Sustainable Development | Andrea Brennen | Saturday 20th March 2010

Everyone loves composting toilets.

Okay, let me rephrase that.

Everyone should love composing toilets. And here's why: The average American uses 7,665 gallons of water every year, just by flushing the toilet. Composting toilets, on the other hand, don't require any water at all. If done right, they don't smell, either.

How does a composting toilet work?

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	Go green with compost - getting down and dirty with it! Ethical Consumption \| Caitlin Chock \| Saturday 13th March 2010 If you're ready to go green and in turn let that green debris go brown, you can do just that in building a compost bin. Compost is a great way to give back to the soil vital nutrients that will spur the growth of your plants and garden in a much better way than any fertilizers that will instead contain nasty chemicals. Having a compost bin in your backyard is easy to set up and just one more way you can help the environment. By adding the cardboard, coffee grounds, fireplace ashes, leaves, food wastes, and many more items you can then recycle and reuse it all at the same time! Yet there are some things that should never be added to a compost pile and the initial staring of one should be done in a certain manner. So here is your composting 101 guide to green living. Start out by finding where the best possible location is for your compost bin; ideally it will be in an area that will receive plenty of water. When you then begin your pile you will want to start it off with a base layer of brown and green 'duff'. The brown will be things such as pine needles, saw dust, newspaper, and dead leaves while you will want the green to i...

	What's in a bag? Green product bag review Ethical Consumption \| Tiffany F \| Saturday 13th March 2010 Make more than a fashion statement with your reusable bag. These green products are long-lasting, functional, and fun. Their alternative, plastic bags, are being banned across the World including San Francisco, China, and Australia. EPA estimates that 500 billion to a trillion plastic bags are created annually, with a handful being recycled. Although they are often used for other purposes, their long-term environmental impact can be devastating. Their decomposition leaches dioxins and other environmental and health pollutants into the environment. From a conservation perspective, the time spent using the bag versus the time it takes to create the bag, the resource input, and the bag decomposition are vastly different timelines. Places like the Pacific Garbage Patch and the hidden sites of our landfills mask the true devastation of our 'convenient' choices. Here are the top five innovative ways to save the world with a single green product, bags. Compactable Bags - There are a wealth of bags that now fold, scrunch, and roll into compact sizes that are easy to drop in your purse or backpack. They are the easiest way to remember to bring a bag, because they are so small ...

	A123 Battery Capacity Expansion for HEVs Energy & Emissions \| Brian Coppa \| Saturday 13th March 2010 A123 Systems, a developer and manufacturer of advanced lithium ion batteries and systems for hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), announced its financial results this week. This company is one of the leaders in this technology area and has received numerous U.S. Department of Energy and stimulus grants to fund its R&D. Headquartered in Massachusetts and founded in 2001, A123 Systems' nanoscale electrode technology is built on foundational research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A123 Systems is winning new contracts on a regular basis and is expanding production domestically. They are advancing Li ion batteries for HEVs to ensure this becomes the winning technology over competing options such as hydrogen fuel cells, which will improve their long-term financial performance. Their latest financials revealed this week showed total revenue for 2009 was $91.0 million, an increase of 33 percent compared to 2008. Product revenue for 2009 of $76.5 million increased 43 percent compared to the year before, while R&D services revenue of $14.5 million decreased from $15.0 million over the same time period. This company had a successful IPO in 2009, which led to a 50 pe...

	Blu is the new green Sustainable Development \| Andrea Brennen \| Saturday 13th March 2010 As promised, here it is, the coolest new idea in prefab: Blu Homes fold for easier shipping. [In honor of full disclosure, I should probably tell you that Dennis Michaud, Blu Homes' VP of product development is a friend of mine from architecture school. However, that doesn't change the fact that, as you'll see, this company is doing some pretty rad things.] At the end of last year, Blu Homes, a Massachusetts-based design build company, announced the launch of their Origin product line. The design of Blu's Origin homes is based on a logic of mass customization, an approach that takes advantage of computer-aided manufacturing systems to make products which are customizable for individual needs. Aspects of the homes are standardized - wall sections, programmatic components, construction details - but the flexibility of digital modeling tools and digital fabrication allows these standardized components to be configured and reconfigured in a variety of ways to suit the specific needs of a client and his or her particular site. Basically, instead of designing single buildings, Blu Homes has created a streamlined system of making buildings tha...

