We’ve known forever that cigarette smoking is deadly.  But so are the butts that smokers toss aside after their last puff, claim researchers from San Diego State University, the University of California-San Francisco and consulting groups Oxford Outcomes and the Varda Group.

That’s why the team is leading an effort to have the butts considered toxic waste.

The researchers will present their findings today at the 137th annual meeting of the American Public Health Association, right here at the Philadelphia Marriott.

According to SDSU public health professor Rick Gersberg, cigarette butts allowed to soak in both fresh and salt water kill half the exposed fish in a standardized hazard assessment at a concentration of about one butt per liter. Further research is planned to identify the organic and inorganic chemicals in the cigarette butt that are lethal to fish and may be identified in natural environments.

The research is part of the Cigarette Butt Pollution Project funded by the California Tobacco Related Disease Research Program of the University of California.

According to a press release from SDSU, project participants are committed to eliminating toxic cigarette butt waste from the environment using science, awareness raising and policy interventions at local, state and national levels.

The big, bad tobacco industry is not amused, notes the release, because an alliance among environmental and tobacco control groups would demand that the industry take responsibility for discarded cigarette butts.

Regulatory policies that may help reduce cigarette-butt waste, the research suggests, might include levying litter fees on tobacco products, strengthening the enforcement of existing penalties for illegally disposing of cigarette butts and possibly bringing lawsuits against the industry to recover costs to communities of cigarette butt blight and butt cleanups.

The research will be presented today from 12:30-2pm in Marriott’s Grand Ballroom, Salon B. Immediately following, the research team will hold a press conference from 2:30-3:30pm in the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Room 301.

It's completely a coincidence in terms of timing, but today's news of a surprise, late-night SEPTA strike was accompanied in our pages by word that Philadelphia may soon be getting a serious fleet of Pedicabs, which are already a fixture in Boston, New York, San Francisco and Seattle. If you were one of the many people trying to shoehorn yourself onto a Regional Rail train today - or if you weren't even that lucky - you may have wished you could jump on the back of one of these oversized trikes and be whisked away.

OK, maybe only 1.3% of you were thinking along those lines. But there are other reasons to take a good look at the phenomenon also known as "cycle rickshaws" besides save-the-planet rationales.

Among others, two brothers tell of being forced into exile by L&I...

The lack of pedicab regulation in the city had been a problem for local companies and for operators in other cities that wanted to set up shop here.

Ben and Tom Dambman co-own Chariots of Philly, a pedicab company that operated in Manayunk from 2003 until 2005.

When the brothers tried to expand into other parts of Philadelphia, the Department of Licenses and Inspections ordered them to cease operations until pedicab regulation was in place.

For the last three summers, they operated their business in Avalon, N.J.

"We want to work exclusively in Philadelphia - this is our home, and this is where we want to live and work," said Tom Dambman.

Seems like a good idea to let them work at home. But could pedicabs make a difference in city traffic? Ecologically we'd like to say yes. But how would traffic change if we started to see more than one or two pedicabs?

Despite their common eco-friendly underpinnings, pedicabs would seem unlikely to challenge the habits of public-transportation riders, what with their relatively high price. The most obvious industry that might logically fear the rise of pedicabs is that of carriage horses. The colorful, sometimes inaccurate Colonial tour guides compete as "novelty" transportation, have certain liabilities that pedicabs don't, and offer against that a sense of history - an Old City tradition dating back a full 33 years.

But for now, anyway, the costumes and clackety-clop are the draw right around Independence Hall, and if New York is any model, pedicabs won't suddenly knock that out. Outside of Manayunk, one could imagine pedicabs competing with taxicabs in and around that whole Penn's Landing / Society Hill / Independence Mall area, or perhaps University City, where quickly and safely navigating among often unpredictable crowds on both walkways and streets is called for - but then again, cities sometimes ban pedicabs in their most congested areas. A case could also be made for pedicabs concentrating in the parkway / Art Museum area. Hey, if it's good enough for the Segways...

At any rate, the regulation, once in practice, will tell the tale. How will licensed, city-certified pedicabs be identified? Will pedicabs be restricted to bike lanes on roads that have them? What non-car areas would they be permitted to serve? What kind of safety and/or maintenance rules will be in place to prevent the occasional fatal accident?

Council should look at these questions carefully, but now is the time to start looking and answering questions. Let's hope sometime soon the kinks get worked out and Philadelphia pedicabs can pedal us toward "Greenest City in America."

Michelle Obama poses for a photo at the White House garden harvest. (via Huffington Post)

Here are some new developments in stories you may have read about previously here at Earth to Philly - each one not worth a standalone post of its own, perhaps, but certainly worth keeping track of.

