Hazmats or Green Business

It came to my attention recently that businesses in Alameda County can get this whole Green Business certification title, and there's a point system or whatever that qualifies them.

Which is awesome, of course, because we all would like more green businesses, Or at least, you know, nobody wants more pollution, right?



Anyhow, apparently, it doesn't matter if you're involved with not-so-environmentally conscious business.

Oil changers and dry-cleaners (some of the most toxic commercial stuff out there) can join in the fun too. That is, if they make up the points somewhere else.

Is that good? I don't know.

There ARE better ways to recycle used car oil, and any incentives convincing companies to do things in a cleaner way seems great, especially since no matter what, it looks like people will need to be changing their oils SOMEWHERE for some time to come.

But some companies might just be plainly misleading the public with their little green business seal of certification. These companies may be doing more to be green than their competition, but some of them are still generating lots of toxic waste.

A brief perusal of the public records at Berkeley's Toxic Management Department shows that at least one of these green businesses is using a lot of caustic and toxic materials and has a history of hazardous materials violations.

Is that really fair? Maybe they should have a second chance, but then again, perhaps consumers have a right to know that their products are being made in an ecologically unsound way, despite that swanky green seal on the front door.

Things you breathe

So everybody says that smoke ain't healthy.

Those little bit floating around, getting into your throat, your eyes, soaking into the tiny passageways in your lungs.

But what's the difference between types of smoke? Wildfire smoke doesn't have the nasty chemicals than those from manmade fires, but we don't know exactly what that means in terms of human health.

In fact, the medical folks don't even quite know the mechanism by which airborne particulates (smoke is comprised of these) cause asthma problems, respiratory infections, and cardiac problems. Much less the difference between the stuffs that make up these tiny floating balls from fires.

I wrote a sorta story about particles this week. Check it out for the satellite picture of the smoke from the Southern California fires.

Also, check out the cool photos on The Smog Blog.

Carbon Disclosure - where does the stuff come from?

Still working on this one...check back later

Bio fuels: anything good behind the hype?

Biofuels aren't all that compelling.

Not nearly as compelling as energy conservation.

Yes, scintillating, fantastic, genius-style people are researching them willy-nilly and with much new and exciting funding.

Especially since global warming has become nationally recognized. (see Nobel Peace Prize)

But what is the time frame here? And what are the consequences of bio fuels already used?

Biofuels are better than gasoline how?

Plants eat up the greenhouse gas "carbon dioxide" to make more plant material, storing the energy of sunlight in the process. These plants are then used to make biofuel, and that biofuel burns up in cars or generators to make energy and emit more greenhouse gas.

It's good because it's a closed cycle, I guess. You emit the CO2 that you captured earlier on.

But do we really have enough stuff to make enough biofuels?

Last week I talked to Dr. Blake Simmons, a researcher at Sandia National Labs in Livermore.

He's pretty adamantly against corn-based ethanol. Not surprising, since a lot of educated folks are darn pissed about ethanol and corn and for good reason.

How it works, I think:
Extract the sugar from the corn (not the whole plant), mix that with yeast, and ferment that combo. The yeast eats the sugar and poops out ethanol, which is then distilled to get rid of water so the ethanol gets to an appropriately high proof. You know, so it's flammable.

One problem is, if you use corn or beets or other foodstuffs to make ethanol, you've got to grow up the plant until it's ready to harvest, and then you're only using the corn kernels, not the whole plant.
Another problem is that if you cut down a bunch of rainforest or whatever to grow corn, you're really not capturing more CO2 than you were when the rainforest was there.

The most pressing problem though, is that corn is food. Food for people or the animals that people eat. Already there have been riots in Mexico about the skyrocketing price of corn, and that's no joke.

Food verses fuel is already happening. Check out the price of corn over the last couple years, if you think I'm kidding.

Let's get back to Simmons

He studies two biofuels that aren't supposed to conflict with food: biodiesel from algae and cellulosic ethanol.

Algae, a tiny water plant, can grow in super-gross, non-edible, brackish water, and some algae is up to 60% oil by dry weight. This oil, once extracted, can be easily processed into biodiesel. Unfortunately, it's hard to get the oil out of these water-loving little guys, and they are difficult to breed to order, unlike the more genetic-engineering friendly bacteria.

Cellulosic ethanol is the same as ethanol from corn, but you get it from cellulose, a different type of carbohydrate than the sugars in corn.

The big trouble here is two-fold.

Cellulose is tough to isolate from plants. It's part of the structural material of plants, and it's stuck to stuff like lignin and hemicellulose.

Secondly, the process of separating cellulose out from other tree or plant bits is not "simpatico" with the next step, according to Simmons.

Isolated cellulose is broken down by special heat and acid-tolerant enzymes. They're tolerant, but it's still tough for them to work in the environment left over from "pre-treatment." The enzymes Simmons uses are derived from a microorganism (Sulfolobus, an archaon) that lives in hot, sulfurous ponds.

On a side-note, the Sulfolobus in question was discovered by Georg Lipps, a "bio-prospector." I just like the sound of that.

Basically, once the cellulose is broken down, it's just like the sugar from the corn and can get eaten by yeast and pooped out as ethanol.

It's better though, apparently, because you can use the whole plant and any plant, not just food plants.

I agree, but I'm still worried that we don't spend enough money, time, energy, and thought on conservation, the only thing we know for sure works.

Port of Oakland

The Port of Oakland is, sort of, a beautiful place. You can see the water and San Francisco. The cranes tower over everything; it's the essence of urban life, but without the people. Yes, there are the people in the trucks and the whole dockworkers situation, but pretty much I think I made a fair amount of splash just moving around on a red bicycle.

I'm not clear on how it's an Ecological Protection Area exactly:

I got a lot less flack then I would have expected. Only one "sweetie" and one whistler, which isn't so bad considering that the port is entirely full of male truck drivers. Or is that stereotype supposed to be applied to construction workers? I can't keep track.

But the sun and the diesel fumes were unexpectedly crummy, what with the backup. Not really worth complaining about, especially when you start thinking about bicycle rickshaws breathing the black air of Calcutta.

My neighborhood

Talking about my neighborhood inevitably comes down to the homeless people and students. I wish it weren't so. I do not want to write about the homeless. I feel bad for them, and I believe they're around because of huge - possibly unfathomable - systemic issues that I don't have the resources to address. Kicking them out of the neighborhood isn't possible, and kicking them out of People's Park is just going to send more of them to my doorstep, where they leave garbage and pee and worse.

I don't really want to write about students either. My non-student neighbors feel roughly the same about the students and the homeless. They like them on certain levels. They like the students, the feeling of minds soaking up information around them.
They like the homeless, well, ok, they tolerate the homeless, and they feel for them. Yet, the homeless and the students bring a carelessness that longterm residents don't have. These transient folks don't care about the trees or the rotten furniture or whether or not they're keeping anyone up with their screaming.

My thought process in coming up with stories about the Telegraph/South Berkeley area is as follows:

Going to have to think of something better than the vagrants' excessive urinating as an angle
Drunk people on my porch at 3am singing is also not an angle
Garbage everywhere - well, that's a homeless issue too because they go through the trash and the wind blows it everywhere
Huge party in the street with a domestic fight in my yard
Bus

Ok, I say, I'll write about the bus.

See, it got published: http://www.insidebayarea.com/search/ci_7117154?IADID=Search-www.insidebayarea.com-www.insidebayarea.com

Friday

I'm not sure why I attend these art murmur events; it's not the greatest opportunity to see art.

There's too many people trying to see art to actually see art.

However, a new button was made for $1 investment.

A boat button. It's orange and yellow and has not yet been photographed.