We have been having a lot of discussions at Green Collar recently with companies involved in helping Vehicle Fleets become more efficient.  The great thing about this area of the Green Collar Economy is that it is an easy area to get a great business ROI (which CFO’s love) and a area where a huge amount of carbon emissions can be eliminated (which is good for all of us).  This short video highlights how quickly both of these benefits come to fruition when dealing with fleet vehicles.

If you haven’t yet, you should check out the White Papers and Case Studies on GreenCollarEconomy.com reviewing the different approaches and benefits to improving fleet efficiency, saving money and lowering carbon emissions in companies operating fleet vehicles (I’m looking at you municipalities, delivery companies, repair companies, etc.). Also, check out the huge directory of green fleet solutions.

Building efficiency may be the most visible low-hanging fruit in the race to become more sustainable as a nation and a planet, but with the ROI available to fleet managers going green, this area is going to get hot and get hot fast.

If you’re like me, you’ve often thought that we humans produce a huge amount of energy when we excerise - or just go about our daily lives. The huge majority of that energy is wasted - but perhaps not anymore. A startup out of Cleveland, Tremont Electric, just released a new kinetic energy capture device that can generate wall socket level energy just by carrying it around with you while you walk.

About the size of a flashlight and weighing in at 9 ounces, the nPower PEG (Personal Energy Generator) takes advantage of magnets and springs to capture and amplify the kinetic energy we generate when we move and turn in into enough power to recharge personal electric devices. In the short-term it seems like a dream come true for serious campers, hikers, lumberjacks - folks who spend extended periods of time outdoors and off the grid. Based on the feedback about how well these things work, it will just be a matter of time before we start seeing them integrated into appliances and products we are already carrying around with us.

The folks at Tremont are already scaling the devices up - way up - and looking at ways they can put them in buoys and use them to generate 50kW per device in lakes and the ocean to create kinetic energy from Wave Energy.

This is an idea that has needed to happen and seeing a product of this type commercialized and ready to roll-out to market is a great example of how American ingenuity will help us make up for lost time in sustainability. Now if someone will just roll-out an entire gym worth of exercise equipment that will make every health club in America carbon neutral - let’s turn all those burned calories green!

I was just watching Hardball (on MSNBC)  with Mike Barnacle (a Boston-guy) sitting in for Chris Matthews.  Towards the end of the show, Barnacle asks his guests (paraphrasing) “When is one of these presidential candidates going to get specific about their energy policy and when are they going to get the guts to tell the American people the truth.   That it is going to hurt and that we are going to have to stop driving so much.”  

This seems like a reasonable question to ask, but to ask it two days after Barack Obama gave his speech on energy and announced his formal energy platform either means he is, a.) not doing his homework (at all), or, b.) actively trying to keep people from learning about it by making obtuse statements that change the conversation away from substance and towards rebuttal.  He continued this pattern with the other main point he brought up, that Obama would tax the oil companies on their windfall profits.  That he would do this to help  provide $1000 energy rebates for families unable to afford gas or heating oil was barely touched on, but plenty of time was spent on the part about how Obama hates companies that make a profit.  Mike, you can change the subject all you want, but you’re from the northeast, and you probably know people personally who are not going to be able to pay their heating bills this winter.  There are lots of working families and people on fixed income that are being hurt by these price increases and one of our presidential candidates presented his ENERGY POLICY, and American’s deserve to know what it is and how he plans to pay for it - all without partisan talking points as the main focus.   I am equally interested in learning how Senator McCain is planning on addressing this short-term issue and the much larger issue of his long-term energy policy.

I urge you all to watch or read Senator Obama’s speech, as it is vitally important.  Early on he eloquently lays out the essence of his position with this statement:

When it comes to our economy, our security, and the very future of our planet, the choices we make in November and over the next few years will shape the next decade, if not the century. And central to all of these major challenges is the question of what we will do about our addiction to foreign oil.

