The Brighter Planet Blog

Air travel is the most environmentally damaging form of transportation. It’s usually the dirtiest way to get from place to place, and we use it to cover vast distances. In the U.S. alone more than 827 million passengers travel by air each year, flying just over a trillion miles. These flights emit over 350 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (including RFI), about 4% of total U.S. emissions or 16% of transportation emissions.

Air travel’s convenience and ubiquity make it easy to dismiss as a necessary evil. But this obscures the reality that there are simple ways to reduce its impact. Our latest report covers five simple steps that businesses (and individuals) can take to minimize their travel footprint. Take them to heart!

-Ian

It’s been another great month for the Project Fund – over 5,700 votes were cast for six projects to fight climate change. They range in focus from renewable energy to education to energy efficiency to community engagement. This diversity is nothing new, we’ve been seeing it for six months. It is truly a testament to the power of the Brighter Planet community to make a difference in their hometowns.

The Wise Energy and Sustainable Economic Diversification and Development Project (WE SEDD) garnered the most votes of all, with a whopping count of 2,052. We are pleased to announce that they will receive a $5,000 Project Fund grant to support their work, which will encourage local sustainability and renewable energy initiatives.

By holding community forums and encouraging the growth of economic systems that are alternative to harmful mountain-top removal coal mining, WE SEDD will help grow the green economy and improve the sustainability of the region. It will also create jobs that will give workers an alternative to the coal mining industry. Along with hosting community events to raise awareness on the issues, the grantees will conduct a series of interviews across the region to identify what the community needs most and what tools exist to achieve their goals.

We’re proud to support great initiatives to fight climate change. Check out the Project Fund homepage to see our other grant recipients, or to submit a project of your own!

-Matt V

The answer may be blowin’ in the wind, but it’s not always easy to find.  For Greensburg, Kansas, it took a devastating natural disaster, a visionary commitment by residents, an arduous fund raising effort, and a lengthy planning and building process, to get the clean energy flowing.  But that day is finally here.

Leveled in 2007 by a EF-5 tornado that destroyed more than 95% of the buildings in this town of 1500 residents, Greensburg vowed to rebuild as the greenest town in America.  Now, less than three years later, that commitment has paid off as the first of ten massive new wind turbines begin to spin outside town.

The Greensburg Wind Farm by NativeEnergy came online this month, and we’re thrilled that members of the Brighter Planet community were able to play a key role in making this story a reality.  As charter supporters of this wind farm, every Brighter Planet cardholder helped fund its construction every time you swiped your card to buy gas and groceries.  Thanks everybody!  It’s great to see another inspiring example of innovative ways we can come together to build a clean energy future.

The ten turbines, each capable of producing up to 1.25 MW of electricity, will provide enough clean energy to power the town several times over — this allows Brighter Planet members who contributed to the project to claim rights to some of the clean energy produced, with enough left over for the town of Greensburg also to claim carbon neutrality.

The sheer scale of these turbines is awesome; each one is as tall as a 35-story building, with blades a long as the wingspan of a Boeing 747.  An eyesore for local residents?  Quite the contrary — the only concerns raised during the placement process came from folks who wanted the project located where it could be seen from their homes.

Ditching your car for pedal power just got way easier.  Google announced today that they’ve added bicycling directions to Google Maps.  In doing so, they’ve helped to eliminate one of the biggest obstacles to getting people in the saddle — finding safe and easy routes through hilly, traffic-choked landscapes.

The new feature avoids roads that are unsuitable for biking, prioritizes flat and quiet routes, and unveils a new map notation that identifies in various shades of green bike-only trails, roads with dedicated bike lanes, and roads without bike lanes that are preferred for cycling.

The network of bike-only trails (more than 12,000 miles of them across the country), which was added in collaboration with Rails-to-Trails, is especially impressive, and especially appreciated.  I’ve already found bike paths in my area that I never knew existed.

I can’t wait to put this tool to the test, both for transportation and for recreation.  It couldn’t be a better time of year for this feature to launch, either, as thoughts around here are beginning to turn from skiing to biking.

We all know cycling is an environmental boon, but let’s not forget it’s also a joy — here’s a refreshing video we made on biking for biking’s sake:

A Reason to Bike from Brighter Planet on Vimeo.

–Matthew

In November, in response to a lack of good data about emerging employee sustainability engagement programs, we conducted a survey to get a snapshot of what’s going on in this space.  Last week, we presented some of our findings from that study as part of a webinar roundtable hosted by our friends at the National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF).

Now, we’re pleased to see another clear-headed analysis being added to the growing buzz about employee engagement, this in the form of a report recently released by NEEF themselves, entitled “The Business Case for Environmental and Sustainability Employee Education.”

The white paper does a great job highlighting real world examples of companies that are frontrunners in employee sustainability.  Our partner Stonyfield Farms, for example, “challenged its employees to save energy at the company’s facilities. Savings were tied to employee bonuses for all workers, providing additional motivation. The company achieved its annual goal, reducing company energy use (per ton of product) by over 22 percent.”

But as NEEF points out in the report, sustainability practices and engaged employees can build major value for the bottom line, not just for the environment.  They identify six business benefits of employee sustainability programs:  improving operational efficiency, strengthening customer relations, innovation, supply chain management, strengthening community ties, and attracting and retaining employees.

You’ll find the full report on the NEEF website.