The Abrams Clean Tech Report

 

Post Olympics, Conventions & Other Things…

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I pretty much needed the month of August to take a time out. I abstained from blogging. Instead I watched the Olympics, followed election coverage, watched the markets, sat and vegged in front of the tv and learned about things like bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), biked and walked around Park City on vacation with Jon, did some crosswords, tested some products that had been sent to me to try out (one, an energy-efficient vacuum [the new Eureka envirovac]; another was a Medport, LLC BPA-free ‘sports-bottle’ that has a water-sanitizing filter built in, called the LivePURE Fit & Fresh Filtered Water Bottle; and another was a Tersano Lotus Sanitizing System), took lots of hike-like walks and naps, and did a bunch of research. And here it is September and time to get back at it. Where the time goes, I don’t know, but August was very nice and interesting, with all that was going on.

Among other things Jon and I did this August was attend a dinner (for which the evening’s topic was discussion of green business issues) at the lovely SF home of Peter Kuperman, who I met through LinkedIn (as did everyone else at the dinner). Since that dinner, I’m of the opinion at this point that Peter has a good shot at becoming a professional chef, after eating my way through the dishes served that evening-all of which were delectable. About the event itself: everyone in attendance was fun to talk with. One guy was there from Treehugger.com, as was his girlfriend, who’s with Saatchi & Saatchi S; someone else showed up who incidentally is a friend of ours and also happens to be a Green Programs Specialist with the Department of Public Health, and she in turn brought along one of her friends, who handles Waste Diversion for Macy’s West (though she’s about to take on several of Macy’s stores’ waste diversion programmatic efforts). Then someone from KEMA showed up, as did someone from URS and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. And Ecounit’s CEO Kent Ragen was the night’s featured guest. He was there with his lovely wife Naoko, and he talked to us about what his company Ecounit is doing to connect eco-conscious companies with their environmentally-aware consumers. “We reward consumers for taking eco-friendly actions,” Ragen told me. “Today we offer green-themed surveys so that consumers can provide feedback to companies about green products and brand perception related to the environment. In the near future we will be launching programs with grocery stores that reward consumers for utilizing reusable bags; eventually the program will be extended to other industries that want to motivate their customers to take eco-friendly actions. EcoUnit participants are rewarded with EcoUnit credits which they can put toward carbon offsets, tree planting, and other eco-friendly products.” And we talked about Portland. Being at heart the Oregonian I am, and seeing that Kent’s from Portland, it was fun talking home state stuff, and by the end of the evening, Jon and I concurred that we’d had a lovely evening, and how refreshing a party it was. For the curious, I’ll tell you that Peter’s “Chef By Night” parties have become so popular that he’s wisely outsourced event management activities to the delightful Erin Reeser, who’s clearly a whiz at event planning, guest relations, and keeping things from burning on stoves as much as she’s good at keeping Peter from worrying about what’s happening to things on the stove. Guests are encouraged to roll up their sleeves and help out in the kitchen, too, which I always think is part of the fun. If you’d like to find out more, or to get on Peter’s invite list for the next “Chef by Night” dinner, I suggest you ping Peter via LinkedIn. So that was one very fun night in August.

Also in August I had an opportunity to speak to the guys at TechForward, which is a startup doing a great thing for consumers purchasing new consumer electronics: they’re working on a program with consumer electronics retailers to offer consumers a guaranteed buyback plan for their electronics, building for consumers a way to easily support a reuse/recycle process for all their consumer electronics (caveat: not mobile phones though). The company offers a guaranteed future trade in value for your electronics, free shipping as well as a box to put it all in, and then takes care of disposal in an environmentally friendly manner. We’ll see how the company progresses, but they’ve got funding, and I expect to see them grow. NEA and First Round Capital have put money in, and the company is talking to all the major CE retailers about putting guaranteed buy back plans – even talking to people on the extended warranty side, big box retailers. The company’s reached an agreement with SYX Services, a company that is an affiliate of, and provides management services to, TigerDirect.com and CompUSA.com, to offer Guaranteed Buyback Plans via their web sites and retail store locations. The plans will be offered through both TigerDirect and CompUSA. One thing that I think is most interesting about the organization is the concept they’ve coined, which is also the name of a Consortium they’ve launched, called “Ownership 2.0.” I think you’ll be interested to read more about it, and it hits a trend spot on. To quote their website: “Ownership is changing. Across all types of consumer products, people are realizing that long-term ownership often doesn’t make sense anymore. Ownership 1.0 basically says: buy an item, own it, then either 1) throw it away 2) recycle it, or 3) resell it; whereas Ownership 2.0 realizes at point-of-sale that you don’t want to own the item forever, and want to take steps to be able to reclaim value from the item when acquiring it. More here: http://ownership20.com/.

