Author: Sarah.chappel

GreenWire: Coca-Cola Co. has introduced new bottles that are made partially from plants, a move the company hopes will reduce its carbon footprint and better its image with environmentalists.

The new beverage container, which has “the same weight, the same feel, the same chemistry and functions exactly the same way” as a regular plastic bottle, according to a Coke spokeswoman, is made of 70 percent petroleum-based materials and 30 percent sugar cane-based materials. Traditional bottles are made from polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, the production of which consumed 17 million barrels of oil in 2006.

The “plant bottle” debuted at the Copenhagen summit in December and will appear in Vancouver in time for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games next month. The company hopes to sell 2 billion drinks in the new bottles this year.

A Coke-funded study out of Imperial College London found production of a plant-based bottle has a 12 percent to 19 percent smaller carbon footprint than a regular bottle. But critics say the real impact comes from consumers not recycling. Just 27 percent of PET containers were recycled in the United States in 2008.

Other companies also are entering the environmentally friendly packaging race. PepsiCo Inc. recently introduced a compostable bag made from plants for SunChips, and Nestlé is reducing the amount of plastic used in its bottles.

But plant-based bottles have shorter shelf lives than PET bottles and do not hold carbonation as well, industry experts say.

“It just doesn’t keep the product protected the same way that the current bottles do,” said Wade Groetsch, president of Blue Lake Citrus LLC, a juice processor. “It’s definitely a tradeoff.”

(Chris Herring, Wall Street Journal [subscription required], Jan. 24). – EL

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Greenwire: A U.N. report has recommended a moratorium on mining in the Flathead Valley of southeast British Columbia, suggesting that any activity in the valley could cause environmental stress on a neighboring U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, world heritage site.

A comprehensive conservation and wildlife management plan should be developed for the valley, which sits by the Canadian-U.S. border and adjoins the transnational Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park. The 457,614-hectare park stretches across the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains into Montana and gained UNESCO protection in 1995.

The U.N. report, to be officially presented in July, suggests that any mining in British Columbia’s Flathead Valley would spill over into the parks, according to Stephen Morris, chief of international affairs for the U.S. National Park Service, who received a copy of the report.

Harvey Locke, conservation vice president of the Wild Foundation based in Colorado, said he is not surprised that “international experts would draw the same conclusion as the majority of East Kootenay residents, namely that the beautiful Flathead Valley with its world-class ecological values is no place for mining or oil and gas.”

Conservationists are pushing to fold 45,000 hectares of the Flathead River into Waterton Park. An additional 300,000 hectares west of the river would be declared a wildlife management area. Mining or oil and gas extraction would be allowed in such an area but not in the Flathead Valley itself (Larry Pynn, Vancouver Sun, Jan. 22). – PV

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Greenwire: In a 13-page critique, U.S. EPA lambasted the risk assessment included in an October report on Oregon’s largest Superfund site written by industries and local government agencies that will likely foot the bill for much of the cleanup.

Federal regulators said the Lower Willamette Group’s report on the Portland Harbor contamination cleanup tends to “minimize the risks to human health and the environment” and was “incorrect” in concluding that the majority of the contaminants identified at the site pose no unacceptable environmental risks.

“They tried to make some inappropriate claims about what’s risky and what’s not,” said Eric Blischke, an EPA project manager. “They just really kind of beat that to a pulp to some degree.”

EPA said in its letter that the $74 million report prematurely dismissed the risks of contaminants harmful to wildlife, such as pesticides and tributyl tin, and low-balled the risk of PCB concentrations in fish. The report found that PCB concentrations in fish in the Willamette and Columbia rivers range from 20 to 100 times higher than EPA targets but still it concluded that the risk assumptions about how much fish people eat are “potentially significantly higher than actual risks.”

EPA’s interpretation of how dangerous the contaminated sediment is will determine the extent of the cleanup and influence whether the sediment is capped or dredged, which would be more expensive.

The cleanup work is slated to cost up to $1 billion, paid for by industry, landowners and Portland’s sewer and utility ratepayers.

Federal regulators hope to have a cleanup plan in place by the end of 2012 and do not expect a dispute over the findings to slow down the process (Scott Learn, Portland Oregonian, Jan. 21). – DFM

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GreenWire: Microsoft Corp. sees the oil and gas industry as an ideal fit as the software giant looks to expand its commercial information technology business, CEO Steve Ballmer said during a conference in Houston yesterday.

“The power and importance of information is as obvious to leadership in oil and gas as any industry,” Ballmer said in an interview before a speech at the Microsoft-sponsored Global Energy Forum in Houston. He said the industry is “very opened-minded, frankly, to information technology as a tool and the kind of investment that sometimes has to go into information technology to improve productivity.”

Ballmer hosted a breakfast that was attended by the CEOs of Marathon Oil Corp. and Baker Hughes Inc., as well as medical, financial and manufacturing industry executives. Those are some of the sectors served by Microsoft’s commercial industry group, which provides about $5 billion of Microsoft’s roughly $60 billion in annual revenue.

Ballmer said he hopes to provide oil and gas companies with sophisticated communications systems and cloud computing technology, which allows users to store data remotely and access it over the Internet (Brett Clanton, Houston Chronicle, Jan. 22). – GN

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GreenWire: Floating fish carcasses littered Florida’s waters after this month’s record-setting cold snap, and ecologists predict it may take some native fish years to rebound. In southern Florida, the death toll was too large to be estimated.