	Social media campaign raises HIV awareness Health \| Alisa Ulferts \| Friday 12th March 2010 Fearing that too many young African-Americans are becoming complacent about HIV, public health officials have launched a new social media effort intended to help that at-risk population learn the facts about the virus. "i know", a new social media effort of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is designed to encourage young African-American men and women aged 18-24 to talk openly and often about HIV/AIDS with their peers, partners, and families. Just by texting iknow to 44144, young people can get updates about risk, statistics, testing and treatment. People can also connect via Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools by visiting the CDC's Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention site. "i know" is the latest installment of the CDC's five-year communication campaign, Act Against AIDS, which aims to combat complacency about the HIV crisis in the United States. The campaign - which highlights the alarming statistic that every 9½ minutes another person in United States becomes infected with HIV - features targeted messages and outreach to the populations most severely affected by HIV, beginning with African-Americans. While accounting for just 12 pe...

	Local Climate Change: Its Unique Causes and Effects Climate Change \| Brian Kahn \| Friday 12th March 2010 Global warming has always been a shaky term for me. It implies that there's a one-dimensional effect of burning fossil fuels and that every place in the world is seeing the same trend. Climate change is a much more dynamic term that gets at the complexities of how humans interact with and alter the Earth's systems. It also makes local changes in the climate more understandable, particularly if they're not what you'd expect. A recent talk I went to beautifully illustrates this point. The presentation I saw was on the findings of a paper submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research. The paper examines the effects of irrigation on global climate in the 20th century, and the results may surprise you. The researchers found that temperatures around heavily irrigated areas actually showed significant summer cooling due to a variety of factors including evaporation and ground cover. The trend was particularly notable over the Indus Valley in India. Areas downwind of irrigated regions also showed increased precipitation. Interestingly, the one exception was in India. This is due to technical dynamics related to the monsoon season to in-depth to explain her...

	CRO's New CSR Ranking Corporate Social Responsibility \| Madeline Ravich \| Friday 12th March 2010 It's already time for an update to my CSR rankings post from last week. In my last post in this series, I compared the new RiskMetrics Group 2010 Global ESG 100 ranking with the Corporate Knights 2010 Global 100, the Ethisphere Institute's 2009 Most Ethical Companies, Newsweek's 2009 Green Rankings, and the CRO's 2009 Best Corporate Citizens. I demonstrated that there is no universal consensus between the five rankings--- not surprising given that each group uses its own methodology to distinguish itself from its competitors. On March 2nd, CRO (now renamed Corporate Responsibility Magazine) came out with its annual update to its Best Corporate Citizens rankings. Results are posted in the table below, and include a comparison between CRO rankings for this year and last as well information on which of the four other groups I've been following include each company in their top 100s. I have also added a final column titled "Consensus Level", illustrating the number of other ratings groups which agree with CRO's evaluation of a company as deserving of top 100 recognition. These figures are interesting--- scan the list...

	Bacterial- beverages: Obesity not the only fast-food health risk Health \| Ano Lobb \| Friday 12th March 2010 Add bacterial infection to the list of health risks associated with eating and drinking at your local fast food joint. A new study published in the International Journal of Food Microbiology found that nearly half (48%) of the beverages dispensed from fast-food restaurants contained coliform bacteria, and 11% contained E coli. While a positive coliform bacteria test isn't necessarily dangerous, it is an indicator of poor sanitation. (Coliform can refer to a number of specific bacteria, some of whom may come from municipal water supplies). E. coli, when ingested in sufficient quantities, can cause diarrhea, stomach distress, and in serious cases lead to hospitalization and death. Young children, and others with weakened immunity due to advanced age or illness are especially susceptible. Eating calorie-dense fast-food, and drinking soft-drinks has previously been associated with increasing the risk of obesity and associated conditions such as diabetes and heart disease. In fact, eating healthier meals at home is considered a leading strategy for reducing childhood obesity. And previous outbreaks of E. coli infection have been traced to improperly cooked, stored o...

