There have been some interesting twists and turns recently in the Reading Viaduct project, something that could push Philly a long way toward being the literal "Greenest City in America."

The Daily News today chronicles a successful NIMBY campaign to stop a "Neighborhood Improvement District" that would have hiked taxes in return for improvements that were tied to the project.

[The NID] was seen as a precursor to converting the abandoned Reading Viaduct train trestle that runs through the neighborhood into a park modeled after New York's successful High Line.

But Maria Yuen said that the additional tax was too big a burden.

"Everybody agrees we all want to live in a beautiful place with clean streets and green parks," Maria Yuen said. "But with this economy, the priority has to be jobs. People need to put food on the table."

Meanwhile, with Mayor Nutter confirming his commitment to the overall project, a City Paper article points out that while we're all wrangling over the hometown High Line portion, we could be getting started on the nearly 3-mile stretch that runs below the city's ground level.

Paul Van Meter, a landscape architect, and Liz Maille began the initiative with an eye to the Viaduct's history. Van Meter had been researching the old rail line, and he and Maille decided to walk around and search for the entrance, hidden in the woods off Pennsylvania Avenue. Instead of darkness and rubble, says Van Meter, they saw "Philadelphia's next great civic space."

"We realized that it was almost a three-mile right of way, and that, wow, this is a fabulous opportunity for Philadelphia. It connects so many diverse neighborhoods," Maille says. Plus, unlike the elevated branch, "We thought there's a lot more opportunity to make this happen fast."

This is a big project with many interested constituencies, so we can't expect it to happen overnight. On the other hand, this proposal has been kicked around for years now, and as we get closer to actually implementing any portion, it seems that turf wars are intensifying.

Come on, folks. We really don't need a polarized "elevated first" or "submerged first" argument, but rather, look toward that greener Philadelphia and see how we can move forward without overrunning - or undercutting - anybody.

Well, it's good to hear the federal EPA is going to be carrying water - no, not figuratively, literally - to families in Dimock, PA, where drilling by Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., contaminated the water wells of 19 homes three years ago, according to the Pennsylvania EPA.

The agency went back and forth on the question of how to deal with the contamination, and given the hemming and hawing, this still may not be the final answer. But one passage in today's story caught my eye:

EPA toxicologist Dawn A. Ioven, in a memo posted on the agency's website, said well-test results from eight homes showed that four "contained contaminants at levels of potential concern."

The well water of one house, whose occupants include two toddlers, contained arsenic at levels that would pose a long-term cancer risk.

Arsenic is, of course, a deadly poison whose people-kiling powers are celebrated in the play and movie Arsenic and Old Lace. It was also the subject of a lot of heat recently generated by Dr. Oz in terms of packaged apple juice. FDA tests found only trace amounts of inorganic (poisonous) arsenic, but Consumer Reports did tests that found enough for parents to be warned to limit their children's apple-juice consumption.

What's odd about this is that parents are not being warned to limit their children's CHICKEN consumption, despite the latter's higher arsenic risk. Whether arsenic exposure in eating chicken is 15 or 30 times that of drinking apple juice, as this One Green Planet article details (or even, if, say, it's just the same amount), "the majority of the arsenic found in chicken is the highly toxic inorganic form. The cooking of meat may then also produce further toxic arsenic by-products."

It goes on to point out that although the arsenic in apple juice is thought to come from pesticides in other countries, you might wonder how so much arsenic got into chicken - and then provides the answer: "The poultry industry fed it to them." Yes, in addition to overusing antibiotics and helping to create drug-resistant bacteria, the livestock industry feeds arsenic-based drugs to animals as a way of making sure they don't die before they're prime slaughtering age. Once they're slaughtered, the arsenic becomes your problem.

Yet even while admitting the existence of this carcinogen in chicken, the FDA tells us to go ahead and eat all the chicken we want. It makes one wonder how many residents of Dimock may be following that advice even as they avoid the water from contaminated wells.

Bottom line: We all have a resposibility to choose healthy foods and lifestyles and to educate ourselves to the point where we can make such informed choices. But personal choice doesn't exonerate the polluters who have our environment. And it's past time for the EPA, the FDA and the USDA to stop carrying these big-bucks industries' water at our expense.

The tacit notion that whatever we throw away or stop paying attention to simply disappears from existence is called the "toilet assumption."

