BLADE

Published in the Sun June 16, 2012

“We cannot always build the future for our youth,

 but we can build our youth for the future.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1940

Daniel Thomas, Jina Torres, Michael Carlson, Jessica Carr, Jim Rudd, Jeremy Carr, Jacob Bishop and John Jarmon.  Not pictured is Sean Bullock, president of BLADE club.

When Jacob Bishop, 16, was first learning to build solar panels he wasn’t very good at soldering.  The 6 inch square polycrystalline wafers he was soldering together were as brittle as potato chips.  He and his fellow students at Taylor High School broke quite a few of them in the beginning, which was a shame because the wafers were bought with money from the Waffles for Wafers Breakfast fundraisers.  But the students kept soldering on, and painstakingly completed four 126 watt solar panels, each constructed from 36 of the delicate wafers connected in series, framed and protected from breakage under glass.

Jacob and his friends are members of BLADE – Beginners Learning Alternative Designs for Energy.  The after-school club was the brainchild of John Jarmon, a master electrician and employee of ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) who wanted to give back to the Taylor community.  John believes we need a lot more people with technical skills and wanted to teach electrical theory to teens who might become electricians and engineers.  A few kids showed up for the club, but when they saw that a textbook was involved they drifted away, leaving John alone in an empty classroom, pondering how he might spark some interest in electricity.

The breakthrough came when John was approached by a representative of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).  IEEE was recruiting high schools to compete in a photovoltaic design competition culminating in a presentation at the Austin Convention Center on Solar Day.  The students would have to design and build a project demonstrating a practical use of solar energy, using photovoltaic solar panels as the sole source of energy.

Competition set the BLADE club on fire.  The kids decided to build their own solar panels and mount them on top of a van.  When parked in the sunshine the panels would charge a bank of batteries storing six kilowatt-hours of electricity, plenty for hours of video games on a wide screen TV or full length movies projected on an outdoor screen with a thundering sound system.  The van would become an off-grid mobile entertainment center.  How cool is that?

The solar panel factory opened for business.  John gathered some of his co-workers at ERCOT and they started looking for a van.  Jim Rudd, one of the co-workers, pointed out that John already had a 1999 GMC Safari van with 220,000 miles on it, and hadn’t John really been planning to get a Prius anyway?  John’s van was donated to the club.  Maroon was the wrong color for the Taylor Ducks, but a green paint job and some duck decals on the doors made it perfect.

Sponsors rallied around the cause.  Interstate Batteries supplied six deep cycle batteries, HEB helped with a 40 inch flat screen television, Best Buy gave an amplifier, and Taylor Sporting Goods provided a PlayStation 3.



Jessica Carr points out the fragile wafers
 the club members soldered together.

By June 3, Austin Solar Day, the van was ready, and the kids had a booth at the convention center.  Although they were competing against seven other Central Texas high schools, the BLADE kids came away with first prize – a thousand dollars.  According to the judges, the fact that they built their own solar panels rather than use off-the-shelf panels was a major factor in the victory.  Of course the win was also a huge self-esteem booster for the kids.  Jessica Carr, one of the few girls in the club, plans to major in both solar engineering and art at Concordia, and Jacob, who is now pretty decent at soldering, will pursue an electrical engineering career in the military.

Winning was great, but I was curious why these ERCOT people were so enthusiastic about solar energy.  After all, ERCOT controls 85% of the state’s electric load, managing 40,500 miles of transmission lines and the flow of electricity to 23 million Texas customers.  I had thought that ERCOT might be dismissive of solar energy, but I was wrong.  When people put up solar panels, they are generating electricity for their own use during the sunniest part of the day, right when power is needed most.  This is called distributed generation.

John pointed out that we were very close to rolling blackouts last summer when all the overworked air conditioners put a huge strain on the electrical grid.  “When we get up to those kinds of loads, those power plants are in trouble.  The transmission lines are in trouble too.”  With demand for power peaking, “a couple more solar panels on a couple more roofs would have been nice.”

Jim Rudd, the friend who persuaded John to donate the van, agrees that we were very close to blackouts last summer.  Jim keeps his electric bill down to $50 a month by turning his AC up to 84 degrees while he is at work.  He wants to put a 4 kilowatt solar system on his roof so that his house can be “net zero,” meaning he will produce as much electricity as he uses.

