EnviroPolitics Blog

Jeez, even the postman’s gone green

The U.S. Postal Service is the first is the only mailing or shipping company in the nation to achieve “Cradle to Cradle”SM Certification at the Silver level.
Postal Service mailing and shipping supplies already had exceeded government requirements, including recycled content standards from the EPA. Going beyond existing federal and state agency requirements was a goal in seeking certification.
Cradle to Cradle Certification is a scientifically based process that reviews specific criteria to assess the environmental attributes of materials used in products. In the review, 60 USPS packaging items were broken down into their 250 component materials. Some 1,400 individual ingredients in those component materials were further analyzed before the certification was made.
Based on the recycled content of the more than 500 million Express Mail and Priority Mail packages and envelopes the Postal Service provides its customers each year, more than 15,000 metric tons of carbon equivalent emissions (climate change gases) now will be prevented annually. Express Mail and Priority Mail boxes and envelopes also are 100 percent recyclable.
The USPS is requiring all 200 suppliers contributing to the manufacture of its envelopes and packages to complete a series of measurements and assessments of materials for human and environmental health.

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Will Albany ‘recycle’ NYC’s garbage plan?

Backed by a phalanx of city officials, community leaders and environmentalists, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg held a news conference last week to urge state legislators to authorize the construction of a marine transfer station to handle recyclable paper, metal, glass and plastic at Pier 52 on the Gansevoort Peninsula in Manhattan.

The facility would handle those recyclables generated in Manhattan that currently are trucked to facilities in the Bronx, Brooklyn and New Jersey. In doing so, the new facility would free-up capacity at an existing transfer station at 59th Street on the Hudson River to handle Manhattan’s commercial waste.

The transfer station is seen as an essential part of the mayor’s 20-year solid waste management plan that won approval from city council only after two years of jawboning and political compromises. But the effort is now in jeopardy, as the New York Times reported, because three Assembly members whose districts either include or are near the Gansevoort site say the city has never adequately studied alternative locations. The three are threatening to use their clout with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat who is also from Lower Manhattan, to kill it.

This battle has lots of political subplots and should be fun to watch from the sidelines.

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New director of legislative affairs at PA-DEP

Scott Pauchnik of Dauphin County has been appointed as the department’s director of legislative affairs. Since 2003, Pauchnik has served as a legislative specialist in DEP’s Office of Legislative affairs, most recently as the assistant director. He was directly involved in the review and development of such legislation as the energy portfolio standard, Growing Greener II and water quality/clean air initiatives. He’s also responded to inquiries and requests by members of the General Assembly and has worked with the DEP secretary and Governor’s Office of Legislative Affairs on numerous legislative matters.

Pauchnik worked for two years at EAP Industries, an environmental service provider located in Atlasburg, Washington County, where he was involved in environmental response actions and mitigation projects. He also was involved in environmental permitting and held sales and marketing responsibilities. Pauchnik holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Slippery Rock University. A native of Atlasburg, he currently lives in Harrisburg.

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Can dancing help save the planet?

Research conducted by a Dutch company concludes that an average-size dance club, open three nights a week, consumes 150 times the energy a four-person family does in a year. So an eco-minded couple, Stef van Dongen and Alijd van Doorn, have set out to develop designs that would change that. As reported in The Independent, they’re working on a dance floor that will convert the movement of clubbers on it into electricity. Their prototype uses simple electro-mechanical system in which dancers’ stomping feet squeeze a surface membrane in the floor which works a flywheel to generate voltage. The charge is then fed back into the system to light the dance floor up. Tweaking the floor system, they hope to generate excess electricity to contribute to powering the sound system, lighting or air conditioning. Another innovation involves capturing rising hot air from sweating dancers, passing it through a cooling chamber, and using the condensate to flush the lavatories. Hey, are you guys down at The Stone Pony listening to this?

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In Paramus: Pesticides, Politics and bad PR

The Bergen Record had a journalistic field day last week, reporting on how Paramus (NJ) school officials had failed to tell parents about pesticides found in soil on the grounds of a middle school. Parents went nuts when they heard that the school district was aware of the problem for five months before disclosing the news.

At this point, any public relations practitioner would have advised school officials to quickly issue an apology, announce that swift steps would be taken to remedy the problem, and promise never again to withhold such information.

But no. Instead, a defensive school official protested that the district had no legal obligation to tell the parents about the potential health problem. Isn’t that just what any concerned parent needed to hear?

The resulting uproar became such a hot political issue that the mayor stepped in and ordered the school shut. Governor Jon Corzine followed suit, ordering the DEP to remove the soils ASAP.

Here’s the point in the story where calm should return to Paramus, right? Wrong! On Saturday, the reporter who broke the story showed up at the school site with a lab technician to gather soil samples for independent tests. How did the town handle it? They arrested both men for trespassing, confiscated the soil samples and both men’s shoes and socks.

We’re not making this up. Read it for yourself.

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NJ’s Public Advocate on eminent domain abuses

“I don’t want their money, I want my house.” – Louis Anzalone, Long Branch, NJ property owner

“To move heaven and earth and the New Jersey Legislature, it will take more than Public Advocate Ronald K. Chen and a few good citizens. But the report issued yesterday by the Office of the Public Advocate may well be the tipping point, ” writes attorney William J. Ward in his blog, New Jersey Eminent Domain Law.

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