The derivation of the term should be obvious. And it's exactly the kind of thinking that the sustainable movement constantly fights against, working to keep people paying attention and considering consequences that may not be instantly apparent.

William Toffey is definitely working to raise awareness. But unlike most of us, he wants us to pay attention to what is actually and literally flushed down the toilet. Not just human waste but water, both of which make their way to treatment plants and then, in some form or another, out into the wider world.

Toffey took a moment to talk with me about this (MP3, 3 MB) at last week's Green Drinks Delaware Valley, at the Standard Tap. As he notes, some municipalities are already capitalizing on the potential and capturing the heat and energy that is otherwise being thrown out with the, er, bathwater. Have a listen and for more info on this topic and his Effluent Synergies LLC, check out Toffey's blog, Effluential Visions.

After a much-too-long hiatus, I was able to make it to a Green Drinks Delaware Valley event last week -- this one at the Standard Tap, where Green Drinks is the first Wednesday of each month - and as always I met some colorful and committed people who are trying to bring sustainability to Philly in various ways. Also, as happens sometimes, I got a couple brief audio interviews with some of these people.

Gabriel Mandujano has started a business called Wash Cycle Laundry, which pushes commercial laundering (and everyday household laundering too) into the Green zone. Their wash system has several efficiencies that Mandujano explains in this four-minute podcast interview, but the main hook for now is that all their pickups and deliveries are done by bicycle.

Listen for our discussion on whether bikes might someday also be used to power the machinery involved, a win-win if people could be persuaded to ride them for the exercise. Even more so if they would pay to do so. Hey, you never know, maybe Michelle Obama's "Let's Move' will kick in some funding to help people stay fit while they wash clothes!

At any rate, even as is, Wash Cycle Laundry makes an interesting development in our local eco-sphere, so check out what its founder has to say. And stay tuned later this week for another audio clip from 2nd and Poplar.

There's an interesting Q&A in today's Inquirer about space junk, entitled "Why we need a trash code for outer space." The danger it presents is not so much of falling on our heads (most of it burns up in the atmosphere) but of staying up there in orbit in perpetuity, ready to smash into something that may not be, but might then become, more space junk.

The green connection, of course, is that it's an issue of litter that has been created, unwittingly or not, and who should be responsible for clearing it up, i.e. cleaning the environment, which in this case is one of several orbits around the earth.

Most of the junk in question - tiny bits of machines that have collided and can do still more damage as they whiz around at dizziyingly high speed - is not a threat to us down here, but to other (super-expensive) stuff up there. And the scenario of their ability to become weaponized junk seems to have been largely disregarded in their deployment.

There's increasing discussion about internalized costs vs. externalized. In short, it merely means tracking the ultimate costs of something and being accountable for them in going forward with it. In the junked-up orbit situation, as with other large-scale industries, costs (here, the very real risk of unintentionally destroying our own, and other nations', technology) have not been internalized. If they had, there would already be a plan for how to rectify the problem.

The situation away up there in space mirrors (until said mirror gets cracked by a fleck of paint traveling at 29,000 miles an hour) the one down here. The entire point of "green" is about bringing externalized costs - those that "somebody else" has to pay - back inside their proper realm, whether that's a given industry, a particular company, a unit of product, or our own homes and lives. Paul Hawken was out in front of this issue and his The Ecology of Commerce contains an important treatment of it.

While nations bicker over needed industrial regulations and back at home we dicker over CFLs vs. LEDs or which things to recycle or not recycle, there's one clear area where every single person on the planet can drastically reduce cost externalization: Our food.

It's now clear that choosing to consume meat and dairy - foods that we absolutely do not need, according to the American Dietetic Association - is choosing to keep animals enslaved and killed as well as choosing to increase the level of greenhouse gases and many other pollutants closer to home. Maybe you and I can't do much about the trash in outer space, but we can choose to avoid foisting those extreme costs on others, by eating vegan.

While vinyl is in the midst of a resurgence as a listening medium, there's still way more old vinyl records than there are hipsters to listen to them, and many old, previously cherished LPs wind up in the wastestream as their owners re-collect the content in digital form. This reflects some of the ambivalence a lot of us have about our old records - they have a special meaning, but not so much that we're going to try to get that turntable working again to hear them.

