Urban Ecoist

I ran across this over the weekend, and though it so brilliant that I had to share it.

Prisons across the United States are going green, and by that I mean that inmates are growing organic produce, composting the food waste from the prison kitchens, and even recycling shoes into that rubber turf that is being installed around playgrounds.

Above: Ironwood State Prison in California operates its own solar power plant.

An Oregon prison is raising honeybees, an Indiana prison built a wind turbine to reduce its energy costs, a California prison has solar panels, and a North Carolina correctional facility has built a cistern system to capture rain water.

Can we really learn a better way from those who have strayed? Seems we can. The programs at the prisons are not only a great way to reduce costs, help the environment, and divert refuse from landfills, but also the pro-green programs are teaching the inmates valuable skills and giving them responsibilities to encourage self-confidence and a feeling of community.

From the Associated Press:

LITTLEROCK, Wash. – Of all the things convicted murderer Robert Knowles has been called during his 13 years behind bars, recycler hasn’t been one of them.

But there he was one morning, pitchfork in hand, composting food scraps from the main chow line and coffee grounds from prison headquarters — doing his part to “green” the prison.

“It’s nice to be out in the elements,” said Knowles, 42, stirring dark, rich compost that will amend the soil at the small farm where he and fellow inmates of the Cedar Creek Corrections Center grew 8,000 pounds of organic vegetables this year.

Inmates of the minimum-security facility, 25 miles from Olympia, the state capital, raise bees, grow organic tomatoes and lettuce, compost 100 percent of food waste and even recycle shoe scraps that are made into playground turf.

“It reduces cost, reduces our damaging impact on the environment, engages inmates as students,” said Eldon Vail, secretary of the Washington Department of Corrections, which oversees 15 prisons and 18,000 offenders. “It’s good security.”

As around-the-clock operations, prisons are voracious resource hogs, and administrators are under increasing pressure to reduce waste and conserve energy and water.

In 2007, states spent more than $49 billion to feed, house, clothe, treat and supervise 2.3 million offenders, the Pew Center on the States reported this year.

As the prison population has grown this decade, up 76 percent from 1.3 million in 2000, the number of prisons and jails has risen with it. The latest U.S. Bureau of Justice data show 1,821 facilities in 2005, up from 1,668 in 2000.

To keep costs down, the Indiana Department of Corrections installed water boilers that run on waste wood chips, and built a wind turbine at one prison that generates about 10 kilowatts an hour and saves $2,280 a year.

At Ironwood State Prison in Blythe, Calif., 6,200 solar panels send energy back to the grid, enough to power 4,100 homes a year. The prison was trying to meet an executive order requiring state agencies to reduce energy use by 20 percent by 2015, said a spokeswoman, Lt. Sue Smith.

North Carolina’s Department of Corrections switched to chemical-free cleaners and vegetable-based inks. This summer, because of a water shortage, inmates converted 50-gallon pickle barrels into small cisterns that capture rainwater.

Under a state mandate to reduce energy use, the Oregon Department of Corrections replaced old appliances with energy-efficient ones, installed solar water heaters and used a geothermal well to heat water. It also modified washing machines so they could reuse rinse-water to wash about a million pounds of clothes a month.

At Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton, Ore., inmates recycle scraps from old prison blues to make diaper bags for women’s shelters and dog beds for animal shelters.

“We try to model prosocial behavior,” said Vern Rowan, business manager for the Oregon Department of Corrections. Being sustainable “is something that everybody should be doing, regardless of where they’re at.”

Cedar Creek, in the heart of a forest, feels more like an outdoor retreat than institutional lockup.

Most of the 400 inmates are in a work program, and put in between six and eight hours a day.

The responsibility of caring for the prison’s three hives of Italian honey bees falls mostly to Daniel Travatte, 36, a soft-spoken former drug addict who is serving 10 years for attempted armed robbery.

Under the supervision of prison counselor Vicki Briggs, Travatte has learned to harvest honey — which inmates occasionally eat with breakfast biscuits — and use beeswax to make lotions. He’s become an expert on their habits.

“I’m trying to change myself,” said Travatte. “A lot of people go through prison with no intention of changing. I love working with the bees. It keeps me busy. I have a lot of responsibility to take care of.”

While there isn’t scientific evidence that such activities are helping inmates, Nalini Nadkarni, an environmental studies professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., notes anecdotal evidence that it’s working.

“They were stimulating their minds and having conversations that were different than ‘How much more time we have left’?” said Nadkarni.

