In our book, we use the example of an earthworm as almost perfect sustainability.  GIGO, only in the earthworms case, the garbage that goes in as it eats its way through the earth, comes out the other end as better “earth” than what went in.  That is sort of the way GPGT works.  A garbage truck picks up at curbside.  After it makes its rounds, the truck heads to the landfill where the garbage is dumped and covered.  The garbage decomposes and forms, among other byproducts, methane.  The methane is tapped off, processed and used to fuel the garbage trucks.  Sounds simple, doesn’t it?  When you put it that way, it is, however, there were lots of complex projects undertaken to make it happen.

There’s plenty of stuff to decompose in a landfill, from food scraps to lawn trimmings.  It has been happening for years and as natural gas and propane become more and more expensive, a project to recover methane from landfills became more attractive.  From the altruistic point of view, not allowing methane to escape into the air, or being burned off to contribute to green house gases improves air quality.  But face it, the incentives from the government, and the savings from not having to buy fuel on the open market are pretty good project drivers.

According to  Jennifer Andrews, Director of Communications for Waste Management Inc, there are more than 300 trash trucks (the industry likes the name trash truck rather than garbage truck) fueled by garbage, or rather the methane produced by “trash”.   Waste Management (WM) Inc, the country’s largest provider of waste management services, along with Linde North America, a world leading gases and engineering company, built a liquefied natural gas (LNG) landfill gas designed to purify and liquefy the landfill gas at WM’s Altamont Landfill near Livermore, California.  It has a capacity to produce up to 13,000 gallons/day of natural gas to fuel the WM’s trash collection vehicles.

This project is also part of the company’s environmental sustainability initiative to double its waste-based energy production from the equivalent of 1 million homes to 2 million homes by 2020. WM is also directing capital spending of up to $500 million per annum over a 10-year period to increase the fuel efficiency of its fleet by 15 percent and reduce fleet emissions by 15 percent by 2020 as well as investments in new technologies to enhance their business according to their website www.wm.com.

WM and others are continuing to explore landfill gases as alternate fuel sources.  We’ll keep you informed of other projects in the future.  WM is certainly going to make our next “At the Top of Their Game” list for companies who are doing their sustainable best.

“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.

We wondered how UNH will pay for the project.  The answer is from an article by the EcoLine Partnership.  UNH will sell the renewable energy certificates (RECs) generated by using landfill gas to help finance the overall cost of the project and to invest in additional energy efficiency projects on campus. In addition, UNH will sell power in excess of campus needs back to the electric grid. “By selling the RECs from EcoLine™, UNH will further fund its aggressive plan toward climate neutrality,” says Tom Kelly, UNH chief sustainability officer and director of the office of sustainability. “With this climate action plan, called WildCAP, UNH has committed to lowering its emissions by 50 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2080.”

Of course, WM cannot simply tap the landfill and send it down the pipeline.  The naturally occurring by-product of landfill decomposition is collected via a state-of-the-art collection system consisting of more than 300 extraction wells and miles of collection pipes.  The gas is purified and compressed at a new UNH processing plant at the Waste Management’s Turnkey Recycling and Environmental Enterprise (TREE) in Rochester, N.H.  It then travels through a 12.7-mile-pipeline from the landfill to UNH’s cogeneration plant, where it will replace commercial natural gas as the primary fuel source.

Just in these few paragraphs alone, there were three major projects identified; collection of the methane, the pipeline, power generation conversion at UNH.  While UNH is the first in the nation to do this, we are sure that more and more universities (and business/municipal complexes) will follow, especially those within close proximity to a landfill.  And these days, who isn’t!

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.

This is not the only project the team is working on.  Another one is to collect aluminum cans and plastic bottles for recycling.  To date, in 18 months, the team has collected 11,000 cans and 12,000 plastic bottles.  They also have an awareness campaign for those pesky non-recyclable milk cartons.  They collected them and put them on display to show how many are used.

We, at EarthPm are positive that these efforts are going on across the country and across the world.  Let us know what kinds of projects your area is undertaking to help the environment and to save money.  Who knows, perhaps one or more of those project leaders may qualify for the Shamrock 7™.  Watch this site for the selection criteria coming in July 2010.

The older readers of our pages will (or may) remember The Unknown Comic, an entertainer whose “schtick” was performed completely behind a paper bag.  A fully-compostable paper bag.

In terms of makeup, this was one green comic.  You may not have remembered or liked him, but from his perspective at least, he was at the top of his game.

Well, in our new book one of the companies we consider “at the top of their game” – Sun Chips®, is calling forward the spirit of the Unknown Comic, or at least his fully-compostable bag.   On Earth Day, April 22, 2010, Frito-Lay’s Sun Chips will be  introducing a 100% compostable bag for their chips.  According to their website, the bag is designed to fully disintegrate in about 14 weeks in a “hot, active compost bin or pile.”  It is another example of a  creative project designed to continue on a path of sustainability.

And what do you think they called the effort to introduce that bag?

A project.

And now it’s in the bag.  No joke.

Most of us will be familiar with the line from Mary Poppins that begins the same way as this posting.   And if not, there are some Project Management lessons available from the very simple message from Mary.  You can get THAT spoonful of sugar right here.

But we’re not talking sugar.  And it’s not a lesson about how you can incentivize your project team with sweets.  That may come later…but this posting is about an aspect of Green PM not often covered: toxicity.   In our upcoming book, we’ll be dealing with the aspect of toxicity as we cover the life cycle effects of certain processes and the creation of  hypoxia in the norther Gulf of Mexico.  In this article we talk about a project to develop new materials specially engineered to “catch” and absorb mercury.

As featured in the December issue of Popular Science magazine, a product from Steward Advanced Materials is capable of cleaning mercury from a contaminated area 100 times better than any other method and it does so at half the cost.

Imagine this as you look at the teaspoon photo in this posting.  The particles in this powder are engineered with such an intricate spongelike pattern of holes that a single teaspoon has the same surface area as a football field.  A football field!

The silica-based powder is further engineered with sulfur atoms so that when a mercury-tainted liquid is encountered by the powder (or the other way around), the mercury bonds with the sulfur to form a stable powder that is safe for landfills.  Normally, mercury has to go through an expensive separate step to be neutralized.

This product, called SAMMS®, has successfully cleaned wastewater at coal plants, an offshore oil rig, and a chemical manufacturer.  The product holds promise for other materials, including the possibility of cleaning up radioactive wastes by swapping out the sulfur with other atoms to do that type of work.

Just another example of how a project and a project’s product which certainly is very green (okay…physically, it’s white) does not have to be an electric car, a wind farm, or a recycling facility.