John has another reason to like solar energy.  His wife is from Japan.  Her family (who will soon be installing solar panels on their house) live 100 miles from the Fukushima Nuclear Power plant, the one that was damaged by the tsunami and leaked radiation.

While I was admiring the BLADE van, John’s 12 year old friend Michael Underhill explained to me why it’s good to use fewer fossil fuels.  “We need to save those for the future, just in case.”  Michael, who is going to live in that future, wants to make sure we don’t run out of resources before he gets there.

Published in the Williamson County Sun, June 9, 2012

Houston Toad, photo by Clifton Ladd

The Georgetown salamander, whose only home is Williamson County, is not listed as an endangered species, at least not yet.  But here is a little story about how Bastrop County dealt with their own endangered amphibian, Bufo houstonensis, the famous Houston toad.  I was tipped off to these events by the newest Environmental Studies professor at Southwestern, Dr. Josh Long, who introduced me to his father Bob.

Bob Long has been described as a gun-toting, Republican preacher on a quest to save the endangered Houston toad.  I can’t comment on his voting record, but he does have a pistol strapped to his right hip.  We are heading out to see the toad habitat on his 550 acre cattle ranch near Bastrop, and the gun is in case we see a rattlesnake.  Unlike Houston toads, rattlesnakes are not protected by the Endangered Species Act, so if we encounter an unlucky rattlesnake on this excursion Bob will definitely endanger it.

On the road to the ranch we see burned out forests everywhere, blackened tree skeletons poking up from wildflowers and green meadows that sprouted in the spring rains.  At least, the lucky areas have new meadows and wildflowers.  Some of last summer’s wildfires burned so hotly that the soil beneath the trees was sterilized, all the dormant seeds and roots destroyed.  The Houston toad population, driven out of Houston years ago by urbanization, is now confined to a shrinking habitat centered in Bastrop County.  The toad likes to burrow in the loose soil beneath pine and oak forests, so the fires may have dealt a fatal blow to the struggling species.

Bob was introduced to the Houston toad back in the late 1990s when the US Fish and Wildlife Service called a meeting at the Bastrop Opera House to lay down the law to the local landowners.  A man Bob described as “confrontational” announced that the federal government was dead serious about protecting the Houston toad through the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and if the local ranchers didn’t get on board with protective measures the Fish and Wildlife Service would rule that the continued existence of the toad was in jeopardy.  A “jeopardy” ruling under the ESA has serious legal clout, allowing withdrawal of federal funds for local schools and roads if the community did not comply with conservation measures.  Needless to say, this news did not go over very well with the ranchers.  A lot of people were pretty riled up about this threat to private property rights.

In all his years tromping around on his ranch, Bob had never even seen a Houston toad, so why all this fuss over its possible extinction?  Why should anybody care about the fate of this obscure little amphibian that was throwing a wrench into everybody’s business?  A ruling of jeopardy would affect not just ranchers, but everybody involved with real estate.  Developers would be seriously inconvenienced, as well as all the bankers and lawyers who did business with the developers.

Bob wasn’t too emotional over the fate of the Houston toad, but he did care about the wellbeing of Bastrop County and all his many friends in the area, and he realized early on that the toad problem was not going to disappear just because the Bastrop community didn’t want to deal with it.  Rather than waiting for proclamations to come down from Washington, Bob wanted to have a seat at the table where decisions would be made about protecting the toad, so he helped organize a task force including Bastrop ranchers, developers, bankers, and lawyers, as well as representatives from Texas Parks and Wildlife, US Fish and Wildlife Service, Environmental Defense, The Nature Conservancy, the Forest Service, Texas AgriLife Extension, and the Texas Department of Agriculture.  He wanted to hear what the environmentalists had to say, and he was not intimidated by the federal government.  “Hey, we pay their salaries.  They work for us.”

For his efforts at mediation, he was called a sell-out and a crazy person by some of his neighbors who preferred to fight.  But Bob Long is a relationship person.  He felt certain that a spirit of cooperation would trump confrontation. 

Like most committees, the Bastrop task force had a lot of tedious meetings without making any progress.  But from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Bob learned about Safe Harbor Agreements, a voluntary partnership in which private landowners aid in the recovery of an endangered species in exchange for assurances that no additional management activities will be required of them during the period of the agreement.  Bob was impatient to get the task force off dead center, so he persuaded the USFWS to let him enter a Safe Harbor Agreement for a manageable ten years rather than the daunting “perpetuity”.  If it wasn’t working out, at the end of ten years he could go back to business as usual.

