7 Environmental Disasters That Are No More

On the eastern edge of Niagara Falls, N.Y., 100 homes and a public school stood on Love Canal — an unfitting name for a ditch filled with industrial waste that had been covered over with earth and sold for $1. The three blocks of working-class households looked like any other community, but in basements and backyards, residents found carcinogenic compounds seeping through the soil, leached out of the rotting drum containers buried underneath.
“Trees and gardens were turning black and dying. One entire swimming pool had been popped up from its foundation, afloat now on a small sea of chemicals,” recounts Eckardt Beck, an EPA administrator in the 1970s. “Everywhere the air had a faint, choking smell. Children returned from play[ing] with burns on their hands and faces.”
The environmental calamity at Love Canal prompted officials to launch a national cleanup of the country’s most toxic wastelands. The program — the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund, named for a trust fund bolstered by taxes on petroleum and chemical products — promised long-term remediation for dangerous sites and gave the agency power to bill offending companies for the costs. Since its inception in 1981, 387 sites have been officially cleared. But chronic underfunding — the petro-chemical taxes expired in 1995 — has weakened the EPA’s efforts. Most funding goes to less than a dozen major projects, even though there’s still 1,322 sites in need of further detox, according to an EPA spokesperson.
Despite the odds, here are seven projects that prove a cleaner future is possible and that the residents of Love Canal didn’t suffer for naught.
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Forget South Beach. This Urban Park Is Going to Be Miami’s Top Spot to Get Fresh Air

South Florida will soon have its very own version of New York City’s famed High Line. The southern counterpart’s co-creators are calling their idea “The Underline,” a stretch of urban parkland underneath an elevated train’s railway in Miami.
Led by Meg Daly, a businesswoman who first reimagined the transit corridor’s possibilities after a debilitating accident, The Underline will transform a barren swath of land into safer paths for pedestrians and bicyclists — from the Miami River in the north to the city’s South Station. James Corner Field Operations, the same New York City-based firm behind the High Line, is sketching early blueprints and expects to present plans this September.
The genesis for this huge public works project occurred when Daly was out for a bike ride with her adult daughter. The pair collided, and Daly hit the asphalt elbows first and broke both bones. (The pain was “terrible,” she says, “but I’ve been through childbirth, so whatever.”) For all practical purposes, Daly was incapacitated — unable to drive for three months while both arms healed. So she started traveling on the city’s Metrorail, an elevated train.
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“I took it from one stop to another, and on the final stretch, I’d walk under under the train tracks to grab some shade because June and July in Miami are really hot. It was at that moment I realized there’s so much land here, and there’s really not a whole lot being done with it. This should be like the High Line in New York,” she recalls. “That’s really where the idea came from. It was a crazy idea, and I started telling my friends and family. My background’s in marketing, so I’m used to hearing a lot more ‘no’ than ‘yes,’ but they all agreed it should be a park.”
From end to end, the park will stretch 10 linear miles. Under the tracks, the corridor exceeds 110 feet in width in some spots. (Compare that to 30 feet on the High Line.) One side parallels U.S. Route 1; the other faces building facades.
Today, there’s a crude, narrow path that some frequent, but mostly the space looks how you’d expect a rail yard to appear — utility poles, maintenance ladders, fences (and holes to sneak in) and encroachments from adjacent property owners. “There’s really bad signaling, and it doesn’t have lighting at night. Not a lot of people use it,” says Isabel Castilla, senior associate at James Corner Field Operations.
Although it’s underdeveloped, the passage still radiates potential. Its shade provides a refuge from the Florida humidity, and the patterns of light through the rails roughly three stories above create a dazzling chiaroscuro display — an effect that’s accentuated by pedaling on a bike at a constant rhythm.
This fall, James Corner’s team will present initial renderings for pilot projects downtown and near the University of Miami — two locations where people are “clamoring” for open space, Daly says. At one end of the line, construction of high rises in the central business district is encroaching on limited greenery; at the other, college students can feel disconnected from the town across the train tracks and are actively looking for new recreation opportunities. Neighbors abutting the line are planning out their own use for the space, too. South Miami Hospital, for example, is planning to pull back the pavement on a parking lot and introduce a meditation garden for patients.
Like Gotham’s version, the artery will connect disparate neighborhoods. Designers from James Corner Field Operations will unite the entire passage with native flora and tailor each block to residents’ needs. Columns supporting the tracks above, for example, might become a canvas for local artists in West Grove, a bohemian neighborhood, Castilla says.
But for all its specificity, the most important idea is that the line will be available to everyone, regardless of socioeconomics. “Anyone who lives along a transit line will now be able to come here and walk this, then go back home and never need a car,” Daly says.
