Burning Fuel Particles Do More Damage to Climate Than Thought, Study Says
New York Times; Environment
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: January 15, 2013

The tiny black particles released into the atmosphere by burning fuels are far more powerful agents of global warming than had previously been estimated, some of the world’s most prominent atmospheric scientists reported in a study issued on Tuesday.

These particles, which are known as black carbon and are the major component of soot, are the second most important contributor to global warming, behind only carbon dioxide, wrote the 31 authors of the study, published online by The Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres.

The new estimate of black carbon’s heat-trapping power is about double the one made in the last major report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in 2007. And the researchers said that if indirect warming effects of the particles are factored in, they may be trapping heat at almost three times the previously estimated rate.

The new calculation adds urgency to efforts to curb the production of black carbon, which is released primarily by diesel engines in the industrialized world and by primitive cook stoves and kerosene lamps in poorer nations. Natural phenomena like forest fires also produce it.

Black carbon is already a central target of one of the few international climate initiatives championed by the United States, the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants, which has been supported by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The program seeks to reduce the production of black carbon to combat both climate change and air pollution and respiratory disease on the ground.

Although some scientists have long believed that black carbon is a major force in climate change, the vast majority of previous mathematical models had predicted that the particles had only a modest impact. That view should now change, said Mark Z. Jacobson, an atmospheric scientist at Stanford University and one of the study’s authors, calling the old models “overly simplistic.” He said that many of his co-authors had previously hewed to the lower estimates.

Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of climate science at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego who has long campaigned to control black carbon, described the study as highly authoritative. “The fact that it’s written by a very large group of modelers gives it enormous credibility,” he said. “It was lonely before. I’m now glad to be right in the middle.”

Read the full article here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/science/earth/burning-fuel-particles-do-more-damage-to-climate-than-thought-study-says.html

Totally Green provides sustainability and cost-savings to a variety of businesses with its organic food waste recycling equipment–the ORCA Green Food Composter. The ORCA converts food waste to water in 24hrs and manages your food waste on-site.  The ORCA can reduce up to 2400 pounds of garbage every day into a nutrient-rich grey water that can safely be disposed of through the sanitary sewer system.

Food waste continues to pose enormous challenges. We use vast resources to produce our food, including farmland, freshwater, animals, oil, and gas. Yet 40% is wasted according to a recent CNN article:
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/22/40-of-u-s-food-wasted-report-says/

Then leftover food transported to landfills creates three more considerable problems–the energy required to haul it, the methane gas it produces while rotting in landfills, and the increased space required for landfills.

According to a recent NPR article, “Food waste is now the No. 1 material that goes into landfills and incinerators,” says Schwab, a senior analyst in the waste division at the Environmental Protection Agency.
http://www.npr.org/2012/09/21/161551772/the-ugly-truth-about-food-waste-in-america
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/11/27/165907972/for-restaurants-food-waste-is-seen-as-low-priority

There are also several kinds of pest problems–growing rapidly across the U.S.–that are directly related to food waste.

Food waste is fast becoming a talking point, and occasionally an action point, all across the world. Universities are exploring new ways to reduce and recycle food waste; some restaurants are changing their management of food waste; hospitals, malls, hotels, sports stadiums, military bases, convention centers and more are examining ways to curb this growing problem. We hope these conversations continue while new sustainable actions are implemented.

Totally Green offers one positive answer to food waste, the ORCA Green Food Composter. The ORCA turns food waste to water in 24hrs and manages your food waste on site. It also provides cost-savings by eliminating the need to haul your food waste to the landfill, all the while doing its part to reduce methane gas production, a major contributor to climate change. It even helps keep kitchen cleaners and thereby reduces insects and rodents. In addition, some clients, such as Scarborough Town Centre, have created a closed loop by using the ORCA effluent to water indoor plants or irrigate outdoor landscaping. We’ve had several success stories with businesses and institutions using our ORCA. Please visit our Videos & Media page: http://www.totallygreen.com/media-coverage.

In an ideal world, we will use less and waste less. But even then there is bound to be some food waste. The ORCA is one positive answer.

By Brendan Magone

Totally Green provides sustainability and cost-savings to a variety of businesses with its organic food waste recycling equipment–the ORCA Green Food Composter. The ORCA converts food waste to water in 24hrs and manages your food waste on-site.

We wish everyone a happy and safe Thanksgiving!

While the United States celebrates today, we also want to recognize that Canada celebrates Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October.