One inmate went beyond conversations, enrolling in a doctoral program when he got out and co-authoring a research paper with Nadkarni on a moss-growing project she started to help reduce the impact of wild moss harvesting on forests.

While Cedar Creek went green out of economic necessity — it had to conserve because it didn’t have the wastewater capacity to expand four years ago — it is now embracing other benefits, said Dan Pacholke, a state prison administrator who helped implement many of the practices.

Cedar Creek uses 250,000 fewer gallons of water a year, saves $6,000 to $8,400 annually on garbage bills and avoided a $1.4 million sewage treatment plant upgrade.

A large “Con-Post” marks the prison’s composting station, made of recycled concrete blocks and reclaimed wood, where Knowles spends about six hours a day, making sure the compost gets enough heat, moisture and air to break down food scraps.

“They trust me to do all this with no supervision,” said Knowles, who is serving time for the hit-and-run death of an off-duty police officer.

“I like growing the vegetables,” Knowles said. “My mom had a garden. I can see having my own garden.”

Sorry, I rarely like including an entire article in a post, but I really had a hard time deciding what paragraphs to include. I find this inspirational and I hope that the positive reaction to the established programs will encourage other correctional facilities to follow suit and develop their own gardens, composting programs, and develop ways to convert old systems to renewable and sustainable ones.

And what can we on the “outside” learn from these prisoners? Composting is easy, and organic gardening is also pretty easy. Not only are you providing your family with fresh, healthy produce, but if you include your whole family in the garden, you are giving kids responsibilities which will in turn give them self-confidence. Not only that, but getting kids out in the garden is a great way to teach them about how consumption and our part in the larger cycles of the Earth and its ecosystems.

I think schools should also take a note from the prisons of America. Have students spend an hour in a school garden or turning compost. Have a school wind turbine, and teach kids how it works. Have students organize a scrap drive, like back in World World II, and encourage them to lead the green revolution.

Viva la Revolution!!

And it took prisoners to lead the way? Maybe not, but going green is a great component to an inmate’s rehabilitation.

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Greenpeace has just released it’s updated ninth edition of the Guide to Greener Electronics. As this site is not Flash-enabled, I cannot embed the neat-o graphic to give you a quick view of which companies are making the grade in responsible manufacturing as well as disposal and recycling of their obsolete gadgets.

© Greenpeace / Will Rose

Oddly, as I traded in a Nokia (which leads the rankings) for a Motorola cell phone, I find myself on the lower end of the responsibility scale. Same with my Xbox 360. Luckily, the Dell laptop I use and the Apple desktop are in the middle in the rankings, but that really doesn’t make me feel any better. I hate my Dell, but I love my Xbox. What is an ecoist-nerd to do?

Let’s first look at Motorola. Here is the Greenpeace summary of the company’s efforts.

Motorola drops to 15th place, scoring 3.7 points, losing points because although its models of chargers are certified as Energy Star compliant in March 2007 – this is not since the latest energy efficiency standard for chargers (v.1.1) came into effect, which was in January 2005; it therefore scores no points on this criterion. In the U.S, all Motorola’s mobile phone chargers exceed ENERGY STAR Tier 2 requirements by more than 50 percent in sleep and standby/no-load modes – but what about chargers sold outside the US? On the other energy criteria Motorola scores relatively well for disclosing greenhouse gas emissions, committing to cuts and reporting a 5.4% renewable energy use (as proportion of all electricity purchased) in 2007. Motorola scores better on the chemicals and e-waste criteria. The company has launched 55 models of mobile phone with BFR free circuit boards. However, Motorola is the only mobile phone brand to still fail to commit to eliminating all BFRs and PVC with a timeline, in all of its products. On waste issues, Motorola provides a take-back and recycling service in 73 countries, representing over 90% of global mobile phone unit sales. It reports a global take-back rate of 3% of total handsets sold in 2005.

I do have to wonder how the “take-back” percentage is figured out. Is it just what Motorola itself takes back or any of the phone recyclers? I know that when I switched over to Credo Mobile, I was sent an envelope to recycle my old phone. Let’s say that is also a Motorola, but if I am sending it to a third-party recycler, would that phone be counted by Motorola in it’s “take-back” numbers?

Now, Microsoft.

Microsoft is in 17th position with a miserable score of 2.2 points, mainly on toxic chemicals criteria. The company provides a timeline of the end of 2010 for eliminating phthalates. On e-waste, Microsoft scores only on its weak support for Individual Producer Responsibility. On energy, the company only scores for reporting its total carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, from its own operations and although it now has a Climate Change Policy it makes no reference to specific reduction targets for greenhouse gases.

