On My Radar 9.10.11

It’s been a busy month in New England with an earthquake (for which I was absent) and Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene. I’ve been remiss in reporting a number of important pieces of news. Here are some of the items on my radar.

The WRATH of IRENE:

• No one in the northeast is likely to describe this storm as “over-rated.” While it is true that downtown New Haven survived the storm with minor loss of tree limbs and without any power outages, this was the exception rather than the rule. The city as a whole lost 1,250 trees, storm damage was estimated at $13 million, and some sections were without power for nearly a week. Still, there were no homes or lives lost due to the storm. Such was not the case in the adjoining town of East Haven, where a number of houses washed into the sea. Coastal damage was severe — with extensive beach erosion and property damage statewide, due in part to the astronomical high tide which coincided with the storm’s arrival. So busy were we CT residents focusing on our own woes that it was not until the next day that we learned of the devastation in the Catskills and the state of Vermont. 

GOING GREEN is GOOD for the BOTTOM LINE

• The wind turbine at Phoenix Press kept on turning through most of the storm. The turbine, which automatically shuts down for safety if the wind is more than 60 mph, only did so once over the weekend. Phoenix Press was able to put power back onto the grid during the storm, generating 2,500 kilowatts of power during Irene’s 48-hour visit — more than four times the amount generated normally.

• The Devil’s Gear Bike Shop, sponsor of many local cycling events, was recently named one of the top 100 bike stores in the country by Bicycling Magazine.

• Ecovative Design, LLC, a small company on which I reported on May 30 of last year, recently received the Dupont Diamond Award for its biodegradable mushroom packaging. Ecovative produces home-compostable and cost-competitive replacements for conventional packaging foams using mycelium, or "mushroom roots," as a self-assembling glue. In a June 13 press release the company announced an equity investment by 3M, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the DOEN Foundation. Ecovative's technology has broad applications beyond packaging including insulation, building products, automotive, and consumer goods. The company's Mushroom® packaging, EcoCradle™, is currently used by a number of Fortune 500 clients. Ecovative operates a pilot production facility in upstate New York, and plans to expand to new regional manufacturing facilities in the United States. Ecovative now has an online store featuring a variety of “fun stuff” made from mushroom mycelium, all very green, and some purported to make great wedding gifts. 

NEWS from ALL OVER:

• Gus Speth, former Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and Justin Haaheim, lead organizer of Act New Haven, were among the over 1,252 arrested in Washington, DC in a two-week protest over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, a 1700 hundred mile pipeline carrying the fossil fuel diluted bitumen that would run from Alberta, Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. 

• The state of Connecticut passed a bill which will go into effect on October 1 requiring all businesses that generate over 104 tons of “source-separated organic material” (food scraps, food processing residue and more) annually to compost them.

• In Sacramento, a measure that would have banned expanded polystyrene takeout packaging in California has been shelved without a vote in the state Assembly. Senate Bill 568, which passed the Senate in May and would have gone into effect statewide Jan. 1, 2016, would have applied to PS cups, bowls, trays, containers and clamshells. It would have been the first statewide ban on PS packaging in the U.S. The bill was placed in the inactive file Sept. 8, meaning it could surface again in 2012.

• In response to recent crop failures, women farmers in Nepal have been discarding imported hybrid seeds and husbanding hardier local varieties in cooperative seed banks. 

• The Google Green Grocer program offers Googlers in Mountain View the opportunity to  order the same high-quality, sustainably sourced seafood, meat and eggs they already enjoy in Google cafes, while supporting local community fisheries and farms.

NEWS from NEW HAVEN:

• The Elm City Market has now pushed back its opening to October. At the end of August 625 people had signed on as members.

• Officials including Gov. Malloy and DEEP Commissioner Dan Esty met with developer Bruce Becker at 360 State Street late in August in the hopes that the way can be smoothed for a fuel cell metering request so that the building can meter and charge its tenants for the fuel cell power they consume. 360 State’s fuel cell is currently operating at only 55 to 60 percent of capacity, powering only the building’s common areas—corridors and lobbies. 