We want to give thanks to our clients. Several places in Toronto are trying out the ORCA Green Food Composter under the new leasing program, the Service as a Solution model, and we hope these relationships prosper. Lately we’ve been compiling testimonial videos and letters of recommendation from our various clients, including Aflac, Scarborough Town Centre, The Dallas Cowboys, BOK Center, UT Southwestern Medical Center, and OSU. You can see these videos on our Videos & Media page, http://www.totallygreen.com/media-coverage

We’re thankful for our own slow, but steady, developments with the ORCA Green Food Composter; we’re thankful for the paradigm shift of sustainability and environmental stewardship that is sweeping the globe, from local businesses to international corporations. Even further, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently made efforts at reducing food waste with their new Food Recovery Challenge.
http://www.epa.gov/foodrecoverychallenge/
http://www.epa.gov/waste/conserve/foodwaste/

The ORCA can contribute significantly to this Food Recovery Challenge, as the EPA’s mission mentions the importance of diverting food waste from landfills. Landfills create harmful methane gas and greenhouse gas emissions. And our client Scarborough Town Centre takes this a step further: they create a closed loop by using the ORCA’s nutrient-rich effluent to water indoor plants and irrigate outdoor landscaping.

Again, we give thanks to our clients and for this progress, and wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving.

Totally Green provides organic food waste recycling, sustainability, and cost savings with the ORCA Green Food Composter. The ORCA converts food waste to water in 24hrs.  The ORCA recycling equipment manages your food waste on site, saves money by reducing tipping costs, creates meaningful cost savings for customers, reduces transportation pollution, reduces landfills, reduces methane gas production, and keeps kitchens cleaner.  

November 15, 2012 16:15 ET

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/totally-green-reports-third-quarter-2012-results-pinksheets-tlgn-1727256.htm

Totally Green Reports Third Quarter 2012 Results

TORONTO–(Marketwire – Nov 15, 2012) -  Totally Green Inc. (PINKSHEETS: TLGN) (“TG” or the “Company”), an innovator in organic food waste processing and diversion, reported results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2012.

Totally Green promotes sustainability, cost savings, and food waste management for myriad businesses with the ORCA Green Food Composter. The ORCA converts food waste to water in 24 hours and effectively manages your food waste on site. The ORCA greatly reduces tipping costs, reduces transportation pollution, reduces landfills, reduces methane gas production, and keeps kitchens cleaner.

1 November 2012 – Private businesses, which play a crucial role in achieving sustainable development, must boost their efforts to integrate sustainability principles into their operations, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressed during his trip to the Republic of Korea (ROK) this week.

“It is time to take corporate sustainability to the next level,” Mr. Ban said in his remarks at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development annual meeting in Seoul on Tuesday. “We need companies everywhere to deliver value not just financially – but also in social, environmental and ethical terms – to look at the quadruple bottom line – and to report publicly on results and progress.”

Mr. Ban underlined the importance of the business community and governments recognizing that working on projects for the common good also benefits companies’ profits, making it essential that they contribute to sustainable development efforts.

“Market disturbances, social unrest, ecological devastation, and natural man-made disasters – near and far – directly affect your business – your supply chains, capital flows, your employees and your profits,” Mr. Ban said. “You see that your ability to innovate and grow depends on collective systems that support peace, prosperity and basic human freedoms.”

Mr. Ban emphasized that a significant shift needs to occur in businesses worldwide, in which they consciously embrace sustainability principles and incorporate them into their operations everywhere. He added that governments must also encourage this shift with the right incentives.

In his remarks, the Secretary-General highlighted the UN Global Compact initiative, which counts with some 7,000 corporate participants in 140 countries which have committed to integrate universal principles on human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption into their operations.

Read More: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=43392&Cr=sustainable+development&Cr1=#.UJMGeZQVKPM.twitter

http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680494/the-environmental-impact-of-wasted-food
 

There’s Nothing “Cool” About Wasting Food
Food Literacy
September 10th, 2012 By Diana Donlon

There has been a parade of headlines lately about the shocking statistic that approximately 40 percent of the food in the United States is thrown away. Even allowing some room for error, this level of waste is staggering on many fronts.  For starters, in 2010, 17.2 million households were classified as “food insecure”—a euphemism that spells millions of hungry people in our country. Then, there are people like farmers, farm workers and ranchers who labor exhaustingly to grow our food, so it’s pretty inexcusable that we don’t even eat it. On top of it all, this level of food waste represents massive amounts of squandered fresh water and energy—increasingly precious resources that we can’t afford to throw away.

Read full article here: https://civileats.com/2012/09/10/there%e2%80%99s-nothing-%e2%80%9ccool%e2%80%9d-about-wasting-food/

Totally Green promotes business sustainability and cost efficiency with the ORCA Green Food Composter. The ORCA Green Food Composter converts food waste to water in 24hrs while in turn managing food waste on site, saving money by reducing tipping costs, keeping kitchens cleaner, reducing transportation pollution, reducing landfills, and reducing methane gas production.

