Picking Products & Pine Fuel

What the fine print leaves out…

This is the Environment Report. I’m Rebecca Williams in for Lester Graham.

Congress recently heard testimony that more than 98% of the products making environmental claims might be guilty of twisting the truth. Mark Brush is here, so Mark, you’ve found there’s a new technology that can give you more information:

That’s right. If you’re an iPhone user, there’s a free application that can give you information about products while you’re standing in the aisles. It’s called Good Guide. And you basically take a picture of a barcode - on say a bottle of shampoo – and then Good Guide gives you a rating on things like how environmentally friendly it is, or how safe it is.

RW: But a lot of people assume the stuff they buy is safe.

That’s right. And I asked the founder of Good Guide about this. His name is Dara O’Rourke. And he said, he used to think the same way until he discovered that a sunscreen he was spreading on his daughter contained a chemical that could lead to cancer:

“And that really initially, actually kind of upset me, that this product that I’m bringing into my house and putting on my young daughter has chemicals that have been banned in Europe, banned in Australia, banned in many industrialized countries, but still are in products on our store shelves.”

There are a lot of products, like oven cleaners, sunscreens, and shampoos that don’t have to list everything that’s in them. So there are more companies, like Good Guide, trying to inform shoppers.

RW: OK – thanks, Mark

Yep.



This is the Environment Report.

A lot of people are looking to nature to find alternative fuels. In the West, they’re harnessing wind and solar energy. In the Heartland, it’s sweet crops like corn. Susan Mittleman reports, in the South, they're looking to their forests to make cleaner fuels:

Chuck Leavell plays keyboards for the Rolling Stones. (start fading up sound here) But when he's not on the road, he spends his time on this plantation outside of Macon, Georgia, tending to some 25-hundred acres of pine trees.

(Chuck Leavell-“This is our tree farm here.”)

From this tranquil refuge of nature and wildlife, he sees these trees as a possible way to reduce our dependency on foreign oil.

Leavell
“The fact that we have such wonderful resources, our forest, and that we are looking for new markets, gives us a lot of hope to be able to use our trees to make energy products.”

Cutting down trees and turning them into fuels might not seem like the greenest thing to do. But people like Jill Stuckey insist it is.

Stuckey heads Georgia’s Innovative Center for Energy, and says there’s no better source for clean fuel here, than the state’s 24-million acres of forest land.

“It’s a good thing. Because trees sequester carbon. And we harvest these trees and plant new trees.”

She says an acre of pine trees can yield about seven tons of biomass per year. Biomass is basically any living thing that grows and then can be harvested.
And that stuff can be used to make ethanol, electricity, and bio-diesel.

sound of factory
(start sound) At a small factory down in Albany Georgia, that’s what John Tharpe is making here.

Tharpe has designed what he calls a machine that converts pine-tree chips into bio-diesel.

Tharpe
“We’re using biomass. We make an oil and a char and then we are also looking now at making electrical energy. ”

He’s already begun selling his bio-diesel technology to people around the world. And there are more than 100 alternative fuel companies setting their sights on Georgia’s trees.
The expansion of these kinds of technologies is a good thing for tree farmers and environmentalists like Chuck Leavell. He believes harvesting these trees will have long-term benefits:

Leaveall
“These trees, in the period we plant them and their growing, they’re cleaning our air, our water, providing home and shelter for wildlife, that helps everyone.”

Leavell says the trees here could help the country move toward a greener and cleaner energy future.



That’s the Environment Report for today. I’m Rebecca Williams.