E-NEWS

Save the Planet

The Real Cost of Gaming November 23, 2008 Reporting by Roddy Scheer Video game consoles waste nearly as much energy when idle as when they’re in use. © www.letsgomobile.org Just when you were getting ready to splurge for that new video gaming console this holiday season, here comes the eco-Grinch. According to a new report by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the “big three” video game consoles—Sony Playstation 3, Microsoft XBox360 and the Nintendo Wii—collectively waste upwards of $1 billion worth of energy as measured in utility bills by consuming nearly as much power when left on, but idle, as when in use. The group recommends that manufacturers incorporate more prominent and accessible energy-saving features into future versions of their gaming consoles—such as automatic power-down functionality—that would save consumers money on their electric bills while eliminating significant amounts of greenhouse gas emissions.   In the report, titled “Lowering the Cost of Play,” NRDC makes concrete recommendations for how consumers can set up their gaming consoles to power down when not in use, and also sets guidelines for electronics manufacturers to lower the energy demands of their products. “If you leave your Xbox 360 or Sony Play Station 3 on all the time, you can cut your electric bill by as much as $100 a year simply by turning it off when you are finished playing,” said NRDC Senior Scientist Noah Horowitz. “With so many struggling in today’s economy—it’s important to realize there are simple steps gamers can take to lower their energy costs. And if manufacturers make future systems more energy efficient, they’ll be doing the right thing for consumers’ pockets, for our clean energy future and for the environment.” Source: NRDC

Obama Targets Climate November 23, 2008 Reporting by Roddy Scheer Obama said of addressing climate change: “Delay is no longer an option.” © www.barackobama.com In a videotaped message prepared for California governor Arnold Schwarzenneger’s summit on climate change last week, U.S. president-elect Barack Obama reiterated his strong support for significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions despite continuing economic turmoil at home and abroad. Some 700 delegates representing 19 different countries cheered Obama’s comments and his commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions as a central component of his administration’s economic, energy and environmental policies. Obama went on to tell summit attendees that his administration would establish ambitious annual targets aimed at reducing emission levels to 1990 levels by 2020, following the lead of California, which passed legislation in 2006 calling for similar cuts.   In Obama’s words: “Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all. Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response. The stakes are too high. The consequences too serious.” Source: Terra Daily

