Green Crime: Stealing Solar Panels

  • Solar panels were recently stolen off the community rec center in Carbondale, Colorado. The building is one of the greenest building in the state. (Photo courtesy of Lynn Burton)

Solar panels are expensive and
increasingly in demand. And now,
many communities are learning of
their solar array’s value the hard
way – they’re being stolen. Conrad
Wilson tells up about this new type
of “green crime:”

Transcript

Solar panels are expensive and
increasingly in demand. And now,
many communities are learning of
their solar array’s value the hard
way – they’re being stolen. Conrad
Wilson tells up about this new type
of “green crime:”

Solar panels are expensive and they’re increasingly in demand throughout the
world, so it sands to reason solar panels have become an attractive target for
criminals.

Recently, 30 panels were stolen from one of the “greenest” buildings in Colorado.
Ninety solar panels valued at $135,000 were swiped off a waste water treatment
plant outside San Francisco.

Monique Hannis is a spokesperson for the Solar Energy Industries Association.
She says, over the last year, solar theft has become a greater concern.

“It’s really just emerged as an issue we need to be watching, really, in the last
year. And the reason is, as solar becomes more prevalent and people
understand the value of the solar panels, it’s just like any other target for theft.”

Currently the group doesn’t track the crimes, but since more panels are
disappearing Hannis says they’ll likely start.

This type of “green crime” is nothing new in developing countries. Lori Stone is
international program manager for Solar Energy International. It’s a Colorado-
based nonprofit that trains students world-wide for careers in the solar industry.
Stone says in some cases the solar panels are gone just days after they’re
installed.

“If somebody really wants to steal solar panels, it’s pretty hard to keep them from
doing it. You know, there’s some new things that are coming out now with ways
to lock them and stuff, but they’re costly and so a lot of these developing country
systems, solar home systems, are pretty easy to take.”

In Kenya, last September, thieves unsuccessfully tried to swipe solar panels on
the house belonging to President Obama’s 86 year-old step-grandmother.

As the solar industry becomes more established, security is gearing up. It’s
becoming part of installing a solar array.

The Solar Industry’s Hannis says manufactures are making things harder for
thieves by adding tracking numbers as part of a recycling program.

“This same system could be used to at least track the location of panels, the
rightful owner of panels going forward, similar to a VIN number of a car.”

Hannis says consumers should be wary of purchasing panels from online sites
such as eBay or Craigslist because they could be buying stolen panels.

To ward off thefts, some go so far as to post night watchmen. Other larger arrays
are equipped with cameras and fences. But there’re also more affordable
options.

Bryce Campbell is president of Bryce Fastener Company, an Arizona based
business that specializes in a unique type of security bolt that acts like a key. The
bolts cost about two dollars per panel.

“The solar industry is starting to say, ‘Hey, what do we do?’ Ha ha. Are we going
to up security systems up here, cameras? Not really effective in places where
most of these solar arrays are laid out.”

Campbell says solar companies began contacting him about a year and a half
ago. Now he gets orders daily.

For Campbell, it makes sense considering people are parking thousands of
dollars on roof-tops and in fields.

For The Environment Report, I’m Conrad Wilson.

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Solar Panel Prices Drop

  • Experts say one of the main reasons solar is cheaper is because of Spain. (Photo courtesy of National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

There’s a big push to find alternative sources of energy. Problem is, a lot of alternative energy is just too darn expensive. The cost of solar energy, however, is on the decline. Jennifer Guerra reports:

Transcript

There’s a big push to find alternative sources of energy. Problem is, a lot of alternative energy is just too darn expensive. The cost of solar energy, however, is on the decline. Jennifer Guerra reports:

The price of solar panels took a huge drop this year.

Experts say one of the main reasons solar is cheaper is because of Spain.

The country is a big buyer of solar panels, or what are called PV modules, largely because Spain offers generous incentives for people who buy them.

Galen Barbose is with a federal research lab in Berkley, California. He says, because of the economic crisis, Spain had to slash those incentives.

“And so demand in Spain dropped fairly significantly. And so what we’ve seen over the past year is a glut in the global supply of PV modules. And that has led to a fairly significant drop of the wholesale price of PV modules.”

The cost of solar still isn’t on par with conventional energy, but Barbose says things are headed in that direction.

For The Environment Report, I’m Jennifer Guerra.

