welcome

"You can't manage what you don't measure." How many times have we heard a variation of this statement? It has become a cliché because the words are usually followed by . . . nothing.

Unfortunately, most of our buildings have antiquated, inaccessible mechanical meters that just keep going, like brain-dead Eveready bunnies. As it turns out, just measuring isn't enough. It makes a difference what you measure and how you measure it. If you don't ask the right questions, you won't get the right answer. Even if you get the right answer, it doesn't mean you'll take the right action.

So how do we untie this Gordian knot of generalities?

Let's start with the first premise: measure. Both the producer (utility) and the consumer (you) have an incentive to measure energy. However, under the present perversely incentivized regulatory regime in most of the U.S., the producer wants to measure in order to optimize its own operations, ideally while keeping the consumer in the dark (figuratively, not literally).

At this point, I expect (not fully undeserved) howls of protest to emerge from the good and committed folks who work for utilities helping people save energy. They are out there in the thousands and for the most part these programs do save decent amounts of energy, especially where they are coupled with intelligent regulatory policy as in California. However, these situations are the exception, not the rule.

In most states, utilities earn their returns by selling kilowatt-hours; most save energy because they are forced to do so by a few enlightened state utility regulatory commissions. If you're lucky enough to be in the service territory of one of these states, 1 percent to 3 percent of utility revenues might go to supporting consumers reduce energy, including the installation of smart meters and all other "public benefits." Given the size of a state's utility bill, 1 percent to 3 percent is not chump change, but it is also gives an indication of the importance of efficiency to the producers and their regulators.

A residential smart meter might cost $400, or about $0.01 cents per square foot (levelized over 15 years equipment life), while nonresidential building management systems might cost up to $0.05 per square foot, levelized. The hardware is only about half of the cost of supporting a largescale smart metering effort, which might cost billions of dollars -- and some feel that these costs are usually underestimated.

While we don't have a lot of experience with the demand response result of smart meters in the residential sector, analysis from Pacific Gas & Electric suggests that there is a net economic benefit, even to the utility. In the nonresidential sector, conversations with various analysts suggests that measurement-induced savings range from 10 percent to 15 percent of costs, stemming from the ability to schedule loads for less expensive time periods and identifying and correcting energy waste. Wireless systems like those from ArchRock can be very flexible, monitoring individual circuits as well as get as granular as monitoring the load on an individual plug, though it may not always make sense to get down into the weeds at this level.

As George Ahn notes in his conversation with Yale's Dan Esty this week, soon there should be tens of billions of dollars in green stimulus funds available to states to support smart metering and other energy-saving strategies. As noted above, local energy efficiency finance funds are available now in many states, but they tend to run out before the year is over, so time is not your friend. One can hope that the new joint effort of the USGBC (disclosure: I am a USGBC Board member) and the Clinton Climate Initiative to promote "Climate Positive" cities will help funnel more resources in this direction.

To find an energy saving or renewable energy incentive program that serves you, check out the U.S. DOE-funded DSIRE database at http://www.dsireusa.org/.

So, we're looking at a 30 percent to 50 percent nearly risk-free ROI (not including the potential cost reductions from incentive programs), why aren't more people doing it?

Well . . . this is a management issue. Most of the folks at HQ don't understand this physical stuff, and besides, it's terribly boring compared to 1,000-cell Excel spreadsheet models. Naturally, in the full spirit of "no good deed goes unpunished," every time an energy manager saves operating costs s/he's rewarded with a budget cut, and maybe a pat on the back.

Maybe if we used intelligent accounting that capitalized green building investments instead of expensed them and the hardworking folks in the boiler room actually got to keep some of the savings they generated (I mean they, themselves, not just the overall budget), we might actually see some real green stimulus that makes both dollars and sense.

MOUNTAIN VIEW and SAN DIEGO, Calif. -- Eight utilities in the U.S., Canada and India are teaming up with Google in smart meter projects that will enable customers to monitor their energy use online and better manage their power consumption, the Internet giant announced.

In Southern California, San Diego Gas & Electric is among the first of the utilities to launch its program -- a $572 million effort that will bring smart meters and access to the Google PowerMeter gadget to the energy company's 1.4 million residential and business customers by 2011.

"We see the smart meter as being one of the key components of a smart grid," SDG&E Director of Innovations Alex Kim told GreenBiz.com today.

An SDG&E Smart Meter

The news from Google and SDG&E comes within days of the announcement by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke of developments in efforts to establish a nationwide smart electric power grid that will enable users and energy suppliers to connect directly through two-way, real-time communication technology.

Following a meeting of industry leaders at the White House, Chu and Locke detailed the first set of standards that are needed for interoperability and security of the smart grid. They also said the Energy Department is providing $10 million in Recovery Act funds to the National Institute of Standards and Technology for the development of such standards.

In addition, Chu said the Obama administration is raising the maximum award available in Recovery Act funds for the Smart Grid Investment Grant Program to $200 million from the original $20 million. The maximum grant for Smart Grid Demonstration Projects will increase to $100 million; it had been $40 million.

Google, which wants to organize energy consumption information around the world and make it available online, has been a strong advocate for a smart grid in the U.S.

Google PowerMeter Gadget

"We've been participating in the dialogue in Washington, DC and with public agencies in the U.S. and other parts of the world to advocate for investment in the building of a 'smart grid,' to bring our 1950s-era electricity grid into the digital age," Google's Ed Lu wrote in the company's blog in February. Lu detailed the Google partnership with the eight utilities in his blog Tuesday night.

In addition to SDG&E, the energy companies partnering with Google are TXU Energy in Texas, JEA in Florida, Reliance Energy in India, the Wisconsin Public Service Corporation, White River Valley Electric Cooperative in Missouri, Toronto Hydro–Electric System Limited in Canada and Glasgow EPB in Kentucky.

Itron, a tech firm specializing in metering devices and software, is working Google to make smart meters for the initiative.

SDG&E began installing its first batch of Itron smart meters -- some 200,000 -- in March.  As of today those participating in the pilot are able to go online to see how much energy their properties consumed the day before.

The Google PowerMeter includes a that graph displays energy use hour by hour, and the users can view consumption totals day to day, across a week or more. The information displays in box that sits on a user's personalized iGoogle homepage.

The smart meter program provides "customers greater choice, convenience and control of their energy consumption," SDG&E's Kim said.

The utility said its research has shown that customers typically cut their energy consumption by at least 5 percent to 10 percent when they know how much they are using. The idea, Kim said, is to help people manage their energy consumption, reduce their costs and become more energy efficient.

SDG&E's testing program is expected to run through June. The broader installation project is expected to be complete by the end of 2011.

In April, Miami Mayor Manny Diaz rolled the $200 million "Energy Smart Miami" smart grid project -- a partnership with General Electric, Cisco Systems, Florida Power & Light and Silver Spring Networks.

Deploying smart meters in every home and most businesses in Miami-Dade County is a key component of the project to overhaul the city's electrical grid. Other elements include installing solar power systems at several schools and universities and adding 300 plug-in hybrid vehicles to the city's fleet. The pilot for the ambitious initiative is to bring home energy use dashboards, smart appliances and smart-meter thermostats to 1,000 utility customers.

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has released the newest version of LEED (v3.0) in an attempt to address longstanding concerns over technical details and the arduous review and certification process.  

LEED certification has often been criticized for its confusing documentation requirements and lengthy project reviews. Some critics have suggested the consensus process used to develop the system is not backed by hard science. 

Nonetheless, in the last 11 years LEED certification has been widely accepted as a standard measure for sustainable buildings. The USGBC has approved a total 21,000 projects, representing over 5 billion sq feet of construction, and LEED certification requirements have found their way into municipal building codes and government regulations. 

LEED 2009 has made several adjustments to multiple areas of concern that should serve to improve the building rating system, the online monitoring an updating tool, as well as the certification and administration process. 

LEED Rating Systems 

Previously, individual rating systems each had their own point totals. For example LEED for Commercial Interiors could earn 57 points in total while LEED for New Schools could earn a maximum of 79 points. 

