Greenversations

Each week we ask a question related to the environment. Please let us know your thoughts as comments. Feel free to respond to earlier comments or post new ideas. Previous questions.

Most Americans have safe tap water and drink tap water fresh from the kitchen faucet. Others choose to buy more expensive bottled water. But bottling and transporting water can carry environmental costs and use energy and resources, and bottles contribute to littering if not properly disposed of.

Why do you drink bottled water or tap water?

.

En español: Cada semana hacemos una pregunta relacionada al medio ambiente. Por favor comparta con nosotros sus pensamientos y comentarios. Siéntase en libertad de responder a comentarios anteriores o plantear nuevas ideas. Preguntas previas.

Muchos estadounidenses tienen agua potable sana y beben agua fresca del grifo de la cocina. Otros optan por comprar agua embotellada más cara. Sin embargo, el embotellar y transportar agua conlleva costos medioambientales y el uso de energía y recursos. Asimismo, las botellas contribuyen a los desperdicios si no se desechan adecuadamente.

¿Por qué toma agua embotellada o del grifo?

About the author: Tami Fordham joined EPA’s Seattle office in June 2001 and moved to Anchorage, Alaska to join the Alaska Operations Office in September 2003. Tami serves as the Alaska Resource Extraction Tribal Policy Advisor and is the Tribal Coordinator for Tribes in Western Alaska.

The last time I was visiting with my family in Washington I learned that my parents decided to start making canvas shopping bags. They were noticing plastic bags everywhere littering the streets and hanging in the trees, you may have seen this in your local area, and so decided to start making the canvas bags to sell at their local store and to their friends. I have one of their bags and when people ask who made it, I get to proudly share their story of making a difference in the environment.

I have the great honor to work in partnership with Tribal Governments in Western Alaska along the Lower Kuskokwim River. Plastic bags are often seen throughout the tundra and so many of the communities I work with have worked to ban plastic bags in their village. The environmental programs have made canvas bags available to the tribal members in the place of plastic bags. There are many people that are now taking plastic bags and crocheting them into purses and bags that can be re-used. To find out more, check out their website. Just a few weeks ago a woman all the way from Florida called our office to find out about different re-use projects that could be done because she wanted to find projects that made a difference for the environment.

One person can make a difference, just imagine if we all made one change in how we live our lives the ripple effect it would have in our world.

About the author: Ken Sandler is Co-Chair of EPA’s Green Building Workgroup. He has worked for EPA since 1991 on sustainability issues including green building, recycling and indoor air quality.

At EPA, we strive to help people make the environment part of their everyday decisions. But how can we tell when we’re succeeding?

In truth, we often can’t. But sometimes the evidence of change is hard to miss.

Take green building (Web site or video) – making buildings and their sites better for the environment and health. It’s an issue on which I’ve worked for a decade, and I’m now leading efforts to establish a new EPA strategy on the subject.

Yet for years, I would draw blank stares when mentioning “green building” in conversation. Some people would even ask if it meant painting buildings green.

And then, suddenly, nearly everyone had heard of it. My Dad was sending me articles on green building from Newsweek. I would mention it at a barbecue and people would come up to me and say, yes, we’re looking to green our homes, tell us how!

Green building seems to have reached its tipping point. But how do such things happen? If there’s a formula to make sustainable practices bloom, we’d like to get our hands on it.

In fact, we’ve seen such phenomena before. Take recycling. In 1988, only 1,000 communities in America had curbside recycling. Just 8 years later, that number had leaped to 9,000. Why? One reason was that in 1989, responding to public concern, EPA set a goal for the US to recycle 25% of its municipal waste.

This helped set off a competition among states to set their own recycling goals. In response, systems were established to recycle a variety of materials. The engine of recycling got going – and keeps on humming.

With green building, the story is different. Since the early 1990s, EPA has successfully pushed voluntary programs covering many aspects of the built environment – energy, water, indoor air quality, products, waste, smart growth and more. Other groups began to put these pieces together in holistic, market-based programs.

