Environmentalism: From Freaks to Free Markets

by Chris Savage
May 1, 2007

Growing up as a grade school-aged boy in the mid-70s, I was raised by "hippy" parents. They went to peace marches and ERA rallies. We had day-glo posters on the walls and black lights. My brother and I, with our long hair and bell-bottomed pants, ate peanut butter sandwiches on whole wheat bread when all the other kids were enjoying Wonder Bread. While other kids were drawing pictures of cars and monsters, I was drawing peace signs and ecology symbols.

In other words, I was a freak.

That was the word they used for people like us back then: freaks. Sometimes it was "hippy freak" or "long-haired, hippy freak" or, the worst by far, "long-haired, pinko, hippy freak". But, at the end of the day, we were outside of the mainstream and made to feel, well, freakish.

One of the "causes" my parents really stressed around our house was that of "the environment". At a time when people were paying scant attention to how much waste they were generating or to conservation or to pollution in general, we were taking back bottles to the recycling center and saving our newspapers and cans for paper and aluminum drives. The amazing thing was that were still thought of as "freaks" for doing these things. As recently as the 70s, many people in this country still thought "the environment" was something to be used by humans and something with a pretty much unlimited ability to absorb anything we could throw at it. It was beyond the realm of possibility in most people's minds that we would be capable of polluting the oceans or changing the climate of this immense planet.

The Vietnam War finally ended and the Equal Rights Amendment drew its last hopeless breath and the freaks of the 70s got a bit older and a bit more domesticated. However, one cause continued to simmer along, biding its time, waiting for its moment: environmentalism. By the time the children of us HalfSquares entered elementary school, talk about Reduce, Reuse and Recycle and conservation and pollution prevention were no longer so freakish. In fact, my kids became little environmental cops, chiding us for not doing enough to save the planet. Kids' shows like Sesame Street began regularly preaching the gospel of environmentalism. There was even a superhero named "Capitan Planet" (website) who encouraged kids to become Planeteers ("The power is YOURS!")

These days, it's no longer freakish to be a environmentalist. In fact, it has become Big Business. As environmentalism has become mainstream, our manufacturing industries have woken up and realized that being green can earn them some green. In fact, it can earn them a LOT of green.

Remember those giant piles of used tires that you'd see in the news? They'd catch on fire and burn for months with a polluting, toxic smoke (e.g., the Hagersville tire fire.) They'd harbor disease-carrying mosquitoes. And they just kept piling up higher and higher and higher. In 2005, it was estimated that 297 million tires a year were scrapped in the USA alone.

In 1990, only 11% of the scrap tires were diverted away from dumps and used for something else. These days, according to a recent report by the Rubber Manufacturers Association, nearly 87% of them are used. Not only that, the number of scrap tires estimated to be in stockpiles has dropped from 700-800 million in 1994 to less than 200 million today. Scrap tires are now being used for an increasing number of applications where this nearly free "raw material" is given new life. It is chewed up into ground rubber and used in athletic and recreational surfaces like running tracks, in rubber-modified asphalt, carpet underlay, flooring material, and even railroad crossing blocks. This used up nearly 30 million tires in 2005. Another 50 million tires were used in civil engineering projects to provide vibration and sound control, to prevent erosion and to help with drainage in leachate systems. Finally, scrap tires are being used to make Tire-derived fuel (TDF). This growing use consumed 155 million scrap tires in 2005. Properly burned, scrap tires can generate a large amount of reasonably clean energy for things like cement kilns, electrical utilities and pulp & paper mills.

Ever wonder what could be done with that nasty old carpeting you replaced in your house? Carpet Care Recovery Effort (CCRE) in Georgia and Los Angeles Fiber Company, both winners of plastics recycling awards at the Global Plastics Environmental Conference held in March, are both actively recycling old carpeting. As reported in the March 26th issue of Plastics News, LA Fiber recycles 100 million pounds of used carpeting annually. CCRE has diverted over 486 million pounds of old carpeting from landfills since 2002 and is "well on its way" to achieving its goal of recycling 40 percent of consumer carpets by 2012. And there's plenty of it - 5 BILLION pounds of used carpeting are landfilled each year.

Another winner at the Global Plastics Environmental Conference was GE Plastics. They've developed two new resins called Valox iQ and Xenoy iQ made from recycled plastic (PET) bottles. According to GE, if all PET resins were made using the iQ processes, yearly consumption of oil would be cut by 5.2 million barrels and the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions would be the same as a 260-square-mile forest of trees converting the greenhouse gas to oxygen.

Probably the fastest growing "green" businesses is the biofuels industry. No longer confined to a few weirdos burning peanut oil in diesel engines, industries focused on manufacturing fuels from renewable resources are experiencing incredible growth. Currently, 10.3 billion gallons/year of biofuels are sold around the globe. It is predicted to rise to around 87 billion gallons/year by 2020. The two primary forms of biofuel are bioethanol and biodiesel. Both of these fuels are currently derived from food-based crops, primarily corn and soybeans. This poses some logistical as well as ethical problems for biofuels. There is not enough capacity to replace an appreciable amount of petroleum-based fuel with crop-based fuels. Also, there is controversy over the use of food crops for fuels. Bioethanol is predicted to use about 20% of the corn crop this year.