	Technology and volunteers strengthen health of disabled athletes Health \| Alisa Ulferts \| Friday 12th March 2010 Last November, as I stood on the sidelines of the ING New York City Marathon cheering on a friend, I noticed small teams of people seeking their health, fitness and possibly spiritual goals in distinctive red T-shirts. I wrote off the first few pairs as a coincidence, or friends supporting each other, or maybe even spouses. But when the third red-clad pair passed by I took a good look. I noticed that one member of the pair ran slightly behind and to the side of the other. Each held the end of a short tether. Only one runner actually saw the racecourse; the other felt, heard, smelled and maybe tasted it. Both faces were set in the grim, unmistakable expression runners wear when completing a race is no longer a matter of energy but of sheer psychological will. Up close, I saw that the lettering on their shirts identified them as members of Achilles International, an organization dedicated to helping people with disabilities achieve health through fitness and adaptive technology. For the rest of the race I kept an eye out for more of these runners. I saw a woman who appeared to be about 70, jogging determinedly next to her volunteer. More visually impaired r...

	An ICE Age of Derivatives Sustainable Finance \| Johanna Hoopes \| Friday 12th March 2010 With the global financial system collapsed in late 2008, it became clear that the huge and highly unregulated derivatives market needed to change. The value of derivatives is based on the value of another asset such as a stock or a bond. When Lehman Brothers went under on September 14, 2008, it had $738 billion of these contracts on its books. Lehman was followed by insurer AIG, which reported as much as $53.5 billion in derivatives losses, which were linked to almost one third of its $182.5 billion federal bailout. The scope of this exposure was beyond investors' wildest nightmares. Enron's demise just a few years prior had only $22 billion in derivatives weighing down its financials. Although Washington has been promising to crack down on derivatives for decades, slow-moving regulators and law makers have made little progress toward taming these wild beasts, even after the financial collapse. Derivatives are the reason for the current debt crisis in Greece, where Goldman Sachs helped the government to use currency swaps to take advantage of exchange rates by making its dollar and yen denominated debt look like cheaper euro-denominated debt. While the Senate s...

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	Go green with compost - getting down and dirty with it! Ethical Consumption \| Caitlin Chock \| Saturday 13th March 2010 If you're ready to go green and in turn let that green debris go brown, you can do just that in building a compost bin. Compost is a great way to give back to the soil vital nutrients that will spur the growth of your plants and garden in a much better way than any fertilizers that will instead contain nasty chemicals. Having a compost bin in your backyard is easy to set up and just one more way you can help the environment. By adding the cardboard, coffee grounds, fireplace ashes, leaves, food wastes, and many more items you can then recycle and reuse it all at the same time! Yet there are some things that should never be added to a compost pile and the initial staring of one should be done in a certain manner. So here is your composting 101 guide to green living. Start out by finding where the best possible location is for your compost bin; ideally it will be in an area that will receive plenty of water. When you then begin your pile you will want to start it off with a base layer of brown and green 'duff'. The brown will be things such as pine needles, saw dust, newspaper, and dead leaves while you will want the green to i...

	What's in a bag? Green product bag review Ethical Consumption \| Tiffany F \| Saturday 13th March 2010 Make more than a fashion statement with your reusable bag. These green products are long-lasting, functional, and fun. Their alternative, plastic bags, are being banned across the World including San Francisco, China, and Australia. EPA estimates that 500 billion to a trillion plastic bags are created annually, with a handful being recycled. Although they are often used for other purposes, their long-term environmental impact can be devastating. Their decomposition leaches dioxins and other environmental and health pollutants into the environment. From a conservation perspective, the time spent using the bag versus the time it takes to create the bag, the resource input, and the bag decomposition are vastly different timelines. Places like the Pacific Garbage Patch and the hidden sites of our landfills mask the true devastation of our 'convenient' choices. Here are the top five innovative ways to save the world with a single green product, bags. Compactable Bags - There are a wealth of bags that now fold, scrunch, and roll into compact sizes that are easy to drop in your purse or backpack. They are the easiest way to remember to bring a bag, because they are so small ...

