Research from the State University of New York at Buffalo shows that smart routing can reduce air pollution from vehicles by a significant amount without major increases in travel time.

A university news release states that green routing could reduce overall emissions of carbon monoxide by 27 percent for area drivers, while increasing the length of trips by an average of just 11 percent. Rerouting just one fifth of drivers — those who would benefit most from a new path — can reduce regional emissions by about 20 percent.

Though the article focuses on carbon monoxide, not carbon dioxide as stated by some US media, it does state that green rerouting of drivers can also reduce fuel consumption. None of this is surprising – GallonDaily’s owners were promoting intelligent routing as a way to reduce fuel consumption of truck fleets in the early 1990’s – but the fact that GPS systems can be applied to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from personal vehicles by such a significant amount is well worth some serious attention. As the SUNY at Buffalo study suggests, it appears to make sense to apply as much effort to implementing tools to ‘green reroute’ our existing vehicles as we are currently applying to hybrid and electric vehicle development.

The detailed paper is apparently not yet published but the University press release can be found at http://www.buffalo.edu/news/13070

A group of major European companies, part of the Prince of Wales’s EU Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change, are calling for tighter rules for the EU cap and trade system and higher prices for carbon.  The group states:

Cap and Trade schemes, such as the ETS, are the best market mechanisms to deliver cost-effective reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. However, the economic crisis has significantly impacted the effectiveness of the EU ETS as seen by today’s low level of trading and carbon price. This impact, coupled with potentially distorting effects from other policy measures at national or EU level, threatens the ETS’s ability to deliver Europe’s low-carbon future at lowest cost.

We firmly believe that the simplest and most deliverable route to avoid such impacts is through an urgent recalibration of Phase III of the ETS by withholding allowances and designing a robust Phase IV that will send the right long term price and investment signal and will immediately strengthen the carbon price.

Companies signing the letter include Alstom, T-Mobile, Philips, Shell, Tesco Unilever, and Vestas. The letter and a press release are available at http://www.cpsl.cam.ac.uk/Leaders-Groups/The-Prince-of-Wales-Corporate-Leaders-Group-on-Climate-Change/EU-CLG.aspx

It appears that the US ban on inefficient incandescent lightbulbs that was due to come into effect on January 1st may become a casualty of Congressional wrangling over the budget. Congress has added a rider to the final budget bill preventing the US Department of Energy from going ahead with the ban at least until next September.

The rider is not so good for the US economy. US manufacturers have spent millions on research and development and geared up domestic production to meet the new efficiency standard. If inefficient lightbulbs are to remain on store shelves they will likely have to be imported from Asia.

Even China has adopted a program to phase out inefficient light bulbs starting in September. In the end the Congressional action may be little more than tokenism as most lightbulb manufacturers switch production to the more efficient models.

News of the Congressional action is fairly easy to find in US media. A particularly comprehensive article is at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70534.html

News of the China phaseout of inefficient incandescent manufacturing is at  http://www.residentiallighting.com/china-phase-out-inefficient-bulbs

This week the U.S. Department of Agriculture published a revised National Conservation Practice Standard for nutrient management. This is a directive to agricultural advisors and those providing advice to farmers with the objective of helping producers better manage the application of nitrogen and phosphorus on agricultural land, improve crop results and reduce environmental impacts of nutrients and fertilizers. It applies to land application of natural and synthetic fertilizers as well as nutrients from such sources as sewage sludge.

The Standard includes numerous requirements, including:

• comprehensive nutrient budgets and risk assessments for nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium;
• mandatory soil tests;
• limits on application rates for these nutrients;
• specified measures to reduce air pollution;
• modification of animal feed diets to reduce the nutrient content of manure; and
• mandatory aerial site photograph(s)/imagery or site map(s) in nutrient management plans.

The new Standard, along with other associated documents, can be found at http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/landuse/crops/npm

The US environmental group Environmental Integrity Project has just issued an updated report on groundwater contamination in the vicinity of coal ash dumps. These dumps are commonly found close to coal-fired power plants but may also be found close to industries that burn large quantities of coal.

