Mountain Biking: Rubber side down- And Now, Back to Your Local News…Since the weather’s getting better, I’m sure we’re all totally jonesing to get onto the trails, but in general, they’re a mess. It’s a bummer to see nice singletracks get trashed and widened, so like all of you, I’m grinding my teeth in annoyance while I try to be patient. The good news is that you [...] […]
- Downieville, Take ThreeOkay, well, things went pretty haywire in race promotion after the registration debacle. The organizer received so many hateful emails and comments about the mishap that it made him wonder if he should even bother putting the race on. I can’t blame him, really. In his shoes I might do the same thing. It sounds [...] […]
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The ranch-to-market tale of the organic beef you just bought from Whole Foods
Cattle graze on the Minnesela Slope at the 595,000 acre Arapaho Ranch in Wyoming. Owned by the Northern Arapaho Tribe, it is the largest certified organic cattle ranch in the country. All the organic beef sold at Whole Foods in the Rocky Mountain region comes form this ranch. Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post
Ever wonder where the organic beef you just bought came from? If you bought it at a Whole Foods store in this area, the beef started its life as a cow wandering the range of an expansive ranch in Wyoming.
Grass hugs much of the 595,000 acres of hills, valleys, and mountains that make up the Arapaho Ranch in north-central Wyoming. This sustains the thousands of cattle that live on the property, the largest organic, grass-fed cattle ranch in North America, a nearly 70-year-old enterprise on the Wind River Indian Reservation and run by the Northern Arapaho tribe.
The cattle that roam this range have it good. They spend their entire lives beneath the huge skies of these high plains, never doing time at feedlots, muddy corrals into which most cattle are squeezed for months to feed on grain and get fat. Cowboys do not strike them with electric prods to move them around, nor are the horns of males removed. When calves are weaned from their mothers, they are not forced into pens. Hormones? Unlike most cattle, the ones on Arapaho Ranch never receive injections of them. Read more
Kyle Orton best NFL quarterback and other misinterpretations of data
If you are a Coloradan and concerned about the environment, firstly, thanks for reading and, secondly, we’re worried that you may have come across a story recently that would lead you to believe that Denver is the worst polluter in the world.
Kyle Orton, the best NFL quarterback, according to a study.
We don’t blame you for coming to that conclusion, since a few sites, to which I am hesitant to link, have blared that as an attention-getting headline. And why not? What a great headline! DENVER BIGGEST POLLUTER IN THE WORLD!
Got your attention, right? You’re thinking, but surely there must be another city that pollutes more. Well, not according to science, say these blogs. Yes, they even link to a scientific study!
I wasn’t going to freak out about this until it was brought to my attention that it had spread to several sources — including some that you’d be likely to trust on this sort of thing. The first place that I saw it was on TheDailyGreen, which I usually like. Then I was sent links to similarly misleading stories/posts/releases on ScienceDaily and Huffington Post Denver (whose post is the least misleading of the three, but still a bit unclear; bonus points to the author, though, for simply making the point that regardless of Denver’s spot on the apocryphal list, there’s work to be done). Read more
Vail Resorts ditches wind credits, uses cash for fire restoration
Taking advantage of nealry two feet of fresh snow on Vail Mountain, Andy Henkes blasts down Dragon's Teeth in China Bowl. AP photo.
Vail Resorts, based just down the road in Broomfield, is ditching wind credits and will instead put cash toward a project to restore the area burned by Colorado’s devastating Hayman fire.
The company first started purchasing renewable energy credits — which essentially allows a company to buy the environmental benefits from wind power that’s located elsewhere — in 2006. (Confused about renewable energy credits? Read more about RECs, and the controversy surrounding their value, at DailyCamera.com.) The company declined to renew its contract to buy the RECs from Boulder-based Renewable Choice Energy.
From the Associated Press:
Broomfield-based Vail Resorts and the U.S. Forest Service said they would each contribute $750,000 over three years to the restoration project. The National Forest Foundation is raising the remaining $2.5 million.
