On EarthPM’s Rainbow of Green (see our book), this one may be off the scale, on the Green By Definition side.
Here is the first line from today’s Boston Globe story on the subject:
“A Canton landfill closed for more than two decades will soon be transformed into New England’s largest solar electric development, officials are expected to announce today.”
You can read the whole story here.
For those who are not familiar with our book, we have a chapter dedicated to a scale – or spectrum – or rainbow, of project types that range from “Green By Definition”, to “Green in General”. Those which are “Green in General” are your everyday projects that don’t have that obvious connection to the envrironment or sustainability. For example, creating a new release of payroll software. Not intuitively “green”. Of course, our assertion is that even in such a project there are things one can do to improve sustainability. But that’s a story for another post. In fact, our very next post. So stay tuned, you Writers of Payroll Software, you Warriors of IT Development, your turn awaits.
This post is about the other side of the scale – Green By Definition.
Here we have a landfill in Canton, Massachusetts which will be the site of 24,000 solar panels installed across 15 acres — think 11 football fields — and this project, when completed, will be able to power more than 750 homes. It will be three times larger than any other solar facility not just in Massachusetts, but in the six-state region that is New England.
“The land was just going to sit there forever,’’ said local selectman John J. Connolly. “This is a no-brainer.’’
So here we have a landfill truly fulfilling a higher calling. The land underneath, harboring waste, the surface above generating 5.6 megawatts of power.
What does our Green Rainbow say about this?
The project manager who takes on this project will not have to spend a lot of time drawing attention to greenality. Green thinking and focus on the environment is already in the mindset of the team. This doesn’t solve all of his or her problems but it makes that aspect of their job easier. Here’s an article from the local press showing the kind of attention the project gets even amongst townspeople.
We hope this project takes off. It’s a great way for a landfill to fulfill its promise, and it’s yet another opportunity for a project team to show its stuff!
In our 
“Green Projects” are being implemented at breakneck speed. It is hard to keep up with the sheer volume. That’s exciting news for project managers embracing the “green wave”. One particular project caught our attention, not only because it garnered national attention, Parade Magazine, April 18, 2010, but because it is local to Earthpm and my wife is an alum. The University of New Hampshire (UNH), and Waste Management (WM), are powering the college with garbage. Yes, garbage! According to the recent article, Waste Management, the operators of a landfill a dozen or so miles from the campus of 15,000 students, was dealing with surplus gas containing 50% methane. Most landfill operators are forced to burn the gas because it is a pollutant, but can be used as fuel. WM realized that UNH could use methane, but how to get it there was a problem. $49 million dollars and 12.7 miles of pipeline later, UNH has its methane.
From The Weekly Sentinel, I found seventh and eighth graders from the Noble Middle School in North Berwick, Maine, are recycling school cafeteria wastes. As a result of a year-long project, the school’s “Green Team” is both reducing the amount of waste that goes to area landfills (saving money), and providing rich earth for their vegetable garden. The vegetables will find their way into the school cafeteria next fall, completing a cycle of sustainability. The volunteer project members collect uneaten vegetables for their compost tumblers. The tumblers are turned 5 times a day by the same group of volunteers. One risk the team had to deal with was that they soon ran out of tumbler space. The contingency was to take it to the high school’s “earth tub” composter.
What’s a “green job”, and what’s a green PM?
We came across an interesting series of postings, tweets, and links, totally by serendipity, but it led to some good questions and reinforced our belief in the word greenality.
Below, in italics, you will see a United States BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) definition of “green jobs”. Below this post, you will find the detailed description. But start with the basic one:
Green jobs are either:
There were two immediate discoveries when we did some detective work here.
First, when we followed up and went to the actual US Government sites, we noticed that the supporting text constantly and repeatedly stumbled looking for a word to describe greenality. They used “greenness” in most of those cases. Greenness? Really? Our word – greenality -fits the bill. We will send it along to the author of the document and continue to push for its use. Remember, greenality means: the degree to which an organization has environmental (green) factors that affect its projects during the entire project life cycle and beyond”.
Second, the two-part definition the BLS uses mimics what we say about the spectrum of green in projects. There are some projects – such as the creation of a new biofuel facility – in which the project’s outcome is, by definition, green in its purpose. There are some, however, like a new version of game software, for which the green element is not so obvious. Like us, the BLS seems to be asserting that “making their establishment’s production processes” (or in our view, their projects) – :more environmentally friendly or use fewer natural resources”.
This BLS definition is new, but it is reassuring to see that it reflects our thoughts and what we continue to convey to PMs and their organizations via this site and our book.
Here are some references from which we drew this information.
http://www.triplepundit.com/2010/10/government-looks-green-jobs/
http://www.thegreenjobbank.com/stories/us-bureau-of-labor-statistics-publishes-definition-of-green-jobs
http://www.bls.gov/green/
What do you think? Never mind the US Government for a moment, how would you define a green job? How would you define a green PM? We’ve very interested in hearing from you on this topic.
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