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 bootom 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

Wanted to share with you all a white paper that we just put out, entitled “The American Carbon Foodprint: Understanding and Reducing your Food’s Impact on Climate Change.” Using the emissions model that we built to power the footprint calculator on this website, we analyzed the cradle to grave climate impacts of the average diet, and pulled the results together in a report that explains and interprets them. It turned up some pretty enlightening (and sometimes rather surprising) stuff – good background for anybody who is into understanding the food they eat.

A few highlights:

• The average American’s carbon “foodprint” is 6.1 tons of CO2e a year. That’s bigger than the combined impact of all their driving and flying.
• Production accounts for close to half of a meal’s total climate impact, and red meat is by far the most potent emitter of all the food groups.
• Of all the transportation emissions associated with your food, less than a tenth result from delivering food from the producer to the vendor, while more than two thirds result from your own driving to grocery stores and restaurants. That puts the importance of “food miles” in perspective!
• Kitchen energy accounts for 29% of a meal’s life cycle impact. Cooking at home is far more carbon-efficient than eating in restaurants.

Yes, the climate impact of our dining habits is substantial. But it’s pretty straightforward for each of us to make changes that significantly reduce those impacts. We distilled the learnings into seven take-home tips:

• Eat fewer animals and more plants
• Buy unprocessed foods with less packaging
• Grow and harvest your own food
• Minimize car trips to restaurants and stores
• Cook at home more and eat out less
• Cook with efficient appliances and techniques
• Compost, recycle, and relish leftovers

Check out the full paper to get answers to all the carbon foodprint questions you never knew you had, and let us know what you think.

–Matthew

We ran the Mastering the Art of Sustainable Cooking contest up until Dec. 31st 2009 to give people everywhere the opportunity to share tips and experiences about reducing their environmental impact in the kitchen. We received entries with tips about how to approach leftovers, efficiently raid your pantry, how to choose more sustainable ingredients and more. We’re excited to announce the judges have voted, and the five overall winners are:

Menu and Dining Planning
Jeff Thorp from CA with his delicious plan for getting three meals for two out of one chicken (and you can get the recipes to try it yourself at his blog).

Food Sources
Bettina from Loulies in DC blew us away with a handful of fabulous tips and recipes. One of our favorites (and the judges, too!) is a guide for Getting to Know Your Farmer’s Market.

Ingredients
Thomas from MA shared gorgeous photos and inspiration from his winter garden. Yes you can reap a harvest year-round even in a cold climate.

Techniques
Dave in Florida knows how to increase a BBQ’s efficiency. You just have to learn one little secret…

Appliances, Gadgets, and Gizmos
Cynthia in CA had an awesome idea: create a gadget co-op and share rarely-used appliances and tools instead of piling them up in the back of a kitchen drawer.

These winners will receive Amazon Kindle DXs—predicted by the New York Times to slash the publishing industry’s environmental impact.

The judges chose these winners from the top 15 entries with the most votes on our website. The panel includes celebrated local food pioneer Alice Waters of Chez Panisse and Slow Food International; visionary environmental writer Bill McKibben of 350.org; sustainable entrepreneur Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farms; food activist and anthropologist Amy Trubek; director and producer Ana Sofia Joanes of FRESH; EatingWell Magazine’s editorial director Lisa Gosselin; CEO Patti Prairie of Brighter Planet; and food television writer and producer Zachary Cohen of Farm to Table. Judges rated top-ranked entries based on eco-effectiveness and ability to inspire conservation in others.

Today also marks the release of our Mastering the Art of Sustainable Cooking Guide where we’ve compiled the top tips, stories and recipes from the contest for your benefit. Please enjoy it and spread it widely. The average American’s carbon footprint from food is as big as that of their car or their home, so food is a good place to reduce your climate impact. And if that wasn’t enough, we’ve also published a complimentary white paper for all you data-loving left brainers with an extensive analysis of the American carbon “foodprint.”

Thanks very much to our partners EatingWell Magazine, Guyot Designs
To-Go Ware, and Stonyfield Farms for donating food-related prizes to outstanding contestants.

As Gary Hirshberg said, “There is a connection between your health, healthy food and a healthy planet.” Cheers to that. We can all make choices in this arena and create heaps of benefits.

Bon appetit,
-Carolyn

It’s that time again! We’re happy to announce that the Antigo City Farm Urban Tree Program in Antigo, WI will receive $5,000 in seed money from the Project Fund. The funds will go to purchase 500 trees and support a project coordinator who will oversee a city-wide tree planting and education program. Through workshops, community members will be trained to plant the trees and tap local maple trees to produce syrup, a valuable local resource. If they succeed in their goal of reaching 500 households (20% of the city), the positive impact will be widespread.

With seven worthy projects from Montana, Wisconsin, Vermont, Oregon, Missouri and Colorado, we saw another diverse and successful month for the Project Fund. Other leading projects were weatherization projects from Montana Energy Corps and Button Up Middlebury, and an effort from Solar Oregon to educate on solar energy in rural areas. All of the projects brought in a whopping total of 9,572 votes.

We’re seeing plenty of new proposals coming in for the February round of voting. Be sure to visit the Project Fund homepage after the 1st to let your voice be heard!

-Matt V