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Compared to New York’s undertaking, Miami’s project must also fit more practical needs. “We’re the fourth most dangerous place in the country for pedestrians, and [one of] the most dangerous in the state for bicyclists. We don’t have protected infrastructure,” Daly says. The Underline will function as an “off-road safe haven” running parallel to the region’s busiest highway: U.S. Route 1, she adds. The project’s architects believe the new transit infrastructure won’t only protect pedestrians; they hope the newly landscaped paths, in sight of disgruntled motorists in gridlock, will be a “catalyst” for encouraging alternative modes of transit.
“Everyone hits their head and says, ‘Why didn’t I think of this?’” Daly says. “When I was forced to not drive and walk where I wanted to go, I had this new lens… It’s big, it’s shady. There’s an opportunity here. It’s all because I had never walked underneath it before.”
Many grassroots revitalization efforts have started with an ingenious idea like Daly’s, only to languish in the bureaucracy of City Hall. To the visionary, permits, zoning ordinances and public meetings can be a slow and painful death. A “champion” in Miami-Dade County’s Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces department, Maria Nardi, chief of planning, “a bureaucrat who thinks like an entrepreneur,” propelled the idea forward as the “glue that held future trails together,” Daly says.
No small force to be discounted herself, Daly often talks about bringing private sector speed to government. She sets ambitious goals for The Underline’s construction, but knows she’ll meet them. Overtures made to three municipalities and four nonprofits produced an “unusual collaboration”; altogether, they contributed $500,000 to get planning underway. Again, valuing speed, Friends of the Underline’s planning committee chose James Corner as the lead design team. “The way we’re railroading this thing” — pun intended — “we didn’t have the time to have anybody go through a learning curve. [James Corner] brought that expertise.”
There’s still some practical elements for the firm to work out — designing safe passageways at intersections, getting approval from the Federal Transit Authority, finding the money to make everything possible — but Daly seems positive that the entire line will be completed in six years.
“You know what motivates me? That it can be done; it just isn’t being done. The way the public sector moves needs to be challenged. Development is moving much faster than infrastructure to match it,” Daly says. “The people who live here deserve this. And I want to be sure to use this before I’m in a wheelchair.”
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The Earth-Friendly Second Life of Dorm Cast-Offs

“Pomp and Circumstance” accompanies the annual spring rites of commencement, as thousands of bright-eyed college graduates depart for the real world. Another, less memorable (and certainly more environmentally-damaging) tradition usually follows immediately after: the dumping of four years’ worth of Ikea futons, mini-fridges, Greek life t-shirts and dog-eared textbooks — items that’ll be purchased by the cartload by incoming freshman next fall.
Undergraduate move-out day generates tons of waste. Student activists on these three college campuses created more efficient systems to reuse and recycle.
University of New Hampshire
The first student-run sustainability initiative of its kind in the country, Trash2Treasure at this college in Durham, N.H., makes storage easier for on-campus students who have limited options for where to stash their furniture over the summer; in the process, they diverted 110 tons from dumpsters. Unwanted items are picked up at the end of each academic year, then sold to newcomers in the fall. It’s profitable enough as a business model that it actually generates more money than it spends to operate — earning $55,000 in revenue for future initiatives, as well as saving the school $10,000 in cleanup costs and parents more than $200,000 on dorm furnishings.
“Thousands of reusable items clog up streets and sidewalks and are sent to landfills every year,” Alex Freid, a UNH student who co-created T2T, tells The Boston Globe. “This is a problem campuses, towns, and cities have been seeing for 20 or 30 years, so they love to see students taking initiative and solving the problem.” Freid now runs the Post-Landfill Action Network, a nonprofit bringing the methods they refined at UNH to other campuses like University of Massachusetts, Tulane University in New Orleans, Northeastern and the College of William and Mary. “Our goal is to help campuses achieve zero waste, and move-out waste is a really great way to start,” Freid adds. “What we’re trying to do is to build universities as microcosms of how the world can and should function in the future.”
Yale University
A decade ago, this Ivy League school in New Haven, Conn., began the annual “Spring Salvage.” The program is based on a simple concept: “All students have to do is look for the blue and gray donation bins as they move out,” says Gabriel Roy-Liguori, a rising senior who helps coordinate the collection. “Blue bins are for soft items” — clothes, shoes, towels, sheets — “gray ones are for hard items” — books, lamps, electronics. There’s some mild confusion every year with a handful of students who think the 150 collection bins are meant for trash, but for the most part, the initiative salvages plenty of perfectly good items. Last year, more than 60,000 pounds of items were donated to Goodwill Industries. Overall, waste declined from 101 tons in 2013 to 93 tons last year, and a greater percentage went to charity instead of the landfill.
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Arizona State University
At the largest campus in the country, students on five campuses around Phoenix diverted 156,860 pounds of waste by redirecting it to charity, repurposing it for next year’s students or recycling it. The “Ditch the Dumpster” campaign works similar to other salvage programs, but at a huge scale. “When 9,000 students leave campus in the course of a week, you have to be on top of your game,” says Elizabeth Kather, a former member of the Sun Devils’ program. “You need a dedicated team — one that can be nimble as things change and react quickly to the needs of the program.” With this year’s move-out program, which launched on Earth Day, they’re hoping to exceed last year’s total, breaking past 78 tons.