In the new system, uniform certification sets a threshold across all the rating systems and introduces new standards based on a 100-point scale. Forty points is the lowest level for certification, while 80 points, or platinum certification, is the highest level an individual building project can achieve. 

To achieve 100 points, or more, projects must focus on regional development and other innovations that extend beyond one particular building. For example, a project in New York State could earn extra points for preserving agricultural land, reducing light pollution, and minimizing storm-water runoff. 

The larger aim of the new system is to provide incentives for new projects that deploy strategies with greater potential for environmental or human-health-related benefits. Projects that focus on GHG reduction, and water and energy use earn the most credit. 

Strategies intended to increase energy efficiency and the reliance on renewable power generated on site can earn up to 26 points (up from 13 in the old system). Locations close to public transit can earn up to 6 points (up from 1)  and ambitious water conservation schemes can gain up to 10 points (up from 5). 

It is now a requirement for basic certification to reduce indoor water consumption by 20% above and beyond core-compliant buildings. In order to earn points in this category projects must achieve at least a 30% reduction in water usage. 

Monitoring and Updating

The USGBC invested several million dollars to revamp LEED Online, the automated monitoring system used to collect post-occupancy water and energy use information for each building. The system is also used to facilitate communication between the LEED reviewer and the project team to hasten the review and certification process. 

Such an upgrade was needed when In March of 2008, in cooperation with the New Buildings institute (NBI), the USGBC underwent an extensive survey project to assess the standards of LEED certified buildings. Large variations were noted among individual buildings with 25 per cent of projects being better then expected while 21% were below baseline. 

Certification and Accreditation

USGBC has moved the administration of certification and Accredited Professional (AP) programs to the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI), a non-profit organization spun off from the USGBC in late 2007. For certification GCBI manages 10 organizations, including Underwriter Laboratories (UL) and Lloyd’s Register Quality Assurance (LRQA) which oversees the quality review process. 

The LEED AP program modifications now include a three tiered system of credentials, with lowest tier being a LEED Green Associate. For those that want to demonstrate a commitment to green building but not work directly on LEED projects. For example, lawyers involved in real estate development deals must take a "core concept and key points" exam, and 15 hours of education review twice a year. 

The LEED AP Speciality tracks corresponds to the various LEED rating systems (Homes, Building and Design, Interiors, Neighbourhoods, etc.) and requires both a core concepts exam and one based upon the particular specialization. It also requires demonstration of LEED project experience and 30 hours of education twice a year. 

Looking beyond 2009, those seeking to become a LEED Fellow, the top tier, will require an "elite" level of LEED expertise. LEED Fellows would become part of an extraordinary class of leading professionals distinguished by their years of experience and contributions to the standards of practice and body of knowledge for achieving continuous improvement in the green building field. This credential is still under development.

Early this year, a newspaper story made the rounds when, after extrapolating from some energy use estimates made by an academic, it claimed that two searches on Google would burn enough energy to heat water for a cup of tea. The researcher behind the report eventually disavowed the newspaper's extrapolations but, by then, Google had already felt compelled to defend its energy efficiency in a blog post. Not content to let matters rest there, however, Google is back with a new set of figures, comparing searching using its servers to everything from a glass of orange juice to a cheeseburger. All of that may make the company feel better, but it misses the fundamental point: these sorts of figures are fundamentally misleading.

To be fair, just about anything with an environmental component these days announces some sort of comparison figure. The goal is fairly obvious: the public isn't accustomed to thinking in terms of kilowatt-hours or megajoules, so putting these numbers into a form that's more familiar will help efficiency figures resonate. These days, it's difficult to read about a large-scale project in, say, renewable energy generation that doesn't include figures on the number of houses it can power or the car-equivalents that are taken off the road.

And, for these large-scale projects, those numbers are pretty reasonable. You know how much power is coming out, and you know what an average home's electric use is, so it's easy to perform the calculation. Obviously, the numbers would be different if only Hummers or Priuses were being taken off the road, but, when the figure is in the tens of thousands, it's safe to expect that everyone recognizes it will involve a mix of typical car types.

Where things have the potential to go seriously awry, as we noted in our initial coverage of the issue, is when really small numbers and multiple rounds of estimation wind up getting used. Even a small error or a difference in significant figures has the opportunity to expand in magnitude as it works its way through the calculations. For Google's own numbers, which peg a search at about a kilojoule, we can't even examine the assumptions and errors, since they're simply based on what the engineers told the blogger (Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President of Operations).

On the other side of the equation, one of the examples is a cheeseburger, which clocks in at 15,000 searches. That figure is apparently based on a lifecycle analysis of everything from the beef (which is very energy-intensive) to a few slices of pickle. Needless to say, the potential for errors to creep in at any step is enormous.

The other issue is that, when the comparison winds up being relative to a single item—a load of dishes, or a cheeseburger, among Google's examples—the tendency is to make that comparison with a specific instance of that item. For example, when it comes to the cheeseburger, are we talking gas, electric, or charcoal grills? It matters; a recent study found propane grilling to have a carbon footprint three times smaller than that of charcoal (again, on average). Meanwhile, Google's figures don't even bother with the average usage of a dishwasher—they take the maximum value allowed for the label. But here as well, specifics matter, as this number incorporates the average energy use for heating the water used during the wash, which will vary dramatically depending on how the hot water is supplied.

Unfortunately, Google has decided that these figures are so important, that they've now placed them on the pages devoted to describing how it achieves its energy efficiency. Most of the information in that section is actually useful, in that it provides specific information about how individual aspects of its server farms combine to make them very energy efficient. It's hard to see how fuzzy numbers about the searches per glass of orange juice help get that message across.

Humans have been wired by evolution to respond to the most immediate threats, ones they can hear or smell or see — like the lions approaching our ancestral watering holes in the Serengeti. So in searching for answers as to why society has been so slow to react to one of the greatest threats facing the planet today — global warming — this deeply ingrained instinct is a good place to start. Climate change just doesn’t offer those kinds of sensory signals — at least not yet — and humans have not felt the need to react, according to researchers.

“Danger brings emotional reactions, dread, a feeling of alarm. Evolution has equipped us with that,” says Elke Weber, director of the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University. “The threats we face today are not of that type. They are psychologically removed in space and time. So cognitively, we know something needs to be done about climate change, but we don’t have that emotional alarm bell going off.”

Weber is one of a handful of researchers trying to unravel a glaring contradiction: Even though global temperatures are rising, the Arctic ice cap is melting, scientists are offering increasingly urgent warnings about climate change, and polls show Americans acknowledging that the threat of global warming is real, we’re still not doing very much about the problem.

Scientists are exploring new theories about what affects behavior concerning global warming, such as people’s decisions to give up their SUVs, weatherize their houses, or support tougher environmental legislation. This research has moved beyond the old theory of rational action that predicted we would make logical changes in our behavior if we were given the right information about a problem.

“We make decisions in lots of different ways, even when we are trying to be rational,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, head of the Yale Project on Climate Change. “Humans have two ways of processing information: analytical, and experiential.” The analytic system is logical; the experiential system is based on emotions, past experiences, unconscious memory, stories we have heard, and other immeasurable clues.

“These are parallel processing systems, dance partners always interacting with each other,” Leiserowitz says. So while our rational system may tell us to buy a hybrid car that gets great mileage, we may drive away from the car lot with a muscular pickup because we responded to the ads.

Adding to that problem is the inability to see how our individual decisions will solve a problem created by millions of other individual and institutional acts.

“You don’t see carbon dioxide when you turn on the car,” Leiserowitz says. “You don’t smell it, you don’t taste it, and it’s not poisonous. The experiential system is good at responding to something if I can see it and believe it. That allows us to survive in a more natural world. But we are not good at responding to slow, gradual, incremental effects that we can’t see.”

Changing behavior, then, becomes a complicated process. Leiserowitz, working with the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, recently released research findings showing how complicated the task may be.

Their analysis from an opinion poll of environmental attitudes of 2,164 adults identifies six groups, which they call the “Six Americas.” Those groups react to different messages, to different messengers, and in different ways to information on climate change. Leiserowitz argues that moving society on this issue will require a tailored approach to each.