Katie Pietrak understands that dynamic and is capitalizing on it with Vintage Vinyl Journals, a new product that combines acid-free writing journals with covers made from actual vinyl LPs. "We rescue forgotten vinyl and repurpose it," she told me, adding that people use the journals for all kinds of things, including school notebooks, scrapbooksand other tomes that they consider worthy of a special package.

Pietrak stressed the high-quality acid-free paper in the journals and the glue holding them together, she said, is free of VOCs (volatile organic compounds - at first I heard this as BOC, and wondered what she had against Blue Oyster Cult records). In addition to their marginal eco-friendliness these items call us back to what the company's literature calls "a simpler time - when albums started with a pop and a hiss as needle met groove and thoughts were recorded pen to paper."

Pricing on the journals varies according to the sought-after nature of the LP in question. "Base pricing is around $35 for classic rock," said Pietrak. "Now, rare Zeppelin or Stones, that might run to $45, while the Beatles might get up to $50." On the other hand, the Web site has plenty of off-brand artists and selections currently on sale for as little as $17.99. "Not everybody is interested in a specific artist or record," she said. "Some people just like the concept - hey, we like vinyl, we like music, there you go."

On the other hand, Pietrak observed,"at least half of our sales are from custom requests," where the customer wants exactly one exact vinyl record as the journal cover. How does Vintage Vinyl fulfill those? "I have more than 5000 records in my house, so I may actually have it," Pietrak answered. She also spends time at big record shows such as the Rock & Roll Expo in Oaks, which is where she was when we spoke.

The Vintage Vinyl Journals are currently available in about two dozen stores in our region. But during this holiday gift-giving season, if you know someone who loves music and needs to write things down, the Web site is just a click away.

Yesterday's Daily News had another fine installment in the "Pick it Up!" series, including a page on dealing with trash and litter, district by district (PDF) and a piece on how businesses' recycling violations cost the city.

We've talked before here about how Philly businesses need to take recycling seriously and how so far the majority don't seem to: As of this fall, only a quarter of the city's businesses have even filed their required recycling plans with the city, and this latest piece details solid evidence of at least some businesses utterly ignoring the mandate to recycle.

And here's how this report has room for improvement. Despite its being the central point, the amount of money this is costing Philly taxpayers is nowhere to be found, not even a ballpark estimate. While it's noted that "the city saves $54 on every ton of garbage that is recycled instead of going into a landfill or incinerator," no attempt is made at a grand total.

This is where we need It's Our Money to step in. After all, our city-finance blog is great at both obtaining and crunching numbers, and it quickly jumped right on a different question - how much Occupy Philly was "costing" the city as more police were scheduled to patrol their City Hall camping ground. For the first week the answer was around $32,000 a day, though the police department expected it to drop to $16.000 a day from the second week on. (Philly Clout had similar numbers after the first five days, about $32,000 per day.)

I'm sure it won't be 100% precise, but just for ballpark purposes, let's see what we can come up with in back-of-the-envelope terms using The Google...

6.6 million pounds of trash is being generated by the population of Philadelphia each day, according to Keep Philadelphia Beautiful. And NewsWorks tells us that "Commercial waste makes up about 60 percent of the city's waste stream." Putting these two together we get 3,960,000 million pounds of commercial trash per day, or 1980 tons.

If 100% of that were recyclable we could be losing $106,920 a day. But how much of the trash is recyclable? This is probably the biggest intangible. Looking around at some other locations, we see that, say, 73 percent of household trash in St. Petersburg could be recycled, while 90 percent of campus trash at the University of Nebraska can be recycled and 80 Percent of School Waste in Minneapolis Could Be Recycled. So for a guestimate on Philly businesses let's lowball all those and say 70 percent.

That gives us $74,844 a day if 100% of businesses were not already recycling. But It's Our Money says the biz rate is around 54%, or to turn it around, 46% are not recycling. Doing that math we find that by not doing so these businesses are costing Philadelphia taxpaers around $34,400 a day.

Hmmmm. I'm not going to get into the relative legality of flouting city recycling rules vs. flouting public camping rules - and I've already pointed out elsewhere that the Occupy movement has room for improvement - but at a rough glance it looks like Philly taxpayers have bigger, costlier problems on our hands from the business sector. As I said, it's a rough glance - I await the full report from the money experts.

