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

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.

Is it better to be a vegetarian or a bicyclist? Are fresh vegetables more harmful than frozen meat? If a chicken eats broccoli, and then I eat the chicken, have I eaten chicken and broccoli or just chicken?

Some felt that bio-digesting cow manure makes red meat climate friendly. Others thought bio-digesting cow manure was absurd and gross. One felt that algae could save us all. Another thought the electric car could beat a hundred vegans in a race to the farmers market.

Some don’t believe in greenhouse gases; some do believe, but still can’t help buying avocados out of season from South America. They’re just too tasty.

Everyone of us has a distinct and personal story that informs our choices about what food we eat. I think those quirky personal stories are wonderful and important. If anyone reading this has a story about why you love food, or where you imagine it comes from, or how you secretly love fresh strawberries in the middle of winter even though it makes you feel guilty for days… please post it here.

I’ll start by posting a video about eggs. When I imagine cheap eggs, the ones in the grocery store from who-knows-where, this is what I see.

Watch the video at Vimeo.

-Daniel

There’s been a lot of buzz about the Olympic Games’ environmental impact. Carbon-conscious critics rightly point out that developing new infrastructure, powering these facilities, and supporting an influx of athletes and spectators adds enormous environmental pressures.

We went straight to the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) sustainability report to understand what their efforts to “green” this year’s competitions entail. Though a final review of the environmental actions taken by VANOC won’t be released until later this year, their most recent report illuminates their unprecedented commitment.

In fact, it turns out that the approach they adopted this year—which involves measuring their impact as best they can, reducing this impact whenever possible, and offsetting what they cannot cut—is the same approach we embrace here at Brighter Planet.

To reduce unnecessary emissions, VANOC and their partners selected and planned their venue sites to minimize their energy requirements and the need to travel between locations. They encouraged attendees to use expanded public transportation.

They adhered to sustainable design principles when building new infrastructure. The Richmond Olympic Oval, for example, host of the speed-skating events, boasts a ceiling of reclaimed British Columbia wood that had been infected by pine beetles. Its enormous roof harvests rainwater, much of which then irrigates surrounding vegetation or supplements toilet flushing. Its waste heat reuse system captures heat released when making ice and directs this energy to provide hot water. The space was also designed with flexibility in mind and can be used later by Richmond and the Paralympic games.

Overall, VANOC estimates that their initiatives have reduced the carbon footprint of the Games by 15 percent (that’s 57,000 tonnes of carbon emissions over business-as-usual)!  To meet their goal of carbon neutrality, the committee partnered with sponsors and a local British Columbia company to offset the Games’ direct emissions, projected to be 118,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents.

Spectators traveling to and from events are encouraged by Olympic athletes with Project Blue Sky to reduce and offset their indirect emissions.  Venue Energy Tracker charts the real-time energy consumption of the Games’ major facilities and compares this use with the amount that would have been incurred without the new sustainability strategies.

Overall, it’s uplifting to see that an operation as complex as the Olympics can be addressed with the same simple approach—measure, reduce, offset—we’re honing here. The precedent established by these Games is one that we should uphold even after the closing ceremony; let’s take it upon ourselves to maintain that momentum.

As always, we’d also love to hear your thoughts on the matter (especially if you’ve been lucky enough to have experienced these efforts on the ground in Vancouver)! Join the conversation here or on Twitter…

–Jessica

The Super Bowl wasn’t the only win for New Orleans this month – when polls closed on Monday night, Historic Green’s Spring Greening ended up with a whopping total of 3,931 votes. The Brighter Planet community has spoken – Historic Green New Orleans will now receive a $5,000 grant to fund a ten day volunteer event. The event will coordinate volunteers to work on implementing energy saving strategies in homes in the area, as well as three separate project sites. They will help build a LEED platinum certified community resource center, install recycled covering and renewable lighting at a local playground, and assist the Sierra Club with a clean-up and restoration effort at a swamp that is critical to stormwater retention.

There was a total of 11,036 votes cast this month for nine projects from six different states. Other projects in the running included a project in Boulder, CO to publish a homeowner’s guide to fight climate change at home with a garden, a renewable energy battery pack for the Women’s Prayer Lodge in Busby, MT, and a magazine by WorldChanging to advocate for climate-neutral cities.