The most proactive group, which his researchers call the “Alarmed,” represent 18 percent of the public. These are people who believe that the threat of global warming is real and already are doing something in their lives to address climate change. The largest group, the “Concerned,” is 33 percent of the public. They also are convinced global warming is a serious problem, but have not done anything about it and do not seek information to do so.

The “Cautious” at 19 percent, the “Disengaged” at 12 percent, and the “Doubtful” at 11 percent, are by steps increasingly less trustful of scientists, environmentalists, and the mainstream media, more reliant on information from friends or family, and more likely to believe the television weatherman, acquaintances, and religious figures when it comes to climate change. Only 7 percent, “the Dismissive,” flatly disbelieve in human-induced climate change and actively work against global warming measures. This group reads newspapers at half the national average and gets its news from commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly.

The breakdown suggests that getting action on climate change will require more than dire stories in the media. Some groups will be more receptive to the same message delivered by Pat Robertson — or the corner barber — than from Al Gore. Some groups will be willing listeners, while others will need the message to be hammered home again and again.

Leiserowitz says the sizeable percentage of those who believe in climate change, whether they have acted or not, should encourage environmentalists. “I don’t think most policy makers realize how much consensus there is” on global warming, he says. “It’s latent, sitting there, waiting to be mobilized.”

More worrisome is the politicization of the issue. In another large-scale study on public attitudes, Barry Rabe — a political scientist and professor of environmental policy at University of Michigan who worked with the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia — found that 83 percent of Democrats believe global warming is happening, while only 53 percent of Republicans do so.

“That really did surprise us,” Rabe said. “No matter how you asked the questions, there wasn’t much diversity by state, age, income, gender. The one that jumped out time after time was partisan affiliation.”

Rabe, like Leiserowitz, believes that support for action on climate change is greater than many politicians believe and that politicians have been needlessly timid about calling on the public to make sacrifices to slow global warming. For example, rather than make a case to Americans for tough action — including a modest carbon tax — Congress seems intent on watering down carbon cap-and-trade legislation to make it “politically palatable,” he says. And despite a desperate need in many states for revenue, “they won’t use the ‘T’ word” and raise gasoline taxes that would generate funds and cut driving, Rabe notes.

“Most of what has been enacted is really not asking much in the way of behavioral changes, or would cost (people) much,” he says. While many state leaders have moved more aggressively, national leaders have been “timid, in the sense of not really pushing Americans to confront the complexity of all of this and the possible transitions that may have to be made.”

For example, he asks, “At what point can we speak with more transparency about the whole question of energy transformation? For any political leader who really wants to take the lead on the issue, there is tremendous reluctance to be very specific about price ramifications.”

Some of Barack Obama’s top appointees, such as Energy Secretary Steven Chu and economic advisor Lawrence Summers, have written about the need for carbon pricing, but have not pushed it aggressively in Washington, Rabe notes. Even good ideas such as basing car insurance or state vehicle registration fees on miles driven gets few advocates willing to espouse a sensible — yet unpopular — idea.

Anthony Patt, who studies decision-making and environmental policy at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, believes our language has not been specific enough. Too much information is indistinct and vague about solutions, he says. He has worked to change environmental policies in developing countries where there are too few information sources. But the same lessons apply to developed countries with an information overload, he says.

“The information is not in a form that people quite trust, or understand, or maybe they see contradictory information,” he says. In Africa, for example, farmers need to know what irrigation practices would help conserve water. In Europe, however, the problem is “an inability to find the right information. It was confusing for people to decide if it’s even worth their time to worry about global warming.”

Patt contends that changes in behavior come when people are given information about exactly what they can do to fix the problem. He suggests, for example, creating the energy equivalent of the agricultural extension service, which could advise consumers and businesses on practical ways to save energy, just as the agriculture service advises farmers on the best way to grow crops. Putting a price on the carbon consequences of our choices also makes those decisions much clearer, he says.

And “the message has to come clearly from a source that has moral authority,” says Columbia’s Weber. “In Europe, that might be the Green Party, for example. Here, it could be political leadership, or it could be cultural. It could be evangelical churches, reminding their congregants that as Christians, they have a stewardship of the earth. What would Jesus drive? Turns out it’s not an SUV.”

Weber believes that our behavior toward the environment may well change as a result of messages from a multitude of sources. In addition to following personal motivations, she says, individuals adapt their choices to the rules and norms of society. People are affected by what their neighbors drive, what their family thinks, what a television personality says about global warming, advertising, the attitudes of other communities and groups, and, of course, what laws are passed.

“After awhile, these things add up, and changes happen incrementally,” Weber says. “In the last ten years we have seen tremendous changes in attitude toward climate change. By changing attitudes, I think we will see changes in how people react.”

But that will require overcoming some very basic impulses, she acknowledges.

“People are very unwilling to sacrifice,” she says. They base many decisions on the immediate cost. “It hurts us a lot to give up whatever we think we are due, such as our standard of living,” Weber notes. Or, she says, we decide based on emotion: “If something feels good, like impulse shopping, we do it. Emotions are a strong motivator. And technical risks like climate change don’t trigger those emotions.”

Still, Weber believes that a consistent message about a genuine threat — coupled with social pressure and the right economic carrots and sticks — can eventually change people’s behavior.

“Society,” says Weber, “is a way of overcoming the 2-year-olds in all of us.”

POSTED ON 28 May 2009 IN Climate Policy & Politics North America 

Urine, feces, menstrual blood, hair, fingernails, vomit, dead skin cells. Industrial chemicals, pharmaceuticals, soaps, shampoos, solvents, pesticides, household cleansers, hospital waste.

Sewage sludge, the viscous brown gunk left over when wastewater is treated, is more than just poop: it’s an odiferous smoothie of everything we pour down the drain. There are pathogens; there are heavy metals. PCBs, dioxins, DDT, asbestos, polio, parasitic worms, radioactive material—all have been found in sludge. Despite pretreatment programs that prevent some of the most noxious stuff from entering the public sewers, sludge can include so many toxins that the Clean Water Act lists it as a “pollutant.”  

So it’s a little surprising where it ends up: Today more than half of America’s sewage sludge is spread on land as fertilizer.

Granted, this isn’t a new idea. For most of human history, our crap has ended up back on land—and it wasn’t until the past century, which brought flush toilets and public sewers to mainstream America, that using excrement as fertilizer started sounding at all strange. Sure, this system was driven partially by convenience, but it also made ecological sense: our urine and feces contain the same nutrients that plants need. Spreading it on land closes the nutrient loop; it avoids the need for chemical fertilizers. Eat, shit, fertilize, and eat again. For thousands of years, this arrangement worked just fine.

Or, rather, almost fine. As human populations grew and concentrated, health problems like cholera outbreaks inspired a push for flush toilets and public sewer systems. This led to huge improvements in public health, but resulted in a new problem: sewers mixed domestic sewage with industrial waste and spewed it untreated into rivers and lakes. The next step was sewage treatment plants, which separated liquids from solids, but in solving one issue they created yet another: the cleaner they made the water, the dirtier the leftover sludge. Adding to the challenge, as the population of the United States grew, so did the amount of sludge: we’re currently generating more than 7 million dry tons a year and counting—and we have no intention of cutting back.

Meanwhile, as a mycelium of sewer pipes spreads underneath our cities to whisk our waste away from us, Americans became increasingly squeamish about dealing with excrement. We’re now a nation of “fecaphobes,” obsessed with toilet humor but unaware and uninterested in what happens to our actual crap. We don’t want to think about it; we don’t want to deal with it. We want to flush the toilet and forget.

