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 upcoming book, we make several assertions, which seem to prove themselves over and over again with real stories from the news.

Assertion 3 is that an environmental strategy for a project provides added opportunity for success of both the project and the product of the project.

In the book we also express our opinion that projects are really a microcosm (and the “business end”) of business.

So it’s not really a surprise to us that private equity firm KKR (owners of brands such as Sealy mattresses), which put several of its companies into a “Green Portfolio”, avoided 345,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, 8,500 tons of paper, and 1.2 million tons of waste, and, oh-by-the-way, in addition also saved $160 million in reduced operating costs.

Don’t take our word for it.  Have a look at the video below from The Deal.

You can also read more about it here.

Two stories in Popular Science magazine caught our eyes this week.  We think  you’ll enjoy our spin on them…

Green is in our blood

The first story, “Carbon Captured” summarizes an amazing characteristic of human blood that may end up helping to capture CO2 from coal plants for later containment (rather than emission).  It turns out that the enzyme carbonic anhydrase turns CO2 into bicarbonate. A company called Carbozyme is testing a system that consists of millions of tiny tubes coated with a synthesized version of the enzyme.  When the gasses from a coal plant pass through these tubes, the CO2 is isolated so that it can be pumped and sequestered.  Normally, the chemicals used to do this work are – you may have guessed it – hazardous themselves.  This system avoids those hazards.  A pilot project (note that key word: project) is planned in 2010 at the University of North Dakota, and if that pilot goes well, the company will be able to license the technology worldwide.  So you see?  We told you that “green” was in your blood – and now there’s scientific proof!  Here’s a little more on this from Fast Company magazine…

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Getting lean from fat

The second story,”Extreme Makeover”,  is a highly personal story of recycling.  Extremely.  It seems that one of the obvious waste products of liposuction – body fat cells – given the right set of genetic signals, can transform themselves into pluripotent stem cells – that is cells that have the ability to become almost any other type of cell – for use in the same patient, for example.  Indeed, when the team of scientists from Stanford working on this project (yep – there it is again - the word project) used fat cells, it turned out they were converted into pluripotent stem cells in 20 days instead of the 8 weeks it takes for the traditional skin cells which are used.  Not only that, the fat cells generated 20 times the number of stem cells as skin cells could.  Another benefit is that if cells are taken from Patient A and used in Patient A, the chance of immune rejection is eliminated.  So that’s what we meant when we said it was an extremely personal form of recycling.  Here’s the point: the researchers were so used to disposing of the fat from liposuction that according to Dr. Joseph Wu, one of the researchers working on this project, the idea of using fat cells simply “never crossed my mind”, even though they are an abundant medical resource.  It’s that long-term (and ironically) lean thinking we’ve been talking about at EarthPM.  What use do these ‘wastes’ from a process have?  As a PM, think about fat.  It’s not that it just has to be trimmed – it can be put to work, as in this case!