You'll recall that when the idea of a White House garden was proposed, at first jokingly it seemed, Earth to Philly was one of the biggest cheerleaders. Well, the garden was planted and worked throughout the summer and now has been harvested with the help of local students. As the Huffington Post reported, Michelle Obama "asked the students how much they thought it cost to plant the garden. They guessed $300, $800, $1000 and $6000 as Michelle acted as auctioneer. She then revealed the answer: 'Over 740 pounds of food have come out of this little piece of land..... It [cost] about $180.'" Wow, that's some math we can all get behind!

More recently, we told you about a conference on cohousing, a system where neighbors plan their own neighborhoods around ideals of sustainability and walkability. That latter quality is now being quantified in an interactive tool from Philly's own Avencia. Their Walkshed scores neighborhoods based on your priorities for how close different amenities are - and closeness is in terms of actual walking distance, rather than "as the crow flies." Your walkability score is "based on the actual walking distance to each amenity, accounting for street connectivity and barriers such as highways and rivers."

The site explains how the score is weighted by personal preference:

Walkability means different things to different people. The empty nesters in Center City may enjoy a wide variety of restaurants. Families in Mount Airy might prefer easy access to Fairmount Park. Young professionals in Manayunk may like the nightlife of Main Street. All of these people love and value walkability, but they all have different preferences that shape it.

Using Avencia’s DecisionTree calculation engine, Walkshed is able to dynamically account for each person’s preferences by giving relative weights to each factor before combining the data.

And even more recently, we tipped you to a new report from the Worldwatch Institute stating that the greenhouse-gas contribution of livestock had been dramatically undercounted. A separate study a couple days ago by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studieshas lent credence to that claim in its finding that methane, famously produced by one end of a cow, has been underestimated in the proportion of global warming it causes.

In the journal Science, a team led by Drew Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York finds that chemical interactions between greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide cause more global warming than previously estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other efforts.

"The total amount of warming doesn't change, just the balance of gasses behind it," Shindell says.
Methane played a bigger role than expected, suggesting that climate treaties such as the 1997 Kyoto Protocol need to consider it more carefully, the study says.

Animal agriculture is, of course, not the only anthropogenic source of methane, but it's a big one, and given its many other envioronmental and social liabilities (including yet another mysteriously late beef recall for E.Coli that's now killing people) it's something we might "consider more carefully" in general.

Image from the Worldwatch report "Livestock and Climate Change."

When the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization released its blockbuster report Livestock's Long Shadow in November of 2006, the authors cautioned that in some cases they were using more conservative figures than probably necessary to calculate animal agriculture's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Even so they generated the notable stat, which we've quoted here, that animals raised for food generate more greenhouse gases than all of human transportation, i.e. 18% of total emissions versus 14% for trains, planes and automobiles.

Yesterday the Worldwatch Institute released the findings of Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, who scoured the 2006 FAO report to identify and quantify the undercounted factors and areas, and whose report puts it bluntly: Livestock now accounts for at least 51% of greenhouse gas emissions. The raising of animals for food is a bigger threat to the planet than every other factor put together. This is huge.

At the opening of their article (from the November/December issue of World Watch), the authors explain that

[T]he life cycle and supply chain of domesticated animals raised for food have been vastly underestimated as a source of GHGs, and in fact account for at least half of all human-caused GHGs. If this argument is right, it implies that replacing livestock products with better alternatives would be the best strategy for reversing climate change. In fact, this approach would have far more rapid effects on GHG emissions and their atmospheric concentrations—and thus on the rate the climate is warming—than actions to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.

Later, they go into more detail on why the animal-agriculture sector is not just a bigger player, but an easier one to change quickly:

[R]enewable-energy infrastructure has both long and complex product-development cycles and capital-intensive requirements. Converting vehicle fleets and power plants is forecast to cost trillions of dollars, and to require political will and consensus that do not appear close at hand. Even if money and politics were up to the task, such solutions are expected to take more than a decade to implement fully, by which time the tipping point may long since have been passed for irreversible climate disruption.

Goodland and Anhang all but declare that there should be a shift of focus at the upcoming Copenhagen talks

Action to replace livestock products not only can achieve quick reductions in atmospheric GHGs, but can also reverse the ongoing world food and water crises. Were the recommendations described below followed, at least a 25-percent reduction in livestock products worldwide could be achieved between now and 2017, the end of the commitment period to be discussed at the United Nations’ climate conference in Copenhagen in December 2009. This would yield at minimum a 12.5-percent reduction in global anthropogenic GHGs emissions,which by itself would be almost asmuch reduction as is generally expected to be negotiated in Copenhagen

And in a supplemental FAQ they address the wishful thinking that maybe we can all just eliminate beef and everything will be fine...