Stay tuned for the March round of the Project Fund – voting will open again on March 1st!

-Matt V

We’ve finally wrapped up the crunching, sifting, charting, and interpreting of the 30,000+ datapoints collected in our recent online survey about the employee engagement practices of US employers. Thanks to all of you who took the time to respond to the survey questions. Today we released the report that details our findings.

Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres (and Brighter Planet advisory board member), signed onto the cause with her contribution of the foreword. As she says, “This report from Brighter Planet both provides a benchmark for the status of employee sustainability programs in the US as they continue to evolve, and helps to inform their development by highlighting factors that contribute to their success. We look forward to watching employee engagement initiatives play an increasing role in helping our institutions to overcome the challenges of our time.”

Here are a few of the findings at a glance. Download the complete report to get the full results and insights.

• Most employers have only just begun interacting with employees around sustainability, and their efforts leave room for improvement. Although 86% of respondents said their organization promotes employee sustainability in some arena, only 16% said their employer collects data related to employee sustainability and just 14% said their employer had an official employee sustainability engagement policy.
• Small organizations are leading on employee sustainability engagement. Organizations with fewer than 100 people are nearly twice as likely to promote sustainability very frequently, and their efforts are twice as likely to be effective at changing employee behavior.
• The most effective engagement programs feature an organization’s management or board as the main advocate for employee sustainability. These programs are three times as effective as those in which an employee sustainability director was the main advocate.
• Employees are generally dissatisfied with their employers’ sustainability engagement efforts. Over 60% of respondents want to learn more about their employers’ and co-workers’ sustainability efforts, and 67% would like their employers to change their stance on sustainability.

–Matthew

Recently we’ve been talking a lot about a topic within sustainability that’s a language we can all relate to– food! We released our Sustainable Cooking Guide, which is chock-full of energy conservation tips, stories and recipes for everyone who loves eating and wants to keep their impact under control.

For all the data-lovers out there, we also published a white paper about FOODprints called “The American Carbon Foodprint: Understanding and Reducing your Food’s Impact on Climate Change.” The average American’s carbon foodprint is 6.1 tons of CO2e a year. That’s more than the combined impact of all their driving and flying. That means you can start eating your way to a healthy climate. The seven take-home tips on our previous post are a good place to start.

Now on to the tuna sandwich. The oceans are a crucial part of our planet’s ecosystem and destructive overfishing is rampant. Scientific American predicts overfishing could take seafood off the menu by 2048, with a total collapse of world around 2048. Seafood is not something everyone can relate to, but if you’re a buyer and consumer of seafood I’m here to give you the run-down on what’s responsible and what’s not.

There are some great Seafood Guides out there to help you stop contributing to this problem: The Monterey Bay Aquarium has pocket-sized Seafood Watch Guides you can print out and keep in your wallet. These guides are get updated and they’re based on what region of the U.S. you live in. There’s also a Sushi Guide and a National Guide.

The Environmental Defense Fund has a three part list of Eco-Best, Eco-Ok and Eco-Worst commercially sold fish. (A.K.A. what you’d buy in a store or restaurant, not freshwater or sport fish).

Over at the Blue Ocean Institute, there’s a seafood guide where you can search by your favorite fish and see the environmental ranking. They say “Chefs are the gatekeepers of the seafood industry” because 70% of the revenue generated by seafood sales in the United States occurs in restaurants and catering services, and they even have a program with Chefs Collaborative for chefs and culinary students: oceanfriendlychefs.org.

The good thing is, you won’t be alone alone in making an effort to choose more sustainable seafood. My family and I have kept these cards in our wallets for the last few years, British chef Jamie Oliver stopped using bluefin tuna and recently Target stores stopped selling farmed salmon. More and more restaurants have sustainable seafood options on their menu in Washington, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle.

Maura at Fresh Greens shared a few good rules of thumb to remember about seafood:
- Always avoid bluefin tuna, bigeye tuna, Atlantic halibut, European eel, and any species on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List.
- The smaller the fish, the more sustainable it is, and often, the healthier it is for you – so give those sardines a try.

Moreover, aside from eating or not eating seafood, everyone can contribute to ocean health by avoiding plastic. Beth’s blog Fake Plastic Fish is a great place to get inspired.

-Carolyn

photo credit: environmentalfolly.blogspot.com