A national survey of home builders found 59% are already building smaller homes or planning to build smaller homes in the near future.
(Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)
This week, the US Department
of Commerce announced new
construction for single-family
homes increased 1.7% since June. Lester Graham
reports… what the announcement
didn’t say is that, on average,
those new homes are smaller:
Transcript
This week, the US Department
of Commerce announced new
construction for single-family
homes increased 1.7% since June. Lester Graham
reports… what the announcement
didn’t say is that, on average,
those new homes are smaller:
For the past 35 years, houses have gotten bigger and bigger. The square footage has increased 53%.
But, starting in the second half of 2008, that changed. And the trend to smaller houses is continuing this year.
Steve Melman monitors trends for the National Association of Home Builders.
He says, during past recessions, new house sizes decreased because smaller was more affordable. As soon as the economy recovered, the trend toward larger homes continued.
He says that might not be the case this time.
“This could be a change in that the homes might incorporate better design, better energy features, green features, but not necessarily increase in size.”
A national survey of home builders found 59% are already building smaller homes or planning to build smaller homes in the near future.
Mark Murray, with the nonprofit Californians Against Waste, says that in the space of one month, October 2008, the price for mixed paper on the global market plunged from $100 a ton to less than $30. (Photo by Erin Kelly)
If you want to get a sense of how the overall economy is doing, look outside your window the night before garbage and recycling day. Last fall, you’d have seen trucks full of cardboard circling the neighborhood. By winter, the cardboard poachers had disappeared. That’s because wastepaper – like other recyclables – feeds into a multi-billion dollar global commodities market that rises and falls just like housing prices and stocks. Amy Standen has more:
Transcript
If you want to get a sense of how the overall economy is doing, look outside your window the night before garbage and recycling day. Last fall, you’d have seen trucks full of cardboard circling the neighborhood. By winter, the cardboard poachers had disappeared. That’s because wastepaper – like other recyclables – feeds into a multi-billion dollar global commodities market that rises and falls just like housing prices and stocks. Amy Standen has more:
Last winter, Carolyn Almquist had a problem. Carolyn’s in charge of exports for APL transportation in Oakland, California. It’s her job to move shipping containers full of American exports, like wastepaper, to factories over in Asia. The problem was, the factories in Asia didn’t want them.
“There was no buyer. It would arrive at our terminal, say, in Jakarta, and no one would pick it up.”
Asian paper mills were canceling deals with the ships halfway across the Pacific. And Carolyn – who’s in charge of APL’s exports – was the first to hear about it.
“I’m getting an email saying, ‘what are you people doing? Don’t send stuff without a buyer.’”
Waste paper is the country’s number one export, by volume, so when prices fall, it’s not just Carolyn who’s in trouble.
“Hey, Alex, good morning! Steve Moore calling.”
Steve runs a company called Pacific Rim Recycling, 40 miles north of San Francisco.
“Got any updates for me on the marketplace?”
Every day, he calls around to see how much people are paying for things like newspaper, water bottles, old envelopes.
“What about corrugated?”
Most of our recycled cardboard, and a lot of our plastic ends up at Asian factories where it’s turned into iPhone boxes, polyester shirts, that are then shipped right back to the US market.
Until, that is, we stop shopping.
“When people stop buying those goods and products – the VCRS and the TVs from China – there’s no need for the boxes to go around them.”
That’s Mark Murray, with the nonprofit Californians Against Waste. He says that in the space of one month, October 2008, the price for mixed paper on the global market plunged from $100 a ton to less than $30. In two months, plastic water bottles dropped from $500 a ton, to less than $100.
“What recycling experienced in the last six months is really the same thing the entire global economy has been experiencing.”
So, when the economy falters, recyclers suffer. Some shut down entirely. Others were forced to simply dump unsellable paper into local landfills.
Steve Moore hunkered down to wait it out.
“We couldn’t sell anything for six weeks. All this material was backing up, I had to rent space next door. I had to sell it at $10 a ton, just to get rid of it.”
By February, prices had started to recover, as demand for consumer goods began picking up a bit – but they’re no where near the highs of a year ago.
“And a ton of paper today is worth $100 a ton. Last year, it was worth $200 a ton. It’s a very volatile market, so the economics of that are pretty severe.”
One reason the market’s so volatile is that with recyclables, the supply never stops. No matter how much or how little those Asian factories want our cardboard and our plastic water bottles, we are going to keep putting them out on the sidewalk.
Oil manufacturers can turn down the spigot when demand drops, to control supply so it keeps pace with demand. But bales of paper and plastic just take up too much space. And here at Pacific Rim recycling, the trucks keep rolling in.
