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Dallas is looking to halt chronic homelessness, following the movement recently bolstered by its neighbors in Houston.

Fifty of Dallas’ most chronically homeless residents will move into small cottages in a neighborhood complex expected to feature green recreational space, solar energy and rainwater collection, according to the Corporation for Supportive Housing. Contractors broke ground for the project in mid-April, and those who have struggled most to find housing will finally settle into a home to call their own in November.

Not only is the city sweeping its most costly residents off its streets, but it’s also saving taxpayers money — a projected $1.3 million in total. A chronically homeless person jumping back and forth between prison and emergency health services costs the country nearly $40,000 a year, Keith Ackerman, executive director of Cottages at Hickory Crossing, told the Huffington Post. The cottage-fostering program will slash those prices to less than $13,000.

Dallas isn’t the first city to initiate such a program, and it’s been successful in the past. In 2012, Charlotte, North Carolina, introduced a program through nonprofit Moore Place, which provides homeless people support by way of social workers, therapists, nurses and psychologists while housing them in an 85-unit complex.

Houston joined the movement in early June, vowing to end chronic veteran homelessness over the next three years. The city plans to bring local agencies together to look after the roughly 3,650 homeless veterans.

The $8.2 million project included a partnership from a number of organizations, including the Corporation for Supportive Housing, which pledged a $50,000 grant and another $50,000 loan.

Located just half a mile away from the city, the Cottages at Hickory Crossing will revolutionize the fight against chronic homelessness by targeting those who can’t get out of a vicious cycle. Whether residents suffer from mental illnesses or substance abuse, the cottages give them a place to settle and regain control.

“Looking past the strong research, it just makes sense that someone who is homeless needs a stable place to live before they can really start working on recovery,” said Dallas County director of criminal justice, Ron Stretcher, in a news release.

Image courtesy of the Cottages at Hickory Crossing

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the August issue of Green Money Journal. Check out more excerpts here. 

By Jason Campbell

At a recent SRI Conference, I joined a community investing project tour of the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans, which was completely devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The Make it Right Foundation (started by Brad Pitt in 2007) was working to help rebuild using the highest standards of green and sustainable building, along with guiding principles defined by the local community.

During the tour, I saw how this collaboration was helping a distressed community. It crossed my mind that a similar project might work on American Indian reservations.

Tom Darden, executive director of Make It Right, attended the SRI Conference, where he was kind enough to let me share with him the parallels I saw between the disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the economic disaster areas where many tribal reservations are located in the United States. My question for Tom and Make It Right was whether they would share their innovative model -- a community-driven approach to socially responsible and sustainable neighborhood development -- with Native Tribes and reservations in dire need. They said "yes," and we started with the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana.

Through a process employing extensive collaboration between the tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation’s leadership, tribal citizens and with Make it Right Foundation, there will be 20 families living in LEED Platinum homes (funded through a low-income housing tax credit) in the fall of 2015. (Check out this USA Today article on the homes.) This is step one of a much larger nation-building vision driven by core principles generated by tribal citizens of the reservation.

Before I approached Make It Right at the SRI Conference, I inquired of Steven Heim, steering committee member of U.S. SIF’s Indigenous Peoples’ Working Group and director of ESG research and shareowner engagement at Boston Common Asset Management, about how I could better understand sustainable, responsible and impact investing particularly on the institutional side. This would be increasingly important to understand due to the work I was starting to do with tribes.

During my time with Boston Common, my sister sent me an article from my local Spokane, Washington, newspaper. A Spokane tribal citizen was on the front page of a multi-page article outlining the horrific impacts of a legacy uranium mine on the Spokane Indian Reservation.

Back in the late 1950s, a unit of Newmont Mining led the Spokane Tribe to believe that extracting uranium in support of the Cold War would create desperately needed jobs and be totally safe. Newmont used the tribe as a disposable workforce that is feeling the adverse effects even today. Newmont also never bothered to clean up the mine site that went dormant in the 1980s and is now a $200 million EPA superfund site. The resulting contamination includes high cancer rates and other diseases, contamination of water, sacred sites, medicinal plant gathering sites, and elk calving grounds.

Read the full article here.

Image credits: 1) Flickr/Aaron Gustafson 2) Jason Campbell 

Article by Jason Campbell. Jason’s organization, Areté Development Group, was launched after graduating with an MBA from Gonzaga University. Areté Development Group focuses on serving American Indian sovereignty by building connected self-sustaining communities. Through culturally based policy development woven with cutting edge practices and strategic partners, Areté Development Group strives to contribute to a quality of life for citizens of Native nations that reflects the core values of individual Tribes. The development of sustainable capacity building opportunities, of which, socially responsible investing of financial assets is a part, represents the historic cultural values of stewardship and generosity.