According to EIP there are 157 sites across the US where coal ash has contaminated the environment. At many of these, coal ash appears to have contaminated groundwater with arsenic or other pollutants at levels above Maximum Contaminant Levels. Many have shown groundwater concentrations of pollutants such as boron, molybdenum, and manganese, above EPA-recommended Health Advisories for children or adults. In a few cases, groundwater around coal ash dumps is more toxic than hazardous waste leachate.

A summary, a press release, the latest EIP report, and links to prior reports can be found at http://environmentalintegrity.org/12_13_2011.php

To GallonDaily’s knowledge there has been no similar systematic study of groundwater contamination in the vicinity of coal ash dumps in Canada. Readers aware of any such study are invited to submit information for possible publication.

It continues to puzzle GallonDaily that Canadian governments are stalling on mandating energy efficient lightbulbs. Even our neighbour to the south, under the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, is moving more aggressively than Canada to phase out use of energy inefficient incandescent lightbulbs. No company makes cheap tungsten lightbulbs in Canada so there is nothing to lose for our economy by following the US lead.

One of the most aggressive lightbulb energy conservation programs is coming from our neighbour to the South once removed. Mexico is handing out 44 million free compact fluorescent lightbulbs, four at a time. The program is expected to save US$3.39 million to Mexico during the ten years of the program, will reduce consumption of electricity by 4.17 Gigawatt hours annually and will save fuel equivalent to 7.44 million barrels of oil per year. It will avoid 28 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions and eliminate the construction of 2 new power plants.

The program is a partnership of the Government of Mexico and CoolNRG International and was announced in October of this year. The GHG emission credits to be generated are already sold to the Netherlands.

If anyone understands why Canada is not participating in such a program, we welcome your comments and will publish the most plausible in the monthly Gallon Environment Letter.

Details of the Mexico initiative are at http://ahorraenergia.mx/2011/10/luz-verde-mexico-focos-ahorradores/ and click on the Translate button then the rollout for English if you are not fluent in Spanish.

Bloomberg is a US multinational specializing in news and information for business. Imagine then GallonDaily’s surprise when, last month, Bloomberg introduced a sustainability section into its daily news offerings.

In late 2009 Bloomberg acquired New Energy Finance, a similar though much smaller news service focusing on renewable and alternative energy. Building on the new energy theme, Bloomberg’s sustainability section seems to be focussing on US and global environment and energy issues and commentary.

Bloomberg claims to have 2300 news professionals at work globally, 4.7 million readers for its Business Week magazine, and more than 15,000 employees around the world. If you notice a name resemblance to the third-term Mayor of New York City you would understand a connection, now severed, between the Company’s founder and the current NYC Mayor. It is reliably reported that, in July of this year, Michael Bloomberg announced a donation of $50 million to the US Sierra Club’s “Beyond Coal” campaign

For a fresh face with a US perspective in the sustainability news world, GallonDaily is pleased to welcome Bloomberg: go to http://www.bloomberg.com/ and click on SUSTAINABILITY at the top of the page.

Ceres, formerly known as the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies and author of the highly respected Ceres Principles, a code of corporate environmental conduct, has, in partnership with the Institute of Clean Air Companies, published a report which seeks to identify the employment implications of clean air regulation of the electricity sector.

The report, which includes a number of case studies, builds on a February 2011 report from the Political Economic Research Institute (PERI) based at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst which estimated that investments driven by EPA’s two new air quality rules would create nearly 1.5 million jobs, or nearly 300,000 jobs per year on average over the next five years.

This new study projects that the total amount of investment needed to comply with the new rules is around $94 billion. This investment would flow directly to US companies, creating both construction and manufacturing jobs. The report also claims that “Unprecedented amounts of capital sit on the sidelines in the American economy” and that America’s electric power generators have cash on their balance sheets at historic levels, ready to be invested.

While the report is perhaps not as quantitative as necessary to convince opponents of clean air regulations, it does document the year‐end cash reserves for the top 20 U.S. electric generators for the period 1995‐2010 and many of the companies ready and waiting to build new clean power plants and pollution control systems.

GallonDaily commends Ceres for producing the kind of report that helps disarm those critics that claim that the economies of developed countries cannot afford clean air rules.

The Ceres report is available at http://www.ceres.org/press/press-releases/new-study-shows-how-epa-clean-air-rules-boost-the-economy-and-create-jobs

Today, Canada and the US entered into a Joint Action Plan under the  United States-Canada Regulatory Cooperation Council that was announced in February.