There is little variability between types of livestock when it comes to livestock respiration, land used to grow feed, and most of the other factors discussed in this article, which are responsible for most of the GHGs attributable to livestock products generally.  The main factors involving significant variability are enteric fermentation, grazing, and amount of feed required to produce beef and dairy products.  However, the difference that these factors make in total GHGs attributable to beef and dairy products vs. other livestock products is relatively insignificant.  Therefore, eating chicken instead of beef (for example) would not result in any appreciable slowing of climate change.

With this newly-crunched data, the authors point out that it's now clear that

the dramatic expansion of the livestock sector in recent decades may imperil humanity, and that there may be no way to manage the climate risk of either the food industry or the world at large other than by replacing livestock products with better alternatives. 

»  More Worldwatch bombshell: #1 threat to planet: Meat

There are many shades of green among the vast assortment of eco-friendly gadgets, services and products available these days. Up your consumer-savvy quotient at GreenChic Living, from 5-9 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 27 in the Crystal Tea Room atop the Wanamaker Building at 13th and Market streets in Center City.

Philadelphia’s new sustainability czar Katherine Gajewski will discuss our fair city's green future. Browse displays of bamboo and organic clothing, or check out some eco-friendly jewelry. Peco reps will explain changing energy laws. GreenandSave guru Charlie Szoradi will discuss recent innovations.

Other highlights include reborn furniture, green electronics, solar innovations, local wine and food companies and much more. Cost is $15 in advance, $20 at the door, which includes cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. Proceeds benefit the Sustainable Business Network.

Event organizers say (and we quote), "The 21st century mantra is recycle, reuse, restore and reinvigorate. The goal is to change the perception about going green which will ultimately help slow the pace of climate change and the ruination of our planet."

Find information and tickets at 610 409-0966 or at the Luxe Phila Web Site.

A Veggie Lean sandwich (pita not pictured) from the Vegedelphia Web site.

If you've ever idly considered paying a visit to the first restaurant in Philadelphia to earn a Green certification from the Green Restaurant Association - and really, who hasn't? - today might be a good day to go ahead and do it. That's because the eatery in question, the Pita Pit at 1601 Sansom Street, will be giving away free pita sandwiches from 2:00 to 6:00 p.m.

Yeah, that's right, free. While you're mulling that over, the Green Restaurant Association is a national non-profit that "provides a convenient and cost-effective way for restaurants, manufacturers, distributors and consumers to become more environmentally responsible." You can read about their standards for assessing a restaurant's "green" quotient here.

Philly Pita Pit owner Adam Green recounts that he and his business partner were already looking into LEED certification when they learned about the GRA. "They do a full analysis of the store," he explained. "They gave us three pro-active steps to take." 

Among the changes Pita Pit made was switching to high-efficiency lighting, replacing standard plasticware with  biodegradable greenware and using recycleable napkins. But the GRA requires certificate-holders to continue their green efforts year after year, rather than sitting back on their laurels. "So this year we're looking into starting composting, we're adding high-efficiency hand-driers and greening all our paper products."

Well, sure, that's laudable, and likely reason enough to check the place out sometime... but what was this about the free pita sandwiches? 

"Yeah, they're doing a promotion to get people to taste the chicken veggie steak," Green says, referring to Vegedelphia Foods, a local (ya think?) company that produces Veggie Lean, a wheat-based meat substitute that you may have encountered - along with their crab-free crabcakes - down at CB Park. "They're gonna be here live from two to six, getting testimonials" from people who try the product, in a bid "to see if they can franchise it, you know, get it in all the [Pita Pit] stores nationally."

This would be a coup for the wheat-meat company, as Green said there are around 200 Pita Pits nationwide, "about 195 open already" and a handful more in the process of starting up. On a related note, Green mentioned that the Pita Pit in State College, which he also runs, will be doing a similar promotion on Thursday, "in case anybody happens to be out there at Penn State."

To get your free pita sandwich you will need to register and fill out a brief questionnaire, which you can do at the door or at this online link in advance. "We're trying to get a sense of how many vegetarians are out there," Green said. "We've already had 400 people register."

Even if you're not veg but want to support the option of a meatless steak sandwich now and then - or if you want to learn more about that Green Restaurant certification - it could be worth a trip to 16th and Sansom today.

In times like these, getting creative and innovative is a must. The bad economy and newfound concerns about long-term sustainability both require new kinds of thinking.