By Dianna Cohen

Look around you. Our world is full of single-use plastic, meant to be used once and thrown away. And though some of it — depending on the type of plastic — could potentially be recycled or downcycled, the truth is that the majority of it becomes instant garbage, and much of it is winds up fouling our oceans and environment.

While our modern society no doubt depends on, and often benefits from, numerous products made from plastics and synthetic materials, we all too frequently default to single-use and disposables when there are perfectly good, often better and certainly healthier and longer lasting — perhaps even natural, alternatives.

To illustrate the point, consider a meal at your local eatery. Food may well be served to you on a single-use plastic plate with disposable plastic utensils. Often, your drink will come with a plastic straw – the cup itself made of plastic. If the restaurant serves wine, enjoy, but it’s possible the bottle will be sealed with a plastic stopper or aluminum screw cap lined with a plastic coating. When it’s time to leave, your leftovers may well be handed to you in a plastic or polystyrene container.

Is all this plastic a good thing? The world produces 300 million tons of plastic each year — and while much of it may be marketed as “disposable,” in the U.S, less than 22 percent of the material is actually recycled. As actor, activist and Plastic Pollution Coalition ambassador Jeff Bridges says in a new video: “Plastic is a material the earth cannot digest. Every piece of plastic ever made is still with us.” It continues to accumulate in the environment, to leach toxins into our groundwater and foul our oceans. And harmful chemicals leached by plastics are present in the bloodstream and tissue of almost every one of us, including newborns.

Don’t believe the price of convenience in our throwaway culture is too high? Look also at these compelling images by Chris Jordan, which capture plastic pollution in the stomachs of dead, desiccated, adolescent Laysan albatross nesting on Midway Atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

These birds are a metaphor for us. We are stuffing ourselves full of plastic and the toxins that leach from plastic into our bodies, and we don’t even know it.

What can we do about it? We can start by refusing and replacing the most common, easily avoidable single-use plastic items in our lives:

1. Plastic bags: Carry a reusable bag or bags instead.


2. Plastic water bottles: Carry a reusable glass or steel bottle.


3. Plastic cups with plastic/polystyrene lids: Carry a reusable glass, ceramic or steel cup.


4. Plastic straws: Whether made from oil-based plastics or bioplastics, just say, “no straw please,” when ordering a beverage.


5. Plastic wine stopper: Choose wines with real, natural corks.


6. Plastic take-out utensils: Bring your own reusable utensil set, or ask for real steel utensils.


7. Plastic and polystyrene take-out containers: Bring your own glass, ceramic or steel container.


8. Cigarette butts and filters: Yep, they are plastic, too.

While it takes vigilance and effort, the objective should be to avoid ubiquitous, single-use plastic whenever possible. Let’s revisit that local restaurant. You can simply choose to refuse anything single-use, and you can bring your own reusable cup, bottle, to-go container, utensils and bag with you. This is an easy habit to adopt. There are plenty of companies that sell attractive, well-designed, utilitarian and portable cups, bottles, utensils, and straws. A great place to get a plastic-free start is at LifeWithoutPlastic.

The ripple effect from the tiniest examples can be telling. Take plastic wine stoppers: While they may appear to look like natural cork, they are in fact made of plastic derived from petroleum. And exotic workarounds like stoppers made from bioplastics — plant-based plastics — are often made from crops like sugarcane which have their own environmental consequences. And ultimately, they’re still plastic.

There are myriad benefits to be gained from using real stuff. For example, natural cork is sustainably harvested from the bark of a species of oak tree in the Mediterranean, and its vast cork groves are the anchors of a rich ecosystem, providing habitat for hundreds of plant and animal species, while absorbing carbon and doing their part to curb climate change. It’s not only renewable, recyclable and reusable, but it is actually, truly biodegradable. Try putting some corks in your home compost in the yard. Yes, they will actually break down and go back to the soil.

Whether at home, on the road, at cafes or in restaurants, we must push back on the single-use onslaught and demand real stuff: materials that can be reused countless times and whose production contributes to the health and well-being of the planet. At Plastic Pollution Coalition, we have built a global alliance of individuals, organizations, NGOs, businesses, policymakers and academics to develop replicable and sustainable approaches to reduce single-use plastic. Visit our website to learn practical tips to live plastic free, and please join our coalition.

By making conscious choices every day about the materials we use, and by refusing single-use and disposable plastic products, we can make a huge difference collectively. If we’re really serious about reducing our carbon footprint, let’s start by reducing our “plastic footprint.”

When in doubt, simply use real stuff.

Image credit: Flickr/Kate Ter Harr

Dianna Cohen is CEO and Co-Founder of the Plastic Pollution Coalition.

