Auto Repair Goes Green

Want to get your hybrid fixed but don't want to take it back to the dealer? No problem--if you live in San Francisco, where you'll find the country's first garage specializing in hybrid repair. Read an excerpt of the Wired story below:
Luscious Garage, owned by mechanic Carolyn Coquillette, is part of a small but growing movement. A number of independent mechanics nationwide are now servicing hybrids, but Coquillette's shop is the first aiming to build its core business around hybrids.
"There's a critical mass of hybrids in the Bay Area, enough to support a shop like this," she said. "You could have opened it three years ago but there wouldn't have been enough cars, and I don't think enough public interest to really have fueled it."
Coquillette, 29, has been a mechanic for seven years and began working on hybrids a couple of years ago. There is no formal hybrid certification. She first cut her teeth in auto repair not far from Detroit, when she signed up for a community college course just after graduating from the University of Michigan with a dual degree in physics and English.
"I had had this problem with my vehicle and I thought, I've got a God damn degree in physics, I should be able to turn off my dome light," she said.
Luscious Garage claims to be a green business with a formal sustainability plan.
"Typically people look down upon auto repair as dirty," Coquillette said. "A green auto repair facility is so essential in terms of moving into this next stage where we have to be so mindful of our environmental impact. A lot about this shop is saying we're aware of what we're doing and we're going to consistently try and do better."
To keep its environmental impact low, Luscious Garage avoids VOCs (volatile organic compounds), offers re-refined motor oil, uses local suppliers when possible and recycles its scrap metal. To cut paper usage, the shop registers customers and prints receipts online.
The shop is equipped with a high-efficiency air compressor and relies on the building’s skylights more than its electric lights, which are compact fluorescents. In fact, the only devices left on are the Wi-Fi, fax machine, refrigerator and alarm system. And although Coquillette owns a Toyota Prius, she mostly rides her bike to work or takes the bus, she says.
According to the automotive research and marketing company R. L. Polk, 255,000 new hybrids were registered in 2006, and 21,000 of those were in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Jack Rosebro, a sought-after hybrid technician instructor who has taught with Coquillette, says this type of specialization will put shop owners ahead of the curve.
"I look at this as a natural extension of the industry," he said. "It's only natural that eventually someone would do this and focus solely on the hybrid so they can give the best service to their customer."
Though hybrids have a reputation as being largely trouble-free, there are lots of components of a hybrid that are unique -- not least the complex electronics.
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Chief Sustainability Officer

An increasing number of companies are hiring Chief Sustainability Officers to up their green credibility, according to an article in the New York Times excerpted below:

The new environmental chiefs are helping companies profit from the push to go green.
“Environmental vice presidents usually spend company money, but this new breed is helping companies make money,” said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. The upshot, said Geoffrey Heal, a business professor at the Columbia Business School, is that “what started out as a compliance job has evolved into one that guards the value of the brand.”
The titles vary, mixing and matching “chief” and “vice president,” “sustainability” and “environmental,” making it impossible to track how many people fill the role. But whatever they are called, the new environmental chiefs — many of them named in the last two years — wield extraordinary power.
They are exploring partnerships with vendors and customers to create green products — and they have the power to close the deal. They are also getting a vote — often, the deciding vote — on product research and advertising campaigns.
Since he became Dow Chemical’s first chief sustainability officer in March, David E. Kepler has been talking to Dow’s technology, manufacturing and finance people about alternative fuels and green products. “We usually agree,” Mr. Kepler said. “But if a critical environmental issue is in dispute, I’ll prevail.”
Linda J. Fisher, the chief sustainability officer at DuPont, scuttled the purchase of a company that was not in a “sustainable” business. “We’re building sustainability into the acquisition criteria,” she said.
And when two business chiefs at General Electric blanched at the cost of developing green products, Jeffrey R. Immelt, G.E.’s chairman, gave Lorraine Bolsinger, vice president of G.E.’s Ecomagination business, the research money. “I have an open door to get projects funded,” she said.
The evolution was probably inevitable. Corporations are facing demands from all quarters to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, and to buy and produce green products. So, many chief executives are urging their managers to “figure out what products they should sell in a warming world,” said Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at http://www.irejn.org/.

Going Green

MSNBC has a feature on various aspects of going green, including carbon offsets, clean energy, green home remodeling, building a green house, and green business. It includes both video and print stories.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at www.irejn.org.

An "Evangelist' for Sustainability

The New York Times has published a profile of green businessman Ray Anderson, excerpted below:

What Ray Anderson calls his “conversion experience” occurred in the summer of 1994, when he was asked to give the sales force at Interface, the carpet tile company he founded, some talking points about the company’s approach to the environment.
At a plant in LaGrange, carpet scraps are collected for reuse.
“That’s simple,” Mr. Anderson recalls thinking. “We comply with the law.”
But as a sales tool, “compliance” lacked inspirational verve. So he started reading about environmental issues, and thinking about them, until pretty soon it hit him: “I was running a company that was plundering the earth,” he realized. “I thought, ‘Damn, some day people like me will be put in jail!’ ”
“It was a spear in the chest.”
So instead of environmental regulation, he devoted his speech to his newfound vision of polluted air, overflowing landfills, depleted aquifers and used-up resources. Only one institution was powerful enough and pervasive enough to turn these problems around, he told his colleagues, and it was the institution that was causing them in the first place: “Business. Industry. People like us. Us!”
He challenged his colleagues to set a deadline for Interface to become a “restorative enterprise,” a sustainable operation that takes nothing out of the earth that cannot be recycled or quickly regenerated, and that does no harm to the biosphere.
The deadline they ultimately set is 2020, and the idea has taken hold throughout the company. In a recent interview in his office here overlooking downtown Atlanta, Mr. Anderson said that through waste reduction, recycling, energy efficiency and other steps, Interface was “about 45 percent from where we were to where we want to be.”
Use of fossil fuels is down 45 percent (and net greenhouse gas production, by weight, is down 60 percent), he said, while sales are up 49 percent. Globally, the company’s carpet-making uses one-third the water it used to. The company’s worldwide contribution to landfills has been cut by 80 percent.
“He bet his entire company,” said Bob Fox, an architect who specializes in “green” buildings and who, like Mr. Anderson, is a member of the advisory board of the Harvard Center for Health and the Global Environment. “It worked out probably better even than he hoped. He has set the mark for every other corporation in this country.”
And in the process, Mr. Anderson has turned into perhaps the leading corporate evangelist for sustainability. He had a head start, he acknowledges, because he ran his company and controlled its voting stock. But he can make the case effectively, he said, because his Interface experience teaches that sustainability “doesn’t cost, it pays” — in customer loyalty, employee spirit and hard cash. He says Interface sustainability efforts have saved the company more than $336 million since 1995.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at www.irejn.org.