Late-night laundry

From today’s Star

 

 

 

 

 

Solar option

Solar technologies are also looking more attractive in a time-of-use scenario, since the sun typically shines strongest during peak hours when electricity rates are highest. If you use electricity to heat your hot water, it may be more affordable to offset that electricity with a solar thermal system instead. This is likely the thinking going on at Toronto city council, which is expected today to approve a plan to equip 20 city buildings with solar thermal systems.

Likewise, as the cost of solar photovoltaic technology falls, using the sun to generate electricity might begin to make more sense in certain applications.

There’s a reason why a U.S. company called First Solar Inc., which was priced at $20 a share for its initial public offering last November, is now trading above $210 – even outperforming the stock performance of stock market wonderGoogle. The potential is there, and investors see it.

Nov 19, 2007 04:30 AM

Tyler Hamilton
When and how we use electricity, while it’s something we often don’t think about, will become top-of-mind in 2008.

That’s because money will be involved. The introduction later next year of time-of-use power pricing – up to 8.7 cents per kilowatt-hour during peak times compared to the 5 cents we pay today – will provide an incentive to not do the laundry or run the dishwasher at 9 a.m. or 5 p.m. or any other time when the province is relying on expensive, often dirty power or electricity imports.

Similarly, a rate of 3 cents per kilowatt-hour between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. will lure us to plug in and turn on during those hours. What we’re talking about is a three-fold jump in electricity rates from off-peak overnight hours to the highest peaks in the day.

Toronto Hydro launched a pilot program last week that lets 50,000 homeowners in the city see the impact of time-of-use pricing on their existing bills, just to give them a flavour of what to expect next year.

It could be a shock to some. Depending on lifestyle, some people may actually see their bills go down. Others will see it skyrocket – a necessarywakeup call in a country that ranks tops in energy consumption per capita and has the well-earned reputation of being most wasteful when it comes to energy use.

But we can’t reasonably expect everything that consumes power to be turned off during peaks. Some people, particularly the elderly, require adequate air conditioning during the hottest of days. Some businesses require hot water and need to keep the lights on during normal business hours. Should they be penalized? Can we really turn the refrigerator off?

This has somewhat limited the potential of time-of-use pricing, but it has also opened up a number of opportunities for entrepreneurs who can figure out an affordable way of storing energy, whether in the form of heat or electricity, and shifting its use to a time when we need it. This way, we see the benefits of energy shifting without sacrificing the lifestyle or conveniences we’ve come to expect.

Battery and fuel-cell technologies hold obvious significance here. If we can store cheap, off-peak electricity in batteries – whether it be the lead acid or flow battery in your basement, or the lithium-ion battery pack in your electric vehicle – then there may be a business case, depending on the cost of the batteries.

The same goes for using off-peak electricity to produce hydrogen that can be used at a later time in a basement fuel-cell system, which can provide both power and heat to a home. Will these technologies fall enough in cost over the next few years to make this a feasible option in Ontario? You can bet the numbers are being crunched, and the engineers are working toward that goal.

A small company in Colorado called Ice Energy, meanwhile, has developed a system that runs an air conditioner at night, using cheap off-peak electricity, to turn water into ice. During the day, the ice is then used to provide cooling without the need for peak-time electricity consumption.

The idea intrigued a Toronto-based company called the Summerhill Group, which saw an opportunity to use the technology in Ontario after time-of-use electricity rates go into effect. The company is now trying to promote Ice Energy’s product, called Ice Bear, in the province.

James Alden, chief operating officer of Summerhill, says the potential is huge for big box stores, sports clubs and restaurants initially. Within weeks, he expects to announce a few company installations of the system. Ice Energy has also developed residential systems.

“This, along with other technologies, should be part of the mix,” says Alden, adding that there’s serious potential to use such technologies as a climate-friendly way to avoid having to build new power generation in the province.

“That’s when it becomes something the Ontario government should be looking at, and exploring mass installations of a product like Ice Bear.”

Diapers to diesel

From today’s Toronto Star

 

 

Quebec project uses thermal process that produces no emissions

Nov 19, 2007 04:30 AM

Sidhartha Banerjee
THE CANADIAN PRESS
MONTREAL–If a Quebec company has its way, dirty diapers normally destined for landfills will soon be transformed into a cost-effective, synthetic diesel fuel.