Internationally renowned actor and screenwriter Emma Thompson has joined Greenpeace campaigners outside Shell's London headquarters protesting against the oil giant's Artic drilling.

Two weeks ago, the Obama Administration gave Shell the final permissions to begin drilling into the Arctic seabed. It now has until 28 September to strike oil, at which time it must close up its operation for the winter.

Thompson helped steer a huge polar bear puppet - the size of a double decker bus  - to the South Bank location. Six protesters are inside the bear, ensuring that it can't be removed.

Thompson is intending to break a legal injunction banning Greenpeace UK staff and activists from crossing a line drawn around the Shell building on the South Bank.

“Shell crossed a line when it moved its rig into the Arctic, so I’m going to step over its line," she said. "And when I do I’ll be carrying the names of thousands of people who stand for Arctic protection. We’re drawing our own line, a line in the ice, and we’re telling Shell to pull back its rig.”

More than 7m people have signed the Save the Arctic petition so far. More than 600,000 of them are from the UK.

One of the world’s largest paper producers is to clear and restore 7,000 hectares of its plantations in Indonesia to protect carbon-rich peatlands.

Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) hopes this will encourage the Indonesian government to tighten forest protection policies.

At the same time researchers from Deltares, the Netherlands-based international environmental consultancy, hired by APP, will use sensing technology to map Indonesia’s tropical peatlands and find more areas to be conserved.

Peatlands have become vital in Indonesian environmental campaigns because they yield enormous amounts of carbon when drained, forming atmospheric carbon dioxide and contributing to climate change.

APP will block its canals that drained the peat bogs in five areas comprising the 7,000 hectares and will flood the land to recreate its natural state. This will be the first effort by a forest commodity company to restore commercial peatland, though similar projects have been conducted in national parks.

The restoration will cost APP up to $50m (£31.9m, €45m) in potential sales.

Aida Greenbury, APP’s sustainability managing director, explained: “We’re definitely about to drown our investment, so we’re basically going to count this type of sacrifice as our investment in tackling climate change.”

She emphasised, however, that the action carried commercial benefits too: “Irresponsible peatland management is detrimental to our business. If it’s not managed properly, peatland can be the cause of destruction of our plantations, including forest fires, so we need to tackle these issues.”

The commissioned high-tech mapping will offer the most comprehensive peatland information ever obtained in Indonesia. Deltares will use it to advise APP on reducing or reversing the impacts of its plantations on neighbouring peat swamp forests and greenhouse gas emissions.

Greenbury admitted that obtaining the board’s backing for the measures had been difficult. There had been “a lot of yelling”.

Greenpeace regards APP’s decision as a “potential game-changer”. Bustar Maitar, global head of Greenpeace’s Indonesia Forest Campaign, said: “Its announcement that it is taking immediate action to retire a number of existing commercial plantation areas and restore them to peat swamp forests sets an important benchmark.

“Greenpeace calls on other plantation companies to take similar urgent action and work together to ensure all Indonesia’s peatland landscapes are properly monitored and protected … The government needs to suspend all further plantation development on forests and peatland.”

Wetlands International, a global conservation body, also Netherlands-based, welcomed the measures, but Marcel Silvius, its head of climate and land use programme, complained the restoration areas remained “just a tiny dot” in APP’s operations.

He said: “APP and its subsidiaries hold hundreds of thousands of hectares of peatland. These areas are drained, leading not only to large carbon dioxide emissions but also to soil subsidence.”

Silvius wondered whether the restoration areas would anyway become commercially useless because they had already been drained. APP countered that those areas were “very viable” at present.

The action is part of APP’s wider commitment to support global efforts to restore forests and cut greenhouse gases. The Indonesian government target is to reduce the emissions by 41%.  

Three national parks in the US are getting help in waste management practices from Subaru, Japan’s 7th largest automaker.
Subaru is a subsidiary of Fuji Heavy Industries (FHI), an engineering conglomerate partially owned by Toyota.

Japanese manufacturers began developing zero landfill technologies in the 1990s, both for use in Japan and also at their overseas factories.

In 2004, Subaru of Indiana became the first manufacturing facility in the United States to reach zero-landfill status. Continued R&D has led to solutions that are applicable outside the automobile industry.

According to the National Parks Service (NPS), more than 100m pounds of waste were generated in National Parks in 2013, with most of it coming from the 273m annual park visitors.

However, this figure only covers waste managed by the NPS, not the larger amount generated by park concessioners, which provide food services, lodging, transportation, retail shops, and other amenities.

Subaru has been a leader in zero landfill practices for more than a decade and makes its zero landfill expertise available to other companies and organizations wishing to upgrade their waste management.