We are continually redesigning our ORCA Green Food Composter to better provide a waste service program that saves businesses money while greatly benefitting the immediate environment along with the greater environment.

Totally Green promotes sustainability, cost savings, and food waste management with the ORCA Green Food Composter. The ORCA converts food waste to water in 24hrs. The ORCA manages food waste on site, saves money by reducing tipping costs, creates cost savings for customers, reduces transportation pollution, reduces landfills, reduces methane gas production, and keeps kitchens cleaner. 

User Experience in the Age of Sustainability

Designers, as makers of products and services, are key stewards of our planet because the products and services we design influence the ways in which people live.

By Kem Kramer on October 15, 2012

http://johnnyholland.org/2012/10/user-experience-in-the-age-of-sustainability/

What we design, how we design, the materials with which we design and for what purposes we design, set the pace for emerging cultural behaviours. We owe it to ourselves as stewards of our world, and as designers from all spectrum to consider the impact of each design that we create on the overall impact of not only our collective culture and cultural practices but also on the environment at large. Accordingly, for the fields of Design and User Experience to remain progressively relevant , that we must begin to form a closer affinity to the Sustainability movement.

For many people, including designers, sustainability is the buzzword of the moment. Over the last 30 years, however, there has been a growing awareness of the environmental problems caused by the exponential growth and human development worldwide. The higher demands placed on the planet due to the growing demands of such things as food, energy and materials is reaching epidemic proportions. In short, many of the problems affecting us today are happening at rates faster than we can curb and counter. Some of these specific problems include the high rates of consumer goods wastage, air pollution, energy production, transportation and the consumption of natural resources. These are only a few of the problems with which we have to contend. But as we begin to narrow the focus down to our specific roles as designers, some concrete examples of these problem include the ever-pervasive mobile phones as well as other electronics with their high rates of disposals. Subsequently, these high rates of product disposal dictate higher rates of natural resources needed to replace those discarded items. While not only applicable to mobile phones and consumer or electronic goods, there are easily identifiable examples with which almost everyone can relate. These example of wastage can also be applied to many other scenarios, and serves to compound the overall problem, when we begin to apply to our work as designers of products as a whole. What this means at a fundamental level is that as designers from all spectrum, we need to actively engage and find solutions for this growing epidemic. We need to have a clearer understanding of sustainability and what it means for us if we are to remain progressively relevant. We need to understand:

•What it means to be sustainable in the context of our work
•How to embrace, advocate and strategize for more sustainable design practices
•Practice sound environmental design with impact in our work

The premise of sustainability asserts that for us to continue to survive as a society, we must ensure that both present and future generations can continue to thrive without compromising the lives and existence of either generation. This means that as we go about the task of designing products and services, we should do so more consciously and responsibility and comply to a principle of sustainable design – the ideal that what we do today cannot take away from enabling future generations to sustain themselves. There are many drivers also forcing us to pay attention and one of these is the growing base of users advocating for more eco-conscious design.

Today, users are more aware of the environmental issues that face us collectively, and their rising expectations in product and service design, is a major trends and drivers of sustainability as a business essential. User experience and design is therefore strategically positioned to change our value offering by incorporating sustainability metrics as part of the overall design criteria. Accordingly, we have an opportunity to transform user experience and design from a commoditized offering into a value-critical service by incorporating sustainability into the existing and emerging frameworks that drive our practices. We are gifted with a foundation in good analytic tools and methods that can be extended to collect additional data from users about their product usage cycles. Furthermore, the trends and challenges for sustainable practices make the business case for adopting and implementing a sustainability framework that incorporates user experience as essential. The key success factors for implementing a sustainability-led user experience is foundational and necessary if we are to survive as a field with evolved value.

At its core, the design of everyday products, solutions and /or services is the problem that underlies the environmental issues we face today, and which we will continue to face the future. Design and designers are part of the environmental problem and we should feature prominently in finding solutions that produce more sustainable creations. Whether it is the design of a poorly built product that breaks down because of poor material selection, or the decisions that we make to design a physical product over a comparable service subscription solution option, are all part of the kinds of decisions that we we will have to address as we move forward. These are all decisions that eco-conscious user experience researchers and designers will face in the future.

At a more detailed level, we need to begin to question the value and output of the designs with which we are engaged and consciously address many questions that are have design touch-points. Some of these questions include but are not limited to:

•What is the ultimate goal of the design?
•Is there really a need for the new design? In some cases this decision is out of our control. However we can become advocates where possible.
•Are there solutions that would require little to less materials – for example a web – based service subscription over a solution that produces material waste?
•If material are used in the solution, are the materials used in the product ethically sourced?
•If material are used in the product you must design, are these materials toxic?
•Can my users service these products if they break?
•Is the product durable?
•Is the product too heavy; is it portable?
•Will the product have an afterlife?
•Is the product energy efficient?
•If there is a User Interface component have you provided the user with energy saving and management options?
•What does this design mean for universal access?