Perhaps Microsoft has been spending too much of its efforts in its lame ad campaigns, instead of making the company more environmentally responsible? The Seinfeld ad was just stupid, and watching Bill Gates “adjust” himself was just disturbing.

Good thing I have put off buying that Wii. Check out Nintendo’s scoring.

Nintendo remains in last place with a pitiful 0.8 points out of 10, scoring zero on all e-waste criteria. The company has banned phthalates and is monitoring use of antimony and beryllium and although it is endeavouring to eliminate the use of PVC, it has not set a timeline for its phase out. Nintendo discloses carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from its own operations and commits to cutting CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases by 2% over each previous year. However, Nintendo admits that an increase in business led to a 6% rise in CO2 emissions in 2006.

If you would like to explore the Guide to Greener Electronics yourself, you can visit the Greenpeace website here.

This guide and many like it underscore the problems with the end-life issues with the electronics that we all have and love. I will discuss more about the problem with e-waste in the next few days.

© Greenpeace / Natalie Behring

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Wow, try saying that one three times fast…

I ran across this little story in one of last month’s Newsweek magazines. My not-so-green secret is that I get a lot of magazines in the mail. I do recycle them, but with printing, shipping and the paper stock involved, it is still a bit of a waste, I admit. But then again, I would be using electricity to read magazines online, so either way I am screwed. And I only get magazines so I have something to read on the bus, which is better than driving my car…

But I disgress.

Anyhoo, this article in the August 2, 2008 Newsweek featured news on pollen and pollen-producing trees and plants, like ragweed — the bane of many an allergy sufferer, myself included. It seems that just one more depressing effect of global warming is that plants and trees will produce more pollen in a warmer world. Not only that but with the spring warm-up coming sooner and sooner every year, trees are pumping out pollen earlier and the allergy season is thus extended by cutting into what we used to call winter.

Here are some selected quotes:

Global warming and increased atmospheric carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels appear to supercharge the growth of ragweed. And not only does ragweed grow larger and produce more pollen, its pollen is more allergenic, studies show.

Oh, great. Super-pollen. I cannot wait to experience that.

To test his ragweed hypothesis, [Lewis] Ziska [a weed ecologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Crop Systems and Global Change Laboratory] planted the weed in three plots: a rural farm, a semi-rural county park and downtown Baltimore. The urban plot’s ragweed produced four times the pollen count of the rural site. “Cities already have more carbon dioxide than rural areas and are hotter,” Ziska says. “Cities are a surrogate for global warming.”

Maybe that is why I supposedly “grew into” bad allergies. I lived out in the country during most of my childhood.

Allergists are also worried. One new concern: a startling rise in the amount of tree pollen. Warmer temperatures in Europe are causing birch trees to bloom earlier, prompting an earlier and perhaps longer allergy season. Studies at Duke University show that elevated carbon dioxide increases pollen production of loblolly pines. Allergists suspect that record pollen counts are contributing to the onslaught of new allergy and asthma patients. “I’m seeing an epidemic of new cases,” says New York City allergist Clifford Bassett.

So much for being a tree-hugger, right?

If plant biomass increases due to elevated CO2 and global warming, fungi may proliferate as well, they suspect. Fungal spores are problematic because they affect air quality indoors as well as out. Higher temperatures will lead to increased use of air conditioners, which spread spores if improperly maintained. Heavier rainstorms and floods predicted under climate-change scenarios will also increase indoor dampness, allowing fungal spores to proliferate in homes and buildings, according to the 2007 study “Climate Change, Aerobiology, and Public Health in the Northeast United States.”

So, mushrooms will become the new enemy? I wonder when the Republicans will start exploiting that fear…

The article also mentions that us city-dwellers suffer the double whammy of increased smog due to ground level ozone — couple that with more powerful and just more pollen, and yeah, maybe it is time to look for a pleasant little cottage out in the country. Also, poison ivy was discovered to produce more potent poison when hit with increased levels of CO2. And finally, if I haven’t freaked you out enough, warmer temperatures usually result in more insects, such as stinging insects, like yellow jackets. In many places, like Alaska, rising temperatures are bringing in new insect populations. Reports of severe stings from yellow jackets and their equally-stinging cousins have increased 600 per cent since 2000 up in the 49th state.

All the more reason to try and mitigate this whole global warming issue. Unfortunately, no one seems to be all that concerned about it in the US Government. Maybe we should change the government…

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