Mark Alan Hughes was proud, clearly. At least he had good news.

City finance director Rob Dubow had just summarized  the bad news about the looming $1 billion budget shortfall.  Deputy mayor Rina Cutler took on the unpopular subject of a $5 per household trash fee. 

Can sustainability survive in this kind of environment?

You bet, said Hughes last night at the latest urban sustainability forum at the Academy of Natural Sciences.  The mayor’s office of sustainability, which Hughes directs, has promised to have a sustainability “framework” by Earth Day, and he said things were on track.

One of the things they’re looking at is efficiencies that have “immediate and sustainable budget implications.” Like reducing energy use in all city buildings 30 percent by 2015, with millions of dollars in outright savings. It would be $36 million less than projected expenditures. But, more vividly, $15 million less than the city spends now.

Hughes crowed that the office is “on schedule to launch the smartest, coolest framework ever designed by an American city.” He said it was even better than the New York plan — PlaNYC — which he’s praised in the past. Hughes joked that he was just setting the Big Apple up to be a better target.

It was an occasionally rollicking evening, down to a surprise guest, Mayor Nutter himself, who snuck in through a back door.

As long as they were talking trash, he came clean about a “big battle in my own household.” Seems that in an effort to make recycling easier, the mayor bought a second trash can for the kitchen. Alas, “it has thrown off the complete feng shui of our kitchen area,” he lamented, adding as the crowd laughed, “I’m going to ask for your thoughts and prayers.”

More seriously, he vowed that no matter what happens with the trash — less frequent pick-ups is one proposal — he’s going to keep weekly single-stream recycling pick-up.

Cutler, meanwhile, took on the $5 weekly trash fee. To keep the system simple (and, presumably, cheaper), they’d have to charge every household, regardless of income level or the amount of trash they put out.  She lamented that the plan, if approved, “is going to be a heavy lift in oh so many ways.”

And how.

Here was one comment from Ben Ditzler of RecycleNOW West Philly: “We in the recycling advocacy community would wholeheartedly support a pay-as-you-throw program, but this is not it. It is, quite simply, a regressive tax that does not encourage a beneficial behavior. Under the city's proposed system, if you put out the maximum amount of trash, you are charged $5/week. If you put out one bag of trash or even a bag of trash once a month (as I do - I recycle and compost), you are charged $5/week. I fail to see how this charge will advance recycling in Philadelphia.”

Stay tuned.

Next up for the Academy’s great Town Square forums: “Extending the Schuylkill River Trail,” 6:30 p.m. Feb. 26.
 

Clean Ocean Action — a nonprofit that seeks to is to improve the degraded water quality of the marine waters off the New Jersey/New York coast — is having a contest for collecting plastic caps.

The organization’s concern is that the caps often aren’t recycled. They become trash or litter, ending-up in landfills and on beaches, or washing into our rivers and oceans.

So between now and May 1, they’re asking groups and families to collect all their caps. The beauty care products company, Aveda, will recycle them into new caps out of 100 percent recycled caps — like the ones on their vintage clove shampoo, which came out last September.

Eligible caps include those that twist on with a threaded neck  (such as caps on shampoo, water, soda, milk and other beverage bottles), flip top caps on tubes and food product bottles (such as ketchup and mayonnaise), plus those on laundry detergents and some jar lids such as peanut butter.

If marked, they’d have the number 5 inside the chasing arrows recycling symbol.

I can attest to how fast they’ll pile up. I collect all mine, except I take them to Recycling Services Inc. in Pottstown, along with all manner of other things I can’t recycle anyplace else.

The contest rules are simple, and based on the honor system. Just keep a tally of the caps collected and submit it to Clean Ocean Action by 5 p.m. May 1.

Registration is required at www.cleanoceanaction.org, or with Carl Guastaferro, contest coordinator, at (732) 872-0111. A packet of information — including details about pre-paid shipping of the caps — will be sent to participants.

Okay. Not hardly. But nanotechnology and hamsters combined are doing some interesting things.

