Water bottle manufacturer SIGG Switzerland just found out the hard way that use of a toxic ingredient in its production process will hurt sales as the greenies promptly turned against the company and its products.

The problem centers on bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical used to harden plastics. The chemical’s been linked to developmental problems in fetuses and young children.

And, as it turns out, before August 2008, BPA was an ingredient in SIGG’s very popular aluminum water bottles. SIGG admitted the presence of trace amounts last month. This revelation by SIGG came well after it had assured its business partner and global outdoor apparel retailer, Patagonia, that SIGG bottles don’t contain BPA.

Bottom line: Patagonia promptly severed its marketing and retail partnership with SIGG. Patagonia’s announcement canceling its relationship with SIGG is here.

The SIGG admission that BPA is in its bottle’s liner  is here.

One of those hurt in this debacle is The Jane Goodall Institute. SIGG had promised to donate $5 to the Institute for every SIGG water bottle purchased.

The ire of the environmental and outdoors community is growing on the blogosphere. Postings on Salon.com and the Huffington Post site are typical of the comments from customers who feel betrayed by SIGG.

Meanwhile, the plastics industry has launched a PR blitz to defend use of BPA in consumer products.

As reported in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the plastics industry is mounting a campaign to defend use of the chemical to hopefully avoid serious regulatory action by the Food and Drug Administration. For the Sentinel story, click here.

Like it or not, you can’t ignore the power of the green marketplace these days.

Water bottle manufacturer SIGG Switzerland just found out the hard way that use of a toxic ingredient in its production process will hurt sales as the greenies promptly turned against the company and its products.

The problem centers on bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical used to harden plastics. The chemical’s been linked to developmental problems in fetuses and young children.

And, as it turns out, before August 2008, BPA was an ingredient in SIGG’s very popular aluminum water bottles. SIGG admitted the presence of trace amounts last month. This revelation by SIGG came well after it had assured its business partner and global outdoor apparel retailer, Patagonia, that SIGG bottles don’t contain BPA.

Bottom line: Patagonia promptly severed its marketing and retail partnership with SIGG. Patagonia’s announcement canceling its relationship with SIGG is here.

The SIGG admission that BPA is in its bottle’s liner  is here.

One of those hurt in this debacle is The Jane Goodall Institute. SIGG had promised to donate $5 to the Institute for every SIGG water bottle purchased.

The ire of the environmental and outdoors community is growing on the blogosphere. Postings on Salon.com and the Huffington Post site are typical of the comments from customers who feel betrayed by SIGG.

Meanwhile, the plastics industry has launched a PR blitz to defend use of BPA in consumer products.

As reported in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the plastics industry is mounting a campaign to defend use of the chemical to hopefully avoid serious regulatory action by the Food and Drug Administration. For the Sentinel story, click here.

Sure, saving water is a green thing to do, but there are more powerful reasons driving business interest in water conservation. For starters, EPA’s certainly not going to relax any water quality standard, and it’s even warning that it will ramp up enforcement of Clean Water Act rules (click here).

But even more powerful is the prospect of trying to operate without access to enough water, especially in states with drought problems, such as Arizona, California, Georgia and Texas where most expect population density to expand rapidly.

How do you get started on reassessing your water usage and target ways to reduce water needs? Siemens Water Technology offers a basic five-step strategy to get started:

1. Audit ALL of your water usage, from intake to discharge, not just your major production processes. Include utility water, irrigation, boiler feed water and wash water.
2. Treat water as a valuable resource because it is costly, especially if you have to pre-treat your water to clean it up enough to use in your production processes.
3. Reuse and recycle water used during manufacturing. This doesn’t mean you have to adopt a zero-discharge policy or reuse 100% of all of your discharged water. Look for the simple ways to reuse water and build from there. Small steps can yield big returns without capital investments.
4. Reduce wastewater discharges. The regulatory costs needed to meet Clean Water Act regulations won’t be going away, so any time you can reduce waste, you’re cutting permitting and disposal costs.
5. Treat water usage as an energy-intensive activity, because it is. Energy bills can account for nearly 30% of water treatment costs, especially for wastewater treatment plants.

Some companies who’ve followed Siemen’s advice and chopped their water usage include:

• A pharmaceutical company that now recovers over 52 million gallons of water a year (check here).
• Northeast Hot Fill Co-op, Inc., a water bottling company that increased its water recovery rate from 75% to over 90%, (click here), and
• a Chrysler plant in Mexico that now reclaims more than 100,000 gallons of water a day (click here).

One thing’s for certain when it comes to water use: the less your company needs, the better off it’ll be.

Sure, saving water is a green thing to do, but there are more powerful reasons driving business interest in water conservation. For starters, EPA’s certainly not going to relax any water quality standard, and it’s even warning that it will ramp up enforcement of Clean Water Act rules (click here).