Action Plan initiatives in the environmental area include the following:

• Refine and enhance the existing Air Quality Committee (under the United States–Canada Air Quality Agreement) work plan with regard to information sharing, technical work-sharing, scientific
• Collaboration and testing related to completed emission regulations for light-duty vehicles, which have been bilaterally coordinated.
• Work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from locomotives, building on the already extensive collaboration and coordination between both governments on locomotive air pollutant regulations.
• Environment Canada, U S Department of State, and the Environmental Protection Agency to consider an expansion of the United States–Canada Air Quality Agreement to address particulate matter, the air pollutant most commonly associated with premature mortality, based on comparable regulatory regimes in the two countries.
• Work to better align American and Canadian standards on the containment of dangerous goods.
• Develop and adopt common monographs (e g , including properties, claims indications, and condition of use) for routine over-the-counter drugs.
• Enhance collaboration on enforcement and compliance by increasing mutual reliance on each other’s routine surveillance good manufacturing practices (GMP) inspection reports of manufacturing facilities for drugs and personal products, rather than having to conduct unnecessarily duplicative inspections in the other country.
• Align and synchronize implementation of common classification and labelling requirements for workplace hazardous chemicals within the mandate of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and Health Canada.
• Share information, and develop joint approaches, on regulatory aspects of nanomaterials—including terminology and nomenclature, as well as risk assessment and management.

Other initiatives which may be of direct interest to our environment and business readers include:

• Develop common approaches to food safety, in light of food safety modernization efforts in both countries, to jointly enhance the safety of the United States–Canada food supply and minimize the need for routine food safety surveillance inspection activities in each other’s country (applies to products within the mandates of both the U S Food and Drug Administration and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency).
• Enhance equivalence agreements for meat safety systems to streamline, simplify, and, where possible, reduce import and administrative procedures, while maintaining public health outcomes.
• Establish mutual reliance on jointly acceptable food safety laboratory recognition criteria, test results, and methodologies to ensure food safety laboratory testing conducted in one country is acceptable to regulators in both countries and facilitate cross-utilization of laboratory results by industry and regulators (applies to products within the mandates of both the U S Food and Drug Administration and Canadian Food Inspection Agency).
• Streamline the certification requirements for meat and poultry including, where possible, the reduction or elimination of redundant certification, data elements, and administrative procedures for shipments flowing between the United States and Canada.
• Further align crop protection product (e.g., pesticides) approvals and establishment of maximum pesticide residue limits/tolerances in both countries.
• Further align marketing application submission and review processes for veterinary drugs, including efforts to establish identical maximum drug residue limits/tolerances in both countries.
• Develop a perimeter approach to plant protection with a view to leverage each country’s efforts to mutual advantage and, where possible, streamline certification requirements for cross-border shipments.
• Work towards a common approach to zoning of foreign animal diseases.
• Jointly review and establish a common collaborative regulatory standard setting agenda for all new motor vehicle safety standards (e g , rear camera, electric and alternative energy vehicles, quiet cars).
• Work together on the development of regulations and standards to fully support the integration of intelligent transportation systems.
• Align rail safety standards and establish a joint mechanism to conduct periodic review of regulations.
• Establish a mechanism to share experiences on regulations related to unmanned aircraft systems, with a view to aligning regulatory approaches.

The full agreement is to be found under the heading United States-Canada Regulatory Cooperation Council Joint Action Plan at http://canada.usembassy.gov/canada-us-relations/border-issues/beyond-the-border-a-new-strategy.html

There are not too many LEED industrial buildings in North America. Most factories are constructed in the cheapest possible way with little regard to the environment or energy efficiency. Hence a car plant certified to the highest LEED standard caught GallonDaily’s eye.

The building is a Volkswagen car plant newly constructed in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The building has many environmental features. Some of those least expected at a car plant include:

• superior building insulation;
• LED lighting on the exterior;
• rainwater collected and used to flush toilets and cool equipment;
• a white roof to reflect heat;
• built on a brownfield site; and
• 100 ft. wide creeks and wetlands around the property to create natural habitats.

More information at http://www.volkswagengroupamerica.com/newsroom/2011/12/01_vw_chattanooga_earns_LEED_platinum.htm