Georgia Institute of Technology researchers who fit special little jackets onto hamsters and then let them run on a treadmill found that the tiny rodents could actually generate power.

According to a press release about their research, they also have also generated electrical current from a tapping finger – moving the users of BlackBerry devices, cell phones and other handhelds one step closer to powering them with their own typing.
 

"Using nanotechnology, we have demonstrated ways to convert even irregular biomechanical energy into electricity," said Zhong Lin Wang, a Regent's professor in the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering. "This technology can convert any mechanical disturbance into electrical energy."

The research was detailed Feb. 11 in the online version of the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters. Funding was provided by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Air Force, and the Emory-Georgia Tech Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence.

According to the press release, "The study demonstrates that nanogenerators – which Wang's team has been developing since 2005 – can be driven by irregular mechanical motion, such as the vibration of vocal cords, flapping of a flag in the breeze, tapping of fingers or hamsters running on exercise wheels. Scavenging such low-frequency energy from irregular motion is significant because much biomechanical energy is variable, unlike the regular mechanical motion used to generate most large-scale electricity today."

Plenty of cities -- and entire countries -- are moving toward charging for plastic bags.

Now, the District of Columbia is considering charging for both.  The proposal, if adopted, would give the District one of the country's toughest bag laws, according to a news story in today's Washington Post. The fee would be five cents per bag.

Post reporter Nikita Stewart writes that, under the proposal, the income would be split between businesses and the city, which would use its share to offer free reusable bags to elderly and low-income residents.

It would also be used to help clean the Anacostia River. A recent study found that plastic bags were "the single largest component of trash" in the eight-mile river and its tributaries.

But businesses didn't want to target plastic solely because of the economics of bag-dom. Plastic costs about two cents a bag; paper, five cents.

Both the paper and the plastics industries are expected to fight the measure.

 

The current issue of Scientific American has a sobering article about the environmental cost of beef.

I'll quote come the key concepts: 

• Pound for pound, beef production generates greenhouse gases that contribute more than 13 times as much to global warming as do the gases emitted from producing chicken. For potatoes, the multiplier is 57.
• Beef consumption is rising rapidly, both as population increases and as people eat more meat.
• Producing the annual beef diet of the average American emits as much greenhouse gas as a car driven more than 1,800 miles.

The article also has great graphics of worldwide consumption, our growing appetite for beef and how beef production leads to greenhouse gases (32 percent is from methane emissions of the cows themselves and their wastes).  

It's written by Nathan Fiala, a doctoral candidate in economics at UC Irvine, who focuses on the environmental impacts of dietary habits.

Since Jan. 1, I've been logging my beef consumption, and I've found I don't eat as much as I thought. Once a week, max.  And that's on the decline.

But cheese? That's another thing. Gulp. I wonder if sheep cheese results in fewer emissions than that made from cows. Any thoughts, anyone?

In today's GreenSpace column, I wrote about Beth Terry, an accountant from California — why is it that everything on the forefront of green comes from the Golden State? — who is trying to rid her life of plastic.

There was tons of information I couldn’t fit into the article. So for those interested in pursuing the topic further, here are a number of links:

One of the first things that brought Terry’s attention to the problem of plastic was an article on Capt.  Charles Moore, who sailed through the plastic sea, which appeared in Best Life Magazine.

Moore has since founded the nonprofit Algalita Research Foundation. The website is fascinating; you can download many of its research papers (pelagic plastics, biological impacts, etc.) and learn about educational efforts, like a traveling “junk raft.”

The nonprofit advocacy group, Greenpeace, did a report on marine plastics. I can no longer find it on their website, but it’s here on the United National Environment Programme site.

LA Times reporter Ken Weiss wrote a four-part series, “Altered Oceans,” in 2006, and the fourth part was this: “Plague of Plastic Chokes the Seas.” Read it and find more links here.