COMMENTARY: Urban Mining Cell Phone Recycling Gets Serious By Amanda Peterka Cell phones contain copper, silver, gold and palladium—all of which can be recovered and reused. © www.howstuffworks.com Mining gold used to mean sifting through pans of water and muck to find precious nuggets. That evolved to crawling through dark passages deep within the Earth. The newest gold mine has plastic, a circuit board and the digits of that girl you met at the bar last night.   “Urban mining,” or the process of extracting precious metals from cell phones, is one way to combat the wastes inherent in the mining industry. And your old cell phone is literally a deposit waiting to be unearthed. One metric ton of cell phones contains 140 kilograms of copper, 3.14 kilograms of silver, 300 grams of gold and 130 grams of palladium, according to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) statistics. Only five grams of gold can be extracted from one ton of gold ore from the ground. “It’s really as simple as getting the metals into a form so that they can be separated from the other materials. It’s no different than if you were to dispose of gold coins and wanted to collect the gold out of those,” says Craig Boswell, vice president of operations at HOBI International Inc., an electronics recycling company in Dallas. There are currently five large-scale smelters in the world that have the resources to reclaim metal from cell phones in an environmentally friendly manner, located in Belgium, Sweden, Canada and Japan. The biggest, Belgium’s Umicore, has the ability to extract 17 precious metals from phones. But you can’t just send in old phones to these companies. Instead, you must go through cell phone recycling companies, a number of which will pay you for your used phone. ReCellular Inc., based in Michigan and the largest phone recycling company, sends about half of its phones toward metal reclamation, refurbishing the other half to be sold around the world, many times in developing countries. Although Americans traditionally send electronics overseas for disposal, utilizing recycling companies is a far cry from just dumping electronics into third world countries like China, India and Nigeria. “In China they’ll do metals reclamation, but it’s not very well monitored. They basically dump the circuit boards into acid bath, which is not very good for environment, and it’s very unhealthy for people actually doing it because of all the fumes,” says Max Speth, sales and service manager at CollectiveGood, a recycling company that ships its dead phones to Umicore. One step of the process that has been made more efficient is the melting of plastic components, which then provide energy to melt down the precious metals. And although Stephen D’Esposito , president of EARTHWORKS, says that companies like Umicore aren’t necessarily “green” companies per se, they are still better than digging a hole in the ground. In 2005, there were about 500 million old cell phones sitting in drawers or closets, and the number is on the rise. © www.cohesion.rice.edu “A gold wedding band generates 20 tons of waste [with underground mining],” says D’Esposito, whose organization is teamed with CollectiveGood to collect phones. “Each time you’re recycling enough gold for a wedding band, that’s 20 tons less of waste, and that’s not even considering the cyanide used or metals released into the environment if water goes through the process.” This also doesn’t take into account the energy saved. According to Thea McManus, Acting Director of the Municipal and Industrial Solid Waste Division at the EPA, “If we took 100 million cell phones that we believe are ready today, and we recycled them and mined them, we could produce enough energy with electricity to heat and cool 194,000 homes for a year.” Before that happens, companies have to wrestle phones from their greatest enemy: the desk drawer. In 2005, there were about 500 million old cell phones sitting in drawers or closets, and with a cell phone turnover rate of about once a year, it’s only increasing. “The issue with phones is that there isn’t much of a negative impact from storing one,” says Boswell. “It’s not like it’s a 65-inch TV that every time you walk by it you think ‘I don’t need this in the middle of my living room.’ [But] when you stop using a certain phone, that’s the time to recycle it.” Meanwhile, the metals that are being mined now either go into electronics or to jewelers. But don’t expect to walk into a jewelry store and request a necklace from recycled material any time soon. “Smelters are constantly feeding in materials, and by and large they’ll see used electronics, process them, then put in some raw ore. It’s hard to say what came out of the end at given time was from electronics,” says Mike Newman, vice president of ReCellular. To solve that issue, organizations like EARTHWORKS are working to define the conditions under which one might produce metals in a responsible manner. The goal is a labeling system that comes with the assurance that a particular product was made from recycled metal. In terms of the final product, the only difference between the recycled metals and those that come out of the ground, are a much friendlier environmental impact. “Copper is copper and gold is gold,” Newman says. “There’s no question that we’re better off as a global society by mining these old phones or other electronics than pulling new metals out of the ground, because it works just as well.” CONTACTS: CollectiveGood; EARTHWORKS Recycle My Cell Phone program; HOBI International Inc.; ReCellular. AMANDA PETERKA is a former editorial intern at E and writes regularly on green topics.