**

Sludge from Los Angeles is dumped at Green Acres, a Los Angeles-owned farm in Kern County, California.Courtesy Bakersfield Californian

The Office of Water doesn’t have the privilege of forgetting about sludge—it’s the Environmental Protection Agency department responsible for dealing with America’s sewage. In the 1990s its job got even harder: sewers and wastewater treatment facilities mandated by the 1972 Clean Water Act more than doubled the amount of sludge America produced each year, and the 1988 Ocean Dumping Act eliminated the option of getting rid of it at sea. The OW had been encouraging land application on a limited scale since the 1970s.  Now, faced with limited options and a never-ending supply, it evaluated its remaining possibilities—landfilling, incineration, or land application—and settled on the cheapest option available: promoting sludge as fertilizer.

To make this palatable to the American people—or, at least, to prevent them from thinking about it too hard—the word “sludge” had to go. So the sewage industry’s main trade and lobbying organization, the Water Environment Federation, stepped in. (WEF and OW often work closely together.) It organized a “Name Change Taskforce” and sponsored a contest to come up with a different term for sludge. Rebranding was an area in which WEF had experience—originally founded in 1928 as the brown-sounding “Federation of Sewage Works Associations,” it had recently gone through its fourth name change, and had begun referring to its members, who included sewage plant operators and waste management corporations, as “water quality professionals.”

The renaming contest received over 250 entries, many of which suggested that even water quality professionals still enjoy a good poop joke. Submissions included “bioslurp,” “black gold,” “sca-doo,” “hu-doo,” “geoslime,” and “the end product”; one person proposed rebranding sludge as “R.O.S.E.” (“Recycling Of Solids Environmentally”). Critics asked whether a rose by any other name would still smell as bad, and in 1991 WEF settled on “biosolids,” a term that Sheldon Rampton, co-author of Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, suggests “must have been chosen precisely because it evokes absolutely nothing in the minds of people who hear it.”

Of course, from the wastewater treatment industry’s perspective, that was the point: they didn’t want any visuals. Armed with an empty word, their next goal was to make “biosolid” suggest something positive. So in 1992, OW and WEF joined in a “cooperative agreement” called the Biosolids National Public Acceptance Campaign and hired a public relations and lobbying firm called Powell Tate to produce a report on how to improve the public image of sludge.

The resulting campaign—“Biosolids 2000”—didn’t answer important questions, like why people living near biosolids application sites complained of health problems, or why current federal legislation still permits every business, institution and industry in the country to dump 15 kilograms (33 pounds) of untreated hazardous waste into the sewer system each month, no reporting required. It also failed to prevent 2000 and 2002 reports from EPA’s own Office of Inspector General from stating that “EPA cannot assure the public that current land application practices are protective of human health and the environment.”

And yet partially because of OW and WEF’s PR efforts, partially because of our willful ignorance, the effort to rebrand sludge as biosolids has largely been successful. Although some is still incinerated or buried in landfills, today more than 50 percent of America’s sewage sludge is spread on land.

***

Biosolid digesters at the Hyperion Treatment Plant in Los Angeles.Courtesy Brian Raimondi

Diane Gilbert, a spokesperson for biosolids at the Hyperion Wastewater Treatment Plant in Los Angeles, is a water quality professional of the sort endorsed by the Powell Tate report. Her enthusiasm seems genuine, but like other biosolids spokespeople I interviewed, she is also a master at following the guidelines articulated in biosolids media training guides. [Sample tip: “If the reporter asks rapid fire (multiple questions), choose the easiest.”]

Enthusiastic and bubbly, Gilbert grew up in Louisiana and has been at Hyperion since 1987. But Gilbert’s involvement with sewage sludge started even earlier; with a father who worked at a wastewater treatment plant and used sludge to fertilize the family’s garden, she considers herself a poster child for land application. “I’ve been eating food fertilized with biosolids for as long as I can remember,” she told me, after I’d returned from a tour of the plant. (Tip: “Encourage the reporter to meet you at a working location.”) “So if anyone should be affected by biosolids, it should clearly be me.”

I’d come to Hyperion because I wanted to learn more about this mysterious brown substance—how it was made, how it was monitored, and how worried we should be. Eager to dispel my concerns about land application, Gilbert had originally wanted to take me to Green Acres, the 5,000-acre city-owned farm just outside of Bakersfield, where Los Angeles ships most of its treated sludge to grow various grass crops to be fed to dairy cows. (Tip: “Location visuals help enhance and give credibility to your message.”)

Unfortunately, lawyers got in the way. Green Acres is in Kern County, and residents there don’t like the idea of being the recipients of Los Angeles’ crap. So, like an increasing number of communities across America, Kern County passed a ban on the land application of sewage sludge. Los Angeles responded by suing the county, and since the lawsuit is still pending, lawyers have gotten cagey about letting reporters visit the farm.

Instead Gilbert and I grabbed sandwiches and headed for a darkened conference room at Hyperion, where Gilbert popped in a promotional movie about Green Acres. With a synthesized soundtrack reminiscent of the theme song for Doogie Howser, M.D., the movie opened with a picture of a field of wheat, its title superimposed in yellow bubbly script.

“Imagine turning arid soil that can only grow tumbleweeds and sage brush into nutrient-rich soil that can grow crops for livestock,” said a male narrator, blessed with the voice of a 1950s public service announcer. “Imagine doing this without saturating the soil with chemicals.”

He continued, smoothly substituting euphemisms for That Which Must Not Be Named: “Now imagine tons of treated primarily organic material from wastewater treatment plants being used to change the soil through its own nitrogen, phosphate, phosphorous and other natural ingredients.”

The movie was titled, appropriately enough, “Imagine.” But instead of being a paean for peace, it invited me to imagine a world in which all of our “beneficial,” “nutrient-rich” biosolids were put to use as fertilizer—and followed a script that could have come directly from the Powell Tate report. I took a bite of my sandwich as the narrator dispelled concerns about using sewage sludge as a soil amendment. “There will always be skeptics who question the use of biosolids,” he announced, “just like there were skeptics who didn’t believe that people could fly—until the Wright Brothers proved them wrong.”

***

Among many others, these skeptics include two unrelated Georgia dairy farmers, Andy McElmurray and Bill Boyce. Starting in 1979 and 1986 respectively, both began using free sludge as fertilizer on their farms, a practice the city of Augusta assured them was safe. But starting in the 1990s, problems arose: hundreds of the men’s cows died, McElmurray discovered his land was contaminated with aluminum, which he attributed to the sludge, and a 1999 test found that milk from some of Boyce’s surviving cows contained thallium—an element once used as rat poison—at 120 times the concentration EPA allows in drinking water.

Both farmers filed lawsuits against the city and in March 2008, U.S. District Judge Anthony Alaimo issued a 45-page ruling on one of McElmurray’s lawsuits that found that “senior EPA officials took extraordinary steps to quash scientific dissent, and any questioning of the EPA’s biosolids program.”

And that’s just the cows. Today, 16 years after the official federal sludge rules came into effect in 1993, EPA still doesn’t have a system in place to monitor or investigate sludge-related health complaints. But in 2002, a team of researchers produced the first peer-reviewed article (whose findings were recently backed up in a separate study) to both document health complaints from people who’d been exposed to sludge and explain how this exposure might have made them sick.

The long list of health problems reported by the study’s 48 participants includes asthma, fevers, nausea, vomiting, skin rashes, coughs, burning eyes and throats, sinusitis, and diarrhea. Two subjects died from Staphylococcus aureus infections acquired shortly after being exposed to freshly applied biosolids. (Interestingly, while EPA’s Office of Water—the department responsible for writing the sludge rules—denies that these deaths were at all connected to biosolids exposure, EPA’s office of Research and Development approved the paper for publication and supported its conclusions.) When the researchers compared their subjects’ rate of staph infections to that of hospital patients, considered “a recognized risk group for S. Aureus,” the infection rate of the study’s subjects was approximately 25 times higher.

According to EPA paperwork, the lead author of this study, David Lewis, Ph.D., resigned from EPA in 2003.  Lewis, however, says he was essentially fired for speaking out on sludge—and his former lab director backs him up. She wrote in a 2008 statement that Lewis’s termination was “involuntary” and that Lewis “was an excellent researcher and an asset to EPA science.”