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5 Cities That Are Making Eco-Friendly Living a Reality

Darker winters and blazing heatwaves, higher floods and months without rain. It’s undeniable that our climate is changing. But some American cities are lagging behind; only 59 percent have a mitigation plan, the lowest rate for any global region.
There are are bright spots, however, as some municipalities are adapting with the weather’s fluctuations — and their early efforts are showing results. Last year, for the the first time on record, the global economy grew without an accompanying rise in carbon dioxide emissions. Cleaner energy sources and conservation are proving more effective than even most experts predicted.
Here are several American projects leading the way into a new century of climate consciousness.
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New York City
The largest metropolitan region — the Tri-state Area, which consists of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and is home to nearly 20.1 million Americans — found itself taken off-guard by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The devastating, 13.88-foot storm surge flooded the city, shuttering the subways and leaving the New York Stock Exchange, along with most of Lower Manhattan, dark for several days. One hundred and six people died along the East Coast, and thousands were displaced from their homes. Spurred into action, the Big Apple took immediate measures to stave off destruction from another nor’easter. A few days after, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, “Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it may be — given the devastation it is wreaking — should be enough to compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.”
Following suit from Southern cities like Galveston, Texas, and Miami, which have built storm barriers and restored wetlands, The City That Never Sleeps proposed a $20 billion, 430-page plan to protect its coastline. A central aspect involves beautifying neighborhoods with miles of parkland wrapping around the island, placing some buffer between city and sea. Offshore, oyster beds could break the storm surges, an innovation Kate Orff, a Columbia University architecture professor, calls “oyster-tecture” or “living breakwaters.” She was awarded a $60 million grant by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to plant millions of pearl-producers off Staten Island. The artificial reef is bringing biodiversity back to New York’s harbor and using the water as an advantage before the next storm strikes.
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Chicago
From the 1871 inferno that burned 3.3 square miles to the 1979 airline flight that crashed seconds after takeoff from O’Hare International Airport, Chicago has been no stranger to its own tragic disasters. But the Second City is taking proactive measures to prevent the next climate change crisis. As part of the Chicago Climate Action Plan started by Mayor Richard M. Daley in 2008, the city is preparing for hotter heat waves and wetter downpours. Researchers have studied ways to combat the “urban heat island” effect, a phenomenon that can increase temperatures by as much as 10 degrees during already scorching summers. In response, the city council passed ordinances requiring more trees in and around empty parking lots as well as reflective covers on most roofs. And at City Hall, landscapers planted nearly 20,000 plants in a rooftop garden.
When it comes to preventing floods, Chicago is once again at the forefront. Almost all public alleyways (and in some districts, concrete sidewalks) have been replaced with pervious pavement, concrete mixed with fine sand that enables water to flow straight through. Under heavy traffic, this paving deteriorates faster than normal, but it also reduces stormwater runoff into the city sewer system by 80 percent, preventing flooding and pesky potholes. Rain or shine, the Windy City’s ready.
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El Paso, Texas
The pipes in this Southern city were running dry after years of drought, so researchers turned to another source: already-used water. Faced with an arid climate in the mountains along the border, El Paso launched the nation’s largest potable-reuse program. Derided by some critics as “toilet to tap,” the technology can seem icky, but most city residents were more worried about running out of water. “In an area where it doesn’t rain you have to explore every viable option, and that’s a viable option,” one resident said at a recent public meeting. While there are some worries about chemicals being poured down the drain, most experts say it’s completely safe since the water’s sent through a body of water, like a lake or aquifer, and then purified an additional time before being mixed in with the regular drinking water supply. The $82 million technology will be fully functional in 2018.
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Los Angeles
This sprawling metropolis is far from the City of Lights, but it’s trying to emulate its European counterparts. Notorious for smog and light pollution dimming out the night sky across Southern California flatland, L.A. has established itself as the definitive leader in smart street lighting, drastically cutting its carbon emissions. In concert with the Clinton Climate Initiative, the city has replaced 157,000 lampposts, more than two-thirds of the total stock. The lights, which used to emit an orange glow from high-pressure sodium vapor, will now be powered by brighter, white light-emitting diodes, or LEDs.
The city has cut energy costs from lighting by 63.1 percent and is saving $8.3 million annually, according to recent figures. To put it another way, by changing out all the bulbs burning through the night, L.A. cut down 94.3 gigawatt-hours — the equivalent power of four dozen Hoover Dams. “It’s a shining example of how green technology can be both environmentally responsible and cost-effective,” says Ed Ebrahimian, the director of the Street Lighting Bureau. Even better? It’s making streets brighter and safer at night: overnight incidents like vehicle theft, theft and vandalism declined by nine percent.