	A123 Battery Capacity Expansion for HEVs Energy & Emissions \| Brian Coppa \| Saturday 13th March 2010 A123 Systems, a developer and manufacturer of advanced lithium ion batteries and systems for hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), announced its financial results this week. This company is one of the leaders in this technology area and has received numerous U.S. Department of Energy and stimulus grants to fund its R&D. Headquartered in Massachusetts and founded in 2001, A123 Systems' nanoscale electrode technology is built on foundational research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A123 Systems is winning new contracts on a regular basis and is expanding production domestically. They are advancing Li ion batteries for HEVs to ensure this becomes the winning technology over competing options such as hydrogen fuel cells, which will improve their long-term financial performance. Their latest financials revealed this week showed total revenue for 2009 was $91.0 million, an increase of 33 percent compared to 2008. Product revenue for 2009 of $76.5 million increased 43 percent compared to the year before, while R&D services revenue of $14.5 million decreased from $15.0 million over the same time period. This company had a successful IPO in 2009, which led to a 50 pe...

	Blu is the new green Sustainable Development \| Andrea Brennen \| Saturday 13th March 2010 As promised, here it is, the coolest new idea in prefab: Blu Homes fold for easier shipping. [In honor of full disclosure, I should probably tell you that Dennis Michaud, Blu Homes' VP of product development is a friend of mine from architecture school. However, that doesn't change the fact that, as you'll see, this company is doing some pretty rad things.] At the end of last year, Blu Homes, a Massachusetts-based design build company, announced the launch of their Origin product line. The design of Blu's Origin homes is based on a logic of mass customization, an approach that takes advantage of computer-aided manufacturing systems to make products which are customizable for individual needs. Aspects of the homes are standardized - wall sections, programmatic components, construction details - but the flexibility of digital modeling tools and digital fabrication allows these standardized components to be configured and reconfigured in a variety of ways to suit the specific needs of a client and his or her particular site. Basically, instead of designing single buildings, Blu Homes has created a streamlined system of making buildings tha...

	Social media campaign raises HIV awareness Health \| Alisa Ulferts \| Friday 12th March 2010 Fearing that too many young African-Americans are becoming complacent about HIV, public health officials have launched a new social media effort intended to help that at-risk population learn the facts about the virus. "i know", a new social media effort of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is designed to encourage young African-American men and women aged 18-24 to talk openly and often about HIV/AIDS with their peers, partners, and families. Just by texting iknow to 44144, young people can get updates about risk, statistics, testing and treatment. People can also connect via Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools by visiting the CDC's Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention site. "i know" is the latest installment of the CDC's five-year communication campaign, Act Against AIDS, which aims to combat complacency about the HIV crisis in the United States. The campaign - which highlights the alarming statistic that every 9½ minutes another person in United States becomes infected with HIV - features targeted messages and outreach to the populations most severely affected by HIV, beginning with African-Americans. While accounting for just 12 pe...

	Local Climate Change: Its Unique Causes and Effects Climate Change \| Brian Kahn \| Friday 12th March 2010 Global warming has always been a shaky term for me. It implies that there's a one-dimensional effect of burning fossil fuels and that every place in the world is seeing the same trend. Climate change is a much more dynamic term that gets at the complexities of how humans interact with and alter the Earth's systems. It also makes local changes in the climate more understandable, particularly if they're not what you'd expect. A recent talk I went to beautifully illustrates this point. The presentation I saw was on the findings of a paper submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research. The paper examines the effects of irrigation on global climate in the 20th century, and the results may surprise you. The researchers found that temperatures around heavily irrigated areas actually showed significant summer cooling due to a variety of factors including evaporation and ground cover. The trend was particularly notable over the Indus Valley in India. Areas downwind of irrigated regions also showed increased precipitation. Interestingly, the one exception was in India. This is due to technical dynamics related to the monsoon season to in-depth to explain her...