The U.S. Green Building Council, a leading non-profit, has its own eye-popping numbers on the transformation they helped bring about. From 2000 to the present, their member organizations went from 570 to over 15,000, the number of buildings registering to use their LEED green building rating system from 45 to 21,000.

So does this mean our work is done? Hardly. The green building field has needs that range from research to stronger standards to more public education and partnerships. We plan to work with a wide variety of groups to help tackle all of these challenges.

But there are many advantages to reaching a tipping point. Those years of struggling in obscurity have given way to lots of new doors opening up. And it’s nice to get fewer blank stares at parties.

About the author: Rob Lawrence joined EPA in 1990 and is Senior Policy Advisor on Energy Issues in the Dallas, TX regional office. As an economist, he works to insure that both supply and demand components are addressed as the Region develops its Clean Energy and Climate Change Strategy.

While enjoying the countryside near Santa Fe, NM, over the Memorial Day weekend, I came across an old glass soft drink bottle. And it got me to thinking about growing up in Baton Rouge in the 60s and my first environmental action – recycling.

My family had just finished building a house in a fairly new subdivision and my younger brother and I were looking for ways to make some spending money. We noticed that the work areas around the new construction sites were littered with bottles left by the roofers, carpenters and bricklayers. So every afternoon during the summer of 1966, we pulled our red wagons around the expanding neighborhood to gather bottles. On Saturday, we would load cases of returnable bottles into the family station wagon and head to a local grocery store to convert someone else’s trash to our treasure. Together, we made about $600 that summer – not bad when you realize that was over 30,000 bottles at 2 cents a piece. Having seen a sign while on vacation in Arizona that said that returnable bottles there went for 5 cents, we tried, to no avail, to convince our parents that we should drive back and get the cases of bottles stacked behind our house.

I learned a lot of lessons that summer, including that even trash has value if you look for it and applying economic theories to environmental issues can be a worthwhile approach.

What was your first act of environmental awareness?

About the author: Jeff Maurer manages Web content and does communications work for the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response. He has been with EPA since 2005.

Before I moved to DC, I lived next to Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs. I love Wrigley Field – it’s like stepping back in time. The scoreboard is still manually operated. There are no billboards for advertising. They don’t play rock music over the PA system, though they do play polka music on the pipe organ during rain delays. You can still buy standing-room tickets at Wrigley, which is good because the seats were apparently installed when the average American was three feet tall and suffered from tapeworms.

Compare that to recently-completed Nationals Park here in DC. Nationals Park boasts 41,888 American-sized seats (my description, not theirs), a 4,500 square foot high-definition scoreboard, and every other amenity you could possibly imagine. The fan experience is great, though their music choices tend to favor Fergie and Fall Out Boy, with surprisingly little polka.

It just goes to show how much attitudes and planning have changed. Fans in 2008 expect a lot when they come to a ballpark. They expect quality food. They expect not to sit behind a post. They expect to do the chicken dance (why?). As a result, the designers of Nationals Park had to consider a lot more than did the designers of Wrigley Field.

And finally – finally! – it seems that environmental impact is becoming a major consideration. Nationals Park is the first LEED-certified ballpark in Major League Baseball. It has several “green” features, including a plant-covered roof that reduces water runoff, an elaborate water filtration system, high-efficiency lighting, and low-flow plumbing fixtures. Compare that to Wrigley Field, which barely features plumbing.

I’m glad that ballpark designers – and designers in general – are starting to figure this out. People in 1914 – the year Wrigley was built – didn’t care too much about the environment, but people in 2008 do. For example, people at public events expect to be able to recycle their empty bottles. I know this because EPA’s Recycle on the Go initiative – which encourages recycling at public events – has held several well-received events in public spaces, including at the 2006 Major League Baseball All-Star Game.

Attitudes and expectations change over time, sometimes for better (e.g., ballparks should have more than one bathroom), sometimes for worse (e.g., Lady Lumps is acceptable music during a pitching change). I think the message is clear: in 2008, the public expects environmentally-friendly buildings and spaces.

About the author: Lina Younes has been working for EPA since 2002 and chairs EPA’s Multilingual Communications Task Force. Prior to joining EPA, she was the Washington bureau chief for two Puerto Rican newspapers and she has worked for several government agencies.