• New Haven’s Apple Store is rising on Broadway.

• I was deeply saddened to learn that Chris Sanseverino, former chef at Caseus and West Hills alum, died on September 2. Donations can be made to Slow Food CT in Chris’s name. See his obituary for details. 

SPECIAL EVENTS:

September 11

Anniversary and Commemoration of 9|11

New Haven’s bells, including the Yale Carillon and the one at United Church on the Green, will toll city-wide at 1 pm for precisely 1 minute.

September 17

Slow Food’s $5 Challenge 

Take back the 'value meal' by getting together with family, friends and neighbors for a slow food meal that costs no more than $5 per person.

September 21

5% Day at Whole Foods in Milford 

Whole Foods in Milford will donate 5% of all sales to benefit New Haven’s Common Ground High School. 

September 24

Moving Planet 

Moving Planet is a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis. At the 350CT event people will come to the New Haven Green via bikes, on foot, carpools, mass transit, anything and everything BUT carbon-intensive travel, for a central celebration with tables, music speakers, art, and a bike-powered outdoor screening of the movie Wall-E! Awesome!

BLOG NEWS

I STILL need a reader in Mississippi. Someone must know someone there.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend and please come back soon.

An Alternative to Styrofoam: It’s Green. It’s locally grown. It’s fungi!

In my last post, I described fungal mycelium and its potential as a building material. On the West Coast the artist Phil Ross used it to create his art.

But on the East Coast, Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre, 2007 graduates of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, have a more practical vision. At Ecovative Design in Green Island, New York, a company they co-founded, these young inventors are creating sheets of Ecocradle™, a packing material with many of the same properties as Styrofoam, but manufactured using 1/10 the energy, and without the petrochemicals.

At Ecovative they mix agricultural byproducts with mycelium, a network of fungal strands, and allow the mixture to to grow in shallow forms in a darkened room for seven days. They then render the product inert with heat. The heating process dries out the product and stops the growth of the fungus. The “skin” apparent on the surface is formed by the fungus, not by the application of any finish coat. If you want the whole story, you can check them out on YouTube.

Ecocradle™ is a good insulator and can be molded to fit any shape, so it’s a natural for shipping bottles of wine, or small electronics, for example. It does not burn, but it does decompose when broken into pieces and put in the garden. Ecocradle™ is not allowed to grow for long enough to fruit and create mushrooms, which is the part of the fungus that produces the spores, so there is no concern about allergens.

The agricultural byproducts currently being used at Ecovative are cotton seed and buckwheat hulls which are essentially without any commercial worth. Company representative Sam Harrington wrote, “We strive to utilize agricultural wastes that have almost no value. We avoid agricultural byproducts that can be used for livestock feed, and because we focus on materials that are high in lignin, they typically can’t be used in cellulosic ethanol processes. The raw material inputs of EcoCradle™ are selected based on regionally available agricultural by-products. So a factory in Texas or China might use cotton seed hulls, and a factory in Virginia or Spain might use rice husks and soybean hulls. By manufacturing regionally, and using local feedstocks, we aim to minimize the trucking of raw and finished materials.” Currently EcoCradle™ is only manufactured in Green Island, but the dream for its future production is a global one.

Using very little energy and no petrochemicals, Bayer and McIntyre have created a viable alternative to Styrofoam from materials considered waste. And at the end of its life, EcoCradle™ can be composted. Their invention, commercially valuable and made from waste, need never become waste. How great is this?

The process is much the same for Greensulate™, a material for home insulation which is also in development. Harrington stated, “EcoCradle™ and Greensulate™ are essentially the same material, but tuned to optimize for R-value or cushioning ability.” Just think, there may come a day soon when you will WANT fungus in your walls.

The company founders have already received a number of grants and honors. EcoCradle™ was named Best of What’s New in 2009 in Popular Science’s Green Technology, and Greensulate™ was featured as a forensic clue on CSI New York.

The Ecovative website store is up and running. For $5.00 you can order a sample of Ecocradle™. You’ve never seen anything like it, and it makes a great show-and-tell for Green Drinks.