As it happens, Philadelphia will be the epicenter of such thinking, at least for a couple days, as the Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit rolls into town on October 5th and 6th at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

While the overall focus is dollar-oriented, there is a whole track at the conference dedicated to "Creative Sustainabillity," including topics like "21st Century Architecture," "Green Places and Spaces," "Go Green with Virtual Business Practices" and a case study - "The Sustainable Urban Science Center at Germantown Friends School." It was about these that I spoke with Kelly Lee, the President & CEO of Innovation Philadelphia, the local non-profit behind the event.

"We wanted to make a clear connection between creative industries and the green economy," she said. "So we thought it was important to have a track dedicated to sustainability isues."

It wasn't just her idea: "In 2006 [the previous time Innovation Philadelphia held such a conference] we had panels on design and we received very few proposals that had to do with sustainable design. We did have a couple and we put those speakers on a panel with other peoople talking about other types of design. Now we've received so many proposals its its gone from a very small part of the [creativity] conversation to its own conversation. There's so much activity in this area, and so much potential for growth."

Lee noted that there's a lot of buzz about "green jobs," but the conversation needs to be broadened: "Right now you have a lot of discussion centered around weatherization," which has "a skill level involved," but "we need to have deeper conversations about the green jobs revolution, to understand how this region can reposition itself to make the most of it, and also talk about how it pertains to technology - what are the technologies we will all be using?"

With attendees from all over and a speakers roster ranging from keynoters Elizabeth Gilbert ("Eat, Pray, Love") and Jane McGonigal (Director of Game Research and Development, Institute for the Future) to Rachel Zimmerman (InLiquid) and Michael Nutter (City of Philadelphia), there's a lot of creative ground that will be covered in the areas of architecture, engineering, urban planning, regional media and information technology."Having this conference," says Lee, "is something we think is critical not only be because we have the opportunity to showcase these [local] professionals but we have the opportunity to learn from what other people are doing."

While full registration may be a bit much for entrepreneurs and starving-artist types in the midst of this downturn, Lee stressed that there are 3 sessions that are free, open to the public, and there's also a "no-frills package" for $75 which gets you access to all the presentations and sessions but not to meals.

Find out more about the Summit here.

Daily News film critic Gary Thompson reviews a pair of 'green'-oriented documentaries today, and both get a B- in his book.

'No Impact Man,' featuring a guy who tries to go a year without leaving a carbon footprint, misses largely because the main character is too much of a wuss, according to Gary.

On the other hand, 'Fuel' is in many ways too aggressive, pushing foreign-oil conspiracies that take up too much time and attention. Gary calls it "about as plodding and stale as it can be for nearly an hour. Until it suddenly and miraculously becomes informative, leading to a lively second half."

That's when the movie starts looking into alternative fuel, specifically algae-based biofuel and its potential as a sustainable solution, helping to power a "Veggie Van," a plug-in hybrid that's touring the country.

If you want to get a close-up look at the "Algaeus," (the fancy name for the veggie van) head out to the U.Penn campus (specifically, 40th and Locust) at 5:00 today, where the van, along with "Fuel" director Josh Tickell and producer Rebecca Harrell, will be making an appearance as part of its road trip. They'll be showing clips from the movie as well as answering your questions.

Whatever the prospects for algae-based biofuel, it's still a ways away as a commodity, so Gary gives a nod to 'No Impact Man' by remarking that until we can solve our problems with cool alternative fuels, "maybe watching less crappy television and spending more times with your kids isn't such a bad idea."

Here at the eco-blog of a tabloid newspaper, we sometimes wonder about how best to convey what's going on with the planet and what people can do about it. I like to think Earth to Philly has come up with some appropriately brazen ways to draw attention to the climate crisis, but I have to admit we're pretty far behind the New York Post.

Or rather, the parody New York Post that was put out earlier this week by the Yes Men. As it's Climate Week in New York City and a UN climate summit opens, the satirical provocateurs had hundreds of volunteers hand out an ersatz Post with the headline reading... well, you can see for yourself.

The real joke is that the main story takes off from a real report commissioned by Mayor Bloomberg and released in February to little media attention. The stunt thus achieves a second level of humor, that of the court jester being the only one able to speak the truth, a la The Daily Show's Jon Stewart.

Replicated on a spiffy Post-like site, the main story shouts, "According to a high tech study commissioned by a concerned Mayor Bloomberg and generously funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, climate change caused by human-created greenhouse gases is threatening the health, livelihood, and security of New Yorkers—especially those who take the subway to work."

Unless the imminent disasters are something localized to Manhattan, it's probably worth all of us down here paying some attention to the report too. Hey, maybe we could do our own anti-authoritarian stunt and... wait a minute, police detention? Hmmm. Maybe this kind of thing is best left to those gutsy New Yorkers.