The Hayman fire destroyed 600 buildings, including 133 homes, as it burned trees and vegetation on about 215 square miles in 2002. Erosion from burned areas caused sediment to build up around Cheesman Reservoir, threatening a main source of water for Denver homes.
Most of the work would focus on about 70 square miles of the most severely affected areas in four watersheds feeding the Upper South Platte River. Plans include planting more than 200,000 trees, plus willows, dogwood, grasses and sage to restore river areas.
The project also aims to enhance trails and restore river habitat for fish and threatened species like the Montane skipper butterfly.
Read the full story at DailyCamera.com or learn more about renewable energy credits.
Glass bottles meant for recycling stack up at Western landfills
Discarded glass piles up at the landfill in Cheyenne, Wyo. The city continues to struggle to find a market for the jars and bottles it collects for recycling. (AP Photo/Mead Gruver)
Giant mounds of glass bottles are building up at Western landfills, where cities and counties are stockpiling them until they can find someone willing to recycle them.
Even though glass should be the ideal recyclable — you can melt it down and reuse it an infinite number of times without affecting the quality of the glass — the market for used bottles is tough, in part because the raw material needed to make new glass, sand, is dirt cheap.
CHEYENNE, Wyo, — After working out at a gym, Amy Mahaffy dropped off a half-dozen glass jars in a city recycling container before heading home.The containers however won’t end up being recycled any time soon. Their destination: A mound of glass at the city landfill, an ever-growing monument to the difficulty many communities across the country face in finding a market for a commodity that’s too cheap for its own good.
”We are stockpiling it in a desperate search for a market,” landfill foreman Monty Landers said.
Cheyenne hasn’t recycled the glass it collects — 9 tons a week — for years. Instead, the city has been putting it in the landfill, using it to surround the concrete-walled wells that pump toxic fluids out of the dump.
The same is happening with glass bottles at sites in New Mexico, Oregon and Idaho. Read the full story by the Associated Press, or keep reading to learn more about the challenges of selling Boulder County’s recycling. Read more
North Carolina smart grid project takes a big bite out of electricity use
A smart grid project in Fayetteville, N.C., that’s been up and running for a month has reduced electricity use by a whopping 20 percent.
This huge feat should give Boulderites inspiration and a taste of what may be possible when Xcel Energy’s Web-based portal for its own smart grid technology is up and running, allowing most folks in town to log on and check how much energy their air conditioners, clothes dryers and fridges are really sucking from the grid.
From the New York Times’ Green Inc. blog:
Those numbers are based on the first month of the project, a joint effort between Consert and I.B.M. that installed energy management systems for 100 residential and business customers of the Fayetteville Public Works Commission, the local utility.
Consert attached controllers on hot water heaters, air conditioners and pool pumps and then let customers go online and set targets for their monthly electricity bill. Smart meters and a wireless communications system provide real-time electricity consumption data to allow the utility to cycle appliances on and off to achieve the savings and help it manage peak demand.
The customer sets up a profile detailing when they wake up in the morning, go to work, return home and what temperature they’d like in their home.
“The consumer can say ‘I want my utility bill to be not to be greater than $200 a month,’ and then we’ll look at their past bill history to see if that’s achievable and ask what they want to do to achieve their goals,” said Jack Roberts, Consert’s chief executive. Read more
Boulder green tweets and #followfriday
If you’re on Twitter, you know the drill — on Fridays, it’s customary to acknowledge a person or two that you find has valuable, entertaining or other follow-worthy stuff to say on Twitter.
We wanted to say hello, thanks and nice job to a bunch of people in our Boulder green community, so we’re going big for this #followfriday.
If you’re not yet on Twitter because you’re unwilling to get a bunch of lunch-related tweets, this is an opportunity for you to start out with a pretty healthy digest of green news and information without the extra junk that people don’t like about Twitter.