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Honolulu, Hawaii
Not only are its residents enjoying the constant sunshine, they’re also harnessing it for their electricity. The most populous city in the Hawaiian chain, Honolulu also claims the country’s highest per capita rate of homes outfitted with photovoltaic panels, with solar power being generated on at least 10 percent of rooftops.
Because much of Honolulu’s power currently comes from burning pricey diesel fuel, the savings from launching one’s own power source attracted many customers, so many in fact that the local utility fought to cap the energy customers could sell back to the grid. Lawmakers ensured solar power would continue to thrive by removing any caps. Last month, in a 74 to 2 vote, they approved a long-term plan that will have Hawaii running entirely on renewable energy by 2045.”Our state is spending $3 [billion] to $5 billion annually on importing dirty, fossil fuels, which is not good for the environment, our future sustainability, or our pocket books,” says Sen. Mike Gabbard, the bill’s sponsor. “Our islands are blessed with abundant, renewable energy. We should be using these resources for the benefit of our people.”

It’s No Bull: These 400 Homes Are Powered by Cow Manure

Can more mooing cows mean more electric power? The owners of one New England dairy say, “Why not?”
The Blue Spruce Farm in Bridport, Vt., is famed for the 3.6 million gallons of milk that its cows have produced annually since 1958. Its cattle are less well known, however, for another bovine byproduct — one you wouldn’t want to consume, let alone smell. One cow produces 30 gallons of manure, and this dairy producer is the first to call it “cow power.” By harnessing methane gas from the manure and burning it in a 600-kilowatt generator, Blue Spruce Farm can produce enough electricity to power 400 homes.
“We wouldn’t run the farm without it,” says Ernie Audet, one of the owners. He adds that, after six years of cow power, the revenue from selling energy back to the grid has nearly paid back the initial $1.5 million investment in the generator.
Cattle often get a bad rap environmentally speaking (especially in drought-stricken California) for methane, which is a byproduct of their digestive system and a greenhouse gas that compromises 14 percent of the atmosphere. But the cow power process transforms a dangerous emission into an asset.
We at NationSwell have long been fans of anaerobic digestion and its ability to turn trash into electric treasure. As a legion of microscopic flora digest waste, they slowly release methane gas which builds up to higher pressures in a 16-foot deep biodigester that looks something like a concrete swimming pool (with murky water) and a concrete cover. What’s unique about cow power is that the biological process in the digestion tank nearly replicates what’s happening in the cattle’s multi-chambered stomach, as bacteria break down tough grains and otherwise indigestible grasses.
The 1,400 black-and-white spotted girls in the barn at Blue Spruce Farm have grown accustomed to their filth being swept away into the biodigester. As they chew on their cud, a scraper runs along the floor, collecting their manure, which Audet and the other owners call “liquid gold.”
“People are always asking us ‘Why don’t all farmers do this?’” the owners write. “Many of us in the dairy industry believe that any size farm can build a digester, and eventually most will. The barriers are the sizable initial investments, and locking in a reliable revenue from the power sales. Operating a Cow Power facility also requires new skills, and more labor. But when a community gets together, these challenges can be met.”
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This Engineer Co-Founded Tesla. Here’s His Next Electric Idea

The automobile industry is a tough business to break into: huge capital outlay and byzantine government regulations have kept three American companies — Ford, General Motors and Chrysler — on top for almost a century. It isn’t easy for a startup to disrupt this scene, but if there’s one man who can pull it off, it’s probably Ian Wright.
One of the co-founders of Tesla Motors, the all-electric car manufacturer whose stock price has jumped 1,040 percent since 2011, Wright has a new vehicular venture in mind targeting the opposite end of the spectrum: electric trucks. His Bay Area company, Wrightspeed, is installing range-extended electric powertrains (the generators that electric vehicles run on) in medium- and heavy-duty trucks for companies like the Ratto Group, Sonoma and Marin counties’ waste hauler, and shipping giant FedEx. Wright admits, it’s far from glamorous — literally, about as far as you can get from luxury sedans — but he believes electrifying commercial fleets will have greater benefits for the environment than capturing a share of the personal car market will.
Up to now, Wright, a soft-spoken, unassuming engineer, has always sat in the passenger seat: a vice president, not chief; Tesla’s “car guy,” (the person who knows the ins and outs of high-performance vehicles) not a visionary. But years of tinkering and observing have all led to this moment. Despite the fact that Wright dresses in crisp, white button-downs and slacks at his San Jose, Calif., office today, you can tell he’s spent countless hours hunched over an engine, his hands greased and black. He’s able to rattle off the horsepower, torque and miles per gallon for various models — knowledge only an experienced collector would memorize — with a familiarity that demonstrates his keen sense of where his company can carve out a niche.