The Woodstove’s Big Comeback Cleaner-Burning, Energy-Saving Woodstoves Are Getting a Second Look By Joe Provey Masonry stoves, like this one by Tulikivi, radiate heat from stones for up to 24 hours. © Tulikivi Between 1973 and 1980, the price of crude oil increased sevenfold. Many homeowners wondered how they would heat their homes if prices continued to climb. Wood heat, long a home-heating fuel in the far north, began to sound like a good idea for the rest of the nation.   Fast-forward 35 years. Wood heat is, once again, hot. Take it from Tom Oyen, president of The Chimney Sweep, Inc., in Washington State. He has been selling wood-heat appliances since 1975. When asked if sales are as strong today as back then, he says, “There are many more people in the showroom today. I don’t see how sales could be any stronger.” Meanwhile, woodstove manufactures are running extra shifts to keep up with the demand. Despite oil’s recent surge in price, wood heat’s latest success is still surprising. Wood heat has long suffered from the perception that it’s dirty, unsafe, and nowhere near as convenient as turning up the thermostat. In fact, the improvement of wood-burning appliances is a success story right up there with high-efficiency furnaces, photovoltaics and hybrid cars. New woodstoves are 30% more efficient than old ones, wresting between 70 and 80% of the British thermal units (BTUs) from every log. They’re much cleaner-burning today, too. A new EPA-certified stove, at worst, produces less than 7.5 grams per hour (g/hr) compared to the 40-60 g/hr of older woodstoves. If you use sustainably harvested firewood, you won’t be contributing to global warming at all. That’s because the CO2 emissions that do remain are absorbed by new tree growth at roughly the same rate it is burned. Cleaner, Safer Stoves Today’s clean-burning woodstoves (including fireplace inserts and hearth stoves) achieve high levels of combustion with a super-hot, stone-lined firebox and prewarmed combustion air that’s introduced at the top of the firebox from small holes. They are safer, too. More efficient burning reduces the likelihood of chimney fires and means the chimney will need less cleaning. If you’re heading to a woodstove showroom, your big choices are going to be what fuel you want to burn and whether to buy a stove that gives off heat primarily via convection or radiation. In general, radiant heat stoves are best for when you want to heat one floor of a house that has an open plan. Convection stoves are better for homes with several floors and divided spaces. The majority of stoves work best with seasoned hardwood logs. Pellet-burning stoves, however, are making big inroads. A pellet burner uses pellets made from compressed sawdust. The pellets automatically drop into a small cup-shaped grate and burn with a fury—leaving barely any ash to clean out later. But pellet stoves don’t work when the power is out—they rely on electricity to feed both fuel and air to the burn chamber, as well as to operate the thermostat. Beyond Cast Iron Another very efficient “stove” has gained popularity in the past few decades. Variously called a heat-storing fireplace, masonry heater or masonry stove, it is different from a steel or cast-iron woodstove in two important ways: 1) Their fires are relatively short and very hot; and 2) They are built of a ton or more of stone (usually soapstone) that can store large amounts of heat. Operation is straightforward. First, build a blazing fire in the combustion chamber. Let it burn for a couple of hours, heating the stone mass. Then close the damper and walk away. The stored heat will radiate from the fireplace’s stone mass for up to 24 hours. Not only do you spend less time building and tending fires, but you have greater peace of mind leaving your home with the fire out but the heat still “on.” The big downside of masonry heaters is cost. Once you add up the cost of the unit, installation, venting system and structural improvements to support the stove’s weight, a price tag of $30,000 would not be uncommon. Marcia Olenych, owner of Mountain Flame, Inc., a distributor for Tulikivi masonry stoves, says, “Saving on fuel is important but secondary with masonry stoves. These units are more about lifestyle than paybacks.” CONTACTS: The Chimney Sweep, Inc.; Mountain Flame, Inc.; Tulikivi JOE PROVEY, a veteran wood burner, is a freelance writer living in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

INNOVATION: My Own Little Turbine By Beth Connolly A personal wind turbine created by the French designer Philippe Starck has just been released. The 18-foot turbine, which resembles a giant rotating magnifying glass, debuted at Milan’s Greenergy Design show in March. Titled “Democratic Ecology,” it will provide 20-60% of a home’s energy needs. The Pramac Com-pany assisted Starck with the technical aspects of the design.   The designer turned heads in March 2008 when he announced his retirement after an illustrious 40-year career. In an interview in Die Zeit, a German weekly, Starck said he would quit designing within two years. “Design is really a terrible way to express oneself,” he said. “I have been a producer of materiality. I do feel ashamed for this. What I want to be instead now is a producer of concepts.” (English translation courtesy of the Mlle. A arts and technology blog, http://mademoisellea.vox.com.) The wind turbine marks a change from Starck’s past designs. His previous credits include consumer goods, furniture, restaurants and hotels, most recently the SLS Hotel at Beverly Hills in Los Angeles. The hotel boasts on its website that it is “rich on pleasure and comfort.” The “Democratic Ecology” wind turbine represents a very different value aesthetic. On display at the Greenergy show, the giant magnifying glass turned inside a distorted cube printed with ecological declarations. As it rotated, the glass magnified statements like, “The more materiality there is, the less humanity.” At $633, the turbine is even relatively affordable. Comparable home turbines can cost thousands of dollars. This follows Starck’s vision for the future of design. “Elitism is vulgar,” he told Die Zeit. “The sole eloquence lies in multiplication.”e