Just check out our green Boulder Twitter list on tweepml.org and you can follow 20+ local, green folks with one click (or you can pick and choose). Yep — 20 or so awesome, local environmental tweeters, one click. Neat site.
A preview of the list is available after the jump. Read more
Green-it-yourself resource pages
Have you checked out our resource pages?
It’s that small but growing list of pages just on the left side of all Big Green Boulder pages — we want to help answer any energy and environment questions you have about living in Boulder County. This week we added the zero waste, smart grid and (frantically, due to weather) the winter biking tips pages, and we’ll keep adding as we have time amid the madness of other blogging and reporting and editing in our daily lives.
Livin' green in Boulder | photo by flickr user cptspock
The other cool thing about the resource pages is that we don’t think of them as static. If questions come up later or if there are additional developments in one of the topics we’ve written about, we want to go back and add to the resource page. For example we recently added to our walk, bike, bus page because a CU student came out with an iPhone/iPod Touch app that has RTD maps.
If you have ideas for the resource pages, let us know in the comments here or on Twitter at @biggreenboulder.
A sad solar story: How NOT to install your PV system
The solar installation at the home of Thomas David Kehoe was done poorly according to Kehoe. He is showing that the panels are shaded by trees much of the day. Photo by Cliff Grasmick.
Boulder resident Thomas David Kehoe’s green dream turned into an eco-nightmare when his solar installer put up his photovoltaic panels in the shade, on a roof that couldn’t take the load and attached to old wiring that couldn’t handle the extra current.
Thomas David Kehoe’s home on 31st Street in Boulder is not a destination on Saturday’s Tour of Solar and Green Homes. Maybe it should be.
The tour, sponsored by the Center for ReSource Conservation, kicks off Solar Week in Boulder County. Saturday, people can tour one or more of the 14 homes CRC has on its list, all great examples of how solar power and green building strategies can cut energy costs.
Kehoe’s home is not a shining example, however. Instead, it’s a solar installation gone wrong, an example of what not to do when installing photovoltaic panels at your home. It’s a cautionary tale of old house meets inexperienced contractor.
“I’m one of those annoyingly green Boulder people,” said Kehoe, who owns Casa Futura Technologies, a company that makes electronic devices that treat speech disorders. “I’ve done everything I can to make my home energy efficient. My house is as green as a 1961 tract house can be. So putting solar on the roof was part of my goal to reduce my carbon footprint even further.” Read more
Not so fast, biotech beets — federal judge orders environmental study
A sugar beet | DailyCamera.com
A federal judge has told the USDA that they should’ve slowed down — and considered the environment — when the agency approved genetically modified sugar beets, which have recently caused an uproar here in Boulder County.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White ruled Monday evening that the USDA has to go back and produce the environmental impact statement that the agency should have worked on before.
Last December, six Boulder County farmers asked for permission to plant Roundup Ready sugar beets on the open space land they lease from the county. Since the county already allows GMO corn — 1,500 acres of open space is planted with it this year — the farmers thought the request wouldn’t be too big a deal.
But the issue blew up, thanks in part to a group of riled up leaders from the area’s organic and natural food industry. In August, the county commissioners agreed to delay the controversial decision on whether to allow the GMO beets while the county debates what to do with genetically modified crops in general. Read more
Power meter theft — another symptom of a down economy
The Denver Post had a story this weekend about power meter theft, which is exactly what it sounds like:
A power meter. | Flickr user johnwilson1969
The criminals remove the meters from homes for sale, vacant properties or foreclosures and plug them into their own homes to get free power, if only until they’re caught.
“Isn’t there something that indicates your meter belongs to your home?” Lopez said.
The answer is no.
Each meter has a serial number that is attached to your account, not your address. If somebody steals your meter, you would still get the bill, presumably until you discover your own lights don’t work.
Reminds me of the guys who were stealing manhole covers to melt them down for the metal, but with a much scarier and more expensive element of identity theft.