The NPS zero landfill pilot project includes Yosemite, Grand Teton, and Denali National Parks, which had more than 7m visitors in 2013, generating some 16.6m pounds of waste from visitors.

Representatives from the NPS, the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), the National Park Foundation (NPF), and concessioners from the three parks, visited Subaru of Indiana Automotive, Inc.

They learned about Subaru’s zero landfill best practices and worked with sustainability experts at Subaru to identify waste management challenges and opportunities present at each location.

A team from Subaru then visited each pilot park to help with assessing current practices and introduce ideas to help meet zero landfill goals at the parks.

The NPCA will conduct a baseline waste audit for each park. It will review current practices for composting, recycling, hazardous waste management, as well as explore “visitor waste behaviour.” The goal is to document the current status and create zero landfill implementation plans that can be scaled to fit other national parks.

This zero landfill initiative, which has a goal of “significantly reducing waste going into landfills from all national parks,” is part of a bigger partnership between Subaru of America and the NPF, which seeks to help celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the National Park Service next year.
 

It doesn't seem that long ago that I brought home my first computer, a Mac Classic "plus" souped up with four megs of RAM (that's "megs" with an "M") sporting a 40-meg hard drive. The Motorola 6800 processor inside the plastic case ran at a blazing eight megahertz. I was thrilled. A few years later, working as a field rep, I got my first mobile phone. I carried it out to my car in a notebook-sized carrying case, unzipped it, put up the antennae, and I was ready to go. All it did was make phone calls. "What a brave new world," I thought.

Fast forward 20+ years. The speed and power of today's electronic devices far exceed what most of us imagined possible at the time (except Steve Jobs). Nor did we then fully understand how these devices would become so thoroughly embedded in our daily lives. In 1990 there were only 12.4 million cell phone subscribers. By 2010 cell phone service reached 4 billion people, or about 67 percent of the world's population.

Like the industrial revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the digital revolution has altered the path of human history. The technology of the past few decades, and the devices that run that technology, have changed nearly every aspect of how we live, even for professed luddites. Microchips are everywhere.

Where have all the pagers gone?

It seems quaint to look back at those old computers, phones and, yes, pagers as a "brave new world," but it was, and it is.

 

Just as the industrial revolution changed the landscape of the streets of London and Manchester, the digital revolution has changed the human landscape, arguably in an even more profound way, and not always for the better.

In our ongoing series, The Circular Economy and Green Electronics, TriplePundit has explored many of the hopes and challenges of this new landscape. As RP Siegel wrote in an earlier post in the series, one issue overshadowing the promise of the digital revolution is "the mountains of waste that resulted as products quickly became obsolete and tossed out only to be replaced by others with an equally short lifespan." The growing mountain of waste and obsolescence Siegel writes of is one unintended byproduct to the pace of change defined by Moore's law.

Another ostensibly unrelated trend was taking shape around the time I discovered my own personal digital revolution. Alongside the exponential character of Moore's law came an exponential rise in U.S. prison populations and a decrease in public social services.

A parallel trend

According to data from the Sentencing Project, in 1980 roughly 300,000 men and women were incarcerated in state and federal prisons in the United States. By 2013 the U.S. prison population had swelled to 1,516,879 people. Much of this growth stemmed from new sentencing laws resulting from the "War on Drugs." The rate of incarceration in the United States is unequaled: 716 per 100,000 people, topping second-place Rwanda by a significant margin. The U.S. has 5 percent of the world's population and 24 percent of the world's prisoners.

 

At the same time, the decline or complete elimination of many social and mental health services left many unmoored from society, unable to get a foothold to rebuild their lives. An already competitive job market was often an insurmountable barrier for the increasing number of formerly incarcerated people returning to their communities and those with mental or physical disabilities depending on shrinking public services for a path to self-sufficiency. Without a job, these people had little means of putting their lives back together.

I do not imply that the exponential growth of the U.S. prison population, homelessness or a lack of assistance for people on the fringes of society is a consequence of Moore's law and the digital revolution. Whether these concurrent trends correlate in any meaningful way is not at issue here.

What is important is where we find ourselves now: with a growing mountain of toxic electronic waste and more people than ever before willing and able to work but confronted with intractable barriers to employment in a flourishing culture of obsolescence. The challenges of these two parallel trends over the past few decades offer in themselves unique solutions to each one.

Social enterprise: Benefits to society and individuals

In February 2015, California-based nonprofit REDF announced findings of a first-of-its-kind study it commissioned on the economic benefits of social enterprise, defined as "mission-driven businesses focused on hiring and assisting people who are willing and able to work, but have the hardest time getting a job." Since 1997 REDF has pioneered efforts to create job opportunities for people facing the greatest barriers to work.