(sound of bottles and cans at Pacific Rim)
“The volume of this material is huge!”
But at least it’s moving. Prices for our recyclables might be lower than their peak a year ago, but Steve Moore can relax again.
And, over at the Port of Oakland, Carolyn’s no longer getting angry emails.
“Things are picking up again. Financing has freed up. The banks are a little less nervous, If we had a ship here today, she’s be sailing Oakland full. Life is a little bit easier.”
And Carolyn Almquist knows as well as anyone in this industry to enjoy it while it lasts.
Airlines say that there needs to be more regulation on oil speculators. (Photo courtesy of NASA)
Recent swings in the price of
crude oil are leading to more
trouble for the US airline
industry. Rebecca Williams
reports:
Transcript
Recent swings in the price of
crude oil are leading to more
trouble for the US airline
industry. Rebecca Williams
reports:
Even though oil futures are trading for half of what they were last summer, the airlines are not happy.
David Castelveter is with the Air Transport Association. He says wild price swings for oil make it tough for the industry to plan ahead.
“They hedge their fuel purchases when the price is high at a lower rate and if the price of fuel goes low then they’re hedged in at higher rates and it costs them money.”
Airlines would like to raise ticket prices, but, with the recession, they’re worried no one will buy them.
So instead, they’re trying to cut back on how much fuel they use. Airlines are retrofitting planes with winglets that cut fuel consumption.
But that takes money and time. So in the meantime, they’re also cutting jobs and routes.
The industry’s putting pressure on Congress to force more transparency in the oil futures trading market.
They’re hoping more regulation on oil speculators would mean fewer price swings.
Some power companies are sending out charts and graphs that compare you to your neighbors. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)
Air conditioners are running full-blast
in much of the country right now.
Shawn Allee reports some
utilities are sending out info that might
get you to turn them down a bit:
Transcript
Air conditioners are running full-blast
in much of the country right now.
Shawn Allee reports some
utilities are sending out info that might
get you to turn them down a bit:
Ever wonder if you’re an energy hog compared to your neighbors?
Well, some power companies are sending out graphs and charts to tell you.
Commonwealth Edison is a utility in Illinois.
It’s sending energy comparison letters to 50,000 customers this August.
Val Jensen runs the company’s program.
Jensen hopes competition will get people to conserve, because power bills alone don’t work.
“Despite pretty compelling economic reasons for customers to become more efficient at using energy, a lot of them don’t do it. Despite what they teach you in Economics 101, most customers don’t behave in the traditional, rational way.”
Jensen says, if enough people conserve energy, utilities can avoid building expensive new power plants.
Commonwealth Edison is just the latest utility to try energy comparison reports.
Power companies in New York and other eastern states will try them this year.
Eric Lindstrom, Vice President of Cannon Design, stands next to the building's 140 new solar panels (Photo by Joyce Kryszak)
Joan Bozer at the American Solar Energy Society Conference, next to pictures of her home's solar system (Photo by Joyce Kryszak)
Neal Lurie, with the Solar Society, says tax incentives are creating demand and that's driving down the cost of solar systems (Photo by Joyce Kryszak)
Buying a solar system for your home still is not as simple or inexpensive as say picking up a new water heater. But solar energy advocates argue that the systems are affordable and obtainable for just about everyone – right now. Joyce Kryszak checked out that claim:
Transcript
Buying a solar system for your home still is not as simple or inexpensive as say picking up a new water heater. But solar energy advocates argue that the systems are affordable and obtainable for just about everyone – right now. Joyce Kryszak checked out that claim:
You might say that sunlight is a trade mark for Cannon Design. The Western New York based firm designs some of the most solar friendly buildings in the world. But only now is Cannon using the sun for its own building.
Eric Lindstrom is Vice President of the company. He says it’s what their environmentally savvy clients expect.
“You know there’s a huge P.R. factor here that we can bring our clients in and say, you know, this is what we’re recommending to you, but we’ve done it ourselves and it works. That we didn’t just read it in a magazine somewhere and say this is what you should be doing.”
Lindstrom takes us up on the roof of the company’s building to have a look at the new system.
Up here we find solar panels. 140 of them. They’re stretched out from edge to edge, soaking up the rays.
Lindstrom says they generate about 5% of the energy the building needs. But he says even at that small percentage the company will recoup the roughly $17,000 investment in about three years.
The system’s total price tag is actually about $170,000. But Cannon Design got corporate tax credits and incentives that covered roughly 90%. After the pay-back period, Linstrom says the company will actually pocket money.
Back in the building they can watch the savings add up on the inverter meters inside. That got Lindstrom thinking. He got a bid on a system for his home. He’s decided against it for now because the payback would take about eight years. You see, businesses get more tax breaks than homeowners.