The Safe Harbor Agreement meant that Bob had to keep his cattle out of a pond on his property during the toad’s breeding season, but Texas Parks and Wildlife paid for a fence and Environmental Defense helped install a watering trough for the cattle outside the fence.  The Longs also had to pull some cedars, plant some native grasses, and control fire ants.

Controlled burns, which were prescribed by the agreement, turned out to be hugely beneficial last summer.  The areas of the ranch that had already been cleared of excess underbrush by controlled burns escaped the massive destruction of the superheated wildfires.

Bob does not consider himself an environmentalist like his son, Dr. Josh.  He prefers the term conservationist.  The conservation measures required by the Safe Harbor Agreement have resulted in increased wildlife, including wood ducks and wild turkey, excellent for hunting.  The toad pond has become a haven for birds.  With the many birds come predators such as fox, bobcat, and even a mountain lion.

But Bob does not go looking for toads around his pond, so he wasn’t sure how they are doing these days.  To find out I called Dr. Michael Forstner, biologist at Texas State and world expert on Houston toads.  Dr. Forstner says Bastrop County is the Houston toad’s Alamo; it has nowhere else to run.  The next 5 years will be critical to the toad’s survival, requiring not only habitat protection but also breeding programs and re-introduction into wetlands like the Long’s pond. 

But does it matter if the Houston toad survives?  Isn’t this a lot of trouble for a two inch creature that sings around a pond?  Dr. Forstner explains that Houston toads are like the proverbial canary in the coal mine.  Just as the death of a canary would signal the presence of deadly gases in the mine, the toads have been revealing for a decade the degradation of the Bastrop forests, a degradation confirmed by the wildfires. The citizens of Bastrop County chose to live there because of the natural character of the area.  “They don’t want to live in Round Rock,” he says, referring apologetically to Williamson County’s rapid development.  The Houston toad is a strong ally in the quest to keep Bastrop County’s ecosystem healthy and natural.  If the forests do well, the creatures that depend on the forests will do well, including the people.

Bob Long, preacher and rancher, doesn’t know what will happen to the Houston toad in the future, but he cares about stewardship of the land and will keep on doing his part.  “I will set the habitat so it can survive if God wants it to survive.”

Steve Hochstetler was fed up with buying gasoline.  It wasn’t so much the price of gasoline that was bothering him, but the realization that the vast amounts of money and effort going into the petroleum business benefitted the few at the expense of many.  “Nigeria is a perfect example.  The money doesn’t flow down to the people of Nigeria.”  In his work for IBM, Steve had travelled to 32 countries, seeing firsthand how people could be desperately poor in countries rich in resources.  While living in North Carolina, Steve had been heavily involved in the fair trade organization Ten Thousand Villages, which provides artisans in developing countries an international market for their products.  So when he and his wife Pat moved to Austin in 2000, they spearheaded the drive to open a successful Ten Thousand Villages outlet on South Congress.  They no longer manage the store, but making a difference in the world remained very important to both the Hochstetlers, so they turned their attention to a new project.

When Steve realized that buying gasoline was not helping anybody, at least not helping anybody who needed help, he decided to stop using it.  He traded his Toyota Prius for a 1983 diesel Mercedes 300TD wagon with 186,000 miles on it.  He enrolled in a workshop to learn how to convert waste vegetable oil into biodiesel.  He bought a biodiesel processor from a guy on craigslist who had built one out of an old electric water heater.  But as he learned to make biodiesel, Steve discovered that the conversion process required both methanol and lye, toxic chemicals that he just didn’t want in his garage.  So he ditched the idea of making his own biodiesel and decided to run his car on straight, unconverted, waste vegetable oil.

Now you can’t just pour canola oil into your Mercedes and expect to motor on down the road.  First, you need the right kind of waste oil:  liquid, fairly clean, and with almost no chicken fat in it.

During the sacrificial season of Lent, Catholic churches have a lot of fried fish suppers.  To me a fish fry doesn’t really seem like much of a sacrifice, but anyway, after the parishioners go back to eating meat, the churches end up with a lot of excess vegetable oil.  Steve takes it off their hands, collecting 700 or 800 gallons of lightly used oil at the end of every Lent season, enough to fuel his Mercedes for the rest of the year.

