Environment

Belinda Li, project engineer in Tetra Tech’s Solid Waste Management Practice in Canada, discusses how waste characterization studies are evolving to collect better data on food waste. Belinda led a comprehensive food waste characterization study across three American cities for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). All opinions expressed in this post are the author’s own.

With food waste from local manufacturing threatening to overwhelm available waste treatment capacity in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the City has begun a project to convert that waste to energy. Tetra Tech is leading the design phase of a $38-million waste-to-energy biodigester as part of the city’s goal of using 100-percent renewable energy to power city buildings by 2025. Biodigesters combine organic waste with microorganisms in air-tight tanks, creating a biogas that produces energy to power and heat buildings.

Science has been around since the beginning of human civilization. It was the engine behind Aristotle’s ambitious effort to fly and even earlier than that, it helped the Babylonians fashion an understanding of time and their universe.

Antea Group blogs about regulations requiring railroads to write oil spill response plans when they are transporting crude oil or other flammables.

This week on Sea Change Radio we dig deeper into one of those recent headlines, and see how bad the news actually is. The decision to impose a 30% tariff on solar panels and solar cells coming from overseas is a move that leaves most renewable energy advocates apoplectic.

2018 marks 12 years of sustainability efforts at Las Vegas Sands. During the construction of The Palazzo in 2016, while green building was still a new concept to the market, Las Vegas Sands hired a consultant to incorporate sustainability features to the development of the new resort and achieved LEED Silver® for New Construction. LEED Certifications, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is a rating system devised by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) to evaluate the environmental performance of a building and encourage market transformation towards sustainable design.

In this Q&A, we talk to the Senior Sustainability Specialist at The Mosaic Company, who told us concrete examples of how sustainability reporting leads to better performance.

At the time, no one individual was to blame, and humans were not intentionally trying to wipe these birds off the face of the planet. The people of the day simply weren’t aware of how their collective actions were impacting the great auks.

The High Atlas Foundation (HAF) works to improve livelihoods and spur economic growth and grassroots development in disadvantaged communities in Morocco. HAF brought in Erb alum Dannan Hodge to help with the organization’s potential carbon credit projects. Hodge’s three-week project was funded by the Land O’Lakes Farmer to Farmer initiative, organized through the International Executive Service Corp.

On July 7, 2017 at the Avery Dennison corporate headquarters in Glendale, California, employees presented a donation to the United Way of Greater Los Angeles. The $10,156 donation was a surprise to the United Way and the culmination of a creative sustainability effort led by Avery Dennison’s 207 Green Team.