewable technologies of the moment. The Chinese government has already created the world’s largest domestic wind power market, and they’re using it as a base to conquer the international export market for wind turbines. Using its success in textiles, food processing, electronics and consumer goods as a model, China has erected mazes of regulations specifically aimed at screwing foreign companies out of Chinese business. That gives Chinese companies a chance to flourish without competition on their home turf, subsidizing their push into export markets.

Having flashbacks to the Japan Inc. of the 1980s? The gradual demise of GM, Ford and Chrysler at the hands of Toyota and Honda? Well this is worse. Unlike democratic Japan, China doesn’t even pretend to play by free market rules. The New York Times reported last week that companies who built manufacturing plants inside China to satisfy domestic content requirements were aced out of the turbine market when the government outlawed turbines of less than 1,000 KW capacity. With tactics like that, it won’t be long before Chinese companies are the Honda and Toyota of the renewable energy industry. Next step, a wind farm near you. And solar is next on the agenda.

Even if China didn’t have a head start in renewable energy technology production, the U.S. wouldn’t be able to compete in volume manufacturing of renewable energy products any more than it could in apparel or consumer goods. China has a lower cost structure based on indentured servitude wages and light regulatory burdens. The U.S.’s winning game is not volume manufacturing of wind turbines or anything else. It’s innovation.

That brings us back to the climate and energy bill. There is $190 billion in the bill to fund renewable energy research. From the Apollo program to the Internet, the U.S. government has proven itself a great engine of new technology. That is the real secret weapon in the American renewable energy arsenal – a constant stream of new and better ideas.

The U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of innovation. No country has a better record of new technology development than this one. American universities and research institutes still attract the world’s best minds. The bill calls for establishing national centers of excellence in renewable energy technology across the country. Massachusetts took a similar approach in the 1980s under Gov. Michael Dukakis, funding centers of excellence in biotechnology, photovoltaics, nanotechnology and micro processing. Supplementing its disproportionately large share of world-class universities, the centers of excellence helped keep Massachusetts a technology leader. North Carolina had similar success with Research Triangle Park, which isn’t a center of excellence per se, but shows how government can effectively prime the private research pump.

China is gearing up to produce today’s state-of-the-art wind and solar technology. Let them. There is plenty of profit in developing tomorrow’s state of the art. Today’s solar and wind technology, for example, isn’t all that efficient. Most solar cells convert only 30 percent of the light that hits them into electricity. Wind turbines can’t turn light breezes into energy. There are no technologies for large-scale energy storage to even out the production peaks and valleys that make wind and solar unreliable in much of the world. Here’s betting the answers to those conundrums are going to come out of American laboratories.

A post script: Lest there seem to be a smack of jingoism in this post, I’ll say for the record that I’m all for China turning into a renewable energy superpower. The country is industrializing at a breakneck pace, creating a gargantuan demand for energy. Burning coal and oil to satisfy the demands of 1.3 million consumers portends a dismal future for the environment. Every wind turbine in the Gobi Desert or the South China Sea is an investment in a better world for everyone. As an American and a believer in democratic principles, I’d still like to think that we have a better way of developing a renewable energy economy than China. But as a father and potential grandfather, here’s hoping that both countries get there one way or the other.

Nukes, slums and GE crops: another shade of green?

Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog founder and environmental movement pioneer, makes his case for why nuclear power, urbanization and genetically engineered crops are not only “green,” but a moral imperative, in a TED talk video for US State Department.

His key takeaways:

Slums and squatter cities aren’t full of people crushed by poverty, but rather a promising new economic model that’s helping them escape poverty as fast as they can.
Nukes are the only realistic near-term solution to urgent environmental threat that coal energy poses.
The huge increases in crop yields under adverse growing conditions that GE crops promise are an ecological advance because it feeds more people in the developing world with less land and energy.

Lots of holes can be punched in his arguments. But the presentation succeeds in stirring the pot on what our environmental priorities should be, and that’s a good thing.

LEED gets real

The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standard was a much needed imprimatur for unifying all the players in the green building industry. It has spawned more than 14,000 green building projects worldwide since its unveiling in 2000.

But critics have long argued that the LEED system is broken and doesn’t really live up to its eco-friendly mantle. They cite meager energy saving improvements and an easy-to-game point system that rewards individual features rather than a building’s total sustainability as just a few of its flaws. More significantly, LEED accreditation is awarded based on hypothetical estimates of energy modeling that was done at the design phase rather than the building’s actual energy performance when it’s in use.

Last week, the US Green Building Council (USGBC) took a step toward addressing its critics by injecting performance measurement and accountability into the latest version of the LEED standard. With LEED v3, building owners will have to regularly report on how much energy and water their buildings truly consume as a precondition to ongoing LEED certification. The new requirement aims to close the “performance gap” between imaginary and actual conservation.

The USGBC says the new rules will deliver two key benefits. First, the insight gleaned from the building performance data will help improve future versions of the standard by identifying which LEED specs work and which don’t. Secondly, they theorize that forcing certified building owners to report energy use on an ongoing basis will cause them to knuckle down and reduce the amount they use.

Justin Moresco at GigaOM’s Earth2Tech blog added that the new rule could also boost demand for products from companies that develop energy-related technologies for buildings. And I see great potential for integrating Smart Grid capabilities into the LEED process. That’s because one way to meet the new requirement is to let the USGBC monitor a building’s performance directly using the local utility as its information gateway. Smart meters, sensors and Smart Energy management systems will be essential to making this happen.

While the new rules are a small step towards improving a flawed LEED system, establishing accountability is one of the proven ways to turn around an under-achiever.

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.