But some people say the payback time can be less. And sometimes it just doesn’t’ matter to them.
Joan Bozer was at the American Solar Energy Society Conference held in Buffalo, New York. Bozer was showing off pictures of her home’s $30,000 solar system. It cost her half that after incentives. The payback will take a while—about eight years. But Bozer says that’s okay.
“Because it doesn’t make any difference to me if it’s five years or ten years what the payback period is. I want the solar panels, like people in their house they put on the roof they want, or they put on what they want and this is what we want – solar panels on the roof. That’s how we want to do it.”
But as green-minded as she is, Bozer admits that federal and state incentives gave her the final push.
While everybody can take advantage of recent federal tax credits, state incentives vary. Some are generous, and some offer homeowners nothing. Some local governments are offering low-interest loans on top of the federal and state incentives.
Neal Lurie is with the Solar Society. Lurie says incentives are creating demand and that’s driving down the cost of solar systems.
He says systems cost about 30% less than last year.
Lurie says with lower prices and tax incentives, some homeowners can have solar without much – or no – money out of pocket.
But how soon will solar catch on with the masses? Lurie predicts in less than six years.
“We’ll see solar technology a low-cost provider of electricity, even lower priced than fossil fuels without incentives. I think that when that happens we’re going to see it go from being something that people are looking at and starting to do to something that is truly common-place, much more than people may actually expect today.”
Others think solar will really take off in just three years. Solar installers are already gearing up. Some say they’ll double their workforce by the end of this year.
The price of a barrel of oil has jumped
up from $45 to nearly $70 in just
three months. And gas prices have been
creeping up too. Rebecca Williams reports
these prices are out of sync with the usual
rules of supply and demand:
Transcript
The price of a barrel of oil has jumped
up from $45 to nearly $70 in just
three months. And gas prices have been
creeping up too. Rebecca Williams reports
these prices are out of sync with the usual
rules of supply and demand:
Right now there’s a huge glut of supply of oil – and at the same time, weak global demand for it.
Ruchir Kadakia is a global oil market expert. He’s with Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
He says speculators are driving oil prices up.
“People believe that with positive economic growth in the future there will be greater demand for oil. So they start to buy up oil in anticipation of that demand recovery.”
So these speculators are making money while most of the economy is in a slump.
But Kadakia thinks the realities of supply and demand will eventually catch up and drag oil prices back down.
“The pain we’re feeling at the pump today is probably going to be the worst we feel all this summer.”
He thinks gas prices might actually get back below two dollars a gallon.
One company created a website that acts as kind of a Craigslist just for reclaimed building materials (Photo courtesy of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction)
In the middle of a recession that’s
crippling the construction field,
there’s at least one sector of
industry that’s doing pretty well.
That’s “material reuse.” Taking pieces
of old buildings and using them in
new ones. Advocates say used materials
could save developers a heap of money.
Samara Freemark has the
story of one re-use company that’s both
green and in the black:
Transcript
In the middle of a recession that’s
crippling the construction field,
there’s at least one sector of
industry that’s doing pretty well.
That’s “material reuse.” Taking pieces
of old buildings and using them in
new ones. Advocates say used materials
could save developers a heap of money.
Samara Freemark has the
story of one re-use company that’s both
green and in the black:
You’ve probably heard what’s going on in the construction industry
these days.
(news montage of housing crisis)
But in middle of all that bad news, there might be one bright spot.
“We’ve actually been expanding quite a bit. I guess it’s one of the
only times I’ve heard
of where that’s the case.”
That’s architect Brad Hardin.
He got interested in reusing building materials pretty early in his career.
He likes the way
the old stuff looked. And he likes the idea of saving resources. And
he’s also kind of
horrified by the tens of millions of tons of construction waste that get
tossed into landfills
every year.
But actually getting his hands on used materials, so that he could reuse
them- that turned
out to be a real pain in the butt.
“You know you’ll be literally going out to someone’s yard and getting
rained on, or
sorting through someone’s basement– it was kind of a hit and miss
process.”
A big part of the problem was simple logistics. Imagine you’re knocking
down an old
house to build a new one. You’d like to sell off whatever pieces of the
old building you
can. But how do you find someone to buy all that stuff? Where do you store
it while you
look for a buyer? And how do you ship the materials?
Harry Giles is a professor of green architecture at the University of
Michigan.
He says most developers don’t want to bother with all that hassle. In the
end, they usually
just end up bulldozing everything. Giles says that’s because there’s no
real secondhand
market for used construction materials- not like there is in a lot of other
industries.