What has the potential to resolve both of these dilemmas, at least for bioethanol, is the use of cellulosic ethanol; ethanol derived from waste cellulose sources like agricultural waste, wood chips and more efficient fuel crops like switchgrass. According to the article "Alternative Fuels - Rolling Out Next-Generation Technologies" in the December 20, 2006 issue of Chemical Week, "A recent study by Nexant (White Plains, NY) concludes that biodiesel and bioethanol derived from food crops such as corn will only be "transition" technologies, and that industry will move to so-called cellulosic biofuels derived from non-food crop biomass." Much to the chagrin of corn farmers and large agricultural conglomerates like Archer Daniels Midland, recent advances in technology are now making cellulosic ethanol more than just a possibility, it's become a reality.

One way to obtain ethanol from agricultural wastes is to convert the five-carbon wood (pentose) sugars found in things like corn husks and straw. Unlike six-carbon (hexose) corn sugars that are the conventional feedstock for bioethanol production, these pentose sugars are resistant to fermentation by standard baker's yeast. Researcher Marko Kuyper of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has figured out a way to insert a gene into baker's yeast that will make the yeast an efficient pentose digester. The gene is from a fungus found in the dung of elephants and it allows the baker's yeast to break down both hexose and pentose sugars "at a high rate and with high efficiency". Since 5 to 25% of a plant's biomass is composed of pentose sugars, this new yeast developed by Kuyper has the potential to increase bioethanol yields considerably.

Similar work is being done by the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute. Researchers there are working with a gene sequence found in the fungus Pichia stipitis, a fungus known for its high-efficiency fermentation of pentose sugars. ìIncreasing the capacity of P. stipitis to ferment xylose and using this knowledge for improving xylose metabolism in other microbes, such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae, brewerís yeast, offers a strategy for improved production of cellulosic ethanol,î said Eddy Rubin, DOE JGI Director. ìIn addition, this strategy could enhance the productivity and sustainability of agriculture and forestry by providing new outlets for agricultural and wood harvest residues.

New enzymes are also being developed that will allow current bioethanol plants to convert to using cellulosic feedstocks. Companies like Novozyme, IoGen, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Dyadic International are working to make industrial processes more efficient through the use of enzyme technology. Jim Greenwood, president and CEO of BIO, a biotech industry association, says, "U.S. farmers can produce both abundant supplies of food for people and animals, and environmentally responsible biofuels for transportation."

Commercial cellulosic bioethanol production is imminent. Some current projects include:

A pilot-scale unit in Spain by Abengoa Bioenergy.

A pilot unit using barley straw, oats and wheat by IoGen near Ottawa.

A joint venture between DuPont and British Petroleum to convert a U.K. ethanol plant to produce 10 million gallons per year of biobutanol, a biofuel more easily transported than bioethanol. (Biobutanol can be blended at the refinery and then sent through pipelines whereas biethanol must be blended at distribution terminals.

A joint venture between Dupont, Poet Energy and Novozymes to build a commercial-scale bioethanol plant in Emmetsburg, Iowa that will increase bioethanol production by 11% per bushel of corn and 27% per acre of corn. The plant will be powered 83% by its own fuel.

Conversion this year of a fiberboard plant in North Carolina by Xethanol to prove the viability of using wood chips as a source for bioethanol.

Shell Oil Products teaming with enzyme producer, Codexis, to develop "next-generation" technology for producing fuels from biomass.

A demonstration plant by Mascoma to make bioethanol from wood chips using genetically-engineered organisms.

Biodiesel is another promising biofuel, one already in widespread use in Europe and is now widely available in the North and South America. Both demand and capacity are increasing rapidly. In addition to being made from soybeans and other renewable oil-bearing crops, the farming of algae is showing promise as a new source for biodiesel. More information can be found at Oilgae.com. GreenFuel Technologies in Cambridge has developed a novel system that takes carbon dioxide exhaust gas from smokestacks and bubbles this greenhouse gas through large glass "test tubes" containing algae. The carbon dioxide is essentially scrubbed from the air while feeding the algae. The algae are harvested periodically and oils are extracted for conversion to biodiesel and bioethanol. A full scale commercial deployment could recycle enough CO2 to yield as much as 8,000 gallons of biodiesel per acre annually under optimum conditions according to the company.

Truly environmentalism has turned a corner. From the days of long-haired, pinko hippy freaks recycling their bottles and cans we've arrived at a day when Big Business is now cashing in on green technologies. What was once only dreamed is now becoming a reality. We're not quite to the day when our cars are powered by "Mr. Fusion" generators like in "Back to the Future". But we are certainly much closer than ever before.

I like to think us freaks were ahead of our time.