OK, that is exactly what we want and need to hear.  What’s more important than our economy, our security and our planet?  The fact that energy policy can positively impact all three is why Green is going to help America get its Mojo back and is why I started Green Collar Media.  He makes it clear that there are some short term pains that need to be addressed due to the price spike and he makes the following suggestions:

1. Provide $1000 energy rebate to every working family in America (to be paid for by windfall profits tax, as mentioned earlier by Mr. Barnacle)
2. Increased domestic oil production
3. Not opening up new areas to drilling but making the oil companies drill on the 68 million acres they already have, or give up their leases to someone who will
4. Increasing shale oil extraction
5. Drilling in a portion of Alaska (not ANWR)
6. Releasing 70 Million barrels of oil from the strategic reserve to bring prices down quickly

He states, though, that these are short-term fixes and in no way address or solve our addiction to foreign oil which is so poisoning our nation.

…breaking our oil addiction is one of the greatest challenges our generation will ever face. It will take nothing less than a complete transformation of our economy. This transformation will be costly, and given the fiscal disaster we will inherit from the last Administration, it will likely require us to defer some other priorities.

It is also a transformation that will require more than just a few government programs. Energy independence will require an all-hands-on-deck effort from America — effort from our scientists and entrepreneurs; from businesses and from every American citizen. Factories will have to re-tool and re-design. Businesses will need to find ways to emit less carbon dioxide. All of us will need to buy more of the fuel-efficient cars built by this state, and find new ways to improve efficiency and save energy in our own homes and businesses.

This will not be easy. And it will not happen overnight. And if anyone tries to tell you otherwise, they are either fooling themselves or trying to fool you.

If that is not a presidential candidate telling us the truth, than I cannot imagine what that could possibly look like.  Mr. Barnacle, you owe this guy an apology.

He goes on to outline 3 main steps that he would take as president to help America succeed in meeting these challenges and taking advantage of the opportunities it will create:

1. Help American car companies create the next generation of electric-hybrid vehicles that get 150 miles to the gallon and get 1 Million of them on the road within six years.  To do this, he suggests investing in advance battery technology, leverage private sector funding to bring the products to market, but offer a $7000 tax rebate for purchasers of the new cars.
2. Require that 10% of our energy come from renewable sources by the end of his first term.  Tax breaks, incentives, funding for entrepreneurs…all the stuff you would expect, but hey…they work.
3. Start a nationwide conservation effort.  He wants America to use 15% less energy by the end of the next decade.  This is the easiest and most cost effective thing we can do and it will save us $130 Billion a year if we can pull it off.   He wants to make national building efficiency standards so that new buildings will be 50% more efficient within 4 years, and based on California’s success, change the ways that utilities get paid by compensating them on how much energy they save, not how much they sell.

This is a substantive and well thought out stance on the most important strategic decision of our time.   I’ll let Senator Obama’s optimistic words, which capture my own beliefs, sum up his policy.

But I know we can do this. We can do this because we are Americans. We do the improbable. We beat great odds. We rally together to meet whatever challenge stands in our way. That’s what we’ve always done — and it’s what we must do now. For the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, we must end the age of oil in our time.

Game On!  Senator McCain - you have your work cut out for you.

A penny now costs about 40% more to make than the 1 cent it is worth.  That is the kind of thing that makes us at Green Collar nuts.  We are losing taxpayer money, burning through natural resources and all for a coin that is more of an annoyance that it is worth.  I mean, when you get a coffee and a donut from Dunkins and it is $2.51, what is more frustrating than getting $0.49 in change…aaarrghhhh.

Not every  green initiative has to be focused on saving energy…although this idea will save energy, and resources and vital metals, and MONEY!  The idea came to me while helping my 6 year old son sort through his piggy bank and make neat little stacks of 10 out of all of the different coin types (oh my god, what a pain).  It turns out that while scavenging around the house, he had collected 396 pennies.  I was impressed with his persistence in getting them all stacked (not to mention scamming all those coins from his mother and I).  We were going to bring them to the bank to cash them in - until he dumped them all back into his piggy bank and mixed them with all the other coins as soon as he had finished. 

But that got me thinking.  How many pennies are in the average home?  And how much does it cost to make a penny in this era of spiking commodity prices?  And how many pennies are we minting every year?  And how much time are we wasting dealing with these things.