Motivated by stories like these, several passionate groups—like Citizens for Sludge-Free Land, Sludge Victims and Riles (Resource Institute for Low Entropy Systems)—have dedicated themselves to fighting the land application of sludge. They run websites; they lobby politicians to try to change the rules. But as for the rest of Americans, the subject of sludge is still not something we dwell on.

Unfortunately, as arguments and lawsuits against land application pile up—not to mention the sludge itself—our days of blissful ignorance might be limited. I’d come to Hyperion not just because it had occurred to me that we should be thinking about what happens to our sewage, but because I could see a day in the not-so-distant future when we’d be forced to.

Given the inconsistency and toxicity of the ingredients in sludge, the loopholes in its regulations and the mounting criticisms against its use, I kept reaching the same conclusion: despite the Office of Water’s insistence on the safety of spreading sludge on land, we should be looking for alternatives. The United States will never stop producing shit. But there must be a better way to deal with it.

“We’re trying to get the pieces bigger—ideally the size of pencil erasers,” said John “Rus” Miller, handing me a plastic packet of a brown, dry, crumbly material with the texture of couscous and the odor of manure. That’s because it was manure—in the form of dried sewage sludge. To me, it looked and smelled like shit. But when Miller looked at the pellets, he saw coal.

I was visiting a company named Enertech‘s plant in Rialto, California, because I was searching for alternatives for what we currently do with sludge—the dark brown, complex material that’s left over after wastewater is treated. Referred to as “biosolids” by the sewage industry, more than half of America’s sludge is applied to land as a soil amendment or fertilizer. However, since sludge also contains thousands of chemicals, pharmaceuticals residues, and other toxic materials that get dumped into our sewers, many call this more of a problem than a solution.

But what if we could use sludge as energy? In addition to undigested food, it contains woody material from toilet paper and billions of microorganisms from our digestive tracts and the plants where sludge is treated, all of which contain carbon. Sewage treatment plants have captured methane from their sludge for years, which can either be sold or used to run the plant—but those systems only partially reduce the volume of the sludge that’s left over. So far there’s no widespread method to create energy and get rid of the sludge at the same time.

You’d think this wouldn’t be the case. Back in 1873, before most American cities had sewer systems to begin with, Scientific American commented that “(i)t is no exaggeration that the problem of the conversion of the excremental waste of towns and people and the refuse of factories into useful materials is now engaging as much of the attention of intelligent minds throughout the world as any social question.”

Other social questions trumped sewage, though, and it’s only been recently that the cost and controversy of our current methods has inspired a new generation of intelligent minds to look for alternative solutions. Some of these, while exciting, are still embryonic, like fuel cells that use sewage-eating microbes to produce electricity, closed-loop incinerators that run off of sludge and waste oils, biofuel made from sewage-fed algae, or methods that gasify sludge into liquid fuel. But a handful of promising alternatives are already in use. One of them is SlurryCarb^TM.

Enertech’s plant in Rialto, California, is producing a biofuel from processed sludge.Courtesy Enertech

The theory behind SlurryCarb is not particulary complicated: take sludge, dry it into pellets, then burn it as a carbon-neutral replacement for coal. And in fact, when I first saw Enertech’s Rialto Plant, I wasn’t particularly impressed. Flanked by a sewage treatment facility and a cement manufacturer, it blends in perfectly with its industrial surroundings. Large silos of sludge feed into an outdoor network of metal pipes; eventually, the sludge goes through a centrifuge and heat dryer and comes out as pellets on the other end.

But while the idea of burning sludge is simple, there’s a big problem: when it arrives from the wastewater treatment plant, sludge is really, really wet. Treated sludge looks like clumpy dirt but it’s actually 70 to 85 percent water, much of which has to be removed before the sludge will burn. Adding to the challenge, a lot of the liquid in sludge is locked within its cell walls. Releasing that trapped liquid takes so much energy that although plants have been pelletizing sludge for years (usually to use as fertilizer), there’s a net energy loss.

That’s where Enertech is different. Unlike a traditional heat-drying plant that uses evaporation to get rid of water—which requires a lot of energy—Enertech pressurizes its sludge so that it never boils. Then it uses controlled heat to break down the sludge’s cell walls and force them to release their water. Enertech’s overall process uses less than half as much natural gas as a traditional drying plant and produces what the company claims is a net energy gain of approximately 95 percent. Granted, that gain doesn’t take into account the energy the wastewater treatment plant used to dewater the sludge before it got to Enertech. But the system works well for Enertech’s balance sheets: not only do the treatment plants take care of some of the drying beforehand, but they have to pay Enertech a tipping fee for every ton of sludge that it accepts.

At full capacity, Enertech hopes that its Rialto plant will produce 200 dry tons of SlurryCarb per day, which prompts the obvious question of what they’re going to do with it—in most markets, dried shit doesn’t go for much. Luckily for Enertech, the answer is right next door:  cement plants. Making cement produces a lot of carbon dioxide, and most cement plants run on coal—and ever tightening regulations make cement plants eager to find substitutes for the coal in their kilns. SlurryCarb, which is cheaper and has about half of the BTUs of bituminous coal, is exactly that. (It’s also a hell of a lot easier to extract.)  Even better, sludge’s leftover ash contains silica, another ingredient in cement, and can be incorporated directly into the cement mixture. Cement plants therefore don’t just reduce the volume of the sludge by burning SlurryCarb—they make it disappear.

So far, Enertech has contracts with two cement companies in Southern California, and is in talks with five more. Its technique has also attracted foreign attention: the Masdar Clean Tech Fund is considering hiring Enertech to handle the biosolids produced by Masdar, a planned development in Abu Dhabi for 50,000 people that aims to be the world’s first carbon-neutral city. Back home, Miller says he’s spoken with sewage agencies in most of America’s major cities, who are watching the Rialto plant with interest. If it’s a success, Enertech hopes the SlurryCarb process might become a common way for sewage treatment plants to dispose of sludge.

“But what if you eventually produce so much that the SlurryCarb gets used in places besides cement plants?” I asked Miller when he explained that SlurryCarb could be used in other industries as a substitute for low-grade coal. “What would you do with all the ash?”

“That,” he said, “would require some pretty creative thinking.”

Which brings me to a different plastic bag. This one’s black, tucked into a shelf in my living room, and contains a collection of sewage-related products that I’ve picked up in the course of my reporting. Most can be clearly traced back to sludge—a sample of SlurryCarb-like pellets from a different plant, for example, or a pouch of compost made from sludge and wood chips in an enormous building that used to be an Ikea warehouse. But one of my sewage souvenirs looks like it doesn’t belong: a jar, about the size of a pill bottle, containing tiny black chips the size and shape of a crumbled Oreo cookie. They don’t look or smell like they came from sludge—in fact, they don’t have a smell at all. The chips are glass aggregate, the sparkly material commonly seen on roofing shingles.

Minergy subjects sludge to extremely high temperatures to produce a glass aggregate used in a variety of construction materials.Barb Scheiber

The glass came from a company named Minergy, whose technology is currently being used in a plant at the North Shore Sanitary District in Illinois that won a 2008 Global Grand Project Innovation Award from the International Water Association. Instead of selling dried sludge as fuel, Minergy’s technology uses it as energy for its own process: it combusts pre-dried sludge to create temperatures so high—roughly 2400 to 2700 degrees Fahrenheit—that the minerals that would usually be left over as ash melt into molten glass. When this hot liquid is put into cold water, it shatters, creating the tiny black chips in my jar. It’s as if the sludge consumed itself, avoiding the problem of residual ash by never making it to begin with. The resulting aggregate can be used in shingles, asphalt, concrete, ceramic tiles, sandblasting grit, and a variety of other construction materials.

It’s exciting stuff, but the North Shore Sanitary District has run into a very mundane problem: human hair. Flushed down shower drains, incorporated into sludge, hair (and other similarly stringy objects) clogged NSSD’s machinery, which has been temporarily shut down as its operators work on a solution.