It’s not such a stretch, says engineering and project management company AMEC, which is working on behalf of an as yet unnamed client to build a facility in the Montreal area that would use a process known as pyrolysis to convert diapers to diesel.

The concept has been around for ages and is continually changing, says Luciano Piciacchia, an engineer and vice-president with Amec’s Quebec office.

“But some of the issues that come up with (the process) is the consistency of the material you’re putting through,” he adds.

Enter diapers, which are in plentiful supply in hospitals and consistent in their composition. The company is considering a collection system to ensure it gets the volume it needs.

“If we try to take municipal waste and run it through a system like this, it would be too variable and you’d get all sorts of nasty surprises you’d have to deal with,” Piciacchia says.

The initial plan is to convert about 30,000 diapers, about one-quarter of the diapers that end up in landfills in Quebec yearly. Piciacchia says that number of diapers will translate into about 11,000 tonnes of diesel fuel. The preliminary economic analysis pegs the cost of the fuel at 50 cents per litre.

Pyrolysis, also known as thermal cracking, involves heating up the diapers up in a closed, controlled environment at temperatures of up to 600C without air, essentially breaking them down thermally.

“Then you’re bringing it to the next level which is breaking the carbon chains down … and (in the end) they will resemble the fuels which are what we’re going to end up producing,” Piciacchia says.

So-called diaper diesel can be used in just about any industrial application, but probably won’t be suitable for use in an automobile, he says. “The other beauty of it is because this whole thing works in a closed system, there are no emissions.”

David Bressler of the University of Alberta says pyrolysis is a “very hot area of research right now” as industry looks for ways to further develop biofuel production. “There are a lot of good things about this class of technology. There aren’t a lot of negatives,” he says.

Garbage: the revolution begins at home

From today’s Toronto Star

TheStar.com | entertainment | Film tracks family’s garbage production

 

 

 

DOCUMENTING WASTE

Film tracks family’s garbage production

Nov 19, 2007 04:30 AM

Catherine Porter
Environment Reporter
The McDonald family knows their garbage intimately.

They lived with every used plastic fork, balled-up candy wrapper and ripped shred of holiday paper for three whole months. Instead of chucking it out of their home – and minds – every week, they stored it in their increasingly pungent and maggot-infested garage.

“It was eye-opening,” says Glen McDonald, who reluctantly agreed to the project as part of his friend Andrew Nisker’s documentary on household garbage, called Garbage! The Revolution Starts at Home.

The idea was to document how much garbage a typical family in Toronto produces – in diapers, takeout containers, magazines and plastic bags. The family was filmed in 2005 during the most consumer-frenzied season of the year: Christmas.

“The McDonalds produced more waste in December than October and November combined,” said Nisker, who wrote, shot, directed, produced and edited the 76-minute film himself.

In his film, Nisker also looks at the less tangible garbage we create daily. He shows viewers the sludge at the bottom of the sewage treatment plant that is regularly trucked to a Michigan dump, the oily “road runoff” from our cars’ dripping exhaust pipes that snakes into our rivers and streams, and the chemicals we dump into our dishwashers and washing machines that feminize male fish and make the air inside our homes more toxic than outside.

“I used to love the smell of the dishwasher when it was drying the dishes. It smelled like home,” says Nisker, who has since converted to all-natural cleaners. “When I started connecting the dots, it was shocking to me.”

As part of the dot-connecting process, Nisker visited both the Michigan landfill, where 130 trucks carting Toronto’s garbage rumble every day, and a mine in West Virginia, where much of the coal stoking the fires – and electricity – inside our Nanticoke generating station comes from.

There, he finds entire forested mountaintops denuded, children whose classroom sits next to the coal-processing plant complaining of headaches, locals coughing up dust and being intimidated from protesting by the mine workers and owners.

“I hear dynamiting 10 to 12 times a day – dynamiting so large and so big, they explode debris on my land as big as cars,” said Larry Gibson, a holdout who says he has been shot at, had a cabin burned down, and is now seeing the land beneath his family’s home crack in deep chasms because of the neighbouring mine. “Think about that when you flip that switch on your wall.”

Nisker’s hope is to start a conservation revolution in our homes.

