Articles by Chris Schults

Wired profiles companies striving for zero waste

Here in Gristmill, we like to present companies and their eco-friendly practices to see if they should be praised for their efforts. Today I give you: Subaru, Cascade Engineering, HP, Xerox, Toyota, Fetzer Vineyards, and Collins & Aikman Floorcoverings.

What do these companies have in common, you might be asking? One, they are all mentioned in the Wired article that I'm writing about. Two, and more importantly, they are all actively reducing waste in some fashion.

For example, a Subaru factory in Lafayette, Indiana produces less waste than you and me. In fact, the article claims the amount is zero:

The factory is the first auto assembly plant in North America to become completely waste-free: Last year, 100 percent of the waste steel, plastic and other materials coming out of the plant were reused or recycled. Paint sludge that used to be thrown away, for example, is now dried to a powder and shipped to a plastics manufacturer, ending up eventually as parking lot bumpers and guardrails. What can't be reused -- about 3 percent of the plant's trash -- is shipped off to Indianapolis and incinerated to generate electricity.

So, way to go Subaru! Next step: start producing hybrid vehicles built in a solar-powered manufacturing plant where the employee cafeteria serves nothing but locally produced organic food.

Fedex doesn’t want you reusing their boxes

What do you do if you need furniture but are living on a limited income? If you're one Jose Avila, you direct your web browser to Fedex.com and order a bunch of boxes. Cuz, apparently, Fedex boxes can be used to make quite sturdy furniture -- from couches to beds to chairs to desks. To help spread the word that "it's OK to be ghetto," Jose setup the website FedexFurniture.com to share pictures and provide details for construction materials.

Enter Fedex and its lawyers with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in tow.

Head on over to Wired to get the full scoop and to read the exchange between the Fedex legal team and the lawyers from the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, who are representing Jose. After reading, let us know which is the crime: Jose's ingenuity or Fedex's attempt to crush it.

While I'm disappointed that Jose decided to use new Fedex boxes (I'm sure he could have been just as innovative finding used ones) I think his creativity is just another example of how we can reuse products that are often discarded.

And I'm totally disappointed in Fedex. Their antics will only encourage the Freecycle media relations people.

Eating locally — part three.

For those of you who read the hundred-mile diet post and are hungry for more, The Tyee published the latest from J.B. MacKinnon and Alisa Smith about two weeks ago and I'm now getting around to linking to it.

In the third installment, J.B. provides a little more detail about what exactly they have been eating and offers up a few recipes for Breakfast Fritters, Hundred-Mile Pesto, and Fanny Bay Pie in the hopes to challenge you to try a Hundred-Mile Meal.

For the appetizer lovers, here's a little morsel to whet your appetite:

... There are a lot of Big Issues associated with the food system, and there will be time to write about several of them here as the Hundred-Mile Diet continues. The point of this dispatch is to forget about the politics and . . . rhapsodize. Eating locally is a grand adventure. It has taken us to 40-year-old family fish shops and introduced us to people who have grown their own soy beans for homemade tofu. It has left us calling our mothers to find out how to wash and cook whole-grain wheat. Best of all, every time I open the refrigerator to come up with something for dinner, I feel like a pioneer.

To the join them on their journey, go here.

It could happen

Fusion too far in the future? Moving to the moon (or Mars) not an option? Nuclear a big fat no? Skeptical about the hydrogen hype?

Enter chemist Daniel Nocera. His goal: create a renewable energy source by using sunlight to separate water into oxygen and hydrogen.

From the AP (via Wired):

There is a beautiful model for this: photosynthesis. Sunlight kickstarts a reaction in which leaves break down water and carbon dioxide and turn them into oxygen and sugar, which plants use for fuel.

But plants developed this process over billions of years, and even so, it's technically not that efficient. Nocera and other scientists are trying to replicate that -- and perhaps improve on it -- in decades.

Here is where he is today:

Nocera has performed the reaction with acidic solutions, but not water yet. The catalyst he used was a compound that included the expensive metal rhodium. To be a practical energy solution, it will have to be made from inexpensive elements like iron, nickel or cobalt.

Good luck Daniel!