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Sampling a New Crop: Sugar Corn

  • Todd Krone researches corn for Targeted Growth, a bio-energy company. Targeted Growth is tweaking corn genetics to produce 'Sugarcorn,' a variety with high amounts of sugar and biomass. The hope is the plants can be converted into ethanol cheaply. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

The federal government wants more
and more ethanol in our fuel supplies,
but it worries about how its made.
Most American ethanol is made from
corn kernels. That’s inefficient
and it makes the ethanol and food
industries compete for corn. The
government’s mandating we start making
ethanol out of things other than corn
kernels. Shawn Allee looks
at one effort to meet that mandate:

Transcript

The federal government wants more
and more ethanol in our fuel supplies,
but it worries about how its made.
Most American ethanol is made from
corn kernels. That’s inefficient
and it makes the ethanol and food
industries compete for corn. The
government’s mandating we start making
ethanol out of things other than corn
kernels. Shawn Allee looks
at one effort to meet that mandate:

I’m just outside an ethanol plant in central Indiana and its pretty much like most ethanol
plants. There’re a lot of semi-trucks going by and they’re loaded with yellow corn kernels.


Most ethanol plants grind corn kernels for starch, they let that starch turn into sugar, then
they brew the sugary juice into ethanol. Now, this whole process would be easier and
cheaper if we could make ethanol directly from sugary plants instead of starchy grain
kernels like corn.


Pretty quick here, I’m gonna meet a guy who’s trying to make corn a plant that’s easy to
grow in the Midwest but produces sweet juice – not starchy corn kernels.

“If you walk over here, these are our sugar corn hybrids.”

I’m with Todd Krone. He’s a researcher with a company called Targeted Growth. He walks me
through a test plot of a plant nicknamed ‘Sugarcorn.’ He pulls off a ear of corn and pulls back the
leaves.

(sound of leaves being pulled back)

The ear is almost bare.

Allee: “There’re just a few stray kernels developing, very few.”

Krone: “Yep. A few got through.”

Krone says this plant avoids making corn kernels. Instead, it puts energy and sugar into the
stalk. He can prove it with a taste test – right here in field.

He snips a piece of stalk.

(sound of snipping)

And pulls out a little press.

Krone: “You squeeze some of the juice to see how much sugar’s there. It’s up to you, if
you like, you could put on on your finger and taste. Is there sweetness?”

Allee: “Yeah, it’s definitely sweet. It’s definitely got a sweet tinge to it.”

Krone: “It might be a bit sweeter than pop might be.”

Krone says tests show Sugarcorn juice is as sweet as juice from sugar cane. He says this means
America could have a new plant that boosts ethanol production – but doesn’t compete with food,
and uses equipment farmers already have.

Krone: “For the farmer, not much changes until harvest when some logistics still need to
be worked out.”

Allee: “Obviously if you’re selling a lot of this corn, you’d be making a good deal of profit,
hopefully, what’s in it for the rest of us in terms of the success or failure of this, for drivers
and everybody else?”

Krone: “I would say, hopefully, it results in cheaper ethanol that can compete with cheap
oil. And then meeting that mandate to get more and more ethanol produced.”

Well, that’s the idea, but Targeted Growth would have to change more than just corn plants to
succeed. They’de have to change how at least some ethanol companies do business. And some
ethanol companies have some tough questions about it.

“How could you handle sugarcorn? How would you store it?”

This is Jeff Harts. He works at Central Indiana Ethanol. Harts says he likes the idea of using
sweet corn juice to make ethanol – it could be efficient. But he worries about getting enough to
run an expensive operation like his. He has no problem finding corn kernels.

“It’s a consistent flow of corn and we need that consistent flow to keep going. That’s why
we have storage, the farmers have storage. That’s why we have a local grain elevator
network to ship corn to us to keep that flow steady 12 months out of the year.”

Harts’ company might be a bit reluctant to change right away, but ethanol producers will have
find alternatives to the corn kernel. The government is capping how much ethanol can come
from corn starch.

As those requirements phase in, alternatives like Sugarcorn might look sweeter than they do
now.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

The Attractiveness of Ethanol

  • The government will soon decide whether to allow increasing the mix from the current 10% blend to as high as a 15% blend. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

Cheap oil makes switching to alternative
fuels such as ethanol less attractive.
Lester Graham reports that could affect
an upcoming decision about using more
ethanol:

Transcript

Cheap oil makes switching to alternative
fuels such as ethanol less attractive.
Lester Graham reports that could affect
an upcoming decision about using more
ethanol:

Crude oil prices spiked a little because of Iran’s long-range missile testing and revelations of a secret nuclear facility.

But analysts think for the next several months we’ll actually see oil prices go down – maybe to around $30 a barrel, less than half of what it is now.

And that could hurt demand for fuels such as ethanol.

But the government has mandated the nation produce more ethanol.

Dan Flynn is an analyst with the trading firm, Alaron.