	CRO's New CSR Ranking Corporate Social Responsibility \| Madeline Ravich \| Friday 12th March 2010 It's already time for an update to my CSR rankings post from last week. In my last post in this series, I compared the new RiskMetrics Group 2010 Global ESG 100 ranking with the Corporate Knights 2010 Global 100, the Ethisphere Institute's 2009 Most Ethical Companies, Newsweek's 2009 Green Rankings, and the CRO's 2009 Best Corporate Citizens. I demonstrated that there is no universal consensus between the five rankings--- not surprising given that each group uses its own methodology to distinguish itself from its competitors. On March 2nd, CRO (now renamed Corporate Responsibility Magazine) came out with its annual update to its Best Corporate Citizens rankings. Results are posted in the table below, and include a comparison between CRO rankings for this year and last as well information on which of the four other groups I've been following include each company in their top 100s. I have also added a final column titled "Consensus Level", illustrating the number of other ratings groups which agree with CRO's evaluation of a company as deserving of top 100 recognition. These figures are interesting--- scan the list...

	Bacterial- beverages: Obesity not the only fast-food health risk Health \| Ano Lobb \| Friday 12th March 2010 Add bacterial infection to the list of health risks associated with eating and drinking at your local fast food joint. A new study published in the International Journal of Food Microbiology found that nearly half (48%) of the beverages dispensed from fast-food restaurants contained coliform bacteria, and 11% contained E coli. While a positive coliform bacteria test isn't necessarily dangerous, it is an indicator of poor sanitation. (Coliform can refer to a number of specific bacteria, some of whom may come from municipal water supplies). E. coli, when ingested in sufficient quantities, can cause diarrhea, stomach distress, and in serious cases lead to hospitalization and death. Young children, and others with weakened immunity due to advanced age or illness are especially susceptible. Eating calorie-dense fast-food, and drinking soft-drinks has previously been associated with increasing the risk of obesity and associated conditions such as diabetes and heart disease. In fact, eating healthier meals at home is considered a leading strategy for reducing childhood obesity. And previous outbreaks of E. coli infection have been traced to improperly cooked, stored o...

	Technology and volunteers strengthen health of disabled athletes Health \| Alisa Ulferts \| Friday 12th March 2010 Last November, as I stood on the sidelines of the ING New York City Marathon cheering on a friend, I noticed small teams of people seeking their health, fitness and possibly spiritual goals in distinctive red T-shirts. I wrote off the first few pairs as a coincidence, or friends supporting each other, or maybe even spouses. But when the third red-clad pair passed by I took a good look. I noticed that one member of the pair ran slightly behind and to the side of the other. Each held the end of a short tether. Only one runner actually saw the racecourse; the other felt, heard, smelled and maybe tasted it. Both faces were set in the grim, unmistakable expression runners wear when completing a race is no longer a matter of energy but of sheer psychological will. Up close, I saw that the lettering on their shirts identified them as members of Achilles International, an organization dedicated to helping people with disabilities achieve health through fitness and adaptive technology. For the rest of the race I kept an eye out for more of these runners. I saw a woman who appeared to be about 70, jogging determinedly next to her volunteer. More visually impaired r...

	An ICE Age of Derivatives Sustainable Finance \| Johanna Hoopes \| Friday 12th March 2010 With the global financial system collapsed in late 2008, it became clear that the huge and highly unregulated derivatives market needed to change. The value of derivatives is based on the value of another asset such as a stock or a bond. When Lehman Brothers went under on September 14, 2008, it had $738 billion of these contracts on its books. Lehman was followed by insurer AIG, which reported as much as $53.5 billion in derivatives losses, which were linked to almost one third of its $182.5 billion federal bailout. The scope of this exposure was beyond investors' wildest nightmares. Enron's demise just a few years prior had only $22 billion in derivatives weighing down its financials. Although Washington has been promising to crack down on derivatives for decades, slow-moving regulators and law makers have made little progress toward taming these wild beasts, even after the financial collapse. Derivatives are the reason for the current debt crisis in Greece, where Goldman Sachs helped the government to use currency swaps to take advantage of exchange rates by making its dollar and yen denominated debt look like cheaper euro-denominated debt. While the Senate s...