That’s the thing about sludge, though—it has tremendous potential for reuse, but a lot of dirty details.  To find out how the various technologies stack up, I called James Smith, a senior environmental engineer who’s been at EPA for more than 40 years and has played an important role in shaping biosolids regulations. He said that the “world is watching the outcome of the SlurryCarb start-up,” and he was especially positive about a technology called the Cannibal process, which can reduce the volume of sludge produced by up to 80 percent, partially by getting different types of microbes in the sludge to eat each other. But as for the bigger question of the future of sludge?

“It depends on whose Ouija board you have,” Smith said. “I think what we’re all hoping for is [a process that leaves] very few residuals to deal with, and for whatever we do have to deal with to be the highest quality possible.”

Unfortunately, regardless of which processes emerge, all these alchemies are likely to come with a catch. The solids in wastewater are so diluted that they need to be dried before their energy is recovered, which requires a lot of energy itself. Even worse, while these technologies might prevent toxic chemicals from seeping into farmland, they also prevent nutrients from returning to the soil—a deficit that brings increased use of synthetic fertilizers and their accompanying host of problems. An ideal solution would do one without the other, nourishing the dirt without contaminating it. But until we figure out how to better segregate our waste streams, even the best new techniques will still suffer from this critical, unavoidable flaw.

Laura Allen, a 33-year-old teacher from Oakland, California, has a famous toilet. To be honest, it’s actually a box, covered in decorative ceramic tiles, sitting on the cement floor of her bathroom like a throne. No pipes lead to or from it; instead, a bucket full of shavings from a local wood shop rests on the box next to the seat with a note instructing users to add a scoopful after making their “deposit.” Essentially an indoor outhouse, it’s a composting toilet, a sewerless system that Allen uses to collect her household’s excrement and transform it into a rich brown material known to fans as “humanure.”

Laura Allen’s famous composting toilet.Courtesy Nicolas Boullosa via Flickr

Allen is a founding member of an activist group devoted to the end of sewage as we know it. Her toilet recently made an appearance in the Los Angeles Times—which might explain why she didn’t seem surprised when I emailed her out of the blue to ask if I could use it.

Lifting the seat, she showed me a seal of insulating foam tape she’d put around its edges to prevent odors from wafting into the bathroom and then pointed out a funnel-like contraption hanging from the front of the toilet that diverted urine away from crap. The separated waste collected in two containers sitting several feet below the toilet seat, accessible through a hatch cut into the side of the house: the urine flowed into a plastic jug formerly used for olive oil, the feces into a bucket labeled “feta cheese.”  A year from now, once it’s composted, Allen and her roommates will use this excrement to fertilize their fruit trees.

To most Americans, Allen’s system would seem eccentric, if not downright weird. But while feta cheese buckets are relatively new creations, humans have used shit as fertilizer since the dawn of agriculture—the nitrogen in our urine is an excellent fertilizer, and feces, itself nutrient-rich, is a great soil amendment. It wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century that water-based sewer systems became commonplace in the United States; after that, “sewer farms,” where crops were irrigated with untreated wastewater, were commonplace. Even today, the majority of the world’s population doesn’t have access to flush toilets, making us the anomaly, rather than the norm.

As public health advocates will be quick to point out, the switch to sewers helps protects us from sewage borne diseases. But it also breaks the nutrient cycle: instead of returning nutrients to the land from where they came, we now reclassify excrement as waste and use chemical fertilizers to replace it. From an agricultural standpoint, the crazy thing isn’t the idea of using our crap as fertilizer. It’s how far we’ve strayed.

With this in mind, the idea behind our current system would seem to make sense: more than half of America’s sewage sludge is applied to land. But there’s a crucial difference between humanure and modern sludge, known in the sewage industry as “biosolids.” Humanure is made from pure human excrement. It can still contain residues from pharmaceuticals that pass through our bodies, but it lacks the industrial chemicals or other contaminants that make sludge so controversial.

Biosolids, on the other hand, can count as ingredients everything that’s dumped into our sewer system, including a mixture of domestic and industrial waste that can include heavy metals, toxic chemicals, and thousands of other pollutants—and its long-term effects on soil are impossible to predict. The main ingredient of biosolids and humanure—feces—might be the same, but when it comes to their potential to contaminate soil, the two materials are fundamentally different.  

It’s difficult to judge what will ultimately have worse consequences for agriculture and human health: spreading the contaminants in modern sewage sludge on soil or diverting sewage’s nutrients away from land. (Both are bad in different ways.) But one thing is certain: creating pure humanure with our current wastewater treatment system would require segregating our waste streams at their sources, which, thanks to the way our sewers are piped, is impossible to do.

Allen left me alone so that I could experience her bathroom firsthand and then took me outside to see the next step in the process. We walked through a small chicken coop to three 55-gallon barrels full of decomposing feces arranged in a row next to the side of the house, each of which would sit for at least a year in order to compost thoroughly. Covered with netting to prevent flies and plastic lids to keep out rain, they didn’t smell.

Laura Allen with a bucket of humanure in her garden at her house in Oakland, Calif.Courtesy Nicolas Boullosa via Flickr

But then Allen reached for a compost auger—a corkscrew-like device with a hand crank that breaks apart the composting material and adds oxygen—and worked it into the compost. The air filled with the strong, unpleasant odor of methane, a byproduct of anaerobic composting. 

“It must have gotten some water into it, that’s why it smells so bad,” Allen said, pulling up the auger and revealing some confused-looking earthworms. She examined the moist brown material clinging to the corkscrew.  “This one’s probably about seven months old.”

Allen and her roommates’ devotion to their toilet is unusual, but they’re far from alone—a small but growing number of Americans is unhooking from septic tanks and sewer systems (or, in some cases, never hooking in) and composting their waste. If you want to get a sense of how excited people can get about the results, check out the website of a man named Joseph Jenkins. A slate-roofing contractor in Pennsylvania who’s been shitting in a bucket since the 1970s, Jenkins and his followers dream of a day where entire cities might compost their excrement, with municipal collection services similar to today’s recycling programs.

To help jumpstart the revolution, Jenkins self-published a guide in 2005 called The Humanure Handbook that features chapter with titles like “Crap Happens” and an illustrated character named “Tommy the Turd.” For his first run, Jenkins could only afford to print 600 copies; he’s now sold more than 33,000, and portions of the handbook have been translated into Spanish, Norweigan, Korean, Hebrew, Mongolian and Chinese.

The challenge these simple systems face, however, is that most Americans don’t like the idea of homemade toilets. We don’t like thinking about our shit, period. So a middle ground has emerged: commercially designed toilets that look what you’re used to, but have composting systems built in.

The BioLet, originally a Swedish design, includes a heater to speed decomposition and aerates its contents with mechanized arms. The Sun-Mar has a built-in crank and a removable tray that catches finished material.  The Ecotech, the American version of a design by a Norweigan company called Vera Miljö, uses a carousel system—sort of like a lazy Susan—to keep batches separate so that new waste doesn’t mix with old. Biolytix, an Australian wastewater treatment system designed to fit into a conventional septic tank, comes pre-seeded with an ecosystem of worms, beetles and microorganisms that filter and break down waste.

Bio-Sun, Envirolet, Aquatron, Equaris, Phoenix—like “biosolids,” they all manage to sound vaguely green while avoiding any allusions to the substance they’re meant to treat. Talk to people who have owned them, though, and there’s no getting around that what you’re dealing with is shit. With a typical toilet, all you need to do is flush; with a composting toilet, everything you produce stays right where you left it—and some of these commercial designs, while tempting, aren’t big enough to handle daily use. (Horror stories abound.)

Joseph Jenkins sells his book online, and he has posted a series of instructional videos about humanure on his YouTube channel (watch one below).Courtesy Jenkins Publishing

Successful composting, while not rocket science, requires attention, devotion and considerable knowledge of the process; far from being an informational brochure, The Humanure Handbook, is 255 pages long. The environmentalist in me wanted to embrace the idea behind Allen’s toilet—really, I did—but when it came to dealing with my own excrement, I was like most Americans: the only time I wanted to look back in the bathroom was to flush.