“Obviously the government definitely wants to push this through. However, the price of crude oil and gasoline, if that goes down, generally people look not to look for alternative sources of energy.”

One way to use more ethanol is to mix higher amounts with gasoline.

The government will soon decide whether to allow increasing the mix from the current 10% blend to as high as a 15% blend.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Is Your Playground Toxic?

  • Some parents and health professionals are standing by crumb rubber, because it does such a good job of preventing broken bones. (Photo by Ben Adler)

Playgrounds are supposed to be
safe places for kids to play.
But Tamara Keith
has the story of a leaked memo
from the Environmental Protection
Agency that indicates there might
be a problem with crumb rubber:

Transcript

Playgrounds are supposed to be
safe places for kids to play.
But Tamara Keith
has the story of a leaked memo
from the Environmental Protection
Agency that indicates there might
be a problem with crumb rubber:

(sound of kids playing)

Shawn Clancy’s two sons are having fun running around a community play set. And if they fall, he says there’s plenty of crumb rubber. It’s made from recycled tires and it should stop them from breaking any bones.

“I’ve seen kids fall from far distances. I’ve seen the give. I’ve seen them get right back up and kids are playing with it. It’s fun to dig in. They can kind of play with it. It’s about 8 inches thick, so there’s quite a bit of it.”

Clancy and his neighbors like the fact that it lasts a long time and that it keeps old tires out of landfills. And they’re not the only ones.

(outdoor sound)

I’m outside of the White House right now, just on the other side of the fence. And somewhere on those grounds, probably behind some tall shrubs, there is a play set. It’s a new play set that Sasha and Malia, the first family got. And underneath that play set is a pretty thick layer of rubber crumb to protect the girls if they fall.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting that this exposure is good for kids. The only question is how bad could it be.

Jeff Ruch heads Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. His group got its hands on some documents where scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency question whether there’s stuff in the crumb rubber that could be toxic to kids.

“What’s known is very very little. They list, I think it’s 30 toxic chemicals in one of the memos. And so far work has only been done on two of them.”

An EPA spokesman says the agency is doing a preliminary study of 4 playgrounds, looking for lead and volatile organic compounds. The results aren’t in yet.

The Rubber Manufacturers Association says there are more than a hundred studies showing scrap tires are safe in playgrounds and that environmental groups are over hyping the concerns.

Richard Wiles isn’t buying it. He’s senior vice president of the Environmental Working Group. And he feels like he’s seen this movie before – with arsenic treated wooden playground equipment.

“It was a really bad idea to use arsenic in this way and for about 20 years this is what we did.”

And kids all across the country were playing on this contaminated wood. But the thing is, initially arsenic treated wood seemed like a great idea, because it prevented decay – and made play structures safe and strong for years.

Parents might be left with the feeling that you just can’t win. Wiles thinks there’s another lesson.

“The basic problem is, we tend to use these products before we evaluate the health and safety concerns. We tend to just throw it out there without thinking that oh this is a surface that is made out of something that was previously considered hazardous waste.”

With all the alarm about very real arsenic problems, and yet to be verified concerns with crumb rubber, Donna Thompson says it’s easy to forget that playgrounds today are safer than they’ve ever been. She’s executive direction of the National Program for Playground Safety. For now she’s standing by crumb rubber, because it does such a good job of preventing broken bones.

“I’m not going to worry about it yet until I hear what the results are because I think sometimes we make too big a deal out of something and then it’s just not the case.”

The EPA says it will have results in a few weeks.

For The Environment Report, I’m Tamara Keith.

Related Links

Rolling Out a New Tire Program

  • This is a mock-up of what the proposed label would look like (Photo courtesy of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration)

Back in 2007, Congress told the
National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration to come up with
new fuel efficiency labels on tires.
Mark Brush reports on when we might
see those labels in tire shops:

Transcript

Back in 2007, Congress told the
National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration to come up with
new fuel efficiency labels on tires.
Mark Brush reports on when we might
see those labels in tire shops:

It’s been 2 years, and the government is still working out how to get this labeling program going.

Right now, if you walk into a tire shop, it’s hard to compare tires on how fuel efficient they are. There’s no official standard yet.

But that should change soon. The new tire labeling program is expected to roll it out in the next few months.

Dan Zielinski is a spokesman for the Rubber Manufacturers Association. He says they support a labeling law because it’ll help competition.

It could give tire makers something to brag about.

“’It will be an incentive to say ‘my tire is better because,’ or, ‘my range of tires here are better because.’ It offers the consumers better performance on certain criteria. And I think that will drive the market even before the consumer demand does.”