“If you take the car industry, a lot of it is geared around the reuse of
materials. Not just
taking the car and crushing it, but taking it apart and finding useful
components on it.”
You know, like a salvage yard.
And that was the problem Brad Hardin wanted to solve – how to create a
secondhand
market for spare building parts. He figured that if he could do that,
reusing building
materials could actually end up profitable.
So last year he started a company called Planet ReUse. The company’s
website acts as
kind of a Craigslist just for reclaimed building materials. Buyers and
sellers can find each
other on the ‘net.
And Planet ReUse tests all material to make sure it’s up to code. That
way the buyer
doesn’t end up with, say, eight tons of rotten planking. And Planet ReUse
arranges all the
shipping- trying to hook up sellers to nearby buyers. That saves money and
fuel.
By removing those basic barriers, Hardin says his buyers save about 20%
compared to
buying new. And Planet ReUse still makes a profit.
And it’s also a start to reducing those millions of tons of landfill
waste.
So, what kind of stuff does he sell on the site?
“How much time do you have? Steel, flooring…”
It turns out there’s money in just about everything you can salvage from
a building.
Harry Giles says that cash is the key to cutting down waste.
“If people see that it’s a lucrative business to actually salvage
materials, that will drive it
much faster than concern for the environment.”
And it’s not just buildings. Remember President Obama’s inauguration
stage? Well, that
got torn down, and Planet ReUse is trying to get the pieces to New Orleans.
They’ll be
used to rebuild houses damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
It’s just one more way for Planet ReUse to prove that you can do good, be
green, and
make a little money too.
Cranberry harvest in New Jersey (Photo by Keith Weller, courtesy of the USDA)
One thing we can be thankful for
this Thanksgiving is cranberry relish.
After a sour decade of collapsing prices,
the industry has rebounded with a record
season. Julie Grant reports:
Transcript
One thing we can be thankful for
this Thanksgiving is cranberry relish.
After a sour decade of collapsing prices,
the industry has rebounded with a record
season. Julie Grant reports:
In the late 1990s, the market for cranberries started drying up. Americans didn’t
seem to crave the pucker of our native berry. Some years growers were getting as
little as 8 dollars a barrel and they didn’t know if they could stay in business much
longer.
Today, they’re getting as much as 150 dollars per barrel.
Dawn Gates-Allen is fourth generation cranberry grower on Cape Cod.
“It’s been ten years of suppressed grower return for the price per barrel.”
Prices are rebounding because cranberries have gained popularity as a healthful
fruit overseas. Europe and Japan have started importing a third of America’s
cranberry crop.
But even with that new demand, you shouldn’t see a big jump in prices at the
supermarket this year: the weather has been great for cranberries and there’s a
bumper crop.
The recycling industry is the
latest to take a hit from the world’s
economic problems. Rebecca Williams
has more:
Transcript
The recycling industry is the
latest to take a hit from the world’s
economic problems. Rebecca Williams
has more:
The bottom has dropped out of most commodity markets: recycled paper,
metals, everything. It’s tied to the collapse of economies worldwide.
Tom Watson is with the National Waste Prevention Coalition. He says
recycling companies’ profits are way down.
“A lot of it is connected with China – and the demand for fewer products
there so they need less of the recycled materials for the packaging.”
Watson says China is buying a lot less of our recycled paper and cardboard
to make packaging, because we’re all buying a lot fewer products from
China.
That means recyclables are stacking up in a lot of places. Recyclers are
starting to talk about charging garbage companies to drop stuff off. And that
might mean we’ll be paying higher trash bills.
You get more out of your tank of gas if it is purchased in a cold location versus a warm one (Photo by Ben VonWaggoner)
People who buy gasoline in cold
places get more bang for their buck than
people buying gas in warm places. Kyle
Norris explains:
Transcript
People who buy gasoline in cold
places get more bang for their buck than
people buying gas in warm places. Kyle
Norris explains:
Let’s say my friend Ana buys 10 gallons of gasoline in a cold place like the
Canadian tundra. And I buy 10 gallons of gas in the warm state of Florida.
My friend Ana will be able to drive further than I will with those 10 gallons.
That’s because gas expands at warm temperatures. But its energy content
does not.
There’s a gizmo gas stations can put on individual pumps that adjusts for
temperature differences. But each one costs a couple thousand bucks a pop.
Dave Maurer is with the US Government Accountability Office.
“There actually have not been a lot of studies done on the benefits and costs of installing this
equipment. Really what we found is that it’s not really known.”
Right now different states do different things. California has just started a
major study on this topic. But without much research, Maurer said it’s tough
for policy makers to make decisions.
A national survey of home builders found 59% are already building smaller homes or planning to build smaller homes in the near future. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)
