Archive for 'Green Business'
Paper Products that are Better, Cheaper and Greener
Posted on 08. Sep, 2009 by admin.
Marcal Small Steps paper towels are not only made entirely from recycled paper. They sell for less — in some instances quite a bit less — than paper towels made mostly from trees by the industry giants.
Here’s how the consumer’s choices look, measured from cheapest to most expensive, in terms of dollars per 100 paper towels:
• Marcal $1.64
• Bounty (Procter & Gamble) $1.79
• Giant (store brand) $1.85
• Brawny (Georgia-Pacific) 2.04, on sale
• Viva (Kimberly-Clark) $2.17
This is, of course, not the way things usually work. Solar power costs more than electricity made from coal. Organic food is pricier than conventional. You pay more for Starbucks’ coffee than you do for Dunkin’ Donuts. Partly that’s because the price consumers pay for conventional fare doesn’t reflect the full cost of the product. (See, for example, Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food, Bryan Walsh’s recent Time magazine cover story, about the hidden costs of industrial agriculture.)
marcal products
To say that I “discovered” Marcal isn’t precisely true. After I covered Greenpeace’s recent agreement with forest-products giants Kimberly-Clark, a PR woman asked me to look at the company. So I got on the phone with Tim Spring, Marcal’s CEO, who told me a little about Marcal and its history.
“This company was committed to saving trees for two decades before Greenpeace bought its first boat,” Spring said.
It turns out that Marcal, a 77-year-old maker of paper towels, napkins, toilet tissue and other consumer goods, has been using recycled stock since the 1950s. Based in suburban Elmwood Park, New Jersey, its paper-making factory employs about 900 people and draws much of its stock from those blue plastic recycling bins under office desks in Manhattan skyscrapers about 20 miles away.
Read entire article on GreenBiz.com
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U.S. Colleges Set a Green Course
Posted on 24. Aug, 2009 by admin.
It’s the time of year when college students return to campuses across the United States. As the 2009-2010 year dawns upon them, many students will find their schools taking action to reduce their environmental impact. In fact, the trend of colleges and universities going green is growing at an incredible pace. In the second annual Princeton Review’s Green College ratings, there was a 30 percent increase in participating schools.
Last week, President Bill Clinton was in Chicago speaking to the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, a group of 250 university presidents and senior leadership looking to reduce the environmental impacts on their campuses and prepare students for green jobs. Clinton urged the group to speed up their efforts. “All this work is out there laying on the ground, begging to be done with absolutely certain rate of return,” Clinton told the university executives.
Many schools are pushing forward at a fast pace. Students returning to Arizona State University will find a major project under way to retrofit interior and exterior lighting. The six-month project will improve the lighting quality across the campus to reduce energy demand. This is not a small project either: The school is retrofitting 10,214 lighting fixtures on the 300-acre campus. The effort is expected to save more than 1 GigaWatt-hour (1 million kilowatt-hours), resulting in savings of over $100,000 annually.
Read entire article at GreenBiz.com
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Ford Spreads Its Green Painting Process
Posted on 10. Aug, 2009 by admin.
DEARBORN, Mich. — Factories on almost every continent will soon begin using a painting process technology from Ford Motor Co. that can paint more cars in less time, saving money and significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Ford’s 3-Wet paint process, which was first put to use at its Ohio assembly plant, is in the midst of being installed at factories in Wayne, Mich., Romania, Mexico, India and China.
The technology allows Ford factories to apply three coats of paint — primer, base and enamel — one immediately after the other, without waiting for the coats to dry. The result is a painting process that takes 20 to 25 percent less time to complete than standard techniques.
On top of faster painting time, the 3-Wet technology cuts down energy use by consolidating painting machinery into a single integrated booth. The technology itself will also cut down CO2 emissions from painting by between 6,000 and 8,000 metric tons per factory per year, and reduce the emissions of harmful volatile organic compounds (VOCs) by 5 percent.
This is not the first paint-related innovation for Ford, or the auto industry as a whole. Two years ago, Ford installed a fumes-to-fuel system at a factory in Ontario, Canada, that turned the fumes from its painting process into 300 kilowatts of green energy for the facility itself.
And earlier this year, Mazda implemented a new addition to its own three-layer wet paint system that focuses on VOC reductions, cutting harmful emissions by 57 percent.
Read an entire article at GreenBiz.com