Lea la versión en español a continuación de esta entrada en inglés.

As we celebrate the 38th anniversary of Earth Day, I remember when I studied at the Academia San José in Puerto Rico and the events that inspired me to strive for greater environmental protection.

In the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, a beautiful Caribbean island, one enjoys good weather all year round. Beautiful beaches, a colorful scenery, the melodious nocturnal songs of the coquí* , the Yunque Rainforest , the Camuy Caverns - these are some of the images and sounds that live in my memories of my island. In spite of these beautiful surroundings, Puerto Rico faces great environmental challenges-excess of solid waste, lack of landfills, trash along its beaches, problems with the quality of drinking water-these are only some of the factors that undermine its natural beauty.

When I was the president of the ASJ Science Club more than three decades ago, we were decorating an enormous bulletin board for Earth Day. We also planted a tree, I think it was an oak, in the front garden of the school. Today, 34 years later, the tree still stands-a testimony of what some students interested in sciences did one beautiful spring afternoon.

That brings me back to today’s subject - my interest in environmental awareness. That is the seedling that I seek to plant for children and adults so that they may understand that our actions, be it at home, in school, in the community or our workplace, have an impact in our surroundings and above all in our environment. From putting aluminum cans in a recycling bin, buying green products or conserving energy, all these actions enable us to leave the world better for future generations.

Let’s celebrate Earth Day every day anywhere in the world!

*The coquí is a small frog that lives in the tropical trees and shrubs in Puerto Rico. It has been the inspiration for many songs and poetry on the Island.

Cantar del Coquí

Sobre la autor: Lina M. F. Younes ha trabajado en la EPA desde el 2002 y está a cargo del Grupo de Trabajo sobre Comunicaciones Multilingües. Como periodista, dirigió la oficina en Washington de dos periódicos puertorriqueños y ha laborado en varias agencias gubernamentales.

Mientras celebramos el 38vo aniversario del Día del Planeta Tierra, recuerdo cuando estudiaba en la Academia San José en Puerto Rico y los eventos que me inspiraron a dedicarme a la educación sobre la protección ambiental.

En el territorio estadounidense de Puerto Rico, una bella isla caribeña, se disfruta una temperatura cálida todo el año. Hermosas playas, bellos paisajes de vivos coloridos, el melodioso cantar nocturno del coquí* el Bosque Nacional Pluvial del Yunque y las Cuevas de Camuy –son algunas de las imágenes y sonidos que viven en mis recuerdos de mi Isla. A pesar de esos bellos alrededores, Puerto Rico enfrenta grandes retos ambientales-exceso de desechos sólidos, escasez de vertederos, la basura en las playas, problemas de calidad del agua potable–son tan solo algunos de factores que minan esa belleza natural.

Cuando era la presidenta del Club de Ciencia en la Academia San José más de tres décadas atrás, estábamos preparando un enorme tablón de anuncios con carteles alusivos a la protección del Planeta Tierra. También sembramos un árbol, creo que era un roble, en el jardín al frente del colegio. Hoy, 34 años más tarde, el árbol sigue allí-un testimonio de lo que hicieron unas estudiantes interesadas en las ciencias una bella tarde de primavera.

Eso me lleva otra vez al tema de hoy-mi interés en crear consciencia a favor de la protección ambiental. Esa es la semilla que quisiera sembrar para que tanto niños como adultos puedan comprender que las acciones que nosotros tomamos, sea en el hogar, en la escuela, en la comunidad o nuestro lugar de trabajo, tienen un impacto en nuestros alrededores y sobre todo en nuestro ambiente. Desde echar las latas de aluminio en la cesta de reciclaje, comprar productos “verdes” o conservar energía, todas estas acciones nos permitirán dejar un mundo mejor para futuras generaciones.

¡Celebremos el Día del Planeta Tierra todos los días en cualquier parte del mundo!

*El coquí es una pequeña rana que vive en la arboleda y flora tropicales de Puerto Rico. El coquí ha sido inspiración para muchas canciones y poesía en la Isla.