“I’ve always wanted to run my own business,” Wright tells NationSwell. “This is really the first time that I’ve come up with a business plan that I thought was really good. I was a co-founder at Tesla, but it wasn’t my idea. I helped them get the company funding, but it wasn’t my idea. I’ve been at startups and big companies alike. It’s all experience that led me to this.”
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Raised in rural New Zealand, Wright always scored top marks in math and science classes, leading to jobs in the electronics industry post-college. He got his start as an audio engineer for radio stations and recording studios in Sydney, Australia. In 1993, he moved to California, where took a job at Network Equipment Technologies, a communications equipment company, building networking switches for ATM machines. He transferred to Cisco Systems in 1998 to design switches and routers, just as Wi-Fi hit the market. But it was a stint at Altamar Networks, a company that went out of business, that made Wright into an entrepreneur, eager to start something from the ground-up.
Almost by chance, the opportunity to shift his career to electric vehicles arrived at his doorstep in Woodside, Calif. — or next door, really, via his neighbor Martin Eberhard, another Tesla co-founder. Over beers at a party, Wright recalls Eberhard mentioning that he and a buddy were thinking of building a high-performance electric sports car. Wright, a hobbyist who collected and raced sports cars, responded, “I think you’re crazy.”
Wright stuck with his plans for an electronics startup, but the two neighbors met regularly to rehearse and refine their sales pitches for Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists, speeches that gradually began to win Wright’s attention. When Eberhard pulled up in a hand-built electric sports car, Wright hopped in for a test ride. Four seconds later, when the car sped from zero to 60, “I could certainly see how you could make something new and interesting with electric drive,” he says.
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In 2003, Eberhard hired Wright as Tesla’s third employee, serving as the first vice president of vehicle development — essentially the guy who set the roadster’s design in motion. It was a natural fit, not only because of Wright’s love of fast cars, but his electronics background. As electric vehicles began popping up on city streets, the latest technology was no longer being developed by automakers in Detroit, but by engineers in Silicon Valley advancing batteries and electronics.
In March 2004, it was Wright (along with Eberhard) who made a two-hour pitch that convinced Elon Musk to finance Tesla’s nascent business plans. But after spending a little over a year setting up key partnerships, Wright left the company on good terms. “Tesla was all about doing everything they could to make sure everybody’s driving an electric car. And I’m not really a true believer unfortunately,” he recalls. “They cost so much, and the idea that people were just going to pay for them because they should … to be green or something, I never really caught that.”
Still enamored with sleek and sexy speedsters, Wright focused his efforts at the eponymous Wrightspeed on constructing the X1, an electric race car that would be unmatched, even by gasoline-powered combustion engines. (When it debuted in 2005, the X1 was undisputedly the fastest “street legal” electric car; worldwide, it clocked the second fastest acceleration time for any car, behind the $1.25 million, 16-cylinder Bugatti Veyron, which gets 10 miles per gallon.) But when VC firms failed to buy into the idea, Wright realized he needed to temporarily shelve speed and get back to the economics. As innovative as the technology was, he needed a place to apply it.
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Wright scoured the marketplace for buyers who’d also turn a profit from owning an electric vehicle. The technology isn’t cheap, he says, so customers need to save enough fuel to make the investment worthwhile. Take a Prius, for example. The hybrid gets 50 miles per gallon, meaning the average owner won’t use more than 300 gallons of gasoline a year, even less for a city-dweller. With gas priced at $3 a gallon, the most a driver could save is $900 a year, too small an amount to make the upgrade to full electric power worthwhile.
Same goes for the ubiquitous Toyota Camry. At 28 miles per gallon, electric technology could save a motorist $1,600 a year, but that’s still not enough for a car maker to cover costs, let alone turn a profit. In fact, you’ve got to pass SUVs, pickup trucks, vans and box trucks before arriving at the sweet spot of medium- and heavy-duty trucks: vehicles that consume just enough fuel to make the numbers work. Buyers pay more up front, sure, but they’ll reap benefits on the back end with significant gas savings. Each consumes an average of 14,000 gallons of fuel a year, Wright says, costing about $42,000 annually. As a whole, America’s medium-duty fleets burn $22 billion in fuel each year.
Wrightspeed’s range-extended electric powertrains (more on that technology in a bit) save medium-size trucks fuel in three ways. First, they plug into the grid to charge a lithium iron phosphate battery (at a cost of $0.11 per kilowatt-hour), giving the vehicle at least 30 miles of energy. Second, regenerative braking captures the energy of the truck’s motion each time it slows and converts it to stored energy in the battery, significantly extending its range. Third, when the battery is drained, a traditional internal combustion known as a range extender engine kicks in. (It may sound like the hybrid trucks from XL Hybrids  — a model Wright believes is “a dead end” — but there’s a key difference. Unlike in a hybrid where the gas engine takes over, these vehicles run solely through the electric motor: the range extender fuels the battery, not the truck directly.) With the extender installed, the truck’s range is unlimited.