“Millions and millions of pilchards, threadfin herring, mullet” were killed by the cold, said Pete Frezza, an ecologist for Audubon of Florida and an expert flats fisher. “Ladyfish took it really bad. Whitewater Bay is just a graveyard,” he said.

In Florida Bay, one of the hardest hit areas judging by the floating bodies, the water temperatures were in the low 50s for several days this month and then dropped to a record 47.8 degrees at their lowest, according to the National Weather Service. The high winds compounded the problem, pushing colder, heavier waters off shallow flats into deeper channels where fish typically seek warm refuge.

Despite the warm-up, scientists say the chill will continue to claim victims for weeks. Infections from common bacteria such as aeronomas have preyed on weakened survivors of cold fronts in the past, said William Loftus, a retired aquatic ecologist for Everglades National Park.

The cold snap is expected to give less-popular freshwater natives such as sunfish a leg up, however, at least temporarily, since it killed off large numbers of walking catfish, Mayan cichlids and other tropical exotics that have invaded the Everglades and many of South Florida’s canals and ponds, Loftus said (Curtis Morgan, Miami Herald, Jan. 15). – DFM

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Two federal wildlife managers working on a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service aerial survey of migratory waterfowl were killed when their plane went down in Oregon on Sunday.

Pilot Ray Bentley, 52, an agency employee, and David Pitkin, 59, a contractor, were conducting a midwinter count of the birds and were headed back to Corvallis when the crash occurred.

About 50 people assisted in a search beginning Sunday evening, and the wreckage was found Monday morning.

Wind warnings were in effect Sunday, but the flight path reportedly was clear. The cause of the crash has not yet been determined, though the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are conducting an investigation of the single-engine Cessna registered to the Interior Department.

This is the first crash in the history of the survey program, which has been conducting aerial counts since the 1930s, according to a Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman (Bennett Hall, Corvallis Gazette-Times, Jan. 18). – EL

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GreenWire: The electric car developer Fisker Automotive Inc. has raised $115.3 million in private capital, funding that will allow the automaker to tap $528.7 million in conditional federal loans granted to it last year by the U.S. Energy Department.

The federal loans and private funds will help Fisker develop the Karma, the firm’s first plug-in hybrid car. The Karma, expected to retail for $87,900, will in turn lead to a lower-cost hybrid sedan, currently developed under the name Project Nina.

“Raising $115 million in these times speaks volumes about the value of our business model and the vast potential of plug-in hybrids,” said Henrik Fisker, the company’s CEO, who became famous for designing several BMW and Aston Martin car models.

While the Karma will be assembled in Finland using mostly U.S. parts, the Project Nina sedan is expected to be built in Wilmington, Del., at a former General Motors Co. plant. Production of the sedan, which may cost $47,400 less federal tax credits, should begin in 2012 (Jenny Hirsch, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 19). – PV

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The chief of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said today that it would investigate claims that the group’s 2007 report made an erroneous claim that the Himalayan glaciers were receding faster than in any other part of the world and could “disappear altogether by 2035 if not sooner.”

This past weekend, Britain’s Sunday Times reported that the 2035 claim was taken from an interview with an Indian glaciologist in New Scientist a decade ago. Separately, last month the BBC quoted J. Graham Cogley of Trent University as saying that the IPCC authors “misread 2350 as 2035,” calling the 2035 forecast an “egregious” error.

“We will take a view of this,” the IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, said in comments broadcast on the CNN-IBN network.

India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, has repeatedly challenged the IPCC’s glacier claims, saying there is no “conclusive scientific evidence” linking global warming to the melting of glaciers (AFP/Yahoo News, Jan. 18). – PV

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GreenWire: Mining waste from an Oklahoma Superfund site will be used to pave highways in Kansas, according to state and federal officials.

The waste, known as chat, contains high levels of toxic lead, zinc and cadmium. Studies have shown that when encapsulated in asphalt or concrete, chat is safe to use as a highway material, according to Leslie Rauscher, a regional spokeswoman for U.S. EPA.

“I’m comfortable they have done enough science to see that it’s safe,” said Gary Blackburn, director of the Kansas Bureau of Environmental Remediation.

“The concern we had, there’s millions of tons of this material, and if it can be put to a useful purpose it’s so much better for the taxpayers.”

The chat will be taken from the Tar Creek area, where mining polluted parts of Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas. The site, which received more than $35 million in stimulus money and has already spent 25 years in remediation, will take another 30 years and $131 million to finish, according to EPA estimates.

“This is the most devastating Superfund site in America,” said U.S. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.). “Aluminum, lead, arsenic, zinc, all are there.”

The waste will be used primarily on Kansan highways because the state is less restrictive on lead and zinc levels in asphalt than Oklahoma, Inhofe added (Sonya Colberg, Daily Oklahoman, Jan. 18). – PV

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GreenWire: Biologists spotted a record number of bald eagles at two lakes in southern Nevada during an annual count Monday, providing further evidence of the comeback that prompted the national bird’s removal from the endangered species list in 2007.

Bird-watchers at Lakes Mead and Mohave counted 163 bald eagles, more than three times as many as in 2000 and the most seen since the start of the annual count around 1980. The previous high was 116 bald eagles in 2008.

“It’s definitely the best year we’ve had,” said Dawn Fletcher, a research assistant at the Public Lands Institute of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Nevada state wildlife officials are wondering whether the strong numbers mean the lakes are becoming a permanent destination for the birds. Jef Jaeger, an assistant research professor at the Public Lands Institute, said cold weather may have caused this year’s spike, driving more eagles to migrate early from the Pacific Northwest (Keith Rogers, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Jan. 14). – GN

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