In March, the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy will release its report, “The Rising Tide of Ocean Debris,” which it touts as the world’s only country by country, state by state analysis of the problem of trash in our ocean. Meanwhile, you can read their short take on marine debris here.

One of Terry’s early inspirations was “No Impact Man” — aka Colin Beavan.  He in the thick of what describes as an “experiment with researching, developing and adopting a way of life for me and my little family — one wife, one toddler, one dog — to live in the heart of New York City while causing no net environmental impact.” He blogs about it here. (And it's soon to be a book and movie.)

One of the few plastics Terry was unable to rid her life of was the Brita water pitcher filters. Plus, they couldn’t be recycled! So she launched a campaign, and not long ago the company agreed to take back the filters. On Jan. 30, Terry delivered her collection filters to her local Whole Foods store, which is participating. (Note: Not all Whole Foods stores are.) Here’s the website dedicated to the campaign.

Some of the things Terry found to help her manage life without plastics: Glass straws from the GlassDharma and portable cutlery and containers from To-Go Ware.

One of the groups that Terry belongs to is Green Sangha, which is “to restoring our sense of oneness ? healing our communities and the earth through mindful practice and awakened action.”

And, of course!, Terry’s own blogsite, www.fakeplasticfish.com, is a virtual encyclopedia of additional information.

To learn what the plastics industry has to say, they have a website, "Better Living with Plastics," that talks about the convenience plastic offers and gives recycling tips for the plastic you do have.

Happy investigating!

 

 

Wanna see some great outdoor flicks?

On Thursday, Feb. 12, from 6 to 9 p.m., the Stroud Water Research Center is planning a “Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Festival.” It will be held at the Unionville Elementary School on W. Doe Run Road in Kennett Square, Chester County.

The ten films include:

* “Homegrown Revolution” — a 12-minute piece about a family downtown Pasadena that, among other things, grows three tons of organic foods on one-tenth of an acre.
* “Burning the Future: Coal in America — a 30-minute look at mountaintop mining in West Virginia.
* “Sand Dancer” — 10 minutes about a New Zealander who creates art in the sand.
* “Weather We Change” — 30 minutes, about a group of athletes in search of a greener ski-bum lifestyle.

The event is presented nationally by Patagonia, Inc. and sponsored locally by the outdoor gear purveyor, Trail Creek Outfitters. Tickets are $15 and proceeds benefit the Stroud Water Research Center. Read more about it here.

 

I've written several stories recently about white-nose syndrome in bats. It's been a dismal progression.

In the first, the Pennsylvania Game Commission was finding a white fungus associated with the syndrome in bats, but there were no deaths. New Jersey said it was investigating.

In the second, New Jersey reported massive bat deaths at its two major bat "hibernacula" -- the place where bats spend the winter.

In the third, Pennsylvania reported hundreds of deaths in Lackawanna County -- bats flying from their caves in search of nonexistent insects, falling from the sky, their little carcasses piled atop the snow.

The Game Commission has said it wouldn't be possible to take me and a photographer into one of the mines. They're too inaccessible and dangerous. But here's a video they posted on You Tube that gives a sense of what it's like in there.

The first thing I always think when I see one of these castle wannabes is, how must does it cost -- both financially and environmentally -- to heat and cool it? How the heck do they furnish it? Why do they want it anyway?

And I have delicious recollections of a seminar earlier this year, at which former Maryland Gov. Paris Glendenning and others predicted a massive population shift from the outer suburbs to inner suburbs, where there's better transportation and access to services.  The McMansions would, they predicted, remain empty, the owners would be unable to afford their mortgages, the banks would take over and, eventually, two and three low-income families would move in, plant massive vegetable gardens and keep chickens and goats in the front yard.

But that's just me. Now, a professor at Ohio State University and his colleagues have studied just what it is many people find so offensive about McMansions. They found that observers particularly dislike the houses when they are more than twice as tall as surrounding homes and "when their architectural style is not compatible with the neighboring homes," according to a report on the study.

Read a press release here.

And find out more about the main researcher, Jack Nasar, here.