 

Conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, REDF sought to study the cost-effectiveness of social enterprise businesses.  Some of the key points from Mathematica Jobs Study (MJS) include an average 258 percent higher monthly wage, more training, housing stability for employees of these businesses and a significant return on investment for taxpayers.

"Hundreds of thousands of people in this country want what we all want, the opportunity to work and contribute to their families and communities, but don’t currently have the chance,” said Carla Javits, REDF president & CEO. in press release. “As a results-driven organization, we can now make the powerful case that social enterprises that put people to work not only generate the obvious benefits of greater hope and a paycheck, but also produce a clear win for taxpayers.”

The report shows the increased self-sufficiency provided by social enterprise reduced worker income from government benefits from 71 percent down to 24 percent. For every dollar spent by a social enterprise business, taxpayers save $1.31. Adding in the social enterprises's revenue and worker's income, the ROI for taxpayers rises to $2.23. In other words, a $100,000 investment yields a $223,000 return for society.

 

Another 2013 study done by the Kaiser Family Foundation, in concert with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Institute on Homelessness, found that for every job created for persons with disabilities and similar barriers to employment, taxpayers saved $58,016.

The proof is in the data -- mission-driven social enterprise provides a clear advantage to both society (i.e. taxpayers) and to people looking for a second chance, or just a chance, to make a life of dignity and meaning through work. There are many flavors of social enterprise, but electronics recycling is one sector well-suited for this triple-bottom-line approach: returning people from misfortune to contributing members of society and regenerating discarded electronic materials into salable commodities instead of toxic waste in landfills. Win-win-win.

People and electronics: A second chance

In their role as funders and business experts working to help build social enterprise, REDF explored specific industry sectors that could lend themselves to mission-driven social business more likely to "grow and scale, and in turn create more employment opportunities," Mike Daniels, vice president of strategic business development at Atlanta-based nonprofit NobisWorks, told TriplePundit. Daniels and NobisWorks were already involved in electronics recycling with the launch of Reworx in 2009, where Daniels is COO. With a growing need for responsible management of the waste stream from electronics, REDF saw an opportunity to invest in a high growth sector that met the core of its mission.

"As such, REDF had a keen interest in the electronics waste recycling sector," Daniels said. "With our existing relationships with electronic waste recycling social enterprises across the country, we were able to connect Reworx (Georgia), Isidore (California), and Blue Star Recyclers (Colorado) at the Social Enterprise Alliance Conference in 2014, to discuss how these enterprises could share business practices, but also compete for larger customers that require a national footprint to service their business.

 

"These initial discussions led to a convening in Colorado Springs, in October 2014, that established the founding of Impact Recyclers, the national social enterprise electronic waste recycling network, which now includes Tech Dump (Minnesota), RecycleForce (Indiana), Stanley eWaste Recyclers (New York), Merit Partners (California) and newest member Comprenew (Michigan). The network meets on a quarterly basis to guide its business growth and management of the network.

A disparate group of social entrepreneurs from across the country had a similar idea of creating jobs. The initial informal gathering in 2014 helped unite each one into a national network primed to scale, share best practices and develop more business leads -- all of it leading to more jobs and more diverted electronics waste.

“Before I met these other folks,” said Bill Morris, founder of Blue Star Recyclers and a member of Impact Recyclers, in an REDF press release, “I thought that we were the only ones doing this. When we get together, you can feel the excitement in the room and the potential for this group to do great things together as Impact Recyclers.”

Across the network, Impact Recyclers employs 259 people as of this writing. In 2014 network members processed a combined 25 million pounds of e-waste and generated $12.5 million in revenue. Every member of Impact Recyclers is certified to R2 or e-Stewards standards.

 

In addition, people otherwise considered marginally employable find work, recidivism rates are half of the national average, and many gain greater responsibility, higher pay or move on to begin careers in business.

"The bottom line," Daniels said, "is that we are all creating jobs for the most disadvantaged within our communities, often turning tax consumers into tax payers, and handling e-waste in an environmentally responsible manner.

 

 

High-tech struggles to be green

Within the industry as a whole, more attention is now focused on life cycle assessment and the environmental impact of its products. "Much of the electronics industry is really quite proactive in the environmental space," says Bill Bader, CEO of iNEMI, an electronics industry consortia representing players up and down the electronics supply chain. But challenges remain, especially for responsible electronics recyclers.

 

Mike Daniels spoke of the "hodgepodge of legislation" in place in about 25 states limiting electronic waste sent to landfills. But the rest of the states have no such regulations, and the electronics OEMs are "fighting against federal recycling regulations such as the Responsible Recycling Act (RERA) since it might require the OEMs to pay for it," Daniels said. The RERA "would level the playing field for those recyclers such as the Impact Recyclers network that go through the process of becoming certified to R2 or e-Stewards versus those that do not and still ship untested electronics to developing countries," he continued.