All these features work particularly well for garbage trucks since they’re only traveling short distances to landfills and braking to a hard stop every couple of yards, which continually refuels the battery. Wrightspeed estimates that each refuse truck fitted with their electric powertrains would save $35,000 a year in gas and $20,000 in maintenance costs. That’s a payback within just three to five years. And the best news for residents? No more belching exhaust and no more clunky engines roaring into alleys at 5 a.m. The electric version is clean and practically silent.
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When looking back on early experiments with the X1, Wright sometimes wonders why he didn’t instantly see commercial fleets as a prime opportunity. “It’s hard to explain in hindsight,” he says. “I think like everybody else, you tend to scale up from what you know, and at Tesla, we were focused on high-performance cars with high-power motors. It takes an extra moment to realize that means you can do pickup trucks or FedEx trucks.”
Long gone are the days of thinking that electric batteries are just for roadsters. Wrightspeed booked two big orders from FedEx after corporate VPs took turns driving the electric vehicles. (“They all had these big grins on their faces,” Wright remembers.) And that seems to be just the beginning. This summer, the company will be relocating its headquarters to Alameda Point, Calif., across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco where Wright and 25 engineers will have a much larger facility to scale up production. “We’ve got a backlog of orders,” Wright says. If Wrightspeed can tap into just one-tenth of the market for the country’s 110,000 garbage trucks, the company could generate $2 billion revenue.
Does Wright ever wish he hadn’t left Tesla? “No, I don’t think so,” he says. “What we’re doing here is a hell of a lot of fun, and I think it has the potential to save a lot more fuel and emissions.” There is one regret, though: “I kind of wish I had held onto my stock a bit longer.”
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Meet the NationSwell All-Stars

We launched NationSwell.com in December 2013 as part of our mission to elevate the greatest solutions to our national challenges. Since then, we’ve told more than 2,000 stories about people across the country who are bridging the opportunity divide, advancing national service, preserving our environment and making government work.
The NationSwell All-Stars are the most inspiring changemakers we featured in our first year. From a Navy SEAL who is using his war wounds to help fellow soldiers, to the founders of GirlTrek and the street doctor who is bringing medical care to the memeless, these are the people offering creative and impactful solutions.
Last month, the All-Stars joined the NationSwell Council, a membership network and events series for professionals committed to service, for “A Celebration of Service” in New York City. Support them by watching the above video and reading these original stories on NationSwell.com, then share your ideas in the comments below or on this story’s call to action.
We’re partnering with NBCUniversal to support the greatest innovators who are tackling some of the nation’s most critical issues. Tell us who you think the next biggest changemaker in America is by nominating them to be a 2015 NationSwell AllStar.
 

Would You Be Willing to Give Up Everything to Help the Environment? This Man Has

Walter Fuller says each morning at his beachfront home is “heaven.” A painted sunrise spotlights the blue-white waves. A symphony of birds alight and sing. It’s a beauty that’s made Ormond Beach, a two-mile stretch in Ventura County a destination for surfers and fishermen from all over Southern California.
“Every morning, I’m waking up to a different sunrise,” Fuller says, of his routine. “Sometimes it’s cold, sometime’s its raining. But I’m right out in nature, and for me, it’s good.”
Fuller, now 60, doesn’t wake in a palatial villa by the seaside or even a cozy bungalow. From 2008 until last June, he lived in a steel shipping container, a unit crammed with field guides and notebooks that doubled as his office. If the beach looks heavenly today, it’s because Fuller has been its guardian angel for nearly two decades. After first seeing the beach in 1996, he couldn’t keep away. Each day, he works to transform it from an industrialized, crime-ridden dump into one of the last preserved wetlands on the Southern California coast.
“I knew [Fuller] was a completely volunteer person out here trying to protect the wetlands,” says Carmen Ramirez, the vice mayor of Oxnard, the nearby city of 200,000 wedged between two naval facilities. “We didn’t have … .enough protection for it, and he would come out here and talk to people and try to engage them about bird-watching, about not doing negative things on the beach that would hurt the environment,” she says. “More and more, he’s become a legend. We count on him.”
Born outside Phoenix and raised at his grandparent’s home in Ojai, Calif., Fuller says he’s always had an affinity for nature — in particular, for birds. His first pet was a parakeet named Whitey, who’d bop his head in time with Johnny Cash records. Other caged birds — a cockatoo, parrot and myna — remained fixtures at home until a high school science teacher assigned Fuller a report on eagles. He bought a pair of binoculars in 1972 and was instantly hooked; watching birds in the wild became his new obsession.
Today, if you ask Fuller what is favorite bird is, he’ll claim it’s the bald eagle, which he spotted at Ormond last year after a lifetime of waiting. Then he’ll rattle off a list of a couple more — the great blue heron, white crown sparrows, mallards, pretty much all of the egret family — before he gleefully admits, “Actually, I love all the birds.”