But even more powerful is the prospect of trying to operate without access to enough water, especially in states with drought problems, such as Arizona, California, Georgia and Texas where most expect population density to expand rapidly.

How do you get started on reassessing your water usage and target ways to reduce water needs? Siemens Water Technology offers a basic five-step strategy to get started:

1. Audit ALL of your water usage, from intake to discharge, not just your major production processes. Include utility water, irrigation, boiler feed water and wash water.
2. Treat water as a valuable resource because it is costly, especially if you have to pre-treat your water to clean it up enough to use in your production processes.
3. Reuse and recycle water used during manufacturing. This doesn’t mean you have to adopt a zero-discharge policy or reuse 100% of all of your discharged water. Look for the simple ways to reuse water and build from there. Small steps can yield big returns without capital investments.
4. Reduce wastewater discharges. The regulatory costs needed to meet Clean Water Act regulations won’t be going away, so any time you can reduce waste, you’re cutting permitting and disposal costs.
5. Treat water usage as an energy-intensive activity, because it is. Energy bills can account for nearly 30% of water treatment costs, especially for wastewater treatment plants.

Some companies who’ve followed Siemen’s advice and chopped their water usage include:

• A pharmaceutical company that now recovers over 52 million gallons of water a year (check here).
• Northeast Hot Fill Co-op, Inc., a water bottling company that increased its water recovery rate from 75% to over 90%, (click here), and
• a Chrysler plant in Mexico that now reclaims more than 100,000 gallons of water a day (click here).

That’s the case with the nation’s supermarkets. They’re partnering with EPA in a program to reduce refrigerant releases, and they’re getting PR credit for protecting the ozone layer and fighting climate change. That keeps EPA happy. The bottom-line savings keeps owners happy.

The program is the GreenChill Advanced Refrigeration Partnership and six grocery chains have been recognized for their efforts to go green. Other types of business can learn from the GreenChill program because the secrets to reducing ozone-depleting compounds and GHG emissions apply to most all types of pollutant releases:

• switching to less polluting materials, in this case, alternatives to chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) refrigerants
• adopting more efficient machinery that uses less refrigerant in the first place
• increasing leak detection programs to make sure the refrigeration equipment is working at its maximum, and
• installing more energy-efficient chiller systems that require less electricity to operate.

The savings can be huge for grocery chains. Normally, a store’s refrigeration system needs about 4,000 pounds of CFC refrigerant to operate. Leak rates of about 25% are considered normal. At that rate, stores are losing about 1,000 pounds of CFCs due to leaks a year at about $6 a pound.

By adopting new technology and leak detection programs, GreenChill partners are cutting this leak rate to 12%.

GreenChill stores recognized by EPA this week include:

• Price Chopper’s
• King Kullen
• Wild by Nature
• Whole Foods
• Hill Phoenix, and
• Supervalu (parent company of Acme).

For details about the stores and the GreenChill program, click here.

Going green often means just tweaking what you’re already doing. The nation’s auto-repair shops are doing it, and they’re liking the changes.

For starters, going green can be as basic as earning credit for many of the changes that are already required by federal and state environmental laws.

For example, service stations are reducing use of solvent-based cleaners because they contain high levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The problem with VOCs is that they mix with nitrogen oxide and create smog problems. So switching to low-VOC or even water-based cleaners makes a repair shop greener, cleaner and less subject to regulatory checkups. Going green for auto-repair shops also includes:

• recycling waste fluids
• conserving energy and water, and
• adopting spill prevention programs.

A recent story in The Arizona Republic details how happy shop owners are with the program because they’ve found out that once they make the effort to go green, it’s been worth effort. For one, the owners report that the changes make economic sense and two, the greener the facility, the more the customers like it. For the paper’s story, click here.

The idea of green repair shops is pushed by AAA, which launched the Green Business Automotive Program in 2005.  AAA partners with states to recognize and publicize green repair shops for AAA members.

Arizona’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has recognized 51 green auto-repair shops, the last 21 have signed on since May under the Arizona Green Business Automotive Program. The New Jersey Green Automotive Repair Program debuted this past Earth Day.

That’s the problem the San Jose City Council’s wrestling with as it decides how to reduce use of the ubiquitous plastic bags for produce and groceries. The council’s choices:

• ban them
• charge for each bag
• spend millions on public education to encourage consumers to voluntarily bring their own bags, or
• do nothing.

Each option has a problem. The first two will discourage use of the bags, but they will then increase demand for paper bags. According to the American Chemistry Council, paper making releases twice as many greenhouse gas emissions as plastic bags. The group’s Web site contains several myth-busting reports on the plastic bag controversy. For example: plastic bags are mostly made from natural gas, not oil (click here).

