Tag Archives: Energy Use

Sustainable Business Leadership Graduation Ceremony – Cambridge

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Eleven Cambridge companies were certified as “Sustainable Business Leaders” on Thursday April 1, 2010, for completing the Sustainable Business Leader Program (SBLP)—a program of the Sustainable Business Network (SBN) that provides guidance, support and technical assistance to facilitate the “greening” of small and medium-sized businesses. The special certification ceremony, which was held at the Cambridge City Hall Annex, was co-sponsored by the City of Cambridge, Cambridge Local First and the Cambridge Energy Alliance in partnership with the Sustainable Business Network.

The first Cambridge graduating class included:

Cambridge Naturals, 1369 Coffee House, Veggie Planet, Stone Hearth Pizza, Irving House, Greenward, Harvest Co-Op Markets, Harvard Bookstore, The Fishmonger, Cambridge Brewing Company and Economy Hardware.

Graduates earned their SBLP certification by completing the rigorous six-step SBLP process and reducing their collective carbon footprint, plus they received window decals to demonstrate their leadership to the public.  Measurable and significant changes were identified and implemented in various areas, including Energy Efficiency, Water Conservation, Waste Reduction, Transportation Management, Pollution Prevention and Sustainability Management.  Many companies saw financial savings as a result of lowering consumption of energy and water and diverting their waste stream into recycling and compost.

Mayor David Maher was the first to congratulate the businesses, followed by Vice Mayor Henrietta Davis, Susanne Rasmussen, Director of Environmental and Transportation Planning and Energy, Lilah Glick of the Cambridge Energy Alliance and Rachael Solem of Cambridge Local First.

With over 60 participating companies, the SBLP continues to grow and assist small to medium sized businesses “green” their operations, collectively reducing their carbon footprint in Boston, Cambridge and Somerville.  The Sustainable Business Network of Greater Boston (SBN) launched the Sustainable Business Leader Program (SBLP) in 2008 through a partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA). The objective of the SBLP is to provide guidance, support and technical assistance to facilitate the ‘greening’ of small and medium-sized locally owned businesses in Massachusetts.

Biomimicry- The next green revolution?

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Wood Ant Hill

Wood Ant Hill

The current green revolution looks to renewable energy and green products to replace the polluting industries of the modern era.  What is often left out of the discussion is our relationship with the living biosphere and how our technology much revolutionize itself to not just being low-carbon, but operate under the principles of how nature organizes itself.  Janine Benyus, a scientist and founder of the company Biomimicry Guild, has been looking to nature to develop technologies that maximize efficiency prinicples inherent in the natural world.  This new movement, labeled biomimicry, asks homo sapiens sapiens to tap into the intellengence of nature in our design principles.  The natural world is not seen as a dumb organic machine, but rather a dynamic force that intelligently adapts to environmental changes to produce rhobust living ecosystems.

Humans are not the first and only species to be master builders, tool users, or farmers.  For over 3.8 billion years, nature has evolved eligant solutions to some of the basic ecological challenges we are struggling with today.  In the new online resource, www.asknature.org, it provides innovative minds with life’s best ideas to help develop sustainable technologies that are conductive to life.   On this free open source website, one can research a design question and find a list of how nature solves the issue.  For example, under the category of storing energy, there is a list of 33 species that adopt strategies to maximize energy use.

In the case of the wood ant, they build a nest with numerous holes for ventilation and entrances. At night and in cold weather the ants plug the holes to keep heat in. The workers also keep the slope of the nest at the right angle to obtain maximum amount of solar heat. The ants bring extra warmth into their nests as live heaters by basking in the sun in large numbers and taking the heat energy collected in their bodies into the nest.  Can our homes be built in ways to maximize existing natural resources and store and cool the building without destroying our atmosphere?  Passive solar design is one quick example of building techniques that blend old and new knowledge into our building design principles– with the potential of creating net zero energy use homes.

I believe this presents a paradigm shift for humanity, in which humans are not separate from the natural world but part of an intellegent ecosystem full of other species that have skills and wisdom to share with us.  To learn more about Biomimicry I recommend watching a talk by Janine Benyus at http://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action.html.

Playing the Energy Conservation Game

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comicFrom the “Game of Life’ Files, comes this stub about Adaptive Meter, a company who has invented an internet application that makes energy conservation an engaging game.

The company, which makes web applications such as Stickychicken and Twitterlike, is developing an interactive gaming platform in which players bet on others’ energy usage. The stock-market style game, called Lost Joules, will use smart-meter data from consenting players, and other participants—including those without smart meter —will be able to stake virtual cash on whether those players can reduce their energy use or not.

From the Politics Desk… Right Wing Department

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Our ‘friends’ over at American Daily have a unique theory about how to cut the deficit. Eliminate the Department of Energy. That’s right… eliminate.

Apparently, they believe Job#1 of the DOE is to eliminate the import of foreign oil.

According to the DOE’s Web site, however, their mission is as follows:

The Department of Energy’s overarching mission is to advance the national, economic, and energy security of the United States; to promote scientific and technological innovation in support of that mission; and to ensure the environmental cleanup of the national nuclear weapons complex.

You could certainly make the argument that lessening our reliance on oil from countries who may not have America’s best interests at heart is part of of this mission. But when the last Vice-President was known for issuing statements like “It’s our god-given right to drive around in SUVs.” It’s kind of hard for those on the right wing to argue they were helping us meet that goal. The whole ‘climate change is a myth’ thing hardly speaks to lessening our usage of carbon-based energy either.

Still, no matter what their motivation, whenever someone calls for greater accountability in how our tax dollars are spent, it’s hard for Warm Home Cool Planet to disagree. Everyone-government, business and individual citizens-needs to do their part in decreasing our use of non-renewable energy and embracing renewable energies and sustainable living habits.

Anyway, as they say at Fox News: “We report. You decide.”