To find out if there were any way to create a composting toilet that wouldn’t make an average American recoil in disgust, I traveled to Bainbridge Island, a 35-minute ferry ride from Seattle. My destination was IslandWood, an outdoor learning center tucked into 255 wooded acres of a former tree farm that’s home to one of the country’s only large-scale composting toilets. Known as the Clivus Multrum M-15, this particular system can handle up to 36,000 uses per year.

When I reached IslandWood, I was welcomed by Brian Bonifaci, the man responsible for maintaining the Clivus system. Dressed in Carhartt clothing from top to bottom, Bonifaci led me to the basement room where the compost was collected in two large, gray boxes. With sloping floors designed to make it easier to remove finished material, each bin was nearly 10 feet long and over seven feet high, with thick black pipes connecting them to four toilets sitting directly above.

After showing me a trap door where finished compost could be removed, Bonifaci opened a hatch on the upper part of the box so that I could see what was inside: a giant mound of feces, toilet paper, and wood chips. It was level except for an upside down cone that had formed where the most recent deposits had dropped. But even though my face was practically in the box, I couldn’t smell its contents—an exhaust fan was constantly pulling fresh air into the bin and out a vent on the roof so that no odors could leak into the room where I was standing. (The same fan also pulled air down the toilet so the smell couldn’t escape upwards into the bathroom.)

“What do you need to do to maintain this?” I asked Bonifaci.

“I add a bucket of wood chips once a week and rake down the cone when it gets too high,” he said. “That’s about it.”

He explained that the fan helped aerate the pile, eliminating the need to turn the compost, and an automatic moistening system added just enough water to keep the material from getting too dry. Eventually, Bonifaci told me, they’d have to remove some of the compost from the bottom of the pile, but so far they hadn’t had to, despite the fact that they’d installed the toilet in 2002—composting dramatically reduces the volume of waste.

But then again, IslandWood’s facilities weren’t exactly getting their maximum 36,000 uses per year—Bonifaci told me that some campers, fearful about the toilets’ gaping black holes, simply held it till they got to a different building.  So I called Don Mills, the sales director for Clivus Multrum, to find out more about what these systems’ capacities really were.

A metal composting bin that is part of the Clivus Multrum at IslandWood.Catherine Price

Mills, who refuses to use the word “biosolid” unless he can add in a “so-called” before it, has strong opinions on the current way America deals with sewage.

“I’m calling that shit ‘sludge’ until I die,” he announced when I used the word “biosolids” without his preferred modifier. “And I might die from it!”

He then launched into a tirade against land application. But when the subject switched to composting toilets, Mills became cautiously optimistic.

“Look,” he said. “Selling composting toilets is an uphill struggle, partially because of the psychology around shit and also because of regulations.”

But once you sell people on the idea, said Mills, “there’s no capacity limitation with this technology. We can build it for as many people as would need to use any toilet, any place.” If a bathroom is meant to serve more people than a single Clivus Multrum system can handle, you just add more bins or toilets. Clivus Multrum has a system installed at the Bronx Zoo, for example, that’s designed for over 500,000 uses a year.

Mills explained that there are ways to make composting toilets less offensive—Clivus Multrum already has models that use a small amount of foam to “flush” the excrement to a hidden holding tank, which means the toilets don’t have to sit directly over the composting bins and users don’t have to look down onto a giant mound of shit. Less hands-on customers than Bonifaci can also contract Clivus Multrum to maintain the toilets for them. 

“If this were something that were supported by the government,” Mills said, “if the compost toilet was made a requirement, then many things would change.” Toilets would be designed to be even more palatable to non-environmentalists, he said, and large-scale municipal collection systems would evolve to get the compost out of the toilets and onto fields.

Mill is not entirely optimistic—like me, he doubts that composting toilets will become mainstream in America any time soon. Manhattan’s skyscrapers weren’t built with humanure in mind, and as he himself admits, “the dry toilet at IslandWood is not something most homeowners would regard as satisfactory in their dream house.”

But there are plenty of places in the world not yet hooked up to sewer systems—in fact, an estimated 2.6 billion people don’t even have access to toilets. Just as many developing countries adopted cell phones without ever having built the infrastructure for landline phones, poor communities could skip sewer systems and develop an integrated system of composting toilets instead.

In India, where 18 percent of the population lacks toilets, a man named Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of the Sulabh Sanitation Movement, is helping people do just that: he’s developed a line of composting toilets that earned him the prestigious 2009 Stockholm Water Prize. According to the Stockholm Water Institute, the Sulabh Shauchalaya twin pit, pour-flush toilet is being used in more than 1.2 million residences and buildings in India, and its public facilities—spread across 7500 locations—are getting more than 10 million uses per day.

America’s a tougher market. But if composting toilets were inoffensive to use, if someone else were responsible for dealing with the compost—just as right now someone else is responsible for treating our watered-down waste—it’s possible to imagine new buildings and communities that incorporate at least some of the recycling schemes of which the humanurists dream. We probably will never eliminate American sludge entirely, but if we were able to divert even a small portion of our excrement away from the sewer system, treat it for pathogens and turn it into compost, we’d be reducing the amount left to deal with. The best solution for the future, it seems, just might be a modernized version of the past.

Back at IslandWood, I asked Bonifaci if I could try out the facilities, and soon found myself alone in the restroom. Thanks to the fan sucking air into the toilet, the only noticeable odor was a faint aura of lemongrass cleaning products and the lingering scent of lavender soap. Since the Clivus Multrum doesn’t divert urine, when I sat down, I didn’t have to aim. The biggest tangible difference between it and a conventional toilet was the breeze—which, if you’re not expecting it, can be a little surprising. But there was no odor, no wood chips, no worry that in a week or two or three, I’d be responsible for handling the waste I’d just produced.

The experience was remarkably unremarkable. It required so little thought that when I got up, I didn’t even need to turn back to flush.

London, UK -- A UK startup is seeking funds to roll out an innovative plumbing technology that promises to slash the amount of water used by conventional toilets by 84 percent.

The toilet, developed by London-based Phoenix Product Development, features a sealable lid that enables a displaced air-flushing system.

This requires just 1.35 liters of water per flush, compared to the 9.2 liters used by conventional toilets. The system could potentially save the UK 1.85 billion liters of water each day.

Garry Moore, managing director at the company, said the system had been successfully trialed by Greenwich Council and the WRc.

The company has already secured a number of customers and now needs £3 million to fund the commercial roll out of the technology, after a previous backer pulled out due to the financial crisis.

"Greenwich has said it wants to install more of the systems after the trial and we have another trial lined up in Australia," Moore said. "But we can't scale up and begin manufacture without funding."

He said banks were unwilling to provide finance given the current economic climate, while many government investment funds tended to focus on low-carbon technologies, rather than water-saving ones.

Moore added that the system could easily be retrofitted to existing toilets and promised to deliver carbon as well as water savings.

"Three million tonnes of carbon emissions each year come from the water companies, and 12 percent of the water they supply is used by households to flush toilets," he said. "It works out as three grams of CO2 per flush, so saving water also delivers significant carbon savings."

A two-year old Climate Change Market Index developed by HSBC in Britain is getting attention from at least one of the biggest pension fund investors on this side of the pond, signaling to U.S.-based manufacturers that positioning themselves to take advantage of a green economy is a good bet going forward.

Investors will increasingly seek companies making climate change-related products, Kevin Bourne, managing director of equities in HSBC’s global banking and markets unit, told about 100 attendees at the Sustainable Manufacturing Summit in Chicago this week.

“It doesn’t matter if investors believe in climate change or not, they know it’s a good investment category,” he said. “But investors are global and if they can’t find your company, they can’t lend their money to you. The tough question is how to let investors know that you’re involved in climate change.”

As an example, Bourne pointed to a bicycle manufacturer in Asia that was categorized as a leisure company, but saw its revenues grow by 30 percent last year because of sudden increased demand for an electric bike it makes for people who want to reduce their carbon footprint. The company might have been off the radar screen for investors seeking green investments if HSBC hadn't identified it and placed it within the energy efficiency and energy management sector of its climate change index, he explained.  