His passion for the flocks has been one of his most valuable contributions to Ormond Beach, a much needed bird habitat. The beach is home to the threatened western snowy plover, a nearly inconspicuous bird that pecks food from the shoreline and whose nests are often damaged by humans. It’s also a key stop along the Pacific Flyway, a north-south route that migratory birds follow in pursuit of food, breeding grounds or warmer climates. More than 200 species have been documented at the site, including the endangered California least tern.
Due to development along the coast, “these species now have been so confined, and there’s a limited numbers of places where they can breed,” David Pereksta, a local ornithologist who works for the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, explains. Fuller’s presence helps “reinforce what the regulations are and keep an eye on these places,” he adds. “It’s not just putting up some signs and fences. It really needs a strong human presence to engage the public,” Pereksta says. “Without this active management, these birds are just not going to survive.”
Though Ormond now looks pristine, it’s hemmed in by the scars of industrialization. The Halaco scrap metal recycling plant was originally built on the city dump near the beach in the mid-1960s, but after the plant shuttered, the area was deemed a hazardous waste cleanup site by the federal government. Behind the dunes, the GenOn power plant’s tall smokestacks puff fumes into the sky. Nearby, there’s also a deepwater port to the north and a naval base to south at Point Mugu. Ironically, the factories and plants may have actually saved the beach over the long-term because they discouraged developers from putting up condos, boardwalks and marinas on the coastline.
“My vision for Ormond Beach is that it will be restored for the youngsters, that it will be turned over to them someday,” Fuller says. “I want to see my age group put it back together to what it used to be hundreds of years ago, so kids don’t have to go look up birds in a book that used to be out here and have gone extinct. You think of years past, the ivory-billed woodpecker, the passenger pigeon. They’ve all gone extinct because we didn’t take care of them. We didn’t watch them.”
Fuller began tending the beach back in the mid-1990s. He stumbled upon it while searching for a lunch spot before his afternoon maintenance work at Point Mugu began. At the time, the beach was a mess. People got wasted on booze and drugs, fired off guns and dumped trash and old furniture in the canal. Vandals canvased the parking lot for valuables. “You wouldn’t be safe walking your dog out here,” Fuller recalls. “You couldn’t walk down the pathway without worrying about stepping on glass.”
He soon spent nearly all his free time at the beach, watching the plovers scurrying in the surf or other rare birds in the dunes and informing visitors how to behave in the fragile ecosystem. Dogs off-leash or kids with pellet guns, for example, often spelled ruin for a nest.
When Fuller’s mother died, he started spending nights in his Ford Explorer parked at the beach. He took up an informal role as gatekeeper and caretaker. It was, after all, his home. Almost always dressed in a short-sleeved khaki shirt, Fuller kept one eye trained on the birds and another on the parked cars in the lot. Gradually, the beach’s clientele changed. Families and tourists showed up to see the sights, and new birds dropped in on the cleaner sands. Fuller takes notes on everything that arrives at the beach and guesses he now has at least 3,000 pages of observations. “It’s kind of about my life,” he says.
When the City of Oxnard found out about Fuller’s work, they gave him a cargo container to use as an office. Six years later, when they discovered it was also serving as Fuller’s home, they approved funds for a residential trailer. Their resolution also came with an official title and three-year contract to be “Steward of Ormond Beach.”
“This is all still in a wild state out here. Nothing has really touched it,” he says. “This is a jewel.”

Why Are Tech Giants Investing in This Decades-Old Technology?

When the tech titans of Silicon Valley invest in a new venture, the markets pay close attention. But observers may have been surprised when two California-based companies made back-to-back announcements about infusing $1.1 billion into a not-so-new technology.
Last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed an $848 million deal with First Solar to build a huge solar farm in Monterey County, Calif., that will provide power to the creator of the iPhone’s new headquarters for the next 25 years, and Google fronted $300 million for homeowners to purchase their own rooftop solar panels.
Why the big bucks? For starters, they need the power. Along with Facebook, these tech companies all operate massive, electricity-guzzling data centers scattered throughout the country’s remote areas. Every time you upload a picture to iCloud or open a Google Doc, the data is housed in places like western North Carolina or central Oregon. The electricity that keeps those servers humming (plus the intricate cooling systems that monitor their temperature) consumes a whole two percent of America’s energy usage, according to a 2010 estimate. So it’s easy to see why techies would be interested in finding energy that’s both cheap and clean.
Apple and Google, who both have tens of billions in free cash, are making the smart business decision to build their own solar capacity now, rather than pay utilities over the long haul. It’s similar to the difference in cost between sitting on the lump sum and using it to rent an apartment for 30 years or spending it all now to buy a house without a mortgage.
Google’s huge push for residential solar power is particularly groundbreaking, but fits with the company’s ethos. The search engine has always promised it could make the Internet accessible for the masses, and now it’s doing the same with the democratization of energy. Partnered with SolarCity, their funding will pay for the installment of panels on nearly 25,000 roofs, giving each family true energy independence.