According to the New York Times, the US Mint produces about 7.7 billion of the useless little suckers a year.  That’s $77 Million dollars worth of pennies put into circulation per year, but here is the kicker…It is costing the US at least $107 million to produce them.  That’s because the price of zinc (which makes up 97.5% of the penny) and price of copper (the other 2.5%) are at historic highs.  Just like oil, this is not because of commodity traders, although that had something to do with it.  It is due to the fact that demand is sky high.  Countries like China are consuming vast amounts of these metals and there are limited amounts available.  Thank goodness the zinc market has cooled off a little bit.  This time last year, zinc was trading for well over four times as much as it was in 2003.

This brings me to my next point.  The reason we have to produce so many pennies is because they are all in jars in our houses, and retailers need them to make change.  When retailers need them they go to their banks, who go to the fed to get shiny new pennies because the banks don’t have any because nobody is turning in their pennies.  Let’s be honest, when was the last time you rolled up all your pennies and brought them in to be turned into cash?  Even my 6 year old was horrified that all that work netted him less than $4.  So here is some back of the napkin calculations on the number of pennies hidden in houses.  According to the US Census, there are  111,162,259 households in America.  Figuring 400 pennies (we’ve got at least 5 times that many if I look around), we are looking at over 44 Billion pennies hanging out in people’s homes, and my guess is that this is an extremely conservative estimate.

I’m not the only person thinking about this.  There is a pretty strong movement out there to retire the penny, and the most well known group, Citizens for Retiring the Penny, makes the case that pennies, in addition to costing more than they’re worth, are a waste of time:

Most cash transactions involve the exchange of pennies, leading to an increase in the time for the transaction to take place.  The National Association of Convenience Stores and Walgreen’s drug store chain estimated that handling pennies adds 2 to 2.5 seconds to each cash transaction (remember that we are including the occasional customer who spends 30 seconds looking for the penny in his pocket).  

Let us estimate that each person goes through two of these transactions per day and that on average there is one person waiting in line (making for a total of three people’s time wasted in each transaction).   We can then calculate that the presence of pennies wastes (2 transactions/day) X (2 seconds/transaction) X (3 people per transaction) = 12 seconds per day, or 1.2 hours per person per year.  Of course, when you get home you still have to find something to do with your pennies, meaning that probably only about half of the wasted time is directly connected with a cash transaction (the other time is associated with counting pennies etc), giving a total of 2.4 wasted hours per person per year.  The mean wage in the US is approximately $17/hour, implying that each of us is effectively “paying” $40 per year to keep pennies in circulation.  Given that the US has ~ 240 million adults, using pennies is currently costing the nation $10 billion per year!

OK, I think that is interesting….but my issue is that we are not going to retire the penny cold turkey…not gonna happen.  So my little brainstorm is to use the green movement to give us a call to action and a ’time horizon’ (to quote our beloved president) to begin retiring the penny.  This is how it would work.

1.  Have the fed suggest to every bank in the country that they get a self service coin sorting machine.
2.  Run a public service announcement encouraging Americans to gather up their loose change and bring it to the bank - it is good for the environment, saves taxpayers money and helps ensure that we don’t run out of important metals (I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to run out of copper anytime soon…I like electricity and microprocessors).
3. The fed will figure out an amount (less than $0.004 premium they are paying for every penny produced now) that they will pay the bank for every penny collected in this manner.
4.  The banks submit notarized accounts of the number of pennies collected each year and put back into cirulation (fed sends check).  They can offer bonuses to the banks that order fewer than ‘X’ new pennies each year
5.  We announce at the same time a 10 year timeline leading up to the elimination of the penny, and make it a stated goal of the US to mint as few pennies as possible during that time (make it patriotic to turn in the pennies - it is green and good for the economy!)
6.  At the end of the penny era, we ask Americans to turn them in again, and we have a huge smelt-fest, put all the metal on the open market and use the proceeds to help pay down this outrageous-freaking deficit we’ve been handed.

So if my estimated number of orphaned pennies is even close and we can get 10% of the households in America to turn their pennies into cash each year, we will be able to eliminate 57% of our new penny creation.  This is about a $60MM savings to US taxpayers each year (minus what would be paid to the banks) and we get to (literally) put our money where our mouth is when it comes to sustainability.  We also get the added benefit of, in the near future, never getting 49 cents in change again!