Kevin Bourne

After Bourne’s formal remarks at the summit, he told me HSBC has just signed on one of the largest U.S. employee pension funds as a new client to gain access to the companies listed on its climate change index. While he wouldn’t name the fund specifically, Bourne said it was among the four largest: either California State Teachers’ Retirement System, California Public Employees Retirement System, State of New York Employees’ Retirement System, or the Florida Retirement System.

“The big pension funds are beginning to invest in climate change and that will inspire more growth in this sector,” Bourne said. Some 1,200 publicly-traded companies based in 38 countries are listed on HSBC’s climate change index, but he estimated there are at least 23,000 privately-owned businesses worldwide engaged in climate change-related goods and services. They are excluded from the listing because it’s difficult to get reliable financial information from private entities, he said.

So what to do if your business isn’t publicly-traded and can’t get a spot on HSBC’s climate change index or other high-profile listing? Such companies should look to local groups, such as their city or region’s chamber of commerce, to promote them, Bourne suggested. He believes it’s also up to the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, as well as state and municipal entities, to get the word out to global investors about U.S.-based companies that are positioned to be winners in the growing worldwide green economy. 

The sector has enjoyed tremendous growth in recent years. Manufacturers of climate change-related products represented about 4 percent of global market capitalization as of last December, according to data compiled by HSBC. That’s up from only 2.5 percent two years ago, Bourne said.

“A lot of that growth is happening because American CEOs decided five years ago to begin investing in this stuff,” he noted. “Many people think Europe is much further along in developing products to mitigate the effects of climate change, but the U.S. has secretly been catching up. The British love to subscribe to conspiracy theories.”

Indeed, U.S. and Canadian companies represent 33 percent of those listed on HSBC's climate change index, up from 23 percent in the last 12 months.

There was much debate at the conference among speakers about whether the green business sector is undergoing a thoughtful, slow-paced evolution or a full-blown, fast-paced revolution.

Anne Kelly, director of governance for Ceres, a Boston-based coalition of investors, environmental organizations and other public interest groups, believes the growth is more evolutionary. She challenged companies to make thoughtful changes and do it right the first time so they don’t mess things up for the next generation.

Howard A. Learner, executive director of Chicago’s Environmental Law & Policy Center and President Barack Obama’s chief climate change advisor during the presidential election campaign, was fervent that a green revolution is underway. “People are either getting on board for the ride or they’re running fast to catch it,” he says. “The pace of change with clean energy development, wind power and other new technologies is all happening very fast.”

HSBC’s Bourne leans toward the argument for a revolution in the climate change business sector. From conversations he has with financiers gaining interest in climate change investments, he believes U.S.-based manufacturers are well positioned to benefit from the funds that will flow into the green economy in the years ahead.

“We work with people who have some of the biggest lumps of cash to invest in the world,” the British banker quipped, “and the U.S. does do revolution well.”

FAIRFIELD, Conn. -- General Electric's revenue for its portfolio of environmentally sensitive products and services grew 21 percent last year and rose to $17 billion, according to the firm's annual ecomagination report.

The 34-page report released today also announced that the GE surpassed a key corporate commitment to environmental responsibility by slashing its operational greenhouse gas intensity -- the ratio of GHG emissions to company revenue -- by 41 percent by the close of 2008.

The GHG intensity reduction target, which had been 30 percent, is the first of three increasingly ambitious environmental goals that were set in 2005 and call for achieving specific performance thresholds in 2008, 2010 and 2012.

GE said it reduced its absolute GHG emissions by 13 percent and energy intensity by 37 percent as of the end of 2008 compared to the baseline year of 2004, which places the firm on course for reaching its 2012 goals.

The report detailed the company's efforts toward the goals in addition to the growth of the ecomagination product and service line and its revenue.

Ecomagination offerings, which range from refrigerators and smart meters for the home to turbines and engines for industries, now include 80 products and services. The number represents a 30 percent increase compared to the portfolio in 2007, the report said.

In addition, the company's 2008 investments in cleantech research and development increased by 27 percent, rising to $1.4 billion, according to the report. By comparison, the GE's cleantech R&D investment was $750 million in 2005.

The company's business and environmental goals for the coming years include:

• Bringing annuals sales of ecomagination products to $25 billion by 2010.
• Investing $1.5 billion annually in ecomagination R&D by 2010.
• Improving energy efficiency by 30 percent by 2012. (GE has already met its 2012 target to cut absolute GHG emissions by 1 percent, the goal it set in 2005.)
• Reducing water consumption by 20 percent by 2012; the company's water use was flat last year.

Several GE ecomagination initiatives have recently made headlines.

Earlier this month, the company outlined plans to open a $100 million state-of-the-art, heavy-duty battery manufacturing plant just north of New York's state capital. Establishment of the facility will effectively centralize research, development and commercialization for GE's new battery business.

In April, Miami Mayor Manny Diaz announced the $200 million "Energy Smart Miami" smart grid project that partners his region with General Electric, Cisco Systems, Florida Power & Light and Silver Spring Networks to deploy smart meters on every home and most businesses in Miami-Dade County.

And in house, GE employee "treasure hunts" for efficiency opportunities that have yielded $110 million in energy savings.

Large municipal or industrial landfills produce gas that can be tapped to generate electricity. Microorganisms that live in organic materials such as food wastes, paper or yard clippings cause these materials to decompose. This produces landfill gas, typically comprised of roughly 60 percent methane and 40 percent carbon dioxide (or "CO2").

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requires all large landfills to install collection systems at landfill sites to minimize the release of methane, a major contributor to global climate change. Though not a renewable resource, landfill gas will be in great supply absent major innovations in solid waste management systems and could supply up to 1 percent of the nation's energy demand.

Landfill gas is collected from landfills by drilling "wells" into the landfills, and collecting the gases through pipes. Once the landfill gas is processed, it can be combined with natural gas to fuel conventional combustion turbines or used to fuel small combustion or combined cycle turbines. Landfill gas may also be used in fuel cell technologies, which use chemical reactions to create electricity, and are much more efficient than combustion turbines.

What are the environmental impacts?

The environmental impacts of landfill gas begin with issues surrounding landfills themselves - land use impacts and surface and groundwater issues. Does reliance on landfills discourage more environmentally preferred waste management substitutes, such as waste reduction, reuse and recycling?

Since the landfill, typically, is sited for other municipal purposes, many of the negative issues associated with landfills themselves are not incorporated in the analysis of landfill gas as a power source.

Use of the gas produced by landfills may reduce the harmful environmental impacts that would otherwise result from landfill operations. Landfill gas electricity generation offers major air quality benefits where landfills already exist or where the decision to build the landfill has already been made.

Landfill gas power plants reduce methane emissions, a global climate change agent with 23 times the negative impact of CO2.

A landfill gas power plant burns a waste - methane --- that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere or burned off in a flaring process. Methane is a highly potent agent of global climate change, having about 23 times the negative impact on a pound-by-pound basis as CO2. Landfill gas combustion produces some CO2, but the impact of these emissions on global climate change is offset many times over by the methane emission reductions.

While new EPA regulations require gathering and flaring of methane from large landfill operations, small landfills, which fall outside the federal agency's jurisdiction, may amount to as much as 40 percent of the methane generated by landfills nationwide.

Landfill gas generators produce nitrogen oxides emissions that vary widely from one site to another, depending on the type of generator and the extent to which steps have been taken to minimize such emissions. Combustion of landfill gas can also result in the release of organic compounds and trace amounts of toxic materials, including mercury and dioxins, although such releases are at levels lower than if the landfill gas is flared.

There are few water impacts associated with landfill gas power plants. Unlike other power plants that rely upon water for cooling, landfill gas power plants are usually very small, and therefore pollution discharges into local lakes or streams are typically quite small.

 

Additional Information:

EPA Fact Sheet: "Powering Microturbines with Landfill Gas" http://www.epa.gov/lmop/res/pdf/pwrng_mcrtrbns.pdf

EPA "LFG Energy Projects: Current Projects and Candidate Landfills" http://www.epa.gov/lmop/proj/index.htm