A more fuel efficient tire will only get you a couple of miles per gallon more. But, put those tires on the 200 million cars and trucks driving the roads these days, and that could add up.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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A Hidden Danger in the Garden

  • Reporter Karen Kelly and her daughter, Hannah, gather soil from their garden to be tested for toxins. (Photo by Karen Kelly)

All over the country, first-time
gardeners are harvesting their ripe
tomatoes and leafy greens. Gardening –
especially in cities – is thriving.
But Karen Kelly reports on a hidden
danger that isn’t always easy to detect:

Transcript

All over the country, first-time
gardeners are harvesting their ripe
tomatoes and leafy greens. Gardening –
especially in cities – is thriving.
But Karen Kelly reports on a hidden
danger that isn’t always easy to detect:

(sound of little girl in garden)

It’s our first vegetable garden and my daughter and I are looking for some ripe veggies to have for dinner.

It was the highlight of our summer – planting the cucumbers and the eggplant and watching the tomato vines grow higher and higher until we couldn’t even reach the top.

Then I read a story that they had discovered lead in the White House vegetable garden. Exposure to too much lead can cause brain damage, especially in children. And as I read the description of the type of yard that would likely contain lead, I realized that our garden met all of the criteria.

We live in a house more than 50 years old. It’s in an older neighborhood that would have been exposed to residue from leaded gasoline. And we live in a fairly large city -Ottawa, Canada – near a busy road.

So I decided to get our soil tested for lead.

(sound of phone call)

I started by calling the city and other government agencies– no luck. I tried looking for labs in the yellow pages. Those didn’t work out. I moved on to garden centers, a local university, and a local research farm. No one could talk to me.

Finally, I got in touch with a lead expert in Indianapolis, Indiana. He asked me to send him some samples in plastic lunch bags.

“Okay, I just scraped off a place with no wood chips. Okay, so we tested the eggplant, the tomatoes, the lettuce and the cucumbers. Well, we need to do the peppers too, because the peppers are way over here.”

I sent the bags to Gabriel Fillipelli at Indiana University-Purdue University – and waited impatiently. Ripe tomatoes and cucumbers were piling up.

Finally, he got back to us.

“What I found with the samples you took from your soil was relatively high lead values. I was a little bit surprised. Some of them were actually above the EPA levels for playground soils, which is 400 parts per million.”

Great. I figure there’s no chance we could eat these vegetables. But Fillipelli says that’s not the case.

“The other vegetables, like the cucumbers, the eggplants, and peppers – they have very resistant outer skin so as long as you wash them well, very little lead can absorb inside those. The biggest risk you find with vegetables is not lead being sucked up by the roots and poisoning you, it’s actually the soil particles that cling on to the some of these vegetables, meaning beets or carrots or potatoes or, strangely enough, lettuce.”

In terms of children, Fillipelli says the real problem is letting them play in the bare dirt. He actually says covering it with grass or mulch would be safer.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t grow vegetables in a city. You can use containers, or build raised beds with clean soil, and use mulch in between.

It’s still a cheap source of healthy food, and a great way to teach kids about nature, biology and, unfortunately, pollution.

For The Environment Report, I’m Karen Kelly.

Related Links

Your Pet and Toxic Toys

  • The government does not regulate pet products at all. An environmental group looked at pet toys and found some were contaminated with lead. (Photo by Jessi Ziegler)

An examination of pet products
on store shelves found some of
them were contaminated. Lester
Graham reports there is currently
no regulation of toxins in pet
toys and other products:

Transcript

An examination of pet products
on store shelves found some of
them were contaminated. Lester
Graham reports there is currently
no regulation of toxins in pet
toys and other products:

Your puppy’s chew toy might be poisoning him.

The government does not regulate pet products at all. An environmental group looked at pet toys and found some were contaminated with lead.

Mike Shriberg is with the Ecology Center.

“We found over a quarter of pet products had detectable levels of lead in them. Over 7% would have been recalled if they were children’s products.”

Signs of lead poisoning in dogs can be more aggressiveness – even toward the pet’s owner – or withdrawn behavior.

So, how do you tell whether your pet’s toy or bedding is safe?

“There’s no real way to tell. Our data base, healthystuff-dot-org is a first step. But, remember, we only tested a small percentage of the millions of pet products out there.”