Go green…save the planet…kill the penny.

Finally my home state it taking a leadership role. With Governor Deval Patrick leading the charge on one of his signature issues, Massachusetts just passed a landmark energy bill that puts the state in a clear leadership position when it comes to energy policy. Thank goodness.

Among the attributes of the bill, according to today’s Boston Globe:

A requirement for utilities to invest in energy efficiency when it is cheaper to do so than it is to buy power.

 Utilities would have to enter into 10- or 15-year contracts with renewable energy developers, an effort to help those developers get financing from banks.

(A_ provision that lifts a prohibition on utilities owning solar electric panels and allows them to rent the panels to customers. The law is designed to allow utilities to recoup the cost of panels over time from rental fees while the customers reap energy savings.

By 2030, utilities would (be required to) buy 25 percent of their power from renewables.

The creation of “Green Communities.” The state will commit $10 million annually to help communities figure out ways to become more energy efficient or invest in renewables, including giving them no-interest loans.

These are all good things.  When I bought my new house a few years ago, we knew we would need to replace the systems (60 year old steam boiler and no A/C).  We looked into wind, solar, heat pumps, and although there was some support from the state, the premium was so cost prohibitive that it was unrealistic.  We were running ROI numbers that looked as if it would take 25 years to recoup the extra cost.  Unfortunately, that was completely unrealistic for us.  With this new approach, we are going to be taking a look again.

Way to go Massachusetts.  I know that you are all a bunch of northeastern, liberal elites, but this aggressive new law is just about the best “Independence” day present I could have hoped for.  Definitely generating some mojo here. 

Communities around the country are organizing to find ways to become green, and in my hometown, we are no different.  Independent groups of concerned citizens are taking up the baton and running when there is no help from government, and the group in my town, the Newton Green Decade Coallition, has come up with a simple and exciting idea that should be replicated around the country.  A green welcome wagon basket. 

When new familiies move into town, they are  provided with a welcome basket filled with hundreds of dollars of green lifestyle goodies.  Lighbulbs, green cleaning supplies, reusable grocery bags, outlet insulators, coupons for energy efficiency audits, etc  (see the whole list here).

What a simple and powerful idea, and what a great way to welcome new residents to town.  It shows the new neighbors how progressive the city is, encourages them to go green and makes it easy for them.   It provides them with something that is meaningful to all of us right now, as opposed to just a bunch of stuff that would all be put aside and most likely never used (except the baked goods, we all eat the baked goods).  

Of course my business mind started taking leaps about how to take this concept and roll it out nationwide.  The welcome wagon association must be out there somewhere, and this is an idea that they should pick up and run with.  

 Mojo…the Austin Powers kind, not the little bag of voodoo charms.  We are missing it right now in our country, and the goal of this blog is to chronicle the on-going story of how Green is helping America get it back. 

Millions of  Americans feel like the place we grew up in is on the verge of disappearing…the economy is tanking, our industrial base has fled the country, the middle-class is struggling, we are disliked abroad at unprecedented levels, we have an incoherent energy policy (ok, so that’s not new),we are entering a new cold war with Iran, and we are not leading on global warming.  My most conservative friends and my most liberal, all agree on these points.

There is a simple answer to these challenges;  We have to go Green.

By going green as a nation, we can turn this country back into the America we want it to be.  We can be more prosperous than ever, we can revitalize our manufacturing base, we can create millions of new, good paying jobs, we can improve our standing with our allies and our adversaries, and we can be the leading force in the battle on global warming that the world wants us to be.

This blog is going to be about how the American entrepreneurial spirit and the American marketplace is making that happen.  We have to change things, and we can do it like we always have – by making a ton of money along the way.   I will cheerlead for the government when they do something that is going to help us achieve these goals, and I will probably bitch when they do something stupid, or even worse, don’t do anything.

I will highlight people, products, services and solutions that are making a difference.  When I come across an important insight, I will share it with you.  Occasionally, I may scare you when new scientific data becomes available.  I will also look for, and seek out contributors to this blog, as the more knowledgeable voices that join this conversation, the better off we will all be.

I could probably write a lot more elegant opening to this endeavor, but it is time to start telling the story.  It is one we are all going to participate in.  Let’s go.