All of these questions map easily onto sustainability goals that we can set at the onset of design by having a deep level of user understanding and needs through research. Today the push for more eco-awareness in society, and subsequently in design, has created a new class of consumers, whose core values align with such things as:

•Avoiding pollution;
•Conserving natural resources;
•Eliminating wasteful products;
•Being energy efficient;
•Universal design and access.

These consumers (users) have different criteria for their product experiences; they demand integration of their core values, not only in the final products but also in the design process. Understanding this paradigmatic user trends is the role of user experience in the age of sustainability. How can we respond to the changing user needs and goals and how can we tie this back to our role in development and design? Therefore, it stands to reason that as the field of sustainability ripens into a practice, we need to take a deeper look through the lens of our own world and anchor ourselves solidly on this large and amorphous field called sustainability and respond to the collective views of a growing force of socially conscious users.

How can we engage?

Regardless of the type of designer you are (visual, experience, interaction, or other, you can engage initially by embracing some fundamental guiding principles to design. Alan Cooper and Robert Reimann About Face (2003) touches upon the topic of ethical interaction design which could be applied here and used as foundational guides to sustainable design. Cooper and Reimann list four principles that designers can use as guides to design. The principles in many ways resonate with the sustainability movement and are still relevant today. According to Cooper and Reimann, interaction design needs to follow these key principles. They should be:

•Ethical [considerate, helpful]: Do no harm; improve human situations
•Purposeful [useful and usable]: Help users achieve their goals and aspirations: Accommodate uses contexts and capacities
•Pragmatic [viable and feasible]: Help commissioning organizations achieve their goals; accommodate business and technical requirements;
•Elegant [efficient, artful, affective]: Represent the simplest complete solution; Possess internal (self-revealing, understandable) coherence and appropriately accommodate and stimulate cognition and emotion

Further, we must engage at the tactical and strategic levels to translate the changing relationship that businesses will have with customers to ensure we meet a new standard of user experience. Beginning by employing the basic ideas purported in such old time favorite books like Cooper and Reimann is a great first step. The growing base of informed and ecologically conscious users do not care only about functionality but impose their core values on the products they purchase and chose to use in their daily lives. As user researchers and product designer we hold the key to engaging with the wider movement of sustainability at both strategic and tactical levels.

Why else should we care?

Against the backdrop of the growing criticism and the negative social and environmental implications of globalization, many companies have become active in reporting on activities undertaken to prevent these externalities of production. The trickle-down effect that will eventually have all layers of industry having shouldering some level of responsibility has led to an onslaught of new job titles such as a recent Amazon job posts: Sr. Sustaining Engineer, Sustaining Product Design Engineer, Product Design Sustaining Manager. We need not even look far to see that companies in the Design space, such as Artefact are already taking strides into embracing sustainability as a part of their design cycle. On the reporting front, take for instance trends in Europe and Japan where sustainability reporting accompanies regulatory requirements and government encouragements. The number of reports that now include social reporting alongside financial, has increased considerably. Understanding and viewing the wider sustainability initiative through the lens of our own practice is important to evolve user experience and design as fields of practice and remain relevant as key decision drivers in the product lifecycle in the end.

 
Cruise green with Royal Caribbean International
Green Cruise Lines
September 22, 2012
By: Kathleen Story
 
 
Royal Caribbean International (RCI) continues making their cruises as green as possible with new ideas. The company controls 24 percent of the world cruise market with its current 42 ships and more in construction.

Some of the green things RCI has done:
•purchased in 2012 two Totally Green ORCA Green Machines that convert food waste to water in 24 hours, reducing landfills and methane gas, and saving on disposal and transport fees…

read more: http://www.examiner.com/article/cruise-green-with-royal-caribbean-international

Kathleen also put one of our ORCA videos near the end of the article, showing its use in the Dallas Cowboys Stadium.

We’ve been getting strong positive coverage lately, from testimonial videos to online green articles to new followers and connections through environmental social media.

Our Videos & Media page–http://www.totallygreen.com/media-coverage

We’re proud to contribute to earth’s stewardship, the new global mindset of sustainability, and increased cost savings for a variety of businesses.

Totally Green promotes sustainability, cost efficiency, and food waste management with the ORCA Green Food Composter. The ORCA converts food waste to water in 24hrs. The ORCA manages food waste on site, saves money by reducing tipping costs, creates cost savings for customers, reduces transportation pollution, reduces landfills, reduces methane gas production, and keeps kitchens cleaner.