"It is hard for certified firms to compete against such unfair practices."

Another challenge is the roiling of the markets and swings in commodity prices. But none of these challenges are insurmountable. In fact, Daniels sees more interest generated in electronics recycling among aspiring social enterprises "as an 'easier' business to start due to e-waste being among the fastest growing waste streams." Daniels emphasized that "easy" is relative. "Electronics recycling is a "fairly complex and regulated industry," he said, though more streamlined and comprehensive regulation such as the RERA seems a necessary step in the right direction.

Impact Recyclers: Recycle responsibly and socially

Impact Recyclers is a full-service electronics recycling network able to meet the needs of business, government and individual consumers. Each member is licensed, bonded and certified. And the network's impact is growing.

"Impact Recyclers' national footprint today exceeds that of most other large IT and electronics recycling companies," said Daniels, "and to meet customer needs we will probably add a few more members to fill some geographic gaps."

The social enterprise of Impact Recyclers is working hard to meet the challenge of electronic and social waste. Surely 20 years hence, we will look back in wistful bemusement at the gadgets and technology we today consider cutting edge. But some things will never change. Paramount is the opportunity for each of us to pursue meaningful work. The barriers to this simple opportunity for many is as toxic as the growing pile of electronic waste, for both individuals and society. The ability for a second chance, or even a chance, through social enterprise can stem the tide of social waste, turning it instead into the dignity of a good job well done and a path to a better future. For each one of us.

 

Recycle your electronics

• BlueStar: Autism and other disabilities


• Isidore: Formerly incarcerated 


• Merit ePartners: At-risk youth 


• RecycleForce: Formerly incarcerated 


• Stanley eWaste: Autism and other disabilities


• TechDump: Adults facing barriers to employment


• Reworx: 50/50 mix of at-risk and autism spectrum


• Comprenew: - At-risk youth and adults

Image credits: 1) Flickr/Bruno Cordioli; 2) Impact Recyclers, used with express permission

 

Fans of the notorious Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline got a double whammy of bad news last week. First, the latest figures from the U.S. Energy Information Agency highlight the spectacular growth of solar energy in the 50 states, which should knock the job-creating pins out from under the Keystone XL argument once and for all. Second, the rumor mill is heating up with anticipation that President Barack Obama will deny a permit for the controversial project, perhaps as early as Labor Day weekend.

Great numbers for U.S. solar generation

The latest Energy Information Agency (EIA) figures were released earlier this month, covering data up through June 2015. The report focuses on utility-scale solar plants, defined as 1 megawatt or more.

For utility-scale solar generation, EIA reported a one-month record of 2,765 gigawatt-hours in June 2015, a 35.8 percent increase over the same month last year, and a spectacular 31 times the solar generation 10 years ago, in June 2005.

Dig behind the national figures and you'll see some interesting state-by-state numbers emerge. According to EIA, California by far added the most solar generation to the grid in June 2015, accounting for a full 56.5 percent. That's no big surprise from a public policy perspective, given California's progressive reputation along with its ample sunshine.

The surprise is in the numbers for states immediately following California for solar grid contribution: Arizona (13.4 percent), North Carolina (6.7 percent), Nevada (6.4 percent) and New Jersey (3.3 percent). None of these states are particularly known for left-leaning energy policy, at least not as far as their current governors go. However, the legacy of past legislative initiatives continues to power the solar industry.

In Arizona, for example, former Gov. Jan Brewer was a strong advocate of solar development, and her efforts continue to ripple out thanks in part to corporate interest in solar generation. Arizona is also home to the massive Agua Caliente and Solana solar thermal plants, both supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, as well as military installations such as a new 16.4 megawatt array at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.

Despite having a current governor with deep ties to the fossil fuel industry, North Carolina is the beneficiary of high interest in solar generation among its corporate citizens such as Apple and Ikea, along with its previously established Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standard. The state's solar generation numbers also got a boost this year with a 20 megawatt facility for George Washington University.

Like Arizona, Nevada is the beneficiary of giant-sized federally supported solar generation projects along with strong state policies that support an estimated 5,900 direct and value chain jobs in the solar industry.

New Jersey started off strong in solar generation policy under previous administrations, and though its current governor has been less than aggressive in addressing the state's boom-and-bust solar jobs cycle, the sector continues to be a growth engine. As with the other state solar frontrunners, corporate interest in solar energy plays a big role here.

Prospects for continued growth in utility-scale solar don't look too good for New Jersey, though. EIA's map of forthcoming utility-scale power generation looks to California and North Carolina for the big numbers.

EIA also notes that small-scale solar generation is also growing, and in that regard you can check the Solar Energy Industries Association for a state-by-state estimates of jobs related to the solar sector.

