Way beyond shipping container homes, these fresh green buildings are at the cutting edge of style and convenience.

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State energy planners expect a 50-year economic plan for the Railbelt’s six electric utilities to help make the case for major cooperation on power generation and transmission.

Due out at the end of November, the plan — called the Railbelt Integrated Resource Plan — offers a roadmap for building up electric generation and transmission infrastructure through the state’s most populous region. The plan pinpoints the best options for future infrastructure with minimum long-term costs to rate payers, Alaska Energy Authority project manager Jim Strandberg said.

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Energy Stars are those blue stickers that are supposed to help you choose the most energy-efficient appliances, TVs and other power-hungry gadgets. More than one-third of Americans use them to pick products, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, which runs the program with the Energy Department.

The government says Energy Star is working so well that last year it helped Americans save the same amount of greenhouse gas pollution as is produced by 29 million cars.

But for years, critics have pointed to several flaws in the program that raise doubts about the reliability of Energy Star ratings. For instance, side-by-side and French-door refrigerators can get Energy Stars even though they use a lot more electricity than do fridges with freezers on the top. That’s because the government splits up various types of refrigerators into different categories and judges each separately.

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Environmental savings can be elusive, and the benefits and costs confusing. To help households wade through the information, consultants armed with stepladders and gadgets are selling advice on energy efficiency, indoor air quality and even methods for creating an eco-conscious wardrobe.

The field of personal and home eco-consultants is relatively new. GenGreen, a Colorado company that offers a national directory of businesses marketing themselves as green at gengreenlife.com, says it has just over 3,000 listings under the umbrella term environmental consultants, up from 657 when the database was started in 2007. They include energy auditors, health and wellness experts, interior designers and “eco-brokers,” real estate agents who specialize in green homes. While real estate agents can get training and certification as “eco” or “green” by trade organizations, and states like New York run energy audit programs with accreditation rules, there are no industry standards for most eco-consultants, who can range from environmental engineers to the self-taught.

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Building green can open the door to plenty of legal pitfalls, a new study warns.

The study, by Harvard Law School’s Environmental Law & Policy Clinic and sponsored by Manko, Gold, Katcher & Fox, a Philadelphia law firm, says that green building raises a number of liability questions.

What if the building set out to meet LEED certification or other government green-building standards, but falls short, for example? What if it fails to garner expected tax breaks from the government for building green?

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There were kids whose toys were not powered and those whose toys were. Batteries made the difference. I was a powerless kid. My toys only went as far as I could throw them. My best friend Brett, however, had self-propelled cars, a portable radio, and an electric-eyed Skeletor who said, “I must possess all, or I possess nothing,” when pushed. I thought Brett was better off. Decades later, I still feel defeated by the stamina of battery-powered toys.

Batteries weigh on my mind in other ways. What do you do with them after they go bad? Where do they go? And, are rechargeable batteries better? What’s the environmentally sound solution? These questions are all the more pertinent given the premium placed today on portability. Can batteries be recycled? The answer depends on the type of battery. First, some trivia.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), some 3 billion dry-cell batteries are sold every year. The average person disposes of eight dry-cell batteries a year. Most of these batteries find their way into landfills, where their toxic metal content is contained, but not eliminated. Batteries can contain mercury (an ingredient phased out by law since 1996), lead, cadmium, or nickel that can leach into ground water if not disposed of properly or enter the air if incinerated.

Non-rechargeable dry-cell batteries include alkaline and carbon zinc (9-volt, D, C, AA, AAA), mercuric-oxide (button or so-called watch batteries), silver-oxide and zinc-air (button), and lithium (9-volt, C, AA, coin, button). Common rechargeable batteries come in a variety of standard and customized sizes and contain Nickel Cadmium Battery (NiCd), Nickel-Metal Hydride (NiMH), or Lithium-ion. (Li-ion). There are also lead acid batteries, most commonly represented by car batteries.

In theory, any battery contains materials that can be recycled, but in practice only a few types of batteries are recycled. For example, nearly 90 percent of all lead-acid batteries are recycled, but few if any alkaline batteries are. Here in Fairbanks, the Fairbanks North Star Borough Solid Waste Division collects car batteries at its main landfill and at each transfer station. These batteries are stacked and shipped for recycling elsewhere. The lead is extracted and reused. Even the plastic can be recycled.

Rechargeable batteries (NiCd, NiMH, Li-ion) are increasingly collected and recycled by the same national store chains that sell cordless power tools, cellular and cordless phones, laptop computers, digital cameras, two-way radios, camcorders, and remote control toys. Locally, call Sears, Lowe’s, Home Depot, Radio Shack, Wal-Mart and other stores to verify if they can be dropped off. The EPA says button cells are increasingly targeted for recycling because of the value of recoverable materials, their small size, and their easy handling relative to other battery types.

The best way to manage battery waste is to create less of it by reducing your dependence on batteries to begin with. Cordless drills and whatnot may be in vogue, but in reality few of us really need that extra portability. For those applications where a cord just won’t do or is unsafe, rechargeable batteries are the way to go – but only if you commit to recycling them responsibly. Otherwise, rechargeable batteries have the potential of adding even more toxic waste to landfills than regular batteries.

For more information on battery disposal and recycling, check out the Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation online  or the Environment, Health and Safety Online website.

Adam Wasch promotes energy awareness for the Cooperative Extension Service (CES) and the Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC).
For questions or comments please contact CCHRC at (907) 457-3454

President Obama ordered the Energy Department on Thursday to immediately draft long-overdue standards to make a variety of appliances and light bulbs more energy efficient.

Over the last three decades, Congress has demanded stricter efficiency standards on 30 categories of products, as varied as residential air-conditioners and industrial boilers. But successive administrations have failed to write regulations to enforce the laws, even when ordered to by the courts.

In remarks to employees of the Energy Department, and in a presidential memorandum, Mr. Obama said he intended to comply with the laws, starting this year with nine categories of products, including ovens, vending machines, microwave ovens, dishwashers and light bulbs.

He said the new standards would cut energy use and reduce emissions of the heat-trapping gases that scientists blame for global warming.

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Yale Environment 360: You have called energy efficiency “the largest, cheapest, safest, cleanest, fastest way to provide energy services.” How do you quantify that claim? For example, how large, how cheap, how fast?

Amory Lovins: Oh, for example, in the United States we could save at least half the oil and gas and three-quarters of the electricity we use, and that efficiency investment would cost only about an eighth [of] what we’re now paying for those forms of energy. …

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Most people think of LEDs as the lights blinking from inside electronic devices. They are being used increasingly to light rooms, though few people have ever bought them.

“In the U.S., 78 percent of the public is completely unaware that traditional light bulbs will be phased out in 2012,” said Charles F. Jerabek, president and chief executive of Osram Sylvania, a unit of Siemens. By law, bulbs must be 30 percent more efficient than current incandescent versions beginning that year.

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It’s the great taboo, I hear many environmentalists say. Population growth is the driving force behind our wrecking of the planet, but we are afraid to discuss it.

It sounds like a no-brainer. More people must inevitably be bad for the environment, taking more resources and causing more pollution, driving the planet ever farther beyond its carrying capacity. But hold on. This is a terribly convenient argument — “over-consumers” in rich countries can blame “over-breeders” in distant lands for the state of the planet. But what are the facts?

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