The oil has to be filtered really well or food particles will clog up the engine.  Steve is compulsive about this step because he wants to keep driving.  He pours the oil through a series of filters from 600 to 200 microns.  The openings in the mesh are barely wider than a human hair.  Then he lets the oil sit undisturbed in a barrel for several weeks, so any remaining tiny particles settle to the bottom.  For the final step he pours the oil through a one micron filter, fine enough to remove bacteria.

The filtered oil is very, very clean, but it still can’t be put directly into the diesel engine.  Vegetable oil is a big, complex molecule, and more viscous than biodiesel.  Chemically, vegetable oil is composed of three hydrocarbon chains (fatty acids) connected to a glycerol molecule.    Biodiesel is made from vegetable oil too, but biodiesel has the glycerol stripped off during processing, leaving hydrocarbon chains which are almost identical to diesel made from petroleum.

In order to use the thicker vegetable oil in an automobile, it has to be made less viscous so it won’t gunk up the engine.  Just like butter turns liquid in the frying pan, vegetable oil gets less viscous when it is heated.  Cars that have been converted to run on vegetable oil have two tanks.  They start on biodiesel, and then after a few minutes when the engine and the fuel are good and hot, they switch over to the oil.  Before turning the car off, it is switched back to biodiesel to flush the system, so that the vegetable oil won’t cool off and turn to Crisco in the fuel injectors.  Some people say that the exhaust smells like French fries when it’s running on oil, but Steve claims he doesn’t notice it.

Steve and Pat have put about 50,000 vegetable oil miles on the Mercedes wagon without any problems with the engine, and they have also acquired and converted two more Mercedes sedans to run on waste oil.  When they need more biodiesel for start-up and cool-down, Steve gets it at DieselGreen Fuels, Austin’s only source of biodiesel.  They will give him 30 gallons of biodiesel in exchange for 120 gallons of his fish fry oil.

Though he is keeping his day job at IBM, Steve plans to start a side business called “GreaseMyMercedes” to help other people convert their own diesel cars to waste oil.  He admits that a few cars running on vegetable oil won’t replace the gasoline industry, but it’s a small step that he can make toward alternative fuels.  “At least I’m doing something,” he says hopefully.  “If everybody just did a little something, the world would be a lot better place.”

Dalton Rebecek is only eleven years old, but he has no qualms about speaking to the press.  May 3 is a newsworthy day at Jo Ann Ford Elementary School; the lunchroom is beginning a composting program for food waste.  As student council president, Dalton has been preparing his classmates for the inauguration of this new program, so he confidently explains it to me.  The Ford lunchroom used to send 16 bags of trash to the landfill every day.  With the new food composting program and single stream recycling, Dalton says trash will be reduced to only one bag a day, which will be “healthier for the Earth.”

Jason Sanders, coordinator of recycling and composting for Texas Disposal Systems, is patiently herding 500 very noisy grade-schoolers through their first trash sorting line.  Food, paper napkins, and milk cartons go into the bin for composting.  Water bottles and aluminum cans go to recycling.  Styrofoam, plastic cutlery, and sandwich bags go into the trash.  While volunteers continue to teach proper trash line etiquette, Jason invites me outside (where it is blissfully quiet) to see the special dumpster where the food waste goes.  The dumpster is equipped with a radio frequency ID tag.  When the truck comes to collect the food waste it will immediately record the source and the weight of the food, so TDS will know exactly how much waste is being diverted from the landfill by each school.  Ford is the last Georgetown elementary school to go live with the composting program, so Jason has data from all the other elementary schools in town, as well as from the Austin and Hayes elementary schools.  He confirms Dalton’s claim that landfill waste will decrease from 16 bags per lunchroom per day to one or two.  Mitchell Elementary, which was the first Georgetown school to begin composting and recycling, is now the champion of all the TDS Green schools.  Mitchell kids recycled and composted over 8000 pounds of waste in April alone.

Food waste composting is not just for little kids.  At Southwestern University the cafeteria in the Red McCombs center is now diverting over 90% of its waste stream away from the landfill and will save $10,000 a year by doing so.  Gary Hertel, Georgetown Facilities Manager for TDS, shows me a special door at the back of the kitchen where food can be thrown directly into a collection bin, and another chute where recyclables such as cardboard boxes slide into a huge compactor.  I don’t see any place for regular trash so I ask Gary where it is.  Before he can answer a janitor comes out with a single black plastic bag and sets it primly on the curb.  This kitchen feeds 1000 people a day but there is so little trash generated that after lunch a golf cart comes by and hauls the few bags to a dumpster at another location.