The Keystone XL pipeline and jobs, jobs, jobs

For those of you new to the topic, Keystone XL is a pipeline project that would bring crude oil from Canadian tar sands down through the U.S. midsection to Gulf Coast refineries.

The project was first proposed about seven years ago, at the tip of the 2008 global financial crisis and well before the U.S. renewable energy sector began its spectacular job-creating climb. While proponents of the project continue to portray it as a critical economic engine for the U.S. economy, Keystone XL would only create a few dozen permanent jobs. Compared to recent growth in the wind and solar sectors, it is less than a blip on the screen.

Throw in the potential risks to water resources in the nation's breadbasket, and it is evident that the burden is on Keystone's developer, TransCanda, to demonstrate that the project is in the best interests of the U.S.

Because the pipeline crosses an international border, it requires a sign-off from the White House. President Obama is also on record stating that approval would be contingent on Keystone XL not contributing significantly to greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite its best efforts, TransCanada may be doomed to fail. Last week our friends over at Oil and Gas Investor provided a rundown of rumors in Canadian media indicating that President Obama would deny a permit for Keystone XL. The rumor mill apparently began to crank up earlier this summer, courtesy of the consulting company Stratas Advisors (of the Hart Energy publishing group).

On August 27 our friends over at The Hill reported that White House spox Josh Earnest debunked the rumors, stating that the State Department is still reviewing Keystone XL.

However, on August 28 Stratas Director John Kneiss is reported to have predicted that the denial would come down around the Labor Day holiday weekend, so stay tuned.

Image credit: 1) Flickr/Elvert Barnes 2) U.S. Energy Information Agency.

Help can sometimes come from the most unexpected places. Last week labor unions found themselves faced in an unlikely sweet spot, when the National Labor Relations Board ruled that companies that use contracted labor from another company on their premises can be considered a joint employer with the contractor. And in the eyes of labor unions, joint employer status means potentially joint responsibility at the bargaining table.

The expanded definition of what is called the "joint employer standard" came as a result of a hearing concerning a waste management company, Browning-Ferris Industries, and its staffing contractor, Leadpoint Business Services. In this case, Browning-Ferris received its staffing from Leadpoint, the primary employer. In the eyes of the board, however, Browning-Ferris took direct or indirect part in many of the functions that affected the workers' duties and job determination, such as regulating working hours, overtime, employment conditions and termination. Browning-Ferris therefore, reasoned the board, played a direct role in the staffing decisions of contracted employees.

For years, many corporations that offer franchises have been able to benefit from a similar contractual arrangement as found in this NLRB case. Many corporations stipulate that while franchisees are responsible for their own business and staffing costs, the corporation has the right to set guidelines for hiring and performance. As in the case of Browning-Ferris' operations, some corporations set minimum requirements for hiring, work hours, training, quality assurance, overtime and disciplinary procedures.

"Today, we restate the board’s joint-employer standard to reaffirm the standard articulated by the Third Circuit in Browning-Ferris decision," said the board. Under that labor standard, two or more employers can be considered to have joint employment responsibilities if they "“share or codetermine those matters governing the essential terms and conditions of employment.”

While most of the media attention has been trained on the implications for fast food establishments that have been worried about unionizing efforts on their premises, the ruling could have broad implications for small businesses that contract as franchees, writes AP business writer Joyce Rosenberg.

"Franchise owners have also contended they could lose their autonomy if franchisors become joint employers with them, and therefore can have more say in their hiring and management practices," says Rosenberg.

But many corporations that franchise out already set boundaries that direct the way franchisees run their businesses -- including staffing.

"[A] franchise contract is like a prenuptial agreement -- not very romantic, but you'd better understand it before you sign it," says Jeff Elgin in Entrepreneur Magazine. It's usually full of "must-dos" and can't-dos as well as iron-clad "non-negotiable" expectations. Many franchisees already recognize that their franchise is meant to be a reflection of another corporation's brand and image.

Given the sweeping implications of this ruling, it's likely that there will be some legal challenges. But it will be interesting to see how other industries that contract, say, temporary workers on a regular basis will be affected by the ruling. Will it cause some companies to voluntarily change the way they deal with short-term staffing needs? Will it make it easier or harder for workers to do their jobs?

In some parts of the country, such as Tampa, Florida, temporary staffing agencies are used as a matter of practice. It's the go-to place for workers that want to be eventually hired in their area of expertise. Will this new ruling change the way workers are managed if the contracting business has a legal responsibility in how the worker is treated and supervised?