As I mentioned above, I also had an opportunity to test Eureka’s envirovac, and the BPA-free water bottle from Fit & Fresh and the Tersano Sanitizing System. About Eureka’s envirovac vacuum: is there anyone who WOULDN’T be interested to use a vacuum that a) works and b) is more energy efficient than your previous incarnations of vacuums have been? I don’t think so. Eureka generally makes very good vacuum cleaners, and their new envirovac uses an 8-amp motor instead of a 12-amp motor, comes in 100% recycled cardboard packaging, and includes a washable HEPA filter. The company tells me this vacuum uses 33% less energy than a 12-amp motor vacuum, and all I can say is “hey great!” It works, it worked very well, in fact, and you will likely only notice that your carpets get just as clean as they did before, if not more clean, depending upon what you use to vacuum at home. Something to consider, too: interestingly, according to Eureka’s media kit, the average American household vacuums about an hour/week using a 12-amp motor. According to Eureka, if only 25 million households in the U.S. Used an envirovac, 6.25 million kilowatt hours of energy would be saved – an energy cutback that would reduce CO2 emissions by a chunk as well. And anything we can do to reduce CO2 emissions we need to do. More info here: http://www.vacuumgreen.com.

The Fit & Fresh LivPURE water bottle intrigues me, because it’s got the portability I would want, and it would keep a lot of bottled water drinkers from buying bottled water potentially, and therefore keep a bunch of plastic bottles out of landfills, though it’s not quite as far along the purification spectrum as I look forward to seeing something like this eventually be. That it’s made out of a non-toxic material, serves as an alternative to bottled water, yet still is a portable little water purifier, is nice. The bottle’s been tested and certified by the Water Quality Association, too, though again, don’t expect it to purify everything out of water. Right now, Fit & Fresh can really only remove up to 50% of the aesthetic chlorine (and therefore the associated negative taste and/or smell from the chlorine) from the water it filters, meaning you’ll generally get better tasting water than you might from some taps. And it does some other minor filtration stuff, from what I can tell, but what I really want is a portable bottle purifier that can purify what this one can (up to 75 gallons of water), but goes so far as to remove metals like lead or arsenic from the water being filtered. Maybe it does, and I just don’t know, but it doesn’t appear to do so. It’s got a carbon-activated filter. More info here: http://fit-fresh.com/products/livpure/.

Tersano’s Lotus Sanitizing System is one of those things that some of you will likely want to check out. Aside from Tersano being a winner of Canada’s 2007/2008 Top 10 CleanTech Competition, and a TIME Magazine Best Invention 2006 winner, this St. Catharines, Ontario-based company is also interesting because it gives consumers and cleaning professionals a way to clean and sanitize chemically-free. The company’s technologies use a company-patented progressive ozone technology process called Oxyshield that enables you to reduce bacteria and pesticides on foods, or sanitize surfaces. I’m finding myself using the Lotus a lot, and since I clean all the time with water, I happen to like this a lot. We’ve also tried it on strawberries and it really extended the shelf-life of the strawberries.

I’ll have more later this week, but for now, I’ll sign off with the following quick additions, since, as always, there are some upcoming events to make note of (and as always, I’m certain I’ve missed some very important ones, but the list for now will have to suffice…):

Aquatech Amsterdam
Always On’s GoingGreen San Francisco
West Coast Green
The Green Manufacturing Summit on October 16-17, 2008 in San Francisco
And the Urban Revision competition.

Other news that at least I found interesting:
-Borealis and Uponor Study Water Footprint Of Plastics Industry

-RoofRay Your Building’s Solar Potential

And lastly, I was asked to post the following, which I said I would do, since I’m a fan of Robert Redford’s. I’ll leave you with FIGHTING GOLIATH: TEXAS COAL WARS.

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