·:[ Environmental News Bits ]:·
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Read the press release.

Are you ready for free fertilizer and a soil conditioner that will give your flowers and vegetables a boost? Then break out the compost bin.

For people who recycle regularly and are looking for ways to reduce their household waste even further, composting is the sensible next step. Yard trimmings and food residuals together constitute 24 percent of the U.S. municipal solid waste stream. That’s a lot of waste to send to landfills especially when you could put it to good use in your garden.

Tea bags, coffee grounds, fruit and vegetable peels, pet hair, dryer lint, egg shells, leaves, and grass clippings – almost any organic materials — can be thrown into the compost pile.

For a full-color, graphic version of this newsletter, go to http://www.climatebiz.com/enewsletter.

Welcome to GreenBiz 2.0!
By Joel Makower
We’ve been working long hours behind the scenes to make GreenBiz.com and our sister sites even more useful and information-packed. At last, here it is, and here’s what new and improved about the sites.

Sole Technology Discloses Eco-Audit Results, Aims for Carbon Neutrality
Using data generated over more than seven years, the audit focused on the company’s carbon emissions, waste and water consumption. Sole, the parent of etnies and other action sports clothing and footwear brands, will now use the data to begin trimming its footprint with the intention of becoming carbon
neutral by 2020.

Dairy Industry Set to Measure Milk’s Carbon Footprint
The National Milk Producers Federation, International Dairy Foods Association and Dairy Management Inc. will team to address sustainability within the dairy supply chain of producers, processors, manufacturers, retailers and distributors.

JPMorgan Chase Aims for 20 Percent Carbon Reduction
The firm plans to cut its carbon emissions around the globe, mostly from facilities, by 20 percent by 2012 as well as offset all employee air travel.

How Carbon Heavy is Your Email?
By James Murray, BusinessGreen
New research from Sun Microsystems aims to allow firms to measure the carbon footprint of their emails.

Businesses Should Consider Climate Risks: Report
Some impacts of climate change are unavoidable but businesses can evaluate potential risks and try to reduce them, according to a new report from the Pew Center.

Energy East Halves Emissions, Vodafone Plans Same
While one company recently cut its CO2-equivalent emissions in half, the other has just laid out plans to do the same to its CO2 footprint.

Merrill Lynch Enters the Carbon Offset Business
Merrill Lynch launched a full-service carbon offset service Wednesday, with assistance from ICF International, to help companies develop and manage climate-related strategies.

Earth Day Roundup: Trees, Tips, Reports and More
The 39th Earth Day has come and gone, and with it came a slew of announcements, initiatives and reports. Herewith, a brief summary of Earth Day ‘08.

Execs Urged to Adopt a ‘Shadow Carbon Pricing’ Strategy
By James Murray, BusinessGreen
The U.K. government is hoping to encourage more firms to imitate the National Grid’s process of incorporating a shadow price for carbon emissions into their cost-benefit analyses.

Can the REC Market Self-Regulate and Remain Credible?
By Rob Luke
A cornerstone of the market for Renewable Energy Certificates is the knowledge that RECs have passed muster with independent verifiers like San Francisco-based Green-e. But now that a certified company has fallen out of compliance, Green-e is in the position of having to play hardball to maintain the market’s
credibility.

Leasing the Sun
By Rick Daubenspeck
The benefits of leasing transactions for roof-mounted solar collection systems are growing because installation costs are becoming more attractive, due in part to various state rebate programs and the increasing cost of electrical energy.

Eco-promising: Communicating the Environmental Credentials of your Products and Services

This report aims to answer the question of why companies should communicate the benefits of and environmental information related to their products, such as carbon footprint. It also provides a how-to for companies just starting out with eco-labeling.

Via Librarians’ Internet Index.

Background and updates about transportation research at this national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy. Provides fact sheets, publications, and other material about topics such as fuel cells, hybrid electric vehicles, powertrains, vehicle recycling, heavy vehicle idling and fuel use, combustion and emissions control sensors, modeling and computing, and materials and manufacturing. Includes links to related government websites.
URL: http://www.transportation.anl.gov/

Via Librarians’ Internet Index.

Companion website for this PBS Frontline documentary that discovers that “the increasing demand for corn-based biofuel in the United States is driving up the cost of Mexico’s staple food, the tortilla.” Features slideshows on protest and politics, the fight between biofuel producers and tortilla consumers for the corn harvest, and effects on farmers and the urban poor in Mexico. Includes related links on biofuels and rising food prices.
URL: http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/fellows/mexico_2008/

Comedy Central’s Address the Mess initiative brings some humor to basic green information.