After the food waste is collected at the schools, it is hauled down to the Texas Disposal Systems facility at Creedmoor, just southeast of Austin.  I am greeted there by Adam and Paul Gregory, sons of founder and CEO Bob Gregory.  Rarely will you meet two young men so enthusiastic about recycling.  Adam is only 27 years old, but led the design and construction of the 107,000 square foot Materials Recovery Facility (MRF), pronounced “murph” in dump-speak.  Adam proudly shows me huge bales of plastic milk jugs, bimetal cans, and aluminum stacked in endless rows.  He explains that in order to make a profit, sometimes TDS has to hold onto the bales temporarily and wait for the right market price.  Recycling not only makes money by saving valuable resources, but also keeps 300 tons of material out of the landfill every day.  Adam thinks that with diligent materials recovery he can make this landfill last 100 years.  Paul, the older brother, is no less committed to the long view.  As long as every man, woman, and child in America continues to discard over 1.25 tons of trash every year, their family business will have plenty of opportunity for innovation.  Both brothers have business degrees but confess that they have little interest in mundane matters such as quarterly profits.  They prefer to focus on long term projects such as harvesting methane gas from the landfill to run the materials recovery facility, a process that should be operational within two years.  They are also looking forward to opening a safari park in the buffer zone surrounding the landfill and have already collected over 2500 exotic animals, many of them endangered species.  As we drive off-road in the grass among antelope and bison, I forget that we’re in Texas, much less in a landfill.

Paul Gregory is in charge of composting the food collected from the schools.  We drive his truck back to the big piles where the children’s lunch leftovers have been ground up in a five-to-one ratio with chopped brush.  The piles are called “static” piles because they are allowed to sit for the 6 months required for the milk cartons to disappear.  Twice during that period they are stirred up and blasted with water cannons to keep the decomposing bacteria active.  The temperature inside the piles rises to 140 degrees Fahrenheit from the metabolism of the bacteria, killing seeds and pathogens.  In fact, the piles get so hot that they can catch fire if they are allowed to get too big.  After 6 months the compost will be ready to be sold through the Garden-Ville outlets as a valuable source of organic humus and nitrogen for lawns and gardens.  It can also be used at TDS’s tree farm on the premises.

Lunchroom leftovers are only a small part of the composting operation.  Other piles contain such sundry items as animal manure or waste liquids from the Borden dairy and the Coca-Cola bottling plant.

The brothers admit that these massive, hot compost piles are also an expedient way to dispose of rare fatalities among the wildlife.  Last year George, a 20 year old American bison, died peacefully of old age.  He was suitably mourned and then, rather than digging a really big hole, George was interred in a compost pile.  After 10 days there was nothing left but hooves and teeth.

Published in the Sun April 28, 2012

Vegan:  A strict vegetarian who consumes no animal food or dairy products

 

Gary Ranck is probably the last person in the world you would guess is a vegan.  At 70, the ex-marine still works full time as a security guard.  Don’t sneak into his apartment unannounced because he keeps nine handguns in his bedroom closet.  His favorite gun for target practice is a .45 caliber model 1911 automatic pistol.  Gary doesn’t give a rat’s patootie about animal rights or the environmental impact of industrial farming.  But he does listen to his doctors.  Eight years ago when an agonizing blood clot cut off the circulation to his left leg, his doctor told him he had to quit smoking.  Gary threw his last pack of cigarettes in the trash that same day and never smoked again.

When Dr. Allen Mauldin in Leander told Gary that his cholesterol was too high and suggested that he follow a diet free of all meat, eggs, and dairy products, Gary’s first impression was “Yeah, right.”  But Dr. Mauldin himself is a vegan, so Gary reluctantly agreed to try the diet for 90 days.  He was surprised to find that it wasn’t too difficult.  For breakfast he would nuke a frozen Amy’s Tofu Scramble.  He discovered that he genuinely liked grilled Portobello mushrooms on sprouted grain bread.    Before he became a vegan he didn’t even know what lentils were; now he makes his own Lentil Loaf instead of meatloaf.  He is happy to note that the diet allows him to wash down the lentil loaf with a beer.

