Aug 28 2009

The Green Seen

Posted by: Leonard Anderson

Several items relating to the business and technology of clean energy and the environment caught our attention this week:

The Bag Wars continue, this time in San Jose, California's third largest city. In November, the City Council will consider a ban on plastic shopping bags at large grocery stores and big-box retailers. Paper bags with at least 50 percent recycled materials would be okay but bags would cost perhaps 10 to 25 cents each. Last week, voters in Seattle rejected a bag fee. San Francisco outlawed plastic bags in 2007, spurring a boom in sturdy cloth shopping bags.

Help Wanted! The next big corporate-level position may be Chief Green Officer and look to the Information Technology  ranks for candidates, says the GreenBiz blog. Greening a business requires managing and monitoring a lot of data on energy use, carbon footprints and such and IT is best suited for the tasks. Cisco and other companies are producing hardware and software for greening companies and it's IT who will buy, maintain and use the equipment and software. IT folks eyeing a CGO post will need to focus on the business first and technology second.

Fill your gas tank with watermelon juice? A study to be published in the online journal Biotechnology for Biofuels says watermelons could be used to produce the biofuel ethanol. Twenty percent of the annual watermelon crop is ploughed under because of imperfections. A watermelon investigation indicates that "watermelon juice as a source of readily fermentable sugars represents a heretofore untapped feedstock for ethanol biofuel production," according to the study.

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