Shriberg’s group is calling for the government start doing something to stop toxic chemicals such as lead from being used in pet products.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Seeing Abandoned Buildings Through a New Lens

  • Artist Julia Christensen peers through the ceiling of an abandoned auditorium in Gary, Indiana. (Photo by Anne Barnes)

We often take the buildings around us
for granted – that is, until those factories,
schools, or big retailers close shop and
people around town are left wondering –
what’s going to happen to that place?
One photographer’s making a career out
of documenting the surprising ways
people deal with this. Shawn Allee met her in the heart of America’s Rust
Belt:

Transcript

We often take the buildings around us
for granted – that is, until those factories,
schools, or big retailers close shop and
people around town are left wondering –
what’s going to happen to that place?
One photographer’s making a career out
of documenting the surprising ways
people deal with this. Shawn Allee met her in the heart of America’s Rust
Belt:

I meet Julia Christensen in Gary, Indiana.

She’s here for an art project: She’ll photograph buildings in Gary and ask people how they could be re-used in the future. I’m supposed to be the chauffer.

Christensen: We’re going to 5th avenue.

Allee: Where is that, exactly?

Christensen: Right. Uh…

Well, I’ll get to her current project in a sec but with all these wrong turns – I’ve got a chance to ask about her artwork in general.

I mean, what’s the point of documenting how people re-use buildings?

“Looking at use of urban space. It’s a structure we all share. No matter how you interpret it, there it is on he ground in front of you.”

Christensen’s got plenty of examples. She’s done photo exhibits of buildings in several cities, and she wrote this book called Big Box Reuse. It’s about how people reused buildings abandoned by Wal-Mart, K-Marts and other big retailers.

She photographed one big box store that got turned into an indoor go-cart track. Another became a school. And one store turned into a museum dedicated to the canned meat, SPAM.

“What it did was create this niche tourist industry. Over 10,000 people a year come to the SPAM museum and they spend money in the town, and it’s actually done something toward revitalization of this city, you know.”

Christensen says the point is that when big box stores get abandoned, they’re often a blight – kinda like one-building ghost-towns with enormous parking lots.

She found people assumed they were the only ones facing this problem.

“They’d be like, ‘huh, that’s interesting. You mean other people are dealing with this? How did they deal with those glass panes and those central pillars?’ And I became story-telling person who had information about big-box re-use.”

Christensen says she’s got a new art project. She’s interviewing people about old industrial sites, commercial buildings and homes. She’ll write stories about how these buildings could have totally new uses thirty years from now. Then, she’ll put photos and text together for art exhibits or maybe a book.

“It’s like an exercise to take these photos and write a caption for them in the context of the next thrity years, so it’s a little more exploratory.”

Right now, Christensen’s touring Rust Belt cities that are dealing with abandoned buildings. Gary Indiana is just one stop.

“So, we’ll turn left at Broadway.”

Christensen got a tip about a closed building.

“It is a closed performing arts school. It’s closed a few years ago when the city had to consolidate the schools.”

Christensen and I meet a young man named John. He lives nearby and he tells Christensen the closed school’s kind of an open wound.

“Kids just running through there, trust me. You see how the windows broken in?”

But Christensen asks John, What about the future? What could it be?

“I always thought of this being a recreational center for the kids. People can be indoors and play basketball and stuff all year round, stuff like that.”

Christensen notes all this and takes some snapshots of the building.

She’ll do this again and again in Gary and other Rust Belt towns. Christiansen says she wants to return some day – maybe with a book or photo exhibits. She wants people talking about what could happen to these places.

“People can come to arts and access a photo or a sculpture or a creative website from across the board, so I see the arts as central in the conversation about what our future is going to look like on the ground.”

Christensen says documentaries or art can’t solve all the problems people face with abandoned buildings but maybe it could be a good place to start.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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The ‘Burbs Aren’t Very Green

  • Some experts in the study say the U.S. could reduce emissions by up to 11% in the next 40 years - just by building housing closer together. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

When the Senate picks up debate on
the climate change bill, we’re sure to
hear a lot about how power plants and
cars are contributing to the problem.
But a new study finds that we should
also be considering where we live. Julie
Grant reports that living in the suburbs
can create extra carbon emissions:

Transcript

When the Senate picks up debate on
the climate change bill, we’re sure to
hear a lot about how power plants and
cars are contributing to the problem.
But a new study finds that we should
also be considering where we live. Julie
Grant reports that living in the suburbs
can create extra carbon emissions:

Most Americans live in or near big cities – but those in the suburbs have to drive a lot.

The National Research Council completed a study for Congress. It finds that building housing closer together near urban centers could reduce the amount people drive. That would save energy and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Marlon Boarnet is a professor at the University of California, Irvine. He was on the study committee.

“The best evidence out there leads us to believe that people who live in more dense development do in fact drive less. And we feel that the evidence can conclude that that’s a causal relationship.”

Even if single-family homes were built closer together, it would mean less greenhouse gases.

Some experts in the study say the U.S. could reduce emissions by up to 11% in the next 40 years – just by building housing closer together.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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