April 2007 | On Our Radar
Good Day, Sunshine
Supersizing Solar Power
If you think solar power is the pipe dream of off-the-grid counterculture revolutionaries, you’re more than two decades behind the curve. In 1986, Ronald Reagan had his maintenance staff dismantle solar panels that were placed on top of the White House by Jimmy Carter. (The panels were moved to Maine’s Unity College, where they heated the school’s water until 2003.) The eighties were dark ages for solar power, but interest in solar is entirely renewable. In fact, it’s becoming bigger than ever.
California recently enacted a law that calls for one million solar panels to be installed on private residences, schools, and other public buildings by 2018. The power generated over the lifespan of these panels will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 3 million tons. Laws like this create an important milestone for solar energy: Experts predict that by 2012 solar energy will cost roughly 80 cents per watt, which will make it competitive with carbon-based energy sources. The cost for consumers will be much lower. The California law allows citizens to use their homes as eco-friendly power plants; any surplus solar energy can be sold back to the utilities for public use.
The new ubiquity of solar power is thanks, in part, to photovoltaics—new, thin laminates that collect the sun’s energy. These durable sheets are available in rolls, like wrapping paper, making installation much easier as the heavy glass shielding that weighed down the old panels is no longer required.
Many of the fears that fueled the 1980s reticence to use solar power have faded. Research has shown that decidedly non–Sun Belt cities like Chicago and Seattle can generate ample solar power, even on an ambient basis. Despite the lack of sunshine, both cities already employ solar-powered parking meters and road signs that function 365 days a year.
If you’re interested in going solar, it’s easy to find information about solar-friendly contractors. Renewable energy advocate Verde Energy has a website, verdeenergy.com, that provides information about solar energy and a helpful search engine that locates contractors in your area and provides contract bids.
Solar power is a force everybody understands is going to play a major role in our future. Even skeptics agree: In 2002, the Bush administration quietly replaced the Reagan-exiled solar panels on top of the White House, where they stand to this day.
—Paul Constant
Soul Train
Anyone can sit down with peace leaders on the Peace Train.
Presidents and political candidates used to embark upon whistle-stop train tours to drum up support for their campaigns and political agendas. But in a year when the government seems — unbelievably — on the precipice of yet more military involvement in the Middle East, maybe it’s time for peace, not politics, to take to the tracks.
The Association for Global New Thought, a progressive think-tank based in Santa Barbara, CA, has partnered with the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence and an inspiring group of cultural and spiritual leaders to create a literal whistle-stop train tour along the California coast. Departing from LA’s Union Station, the specially restored chartered railroad coaches will act as the meeting venue for discussions, teach-ins, music and guided meditations. Average Joes and Jills interested in the peace movement can sit next to peace leaders and shoot the breeze about making the world a better place. They’ll get to powwow with Arun Gandhi (the grandson of the peaceful crusader himself), Yolanda King (daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr.), Ela Gandhi, a former member of Parliament in South Africa, Paul F. Chavez of the National Farm Workers Service Center, Dolores Huerta of the AFL-CIO, Bernard LaFayette, Jr. from the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies, and Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Viennese religious philosopher who works for Buddhist-Christian dialogue. “A classroom on wheels is an exciting way to interact with people and teach them a philosophy based on love, compassion, respect and understanding. Nonviolence does not mean simply the non-use of physical violence. It means learning to build relationships with people on the basis of love, respect, understanding, acceptance and appreciation,” says Dr. Arun Gandhi.
If it sounds a little insular, think again: anyone can register to come along. “The idea of having the living leaders of the nonviolent social change movement together in one place is cause enough for celebration and awe,” says Barbara Fields, who’s spent a year helping to orchestrate the Peace Train. “But now we’ve added to the equation the community of grassroots nonviolence activists who will take the movement into its future.” During the train trip to San Jose along the California coast — that’s 350 miles — the convoy will stop at towns along the way to chat with community leaders. By the time the locomotive workshop and “beehive”-style teach-in returns to LA, participants will have taken part in discussions on interfaith healing, youth leadership, nonviolent policy change, the environment, family and schools — a complete foundation for building a culture of nonviolence.
“Gandhi used every means possible to approach his goal,” continues Arun Gandhi. “A ‘Peace Train’ seems an ideal way to attract people.”
To register or for more information, visit: www.agnt.org/peacetrain
—Lucinda Michele Knapp
TerraCycle’s green business success story
Picture the CEO of a multi-million dollar company. Now picture a 20-year old guy in the basement of an old office building, shoveling organic waste into worm bins. Same guy.
Tom Szaky /zake-ee/, a freshman at Princeton University in 2002, started the groundbreaking TerraCycle, Inc., in just that way. He was inspired by friends who were using worm castings (that’s “poop” to you and me) to grow “really nice plants,” as he likes to say, in their basement. It gave him a vision of using organic material that people throw away to produce plant fertilizer, and on a grand scale. “People thought we were nuts,” he says, of his fellow Ivy Leaguers’ opinion of him and his partner, John Beyer.
Chances are they don’t think so anymore. The company’s sales have quadrupled every year since 2003, with advance 2007 orders pulling in a cool $7 million. And Szaky says that they hope to be at $40 million sales in 2009. With businesses across the nation scrambling to go “green,” Szaky’s company, based in a warehouse in Trenton, New Jersey, isn’t just zero-waste, it actually consumes waste. TerraCycle uses organic garbage to feed its “armies of worms,” then liquefies the poop and packages it as garden products carried by “bigs” like Wal-Mart, Whole Foods and Home Depot.
Szaky was so dedicated to using post-consumer waste that in 2003, when the company was struggling, he turned down a cool million in funding. “We had $500 in our bank account and no other prospects for funding, but they wanted us to move away from garbage as our source.” So Szaky walked away. As it stands, the company gets its worm food in the form of stinky garbage from local school cafeterias, supermarkets and food retailers.
Not only does TerraCycle start with garbage, it uses recycled soda bottles for packaging. “We couldn’t afford packaging. That’s how we got the idea to use used soda bottles.” So they went out cruising dumpsters. “One of us got arrested in the process,” says Szaky. “It turns out you can’t dumpster dive in New Jersey. It’s illegal.” The company gets around that law by paying five cents for every bottle collected by schools and other nonprofits.
For CEOs who resist the green revolution, Szaky, now 25, has a wake-up call. “Either they’re going to become green or they’re going to be taken out by a company like mine,” he says. “It’s their choice.”
—Monica Woelfel
Visit www.teracycle.net for their full product line
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