And of course, there's the perennial collective bargaining issue in fast-food restaurants and other companies that rely on franchises. For unions that have been unsuccessful in unionizing small franchisees, the NLRB's new and expanded concept of joint employer status may offer some unions a stronger and bigger foot in the door. Will it also levy more responsibility on corporations when it comes to wage and employment issues of non-unionized employees?

These are questions that, however contentious, may have a great deal to say about how companies meet their staffing needs and address their overhead costs in the future.

Images: Flickr/Alan Cleaver; Flickr/All-Nite Images; Flickr/David Bruce, Jr.

The economic ramifications of continuing the 20th century’s economic model, where unsustainable extraction and pollution conveys competitive advantage, are coming into sharp focus. Citigroup now projects a staggering $72 trillion global cost tied to man-made climate change during the 21st century. This is an almost incomprehensible scale of economic damage that is equal to losing four years of the United States’ entire gross domestic product.

The agriculture and food manufacturing industries also confront similar staggering economic consequences. The industrial fast food complex is directly tied to a global obesity and diabetes epidemic that now costs $2 trillion annually, or almost 3 percent of world gross domestic product. If this cost remains constant it will represent $170 trillion in economic cost through the rest of the 21st century.

These staggering economic costs don't even take into account human suffering and premature death. A telling example is that 4,000 people per day, or 1.6 million per year, are estimated to die prematurely in China due to air pollution. This is a morbidity population that is 33 percent larger than the entire population of San Diego. In terms of the morbidity rate tied to our food system, in the U.S. alone over 75,000 people die each year due to diabetes.

Consumers, markets, politics and sustainable economics

The scale of the numbers tied to unsustainable human and environmental impacts are now too large to be wrong or ignored. Continued purchases of fossil fuels in the quantities now being consumed is an exceedingly poor economic decision. Health research now documents that sugary drinks are the 21st century’s tobacco, in terms of negative human health and cost consequences. The question is why consumers and the political system are comparatively unresponsive to numbers that can only be described as staggering.

The answer is based on the distinction between traditional economics and behavioral economics. Traditional economics is based on the concept of rational consumers and markets. It assumes that people will not borrow more than they can pay back and that lenders will not optimize short-term profits by aggressively promoting high risk, highly leveraged loans. Based on these assumptions, traditional economics would not forecast the 2007-2008 Great Recession. But it did happen because people and markets are not rational. The study of behavioral economics is based on the assumption that people and markets make decisions that reward themselves in the short term by ignoring or grossly underestimating long-term consequences until they become too large to ignore any longer.

The irrational consumer, market and voter now define our economy. For example, it is political suicide to propose raising pump prices to discourage the scale of fossil fuel consumption that is projected to create $72 trillion of climate change costs. Raising gasoline prices was also political suicide in 1974 when it was proposed as a solution to an OPEC oil embargo and continued entanglement in Middle Eastern wars. Imagine our national history if we had the economic will to accept higher pump prices as a cost alternative to Middle Eastern wars and pollution.

Another example is the attempt to regulate sugary drink consumption through public policy, taxes or both. Politically, such actions garner consumer and political responses that appear tantamount to a “live free or die” defense of the U.S. Constitution. But public policy designed to limit consumption of sugary drinks to reduce obesity levels is proving to work in Mexico, where a 10 percent tax on soda generated a 6 percent drop in first-year consumption. The economics appear compelling. Taxing sugary drinks will reduce consumption, and reduced consumption is the solution to reducing the staggering cost of obesity and diabetes. Fundamentally the consumer and political issue is not knowing what to do but rather having the consumer and political will to act on behalf of our economic, human health and environmental long-term interests.

The implications of adopting sustainable economics

The sobering reality is that issues like removing lead from gasoline, mandating automobile seat belts and limiting tobacco sales have historically taken approximately 50 years to move from initial activism for change to the adoption of change. Applying this same time-scale to the issues of climate change and obesity would create staggering losses in human health and economics.

We are now at a decision-making crossroads. The study of behavioral economics recognizes that consumers, politicians and businesses will make decisions resulting in substantial economic loss and human health costs based on a bias toward maintaining the status quo. It recognizes that consumers and voters will make decisions that reject science and statistics to protect strongly held beliefs. People and businesses will delay or procrastinate in taking actions that will advance their long-term welfare because change can be hard or discomforting. These behavioral economics factors are now threatening to generate staggering economic and human suffering damage.

In economics there is no such thing as a free lunch, and the pain from not adopting sustainability will eventually be overwhelming. This level of pain will generate mega-shifts in stock valuations, a restructuring of market share away from companies that gain competitive advantage through pollution, and the emergence of new companies that win customers by delivering price competitive and sustainable solutions. The scale of these ramifications will be surfaced in my next article entitled “The $250 Trillion Green Economic Revolution.”

Image credit: Flickr/Pictures of Money