After his 90 day trial period, Gary’s cholesterol was normal and Dr. Mauldin let him quit taking his cholesterol medication.  Since Gary hates to spend money on medicine, he decided to stick with the plan.  He has followed the diet very carefully for over two years now, only cheating with a bit of turkey at Christmas and Thanksgiving.  He is 27 pounds slimmer and his LDL cholesterol (the bad kind) is down to an absolutely perfect 53.  He doesn’t even miss meat, except when he sees a Burger King commercial on TV.  Then the longing for a double cheeseburger briefly reappears; a conditioned response that says more about the effectiveness of advertising than it does about the qualities of ground beef.

Thinking about the qualities of ground beef brings me to the topic of “pink slime,” otherwise known as lean, finely textured beef (LFTB).  After slaughtering a cow, the tiny scraps of meat left over are processed to separate the lean bits from the fat.  The resulting meat paste is treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill bacteria.  Since the process was developed in 2001, “pink slime” has been added to ground beef at fast food restaurants and school lunch programs to make the meat go further.  This process recovers about 13 extra pounds of meat from each cow.  Iowa governor Terry Branstad said that, in order to keep eating the same number of hamburgers, we will have to slaughter an extra 1.5 million cows a year to make up for the lack of LFTB (over the 35 million head of cattle currently slaughtered annually.)  That sounds like seriously bad news for the cow population.

There is, however, another way to make up for the “loss” of pink slime.  We could eat fewer hamburgers.  Meatless Mondays would benefit both our waistlines and our arteries, as well as granting an eleventh hour pardon for those 1.5 million cattle.

Gary Ranck skips meat to save money on cholesterol medication, which is a perfectly good reason all by itself.  But even if your cholesterol is normal, environmental impact is another huge reason to decrease the amount of meat in your diet.  A United Nations report in 2006 titled Livestock’s Long Shadow concluded that the complete process of feeding and distributing livestock accounts for 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, a larger percentage than the entire global transportation sector.

As a retired physician, I must add one small caution.  It is possible to go vegetarian and still have a very unhealthy diet – think chips and soda pop.  Meat should be replaced with actual fruits and vegetables.  And some people who completely avoid all animal products risk becoming deficient in vitamin B12, so a small supplement would be in order.  If you are interested in vegetarianism, a little research will help you get it right.  And of course nobody should stop cholesterol medication without consulting his or her physician.

Published in the Sun April 15, 2012

If you just want eggs you can get perfectly white, clean ones at HEB for $1.58 a dozen, $4.10 if you spring for the organic variety.  So why did hundreds of people show up for Austin’s Funky Chicken Coop Tour on April 7?  Why do otherwise rational people with good jobs at places like Dell and Samsung, people who have the money to buy organic eggs at the farmers’ market and make an arugula quiche every morning of the week if they want, why do they go to the trouble to raise hens in the backyard?

When asked, they always say, “We just want to know where our eggs come from.”  But wanting to know the source of your eggs does not adequately explain the psychological motivation behind this apparently inconvenient hobby, so I am forced to come up with my own (totally unscientific) theory about the popularity of backyard chickens.

For prehistoric humans, hunting game was necessary for survival.  Modern hunters, admitting that they don’t really need to hunt for food, describe their sport in spiritual terms.  They talk about the need to hunt being encoded in our DNA.  They rightfully claim that hunting nurtures virtues such as self-reliance, competence, discipline, and resolve.  Hunters are proud to be conservationists.  Killing game is so much more than just food, they say.  It’s also about creating an honest relationship between predator and prey, and about maintaining a link with an honorable past in which humans provided their own sustenance or they went hungry.

Isn’t it possible that those of us who are a bit less bloodthirsty might experience those same primal urges to get down and dirty with nature?  Just like our armed and camouflaged brethren, we pacifists also want to experience the food chain up close and personal.  The processed, sterilized, and plastic-wrapped chemical conveniences that modern society calls “food” might prevent starvation, but are we truly nourished?  Maybe convenience is not the most important attribute for nutrition.  As Aldous Huxley said in Brave New World, “Being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune.”  In spite of splinters and smashed thumbs, is not building your own chicken coop a thousand times more empowering than a PowerPoint presentation to a lethargic committee of under-the-table text-message-senders?  Can scooping poop from the coop purify the soul as well as the henhouse?  A hen-owner has an honest interspecies relationship with the hen:  the human provides feed and shelter and the hen will reciprocate with an egg.  The egg, collected from a nest and scrambled for breakfast, is not just calories, it’s an accomplishment.

