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NOT ANOTHER GREEN ISSUE

Don't sigh in exasperation. It's not just another green issue: It's all of ours. So deal with it.



The Green Screen
Everyone’s getting in on the green action and that means that there’s actually some educational (and frightening) stuff to watch on TV. This week Sundance Channel launches original programming titled “The Green.” Along with a series called “Big Ideas For a Small Planet,” which details new ways to build, dress and eat in a more eco-cool way, there’s the sad-but-true doc, A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash, that will get you thinking about petrol in a whole new way. Directed by Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack, the film includes some fairly remarkable archival footage of oil boom towns and their current state as well as plenty of prognosticators on our coming oil apocalypse. Yeah, not for the faint of heart.

Easy Breezy
ConEdison Solutions now offers Wind Power and Green Power electricity generated from wind farms in the Northeast and run-of-the-river hydro facilities here in New York State. For between 1 and 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) more than your standard ConEd rate, you can run your home the green way. Using 400 kWh of electricity per month for one year reduces carbon dioxide emissions by the equivalent of planting about 418 trees or not driving about 5,325 miles. Since we doubt you’ll do that, call your friendly ConEd guy to switch!

The Green Renter
For those environmentally semi-conscious, Solar One has a series called The Green Renter. Monday nights at 7, oatmeal cookies and juice lure folks into listening how, with a few changes, we can be better urbanites. Last week I learned about Congestion Pricing, which is levying a tax on vehicles that drive into and through the city at peek hours. Could this help us walk through Midtown without getting run down by a speeding truck making pizza deliveries to Jersey? Interesting Point: 61 percent of the traffic in NYC is just driving through the island to get somewhere else. 

A few more helpful suggestions to cut down on that electric bill:
• Make sure vampire plugs—gadgets that suck juice when plugged in, like computers or televisions—are unplugged when not in use.
• Compact Florescent Lights (CFLs) use a third of the amount of power and last 10 times longer. Not only does this mean more quarters for the laundry, but it also decreases the CO2 in
the atmosphere.
• When the temperature outside is 95 degrees or more, change the refrigerator to a high setting so it doesn’t work as hard.
Solar One, 2420 FDR Drive, Service Road East,
212-505-6050, www.solar1.org.

Fried and Delivered
Up until recently, there appeared to be only three (legal) choices of what to do with the estimated 64 million gallons of used cooking oil collected from NYC restaurants each year: burn it, dump it into landfills or inject it into the ground. Problem is, all of these choices basically suck. Now there’s a fourth choice—convert the spent grease into biodiesel, the alternative fuel that Willie Nelson runs his tour buses on. Biodiesel, which can be mixed with petroleum or used alone to run diesel engines, is clean burning, non-toxic and biodegradable. And Willie thinks it tastes great too!

Last December, a pilot program called Resource Recovery was started, offering city restaurants free pickup of their used cooking oil, which they will then take to regional biodiesel refineries. Resource Recovery is part of The Doe Fund, Inc.’s training program, RWA (Ready, Willing, and Able). Since 1990, the RWA program has been helping former prisoners, drug addicts and the homeless become contributing members of society by helping them get their GEDs and teaching life skills, like how to save money. Doe Fund graduates usually get jobs as street sweepers and pest exterminators. Now, they can clean out grease traps too.

Or, at least, that’s what we think is going on. When I called The Doe Fund, my questions were directed to Rubenstein, a media relations firm whose clients include ConEd, Pfizer and Disney. The publicist I spoke with, Emily Gest, refused to go on record about any grease collection. Until the new program has progressed out of its infancy, it seems, the publicists’ job is to keep it from the public. OK.

So go to Rwaresourcerecovery.org and skip the secrecy. RWA’s people are just a phone call away—ready, willing and able to collect your canola. The next step will be converting the city’s buses to run on biodiesel. Then, the fume-filled streets of Manhattan won’t smell like cancer anymore. They’ll smell like last month’s french fries. (David Callicott)


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