Just a few decades ago, these investments in solar power would have been considered wasteful. Solar and other renewable energy sources were commonly derided as “far-fetched and too expensive,” says V. John White, the executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies. “In the past 10 years, renewable sources have gone from being a slice of green on the dirty fossil-fuel grid to being cost competitive and more reliable than nuclear energy and coal, and catching up with natural gas. The cost of wind and solar power has fallen, and performance has improved.”
In California, that trend will be increasingly clear if Gov. Jerry Brown mandates that renewables account for half the Golden State’s electricity. As is typical in Silicon Valley, Apple and Google will once again be far ahead of the curve.
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Inside the Business of Turning Your Leftovers Into 33 Million Bags of Mulch

Waste, energy and agriculture. These three massive topics will affect how our ecosystem fares in the future. Harvest Power, a company founded in 2008, is providing local solutions that intersect all three. And they start by changing one unlikely place: the municipal dump.
Harvest Power takes discarded organic waste headed for incinerators or landfills and recycles it into usable electricity and soil. The company’s facilities use anaerobic digestion, a process where zillions of natural, microscopic bacteria eat away at the leftovers from your dinner plate and your front lawn, releasing a renewable biogas (essentially methane and carbon dioxide) that can be combusted to fuel electric generators. Any residual solids become nutrient-rich fertilizer.
Based out of Waltham, Mass., (a town north of Boston known for sparking the Industrial Revolution back in 1813), Harvest Power’s conversion results in 65,000 megawatt-hours of heat and electricity annually — enough to power 5,960 homes for a year — as well as 33 million (yes, million) bags of soil and mulch that are sold at Lowe’s, Home Depot and Walmart. The company derives all that power and compost from just 2 million tons of organic waste, which is just a sliver of the 251 million tons of trash (organic matter is the largest component) that North Americans throw out annually.
“We are proud of our current infrastructure to process organic waste, but this is only the beginning of what we hope is an organics waste revolution,” Kathleen Ligocki, Harvest Power’s CEO, tells NationSwell. “Organic waste processing is still a nascent market in North America. Harvest Power is already the leader in the space and we recognize that many more communities need our organics management solutions.”
One of the company’s most successful facilities is in Orlando, Fla., which accepts pizza crusts, fry trap grease and 130,000 tons of organic waste from the local hotels and restaurants at Disney’s Magic Kingdom. The electricity generated — 5.4 megawatt-hours — powers some of the rides and resorts at “The Happiest Place on Earth.” “We’re able to turn all the waste stream into productive products,” Ligocki tells the Guardian. Like something out of a classic Disney tale, the company transforms “pumpkins to power, waste to wealth.”
Another hub is located in California’s Central Valley. Known as America’s food basket, a significant portion of this country’s hay, alfalfa, tomatoes, grapes, garlic and almonds are harvested in the region, so it makes sense that Harvest Power put roots down in the region, accepting brush, branches and weeds for processing at its Fresno, Tulare and Lathrop locations.
The next step? To increase the amount of waste captured and processed for reuse. To do so, operating capacity at Harvest Power’s 40 existing sites will need to be expanded and more locations will need to be added, Ligocki says.
Getting there requires local action. Although Harvest Power operates across North America, from frosty Vancouver, Canada, all the way down to orange groves in Orlando, the company talks about “local renewable energy” and “local soils” nearly as often as they refer to the big picture across the continent. Commitment will have to begin in mayoral offices and neighborhood associations before a waste revolution can begin.
For this to happen, “the first step is recognition,” Ligocki says. “Communities identify organic waste as a panacea for interlocking issues [like] overflowing landfills, increasing greenhouse gas emissions, reduced soil health and the demand for clean energy.” As soon as cities realize there’s no need to truck organic scraps to faraway dumps, the Harvest Power model can take hold.
From there, the organic waste revolution could take two forms, Ligocki predicts: top-down or bottom-up. On one hand, government leaders could change trash heaps simply “by setting rates and policies in a way that divert the organic fraction [away] from the landfill-bound waste stream,” she explains. On the other, a grassroots movement could take hold of neighborhoods, leading innovators to step in and provide recycling services to “forward-thinking customers,” she adds.
Policy, financing, land, permits, community outreach and product distribution still must come together, but that’s where companies like Harvest Power, which oversees the process from start to finish, are making a real difference.
The movement already seems to be catching on. The company has won a trophy case of awards, including Bloomberg’s New Energy Pioneer Award in 2013 and has been named to the Global Cleantech 100, a list of the top private clean energy firms, for five years running. And recently, Harvest Power surpassed $300 million in financing, including support from Generation Investment Management, the firm Al Gore co-founded, and Waste Management, Inc., North America’s largest residential recycler.
Clearly, Harvest Power is onto something good.
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