Educational campaigns costs millions and don’t quickly change behavior. Doing nothing won’t stop the current pollution problem, which according a report in The Mercury News, reveals itself after storms as litter along the Guadalupe River. Click here for the paper’s story.

Helping drive this municipal action is a recent report from the United Nations calling for the elimination of single-use plastic bags because the world’s oceans are littered with plastic, which is non-biodegradable, according to a report in the McClatchy Newspapers. The UN marine-litter report is here.

So far in the U.S., San Francisco has banned plastic bags, and Los Angeles will do the same in January. Washington, DC, is considering a ban. However, several cities have rejected the idea, including Seattle, New York City and Philadelphia.

How? With biomass systems that capture methane gas as waste decomposes. This is not a limited-action kind of fuel source. It’s about converting pollution into a useful product, and there’s plenty of organic waste to use as a renewable resource.

For example, EPA just ordered an entire coal-fired power plant to run totally on biomass fuels.  Ohio Edison Co. will repower the two boiler systems at its R.E. Burger facility in Shadyside, OH, to run on renewable biomass fuels.

The company’s not doing this for altruistic reasons. It was ordered to convert as part of a major EPA penalty for violating Clean Air Act regulations. But the point is that there’s plenty of biomass capacity to replace coal as the fuel for electricity.

The changeover will will reduce the plant’s carbon dioxide emissions by more than 1.3 million tons a year. It will also reduce other air pollutants, such as nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide.

The EPA and Justice Department order is here.

But there are real business advantages of using biomass fuels to reduce GHG releases.

Example: San Francisco’s Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) is using biomass-supplied energy from a dairy farm to reduce the utility’s GHG emissions. PG&E has signed a deal with California Bioenergy to buy renewable energy and in return recieve verifiable credit for reducing 75,000 metric tons of GHG.

California Bioenergy makes the arrangements to sell methane gas generated from the biomass fuel — livestock manure — from a dairy farm in Bakersfield, CA.  PG&E then sells the biomass-produced electricity to its business and residential customers, who get a share of the GHG reduction credits through the utility’s Climatesmart program.

More details on the PG&E announcement are here.

Instead, the best Green IT efficiency move is to improve your company’s heating and air conditioning system to use less electricity. It’s this kind of efficiency that reduces those pesky greenhouse gas emissions.

That’s the advice from Allen Falcon, president of the technology consulting company, Horizon Information Group. In a recent Horizon blog post, Falcon says paying more for equipment that’s more energy efficient is helpful, but it doesn’t compare to the savings your IT department can take credit for if you instead focus on reducing current electricity usage.

He recommends taking steps to improve air flow in your computer room and using in-rack cooling systems. To improve air flow, try repositioning HVAC vents and returns. Of course, be sure to track before and after energy bills to prove the changes are working.

By focusing on reducing power consumption, you’re working on the first R in the Reduce, Reuse and Recycle mantra promoted by EPA and various industries.

The reuse chapter for Green IT is to use less equipment. With fewer devices, there’s less e-waste to dispose of, and that means fewer compliance hassles. Regulators are increasingly cracking down on e-waste because it contains hazardous materials, such as lead, cadmium, zinc and chromium. Strategies to embrace for computer departments: resource reallocation, virtualization and other steps that prolong the useful life of existing equipment.

When it finally comes to upgrading gear, it’s time to recycle what you don’t want anymore. Falcon recommends working with vendors to arrange for recycling, not just servers, but laptops, batteries, cell phones, printers and other peripherals as well.

Falcon’s Green IT posts are here.

Seems everywhere you turn, the future of IT is in Green IT — new computer equipment that saves your company money because it’s so much more energy efficient. You use less energy, you save money, and you help the planet by helping reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) and other air pollutants.

As it turns out, the federal stimulus law gives businesses a variety of tax breaks that increase expense and bonus depreciation limits. Green IT investments are included.

But you’ll have to act quickly. Most of the tax breaks for new equipment under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act are for purchases made in 2009. That was the point of the stimulus, to get money flowing as soon as possible.

The Internal Revenue Service tax breaks boil down to three basics:

• It’s easier to get full credit for relatively inexpensive purchases on your next tax return because the IRS has increased the limit for Section 179 expenses
• You can get a 50% tax deduction for more expensive equipment known as “qualified property” that’s placed in service this year, and
• You can get tax credits for recent years when you’ve lost money and use them to discount tax bills in future years when you’re making profits (under a process known as net operating loss carry-backs).

All the gory details that will keep accountants busy this year are detailed on the IRS Web site. Click here for the breakdown.

The IRS also offers a wide variety of tax credits for clean and renewable energy investments. Click here.