Via Docuticker.

An Exploration of Technology Diffusion
Source: Harvard Business School Working Papers

We develop a model that, at the aggregate level, is similar to the one sector neoclassical growth model, while, at the disaggregate level, has implications for the path of observable measures of technology adoption. We estimate our model using data on the diffusion of 15 technologies in 166 countries over the last two centuries. We evaluate the implications of our estimates for aggregate TFP and per capita income. Our results reveal that, on average, countries have adopted technologies 47 years after their invention. There is substantial variation across technologies and countries. Over the past two centuries, newer technologies have been adopted faster than old ones. The cross-country variation in the adoption of technologies accounts for at least a quarter of per capita income differences.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 774 KB)

Read the full story in InfoWorld.

Spurred by business needs as well as environmental concerns, green IT projects blossomed in data centers and on desktops throughout the world in 2007.

To encourage environmentally sound practices in a world where the serious repercussions of climate change are becoming all too clear, we at InfoWorld are proud to present our first annual Green 15 award recipients to those organizations that have made significant energy-saving, waste-reducing initiatives.

This year’s winners are, in alphabetical order:

• BT Group retrofits to reduce carbon footprint
• Bryant University’s datacenter built to scale efficiently
• Digital Realty Trust mines energy savings from LEED Gold
• EMC gets greener with IT-facilities partnership
• Fujitsu taps hydrogen power to fuel energy savings
• Hewlett-Packard manages power efficiency from afar
• IBM tackles IT energy efficiency on a Big Blue scale
• GM2 Logistics marries SANs and sustainability
• The Green Grid’s metrics sow the seeds for IT sustainability
• Juniper Networks sheds nearly 1.3B watts
• Miami-Dade County Public Schools pinches PC power consumption
• NetApp manages to keep its cool
• One Laptop Per Child’s low-power laptop empowers and inspires
• Sun Microsystems plants pods for sustainability and savings
• Verizon Wireless rings in desktop power savings

Read the full story at Conscious Choice.

I admit it. I’ve stood at the supermarket fish counter, struggling to remember which fish are sustainably grown and which ones are not. I obsess over the deli containers tumbling out of my kitchen cabinet, worrying about their plastic toxins and inevitable resting place — landfill or recycled? I feel guilty every time I buy bottled water, kick myself if I arrive at the grocery store without my canvas bags, and feel like I’m personally murdering future generations whenever the furnace churns. My heart pounds every time ice breaks off Antarctica. I’ve fantasized about slapping stickers that say “I have a small weenie” on the backs of Hummers. And at the odd cocktail party, I’ve been known to blurt out something cheerful like, “\”So, global warming, huh. I mean, shouldn’t we be doing something about it?”

Turns out, I’m not alone.

Read the full story in Waste Age.

Goodwill Industries, Rockville, Md., has testified before the House Science and Technology Committee urging Congress to assist in the development of a recycling and reuse infrastructure for unwanted electronics. With an increasing amount of e-waste donations to local Goodwill agencies throughout the country, company officials say they are feeling the financial strain associated with the collection and environmentally safe disposal of e-waste donations.

Read the full story in the Centre Daily Times.

Some State College Area school board members want the district to build green from now on, and they may take an action no other school board in the state has done.

At the request of its new members, the board is mulling a resolution that would require school administrators to seek Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certifications for all future construction projects regardless of their size.

Read the press release.

Spring is here, and the General Services Administration has begun using organic fertilizer on the grounds of all its federal buildings in the National Capital Region. The region, which is part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, includes the District of Columbia, as well parts of Virginia and Maryland.

Read the press release.

The Philadelphia Phillies announced today a green power purchase of 20 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) to serve the ball club’s 43,500-seat Citizens Bank Park. The purchase not only places the Phillies as the largest green power purchaser in major league baseball, but also as the leader overall among major U.S. professional sports teams in EPA’s Green Power Partnership. The Phillies’ purchase is estimated to avoid the equivalent carbon dioxide emissions of nearly 2,800 vehicles each year.

EPA is requiring petroleum refineries to reduce air pollution emissions from new, modified, or reconstructed process units by using updated performance standards. These standards call for refineries to add technology controls shown to reduce emissions. The standards also include options for controlling emissions through work practices.

The agency expects over the next five years, that the final standards for new process units will reduce the combined emissions of particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, volatile organic compounds, and nitrogen oxides from 30 petroleum refineries by nearly 31,000 tons per year. The cost savings from energy recovery associated with these amendments is estimated to be about $7 million per year.

More information is available at: epa.gov/ttn/oarpg/new.html