In addition to providing a sense of achievement, raising your own eggs makes a social statement.  It says, “I don’t want to support a commercial egg industry that confines chickens in cages so small they cannot even spread their wings.  Chickens, as humble as they are, deserve to live a normal chicken life, wandering about with other chickens and pecking for bugs.  Humans are big enough to extend ethical standards to animals.”

People of all persuasions, from liberals to libertarians, came together at the Funky Chicken Coop Tour in the quest for food realism.  Many home tours have a lot of Wow factor.  You look at something beautiful and you think, “Wow, that countertop must have cost a year of college tuition.”  Not so with Funky Chicken Coops.  Reduce, re-use, and recycle were the watchwords of funky chicken coop construction.

Although not the most functional of all possible coops, my favorite was Erik and Allegra Azulay’s creation, using a Disney castle to house their six chickens.  “All our hens are princesses,” explained Erik.  The Azulays were inspired after the Funky Chicken Tour in 2010 and fashioned their first coop out of a doghouse and some hardware cloth.  Later they expanded into the castle.  I asked Allegra if they had experienced any problems with predators in the inner city.  She admitted that they had one possum attack, “but everybody survived.”  What was her motivation for having chickens in the backyard?  “We just wanted to know where our eggs come from.”

Published in the Sun March 25, 2012

Mining Oil from the Dump

Like many who thought they had their careers planned, the recession put Josh Broussard onto a different path.  He had started his professional life as a chemical engineer smocked up in a semiconductor clean room, but now his office is a trailer on the edge of a landfill.  In spite of the humble (and odiferous) surroundings, Josh loves his new job.  He gets to work on two environmental questions at once:  What do we do with all the trash?  And how can we use petroleum products more effectively?

Here is Josh’s challenge.  Every year, ten million tons of composition shingles are ripped off American roofs and thrown into landfills.  Shingles contain about 20% asphalt, which is the sticky residue left over after the gasoline, diesel, and other oils are taken out of the crude oil.  Each ton of shingles contains the equivalent of one barrel of oil; twice as much oil as can be extracted from a ton of Alberta tar sands.  Not only is discarding used shingles a waste of oil, but it is also exceptionally wasteful of expensive landfill space because shingles do not compact well, leaving a lot of airspace in the pile.

Josh works for WM Asphalt Products, a special division of Waste Management, the company that runs the Williamson County landfill.  His job is to divert composition shingles out of the waste stream, and recycle them into a product that can be used to pave and repair asphalt roads.  It’s like he is drilling for oil, but he’s doing it in the dump.

When a roofing contractor replaces a damaged composition roof, he has to get rid of the old shingles.  He can take them to Josh, even if they are mixed with nails, flashing, and other roof debris.  Josh will charge him $32 a ton, up to a maximum of $64, to recycle the shingles.  This is less than the contractor would be charged to dump them in the landfill, so the contractor comes out ahead.  Josh and his helper Tim Cunningham then “clean” the shingles, which means they pick out all the wood, plastic soda bottles, and other extraneous trash.  The shingles are then run through a giant grinder and chopped into pieces no bigger than one half inch.

The chopped shingles can be sold for $25 to $35 a ton as an additive for hot mix asphalt which is used for paving roads.  Hot mix asphalt can be up to 5% recycled shingles by weight.  The asphalt in shingles is actually harder than the rest of the mix, so it helps prevent heavy wheels causing deep ruts in the road.  Even better, the recycled shingles reduce the need for virgin asphalt, which costs $500 a ton.  The Texas Department of Transportation states that using 5% recycled shingles in hot mix to pave one mile of a two lane highway uses 80 tons of shingles and saves 40 cubic yards of landfill space.  So the hot mix company saves money, the roofing contractor saves money, and both of them give money to Josh.  It’s a win/win/win situation.  Even the county comes out ahead by saving landfill space, which costs millions of dollars to build and operate.

Asphalt recycling is just part of a larger trend called Resource Recovery:  the economical harvesting of “trash” for valuable materials.