Here at Earth to Philly we've tweaked Mayor Nutter for his oft-repeated declaration that by the end of his second term (let's not pretend we don't know he'll get one) Philadelphia will be "The Greenest City in America." At the United Nations Environment Program on Sustainable Building Practices last week he indicated that the goal may indeed be more of a rhetorical device than a competitive race to number one. Is that a bad thing?

The Symposium on Sustainable Buildings was held Thursday and Friday at the T.C. Chan Center for Building Simulation and Energy Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Our mayor was joined by other mayors and leaders at an event "to learn more about the mutual global effort to make where we live and work more comfortable and efficient." The T.C. Chan Center has a track record of working with institutions around the world both governmental and non- to create more sustainable buildings, largely by consultation and the development of simulation tools.

Dr. Ali Malkawi, the founder of TC Chan, discussed the center’s work in building and retrofitting commercial and multi-family residential buildings around the Philadelphia area "not only to increase the efficiency of the area’s buildings, but also to stimulate investment and quality job creation across the region."

Mayor Nutter rightly crowed about the sustainability programs he has initiated here (some of which he had pushed for back in his Councilman days) and observed that “I can honestly say that I’m saving money, putting people to work and delivering a high quality of service at a very low cost." Perhaps a bit ruefully, he added, though, that "What they want is no cost."

The symposium, however, was about real-world scenarios balancing costs, both direct and externalized, with payoffs in efficiency, usability and sustainability. And to this end, Nutter seemed to recast his "Greenest City in America" pledge as part of a group effort: "I want to encourage all of my fellow mayors in the United States and around the world: everyone should set a goal to be the number one green city. If we strive for this goal, everyone will win.”

Wait, I thought it was all about being number one? Nutter addressed this. “It’s not about being number one. It’s about doing what’s right for our city.”

No one can claim Nuter has been anything but Philadelphia's greenest mayor, so it's hard to second-guess his strategy. With the news today from the Inquirer that Swarthmore won third place in a contest sponsoered by the Environmental Protection Agency to achieve the highest percentage of building power from renewable energy, and the various ways the borough finagled and innovated to get there, the value of competing in this arena is palpable. Even Swarthmore's leaders still say they're going for number one.

Obviously not all of Swarthmore's methods are scalable to a metropolis like Philadelphia, but it's worth noting that we've got momentum toward a greener economy and greener living here in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Sharing the knowledge, as well as the motivation, at networked events such as that at the TC Chan center can only help to raise the bar higher.

He's at it again: Philadelphia's self-appointed bike-culture critic Stu Bykofsky today ratchets up the volume in his cri de coeur against the two-wheeled onslaught. While he's crowing about a "Pushback against those who pedal," the latest installment shows signs of nuance that temper what was previously an ongoing broadside against no-good cyclists. Maybe his much heralded bike-riding photo-op earlier this summer has softened his heart?

Consider:

* Stu comes out in favor, more or less, of the "temporary" (like Stu, most of us don't buy that qualifier) removal of a lane along JFK Boulevard between 15th and 20th.

* Stu reiterates that most cyclists don't ride on sidewalks - a safety menace he railed about extensively in his pre-photo-op days - and that in fact, this ban only applies in business districts anyway.

* While proposing registration for bicycles, Stu admits that in the long run, the idea might not work, given other cities that have tried and abandoned it.

Lest you think Byko has turned into a kumbaya-chanting bike-friendly hippie, he does continue his habit of name-calling ("pedalphiles," har har; "bikeheads" "shriek"; "bikehead blowhards" are "yappy about rights," etc.) and still seems to inflate the potential menace of bicycle access far beyond what common sense might dictate.

Case in point: An argument for bike license plates is that they "would help cops find bicyclist hit-and-run artists." Excuse me? Is this a rampant problem that's been underreported? Certainly collissions do occasionally occur, but how many bike "hit and runs" have there been in Philly over the past few years?

And meanwhile, how many car accidents, threatening life and limb in a much more extreme way, have there been during that time that are directly ascribable to drivers breaking the law by talking on cell phones?

As usual, on this vehicular danger, Stu "we must enforce the law for public safety" Bykofsky remains as silent as ever, preferring to "pedal" the same old hobby horse he rode in on.