And, as part of a new trend in independent films with an activist bent, he’s releasing the documentary online. Already, he’s booked 30 screening-parties in people’s homes and schools from Israel to South Africa. You can get the film at: www.garbagerevolution.com. A single DVD sells for $19.99.

“If we have to wait for politicians and corporations to make the change, it will be a long time coming,” says Nisker, 38, who is officially releasing the film tonight.

Since the three-month garbage experiment, the McDonalds have turned over a new, greener leaf.

They’ve exchanged their two SUVs for less polluting vehicles, replaced all five water-guzzling toilets in their north Toronto home with low-flush models, converted to reusable cloth shopping bags, and given up buying bottled water.

When they finally lugged their garbage out to a truck to haul it away, they had accumulated double what they’d predicted: 83 bags. Plus 145 kilograms of compost which they weighed and disposed of each week. They then hosed their garage down.

Drowning in water bottles

Newmarket

Oct 29, 2007 09:47 PM

Eco-Speak
By: Carol Cooper

Believing in the merits of bottled water, Canadians are guzzling it at a great rate.

In 2005 alone, we downed 28.5 billion litres of it.

But concerns about the product and its packaging are beginning not only to taint bottled water’s image, but leading to outright rejection of a commodity once considered cool.

Witness environmentalist David Suzuki, who refuses to drink bottled water, and celebrity chefs, such as Alice Waters and Mario Batali, who have banished it from their restaurants.

On a larger scale, San Francisco and Salt Lake City forbid bottled water in their municipalities’ departments.

Then there’s New York City, which has begun an advertising campaign promoting the superiority of its municipal water to bottled.

And Chicago is considering taxing bottled water to the tune of 10 cents a unit.

Also getting in on the game is the Town of Blue Mountain near Collingwood, which has just prohibited consumption of bottled water inside town buildings.

Individuals and municipalities are showing concern bottling water not only privatizes it, but degrades the environment.

Here’s the rundown on ecological concerns:
• Water for bottling can be drawn from springs and aquifers, depleting them, as well as nearby wetlands and rural wells;

• Transportation of the water, first for bottling, then when shipped to stores and, finally, hauled home in cars, trucks or mini-vans (when’s the last time you saw someone on a bus carrying a carton of water?) burns oil, a non-renewable resource. As well, all these vehicles spew fumes, which we then get to breathe;

• Water bottles, themselves, are made of oil, see above.

• Their manufacture results in nasty byproducts;

• While the bottles are recyclable, not all of them hit the blue box, turning them into one of our favourite street ornaments, often still containing water; and

• Recycling helps, but comes at environmental (and financial) costs of its own. Heavy trucks haul the bottles from curbside blue boxes to York Region’s waste management depot in East Gwillimbury where they’re baled along with other beverage bottles made of PET (polyethylene terephthalate).

From the depot, they head back out on to the highway for markets throughout Ontario and Quebec. Last year, we shipped out 1,962 metric tonnes of PET-containing bales, creating even more unwanted and unnecessary air pollution.

So how to cut the environmental costs? Pretty straightforward, really. Municipal water is just as safe as bottled water.

In fact, a lot of bottled water is municipal water, run through a filter.

Heaving bottled water may give you and your wallet a good workout, but unnecessarily so. You can save yourself both ways, either by drinking tap water straight up or, if you don’t like the taste, by running it through one of the many filters available for home use, into refillable containers.

Cheers.

For more information on concerns about bottle water, visit  www.kairoscanada.org” www.kairoscanada.org. To follow developments in the anti-bottled water movement click on www.insidethebottle.org.

Learning about waste

There’s a seminar next week that teaches you about where our waste in York Region goes and what’s planned for the future.

Here’s the blurb:

Wondering about your waste and what to put where?  Ask an expert at Waste Watching.  Mr. Mike Birett, Manager of Program Development and Planning, York Region’s Waste Management Branch, will describe the ins and outs of our system and plans for its future.  Takes place on Monday, November 19 from 7:00p.m. - 9:00p.m. at the Seniors Centre, 5 Municipal Drive in Aurora.  Free admission. Door prizes.  To register, call Info Aurora at 905-727-8214 or email: infoaurora@e-aurora.ca.  Hosted by the Town of Aurora